man that “local life is terribly conservative” that its conservatism is 
“artistic”, that “the psychology of the people is conservative”. Bolshevism 
having as it were realised the value of conservatism, now smuggles 
in and includes in its collection of revolutionary achievements, strange 
property treasures bequeathed by the old culture; for Bolshevism is mot 
content with usurping and stealing real solid things, it need turn to 
spiritual piracy too. “We build anew,” says Trotzky, “as yet chiefly using 
old material, but we arrange it in a new fashion.” As yet... In order to 
seize the power the proletariat has shattered “the old apparatus of class 
absolutism... so decisively as nowhere else in the world’, but it becomes 
evident now that “for the construction of a new apparatus we have to make 
use in a certain, rather considerable measure, of old parts.” In bold type 
Trotzky prints the following: “We do not reject what the past has left us. 
The revolution itself was made first of all, in order that we could seize 
this bequest.” Disrespectful Trotzky respects the past. In its eleventh year, 
Bolshevism, after causing so many deaths, begins to understand that “the 
productive apparatus of capitalistic anarchy may be reconstructed only by 
degrees”. The dashing revolutionary has turned into a staid evolutionist. 
He speaks, with a touch of sadness, “of huge stores of knowledge and 
skill acquired by mankind during its long life”. Impossible in that case to 
renounce the old world, for the latter has created (among other things), 
as declares our revolutionary turned conservative: “a brilliant school of 
classic bourgeois economics.” A.B.C. truths are spoken by Trotzky who 
no more spouts fountains of demagogical lies, but quietly remarks that 
Marx's dialectic and materialism cannot always act sesame-wise on the gates 
of knowledge and that “the purification of bourgeois science supposes a 
command of bourgeois science, whereas nothing can be reached by dismissing 
the whole matter with a flick of unsound criticism.” 
“In science,” sagely continues the now exiled Trotzky, “generalisations 
are arrived at only gradually.” While defending in science the experimental 
method our faded Bolshevic finds that “we have neither the grounds nor 
the right to forbid any other even a less sound-method trying to foresee 
the deductions, which the experimental way is but very slow in reaching.” 
Wonderful is the science of the old world, wonderful is its art: “it (art) 
has enriched in every way’ human psychology and this enriching is an 
‘invaluable gift of culture”. “We should at once grow poorer in spirit 
Were we to reject in a lump the art of yesterday.” The proletariat should 
in particular “study the Russian classics”. He answers in the affirmative 
to the question of whether trade is included in the proletarian and socialistic 
culture, and he considers that bourgeois habits and morals are inevitably 
penetrated by the traditions of “honest trade’,