tion or the labour energy at the disposal of humanity is crystallised in the enormous annual output of these products it will be found that it amounts to about two to two and a half, certainly not more than three per cent.; a result which is not at all impressive."
By quoting the figures two to two and a half per cent, of the production of cast iron and coal, A. A. Bogdanov thinks he has proved his postulate that the present phase of development of capitalist relations makes it futile even to think of raising the question of transition to the lines of Socialist revolution and to the lines of direct Socialist construction.
Such criticism can hardly be taken for serious Marxian criticism; it is nothing more than a caricature of Marxism.[1]
For the "critics" start out on an extremely vulgarised and certainly undialectical presentation of the pre-requisites for the collapse of capitalism. In their opinion the capitalist form of production
- ↑ As a curiosity we may mention also the "Marxian" criticism of the Bolsheviks by a certain Rudolph Schneider, the secretary of the Imperial Union of German Industry, who, in his pamphlet, "The Soviet System, Socialisation and Compulsory Economy," refutes, not only the Bolsheviks, but Socialists generally by references to Marx. "Fifty years ago," says this learned counsel for the German capitalist industrialists, "the great theoretician of Socialism, Karl Marx, brilliantly refuted all these Utopians and reformers of the world by a single remark" (p. 20). When people speak of practical realisation of Socialism they drop into "Utopianism: 'Socialism has gone back from science to Utopia'" (p. 20), (Rudolph Schneider: "Gescheftsfuhrer des Reichsverbandes der deutschen Industrie: Ratesystem Sozialisierung und Zwangswirtschaft," Dresden, 1919).
