Page:Left-Wing Communism.djvu/117

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115

Soviets themselves, within the Soviet administration, with the Soviet "legal defenders." We have done well to abolish in Russia the bourgeois law fraternity, but it is reviving here under the cover of Soviet "legal defenders." In the case of the Soviet engineers, the Soviet teachers, and the privileged (i.e., the better skilled and better paid) working men at the Soviet factories, we observe a constant revival of absolutely all the negative traits peculiar to the bourgeois parliamentarism. It is only by dint of constant, untiring, long and stubborn struggle of proletarian organization and discipline that we can gradually conquer this evil.

True enough, under bourgeois domination it is most "difficult" to conquer bourgeois habits in one's own party—i.e., the labor party; it is "difficult" to expel from the party the accustomed parliamentary leaders who are hopelessly corrupt with bourgeois prejudices; it is "difficult" to subject the absolutely necessary even if limited, number, of bourgeois intellectuals to proletarian discipline; it is "difficult" to form, in the bourgeois parliament, a Communist Group worthy of the working class; it is "difficult" to ensure that the Communist parliamentarians do not engage in the bourgeois parliamentary game of wire-pulling, but take up the necessary and actual work of agitation, propaganda and organization of the masses. All this is most "difficult," there is no doubt about it; it was a difficult thing in Russia, and it is a still more difficult thing in Western Europe and in America, where the bourgeoisie is far stronger, and where bourgeois democratic traditions, and so forth, are more hide-bound.

"Yet all these "difficulties" are playthings in comparison with the same kind of problems with which the proletarians will inevitably be confronted just the same, and which it will be obliged to solve for the sake of its victory, both during the revolution and after the conquest of power by the proletariat. During the period of proletarian dictatorship it will become necessary to re-educate millions of peasants and small-owners of property; hundreds of thousands of employees, of officials, and of bourgeois intellectuals; it will become necessary to subject them all to the proletarian State and to proletarian leadership, to suppress and conquer in them their bourgeois