101. The Employment of bourgeois Experts.
Contemporary large-scale production is inconceivable without managing engineers, technicians, learned specialists, investigators, and persons with peculiar practical experience. Among the ranks of the workers, very few come within these categories. Neither in the tsarist and feudalist regime nor in the bourgeois regime were the workers given any opportunity to learn. But we have to get on with the work, and there is only one way out of the difficulty. We must make use of those persons with specialised skill who served the bourgeoisie, not from fear, but from inclination. The party is well aware that this stratum of technicians and intellectuals no less than the stratum of ex-managers and capitalist organisers, is saturated with bourgeois ideology. Nay more. Many such persons are directly hostile to us, and would like to betray us to our class enemies. Nevertheless we have to take these bourgeois into our service. There is nothing else for us to do.
The experts and technicians have carried on a fierce struggle against the proletariat, in the first instance by sabotage. But the Soviet Power was able to put an end to sabotage. By degrees, many groups came over to our side, when they saw that the workers were creating as well as destroying, and that our party by no means intended to betray Russia to the German imperialists. Some of them are beginning to realise that the knell of capitalism has really sounded. A split in their ranks has begun. It devolves upon the proletariat to widen this breach to the utmost.
We should be wrong, of course, to expect fidelity from these “experts,” to expect from them devotion to communism. It would be absurd to hope that such people, who are connected with the bourgeoisie by a thousand ties, will undergo a sudden transformation. But here the proletariat must act like a far-seeing employer. It needs the bourgeois experts, and it must compel them to work for it.