V. I.

Lenin

434

REMARKS ON A LETTER FROM G. V. CHICHERIN

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.

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