No profound and powerful popular movement in history ever escaped paying a price to the scum; the inexperienced innovators have been preyed upon by adventurers and crooks, boasters and shouters; there have been stupid confusion, unnecessary bustle. Individual "leaders" would undertake twenty tasks at once, completing none of them. Let the poodles of bourgeois society from Bielorussoff to Martov yelp and bark on account of every additional splinter going to waste while the big old forest is cut down. Let them bark. That is what poodles are there for. We will go ahead, trying very cautiously and patiently to test and discover real organizers, people with sober minds and practical sense, who combine loyalty to Socialism with the ability to organize quietly (and in spite of confusion and noise) efficient and harmonious joint work of a large number of people under the Soviet organization. Only such persons should, after many trials, advancing them from the simplest to the most difficult tasks, be promoted to responsible posts to direct the work of the people, to direct the management. We have not yet learned this. We will learn this.
Efficiency and Proletarian Dictatorship
The resolution of the last (Moscow) Congress of the Soviets, advocates, as the most important problem at present, the creation of "efficient organization" and higher discipline. Such resolutions are now readily supported by everybody. But that their realization requires compulsion, and compulsion in the form of a dictatorship, is ordinarily not comprehended. And yet, it would be the greatest stupidity and the most absurd opportunism to suppose that the transition from capitalism to Socialism is possible without compulsion and dictatorship. The Marxian theory has long ago criticized beyond misunderstanding this petty bourgeois-democratic and anarchistic nonsense. And Russia of 1917–1918 confirms in this respect the Marxian theory so clearly, palpably and convincingly that only those who are hopelessly stupid or who have firmly determined to ignore the truth can still err in this respect. Either a
