Written: Written on October 12, 1919
Published:
First published in 1945 in Lenin Miscellany XXXV.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1975,
Moscow,
Volume 44,
page 290.
Translated: Clemens Dutt
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive.
You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and
commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
Archive” as your source.
• README
Dear Vladimir Ilyich,
Not knowing whether,
among the mass of
radio messages, you have
read about Kautsky’s
book, I am sending you
this excerpt separately.
It seems to me, from
what I am able to read
of our literature, that
we have not thrown
sufficient light on the role
of state capitalism under
proletarian political
power, a role which has
escaped Kautsky. What
we have is not yet
communism, but state
capitalism, with
inequality of remuneration
including piecework
payment, with forms of
compulsion, sometimes
reproducing the old
regime, with centralised
management even of
production and a restricted
factory
???
|||
self–
administration. We have a Red
Army of state capitalism
with an apparatus of
very strong compulsion,
and not an army of
communism....
Unfortunately, there is almost no real centralisation.
This is altogether wrong.
This is not a sign of capitalism.
This is due to the forms of struggle of the enemy and the level of culture and not due to capitalism.
#
I don’t think so. We have the struggle of the first
stage of the transition to communism with peasant and
capitalist attempts to defend (or to revive) commodity
production.
12/X.
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