Leadership Quote by Karl Radek

Radek isn’t trying to win over skeptics of socialism; he’s trying to disqualify them. The line reads like a corrective to the comforting liberal fantasy that hostility is just ignorance waiting to be educated away. For Radek, “enmity” is not a knowledge problem. It’s an interest problem. People oppose socialism not because they haven’t read the pamphlets but because they’ve absorbed - and benefit from - the mental furniture of the bourgeois world: property as virtue, hierarchy as common sense, stability as morality.

The phrase “possessed of bourgeois ideas” does a lot of work. It’s not merely descriptive; it’s diagnostic, almost clinical, implying a kind of ideological infection. The target isn’t only the capitalist class but the party members who think they can straddle class lines in their politics. Radek’s intent is boundary-policing: to say that a party’s program can’t be neutral if its instincts, vocabulary, and reflexes are shaped by bourgeois assumptions. Their “policy,” in this framing, will inevitably reproduce the existing order even when it claims reform.

Context matters: Radek operated in the early 20th-century socialist and communist milieu where splits over reform vs revolution were existential. The subtext is a warning against accommodationists inside the movement: if you treat opposition as misunderstanding, you’ll waste time persuading people who are, in fact, strategically invested in socialism’s failure. This is rhetoric designed to harden a camp, not broaden it.