and this denial in a large measure was based on the alleged impossibility of solving the problems of the new technique owing to the general backwardness of the technico-economic basis of our country. This is what he wrote:
"It is sufficient to know what is the prevailing type of enterprise in agriculture and in home handicraft industry, which employs the largest number of workers in industry, to come to the conclusion that the workers cannot bring into being the Socialist system until capitalist production creates for it the material conditions. In the first few years the Great Russian Revolution will only split off industry from agriculture, will split it off by means of capitalism and only 'in the more or less remote future' will Socialism again unite them in a harmonious whole. Unless it breaks away from agriculture and petty production, industry can never become transformed technically into social production, for the primitive technique of the handicraftsman cannot be preserved, while the change in technique will break up the semi-agricultural economy. Even the revolution, in spite of the tremendous creative power it commands, cannot create new enterprises on a new technical basis out of nothing."
The most characteristic and curious thing in this quotation is the last sentence in which the writer combines the idea of the impossibility of a Socialist revolution in Russia with the idea that there are no sources from which we can obtain the means to establish a new technical basis for our economy.
By what means can we establish the new technical basis? That is the problem. This problem, i.e., the "problem of basic capital," to use a modern
