The Bolsheviki under Lenin's leadership, however, succeeded in capturing control of the armed forces in Petrograd and later in Moscow and thus laid t… - Karl Kautsky

According to the laws of social development established by Marx, a backward agricultural country cannot show the way to Socialism to other countries. Its failure in this respect is foreordained. It is merely a question of when and how this failure will finally manifest itself. Until now the Bolsheviki have been skillful in disguising their failure under the mask of promises of a glorious future. The last such promise was the Five-Year plan. But the Bolshevist state economy has been in existence now more than fifteen years. For more than ten years the USSR <nowiki/>has been enjoying complete peace. And yet, contrary to all promises, things under the Bolshevist state economy have been getting worse every year, (excepting the short period of the Nep), and the day is not far distant when even the most credulous will become convinced that the Bolshevist way leads not upward, toward Socialism, but downward, to open ruin or slow disintegration.

But if socialism is a social necessity, then it would be human nature and not socialism which would have to readjust itself, if ever the two clashed.

Our duty is not merely to abolish the capitalist order but to set up a higher order in its place. But we must oppose those forces aiming to destroy capitalism only in order to replace it with another barbarous mode of production.