* * *

If the proletariat, acting through the Soviets, should
successfully establish accounting and control on a national scale,
there would be no need for such compromise. Through the Food
Departments of the Soviets, through their organs of supply, we
would unite the population in one co-operative directed by the
proletariat, without the assistance from bourgeois co-operatives,
without concessions to the purely bourgeois principle which
compels the labor co-operatives to remain side by side with the
bourgeois co-operatives instead of wholly subjecting these
bourgeois co-operatives, fusing both?[69]

V

It is no mood of captious, unfriendly criticism that attention is specially
directed to these compromises. Only political charlatans, ineffective
quacks, and irresponsible soap-box orators see crime against the
revolutionary program of the masses in a wise and honest opportunism.
History will not condemn the Bolsheviki for the give-and-take,
compromise-where-necessary policy outlined in the foregoing paragraphs. Its
condemnation will be directed rather against their failure to act in that
spirit from the moment the first Provisional Government arose. Had they
joined with the other Socialists and established a strong Coalition
Government, predominantly Socialist, but including representatives of the
most liberal and democratic elements of the bourgeoisie, it would have been
possible to bring the problems of labor organization and labor discipline
under democratic direction. It would not have been possible to establish
complete industrial democracy, fully developed Socialism, nor will it be
possible to do this for many years to come.

But it would have been easy and natural for the state to secure to the
workers a degree of economic assurance and protection not otherwise
possible. It would have been possible, too, for the workers'
organizations, recognized by and co-operating with the state, to have
undertaken, in a large degree, the control of the conditions of their own
employment which labor organizations everywhere are demanding and gradually
gaining. The best features of "Guild Socialism" could nowhere have been so
easily adopted.[70] But instead of effort in these directions, we find the
Bolsheviki resorting to the _Taylor System of Scientific Management
enforced by an individual dictator whose word is final and absolute, to
disobey whom is treason_! Th