necessity.  The sanity of this opportunistic attitude is altogether admirable, but it contrasts strangely with the refusal to co-operate with the bourgeoisie in establishing a stable democratic government—­no less necessary for Russia’s reconstruction and for Socialism.  As a matter of fact, the very promptitude and sanity of their opportunism when faced by responsibility, serves to demonstrate the truth of the contention made in these pages, that in refusing to co-operate with others in building up a permanently secure democratic government, they were actuated by no high moral principle, but simply by a desire to gain power.  The position of Russia to-day would have been vastly different if the wisdom manifested in the following paragraphs had governed Lenine and his associates in the days when Kerensky was trying to save Russian democracy: 

Without the direction of specialists of different branches of knowledge, technique, and experience, the transformation toward Socialism is impossible, for Socialism demands a conscious mass movement toward a higher productivity of labor in comparison with capitalism and on the basis which had been attained by capitalism.  Socialism must accomplish this movement forward in its own way, by its own methods—­to make it more definite, by Soviet methods.  But the specialists are inevitably bourgeois on account of the whole environment of social life which made them specialists....  In view of the considerable delay in accounting and control in general, although we have succeeded in defeating sabotage, we have not yet created an environment which would put at our disposal the bourgeois specialists.  Many sabotagers are coming into our service, but the best organizers and the biggest specialists can be used by the state either in the old bourgeois way (that is, for a higher salary) or in the new proletarian way (that is, by creating such an environment of universal accounting and control which would inevitably and naturally attract and gain the submission of specialists).  We were forced now to make use of the old bourgeois method and agree to a very high remuneration for the services of the biggest of the bourgeois specialists.  All those who are acquainted with the facts understand this, but not all give sufficient thought to the significance of such a measure on the part of the proletarian state. It is clear that the measure is a compromise, that it is a defection from the principles of the Paris Commune and of any proletarian rule, which demand the reduction of salaries to the standard of remuneration of the average workers—­principles which demand that “career hunting” be fought by deeds, not words.

Furthermore, it is clear that such a measure is not merely a halt in a certain part and to a certain degree of the offensive against capitalism (for capitalism is not a quantity of money, but a definite social relationship), but also a step backward by our Socialist Soviet state, which