Terrorism and Communism

all, whence does this come? Since what time has this been admitted by our Kautskians? They accused us – and this formed the foundation of our differences – of Socialist Utopianism; they declared – and this constituted the essence of their political teaching – that there can be no talk about the transition to Socialism in our epoch, and that our revolution is a bourgeois revolution, and that we Communists are only destroying capitalist economy, and that we are not leading the country foreword but are throwing it back. This was the root difference – the most profound, the most irreconcilable – from which all the others followed. Now the Mensheviks tell us incidentally, in the introductory paragraph of their resolution, as something that does not require proof, that we are in the period of transition from capitalism to Socialism. And this quite unexpected admission, which, one might think, is extremely like a complete capitulation, is made the more lightly and carelessly that, as the whole resolution shows, it imposes no revolutionary obligations on the Mensheviks. They remain entirely captive to the bourgeois ideology. After recognizing that we are on the road to Socialism, the Mensheviks with all the greater ferocity attack those methods without which, in the harsh and difficult conditions of the present day, the transition to Socialism cannot be accomplished.