Page:Building Up Socialism - Nikolai Bukharin (1926).pdf/55

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BUILDING UP SOCIALISM
47

sition Communists; in this connection the words of Kautsky may be termed the "vade mecum" for the All-Russian Communist opposition. This circumstance, however, merely emphasised the ideological deviation of our opposition from Leninism. Our opposition speaks about the Soviet State becoming a "kulak State," but Otto Bauer said that long before them. He even now says that there are many elements of Socialism in our economy: he even now considers that our Party is not quite a workers' party; he "only" assumes that we are beginning to breathe the peasant spirit and that such, apparently, is our inevitable fate. Paul Levi, in a preface to an anti-Leninist pamphlet written by Rosa Luxemburg (which Levi published against the will of the deceased revolutionary), writes the same thing. Dalin, in the book we have already quoted, says that "subjectively" our revolution is a proletarian revolution, but that objectively it is nothing more or less than a bourgeois revolution, for it is inevitably a peasant revolution, etc. As for the other theoretical stream—Bogdanov and Bazarov—is not the theory of our inevitable bureaucratic degeneration the theory now held by the combined opposition? While the Social-Democrats place most emphasis upon the peasant aspect, Bogdanov lays more emphasis upon the second half of the process of our "degeneration," namely bureaucratic degeneration (the technico-intellectual bureaucracy, the "organising" caste). In the speeches of several of the opposition delivered in the Communist Academy, reference was made to "Cavaignacs." But even this piece of stupidity is not original: it was long ago "discovered" by Parvus, Kautsky and other gentlemen, for this company does not believe in the possibility of victorious revolution in Russia: and as these "confounded Bolsheviks" will not