As a matter of fact, the very promptitude and sanity of
their opportunism when faced by responsibility, serves to demonstrate the
truth of the contention made in these pages, that in refusing to co-operate
with others in building up a permanently secure democratic government,
they were actuated by no high moral principle, but simply by a desire to
gain power. The position of Russia to-day would have been vastly different
if the wisdom manifested in the following paragraphs had governed Lenine
and his associates in the days when Kerensky was trying to save Russian
democracy:
_Without the direction of specialists of different branches of
knowledge, technique, and experience, the transformation toward
Socialism is impossible_, for Socialism demands a conscious mass
movement toward a higher productivity of labor in comparison with
capitalism and on the basis which had been attained by capitalism.
Socialism must accomplish this movement forward in its own way, by
its own methods--to make it more definite, by Soviet methods. But
the specialists are inevitably bourgeois on account of the whole
environment of social life which made them specialists.
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