V. I.

Lenin

Kautsky on the State Duma [2]

A new pamphlet by K. Kautsky has appeared, entitled The State Duma (Amiran Publishers, St. Petersburg, 1906, price 3 kopeks). The author
expresses a number of highly interesting ideas on questions that are matters of
controversy among Russian Social-Democrats. First of all there is the question
of the boycott of the Duma. Our readers are, of course, aware of the cheap
manoeuvre to which our Bight Social-Democrats resorted and still resort to evade
this issue. Their argument. is a very simple one. Participation in the
parliamentary struggle is Social-Democracy, non-participation is
anarchism. Therefore , the boycott was a mistake, and the Bolsheviks are
anarchists. This is how that sorry Social-Democrat, Comrade Negorev, for
example, argued, and how a great many of his friends argue.

Kautsky is a Marxist. That is why he argues differently. He thinks it
necessary to examine the concrete historical conditions in Russia, and
not repeat what to Europeans are battered phrases.

“ In these circumstances,” writes Kautsky, after briefly describing the
Dubasov regime, “ it is not surprising that the majority of our
Russian comrades regarded a Duma convened in this way as nothing more than a
most outrageous travesty of popular representation, and decided to boycott it
and not take part in the election campaign.”

Kautsky sees nothing surprising in the tactics of “Blanquism” and
“anarchism”. It would be very useful for Comrade Plekhanov and all
the Mensheviks to think about this, wouldn’t it?

“ It is not surprising,” continues Kautsky, “that most of our Russian
comrades thought it more advisable to fight in order to wreck this Duma and to secure the convocation of a constituent
assembly, than to join in the election campaign in order to get into the Duma.”

The inference is clear. In solving concrete historical problems, Marxists must
carefully analyse all the political conditions of the moment, and not draw
deductions from empty phrases about the antithesis between Blanquism-anarchism,
etc.

While it is becoming the fashion among our Social-Democrats to repeat after the
Cadets that the boycott was a mistake, Kautsky, examining’ the question quite
impartially, does not even think of drawing such a conclusion. He does not hurry
slavishly to bow before the fact that the Duma is being convened, although he is
writing at a time when the failure of the attempt to “prevent the
Duma” from being convened has already become obvious. But’ Kautsky is not
one of those who after every set-back (like that in December, for example)
hastens to repent and to confess ·"mistakes”. He knows that
set-backs in the proletarian struggle do not by a very long way prove that the
proletariat had made “mistakes”.

Another important passage in Kautsky’s pamphlet is the one dealing with the
question of who, i.e., which classes or groups in society, can win in the
present Russian revolution.

“ The peasants and the proletariat,” writes Kautsky, will more and more
vigorously and unceremoniously [remember this, comrades of Nevskaya Gazeta who wrote so approvingly about the “wisdom” of the
Cadets!] push the members of the Duma to the left, will
steadily strengthen its Left Lying , and steadily weaken and paralyse
their opponents, until they have utterly defeated them” (p. 8).

Thus, Kautsky expects the peasants and the proletariat to win in the
present Russian revolution. Will not our Menshevik comrades explain to us the
difference between the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat
’and the peasantry and the victory of the proletariat and the peasantry? Will
they not accuse Kautsky of being a Blanquist, or a follower of Narodnaya Volya,
because he thinks that the peasants and the proletariat, and–not the
bourgeoisie, can win in a bourgeois revolution?

Whoever takes the trouble to ponder over this question will get a clearer idea,
of the fundamental mistake of the Mensheviks, who are always prone to
believe that only the bourgeoisie can be at the head of a bourgeois
revolution, and are therefore always scared by the idea of the peasants
and the proletariat winning power (and victory in a revolution means
winning power).

The third important and valuable idea expressed by Karl Kautsky is that about
the Duma being a new centre, an important step forward in the organisation of
the movement. “No matter which direction the Duma may take,” says
Kautsky, “the indirect or direct, the deliberate or unintentional
impulses it henceforth gives the revolution will have a simultaneous effect over
the whole of Russia, and will everywhere call forth a simultaneous reaction.”

This is quite true. Whoever now says the Bolsheviks are advocating that the Duma
be “disregarded”, or even dissolved—whoever says they are
ignoring the Duma—is not telling the truth. At the Unity Congress the
Bolsheviks moved a resolution which said:

“ The Social-Democrats must utilise the State Duma and its
conflicts with the government, or the conflicts within the Duma itself, fighting
its reactionary elements, ruthlessly exposing the inconsistency and vacillation
of the Cadets, paying particular attention to the peasant revolutionary
democrats, uniting them in opposition to the Cadets, supporting such of their
actions as are in the interests of the proletariat,” [1] etc.

Those who want to judge the Bolsheviks by their resolutions, and not by what
the Negorevs say about them, will see that there is no disagreement whatever between Kautsky and the Bolsheviks on the question of the
State Duma .

In his pamphlet Kautsky says nothing at all about a Social-Democratic group in
the Duma.

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Notes:
[1]
See p. 293 of this volume.— Ed .

[2]
The article “ Kautsky on the State Duma ” appeared in Vestnik Zhizni ( Life Herald ), No. 6.

Vestnik Zhizn i—a weekly scientific, literary and political
magazine, published legally by the Bolsheviks. It appeared in St. Petersburg
intermittently from March 30 (April 12), 1906, to September 1907. By November 19
(December 2), 1900, thirteen issues had been published. In January 1907, the
weekly became a monthly, of which seven issues appeared. Contributors to
Vestnik Zhizni were V. I. Lenin, M. S. Olminsky, V. V. Vorovsky,
A. V. Lunacharsky, A. M. Gorky and others. In No. 12 of the magazine, Lenin
printed his article “The Russian Radical Is Wise After the
Event”.