V. I.   Lenin

434

REMARKS ON A LETTER FROM G. V. CHICHERIN


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
???
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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.

Lenin

12/X.


Notes


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