The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky
V.I. Lenin

Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/

## Preface

Kautsky’s pamphlet, The Dictatorship of the
Proletariat , recently published in Vienna (Wien, 1918,
Ignaz Brand, pp. 63) is a most lucid example of that utter and
ignominious bankruptcy of the Second International about which
all honest socialists in all countries have been talking for a
long time. The proletarian revolution is now becoming a
practical issue in a number of countries, and an examination of
Kautsky’s renegade sophistries and his complete renunciation of Marxism is therefore essential.

First of all, it should be emphasised, however, that the
present author has, from the very beginning of the war, repeatedly
pointed to Kautsky’s rupture with Marxism. A number of articles published between 1914 and 1916 in Sotsial-Demokrat and Kommunist ,
issued abroad, dealt with this subject. These articles were
afterwards collected and published by the Petrograd Soviet under
the title Against the Stream , by G. Zinoviev and N. Lenin
(Petrograd, 1918, pp. 550). In a pamphlet published in Geneva in
1915 and translated at the same time into German and French [2] I wrote about “Kautskyism”
as follows:

“Kautsky, the leading authority in the Second
International, is a most typical and striking example of how a
verbal recognition of Marxism has led in practice to its
conversion into ‘Struvism’, or into
‘Brentanoism’ [i.e., into a bourgeois-liberal theory recognising the non-revolutionary “class” struggle of
the proletariat, which was expressed most clearly by Struve, the
Russian writer, and Brentano, the German economist]. Another
example is Plekhanov. By means of patent sophistry, Marxism is
stripped of its revolutionary living spirit; everything is recognised in Marxism except the revolutionary methods of
struggle, the propaganda and preparation of those methods, and the
education of the masses in this direction. Kautsky reconciles in
an unprincipled way the fundamental idea of social-chauvinism,
recognition of defence of the fatherland in the present war, with
a diplomatic sham concession to the Lefts—his abstention
from voting for war credits, his verbal claim to be in the
opposition, etc. Kautsky, who in 1909 wrote a book on the
approaching epoch of revolutions and on the connection between war
and revolution, Kautsky, who in 1912 signed the Basle
Manifesto on taking revolutionary advantage of the impending
war, is outdoing himself in justifying and embellishing
social-chauvinism and, like Plekhanov, joins the bourgeoisie in
ridiculing any thought of revolution and all steps towards the
immediate revolutionary struggle.

“The working class cannot play its world-revolutionary role unless it wages a ruthless struggle against this backsliding,
spinelessness, subservience to opportunism, and unparalleled
vulgarisation of the theories of Marxism. Kautskyism is not
fortuitous; it is the social product of the contradictions within
the Second
International , a blend of loyalty to Marxism in word and
subordination to opportunism in deed” (G. Zinoviev and
N. Lenin, Socialism and War , Geneva, 1915,
pp. 13–14).

Again, in my book Imperialism, the Latest
Stage of Capitalism , [This was the original title of Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism .] written in 1916 and published in Petrograd in
1917, I examined in detail the theoretical fallacy of all
Kautsky’s arguments about imperialism. I quoted
Kautsky’s definition of imperialism: “Imperialism is a product of highly developed industrial capitalism. It consists in
the striving of every industrial capitalist nation to bring under
its control or to annex all large areas of agrarian [Kautsky’s italics] territory, irrespective of what nations
inhabit it.” I showed how utterly incorrect this definition
was, and how it was “adapted” to the glossing over of the most profound contradictions of imperialism, and then to
reconciliation with opportunism. I gave my own definition of
imperialism: “Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of
development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance
capital is established; at which the export of capital has
acquired pronounced importance; at which the division of the
world among the international trusts has begun; at which the
division of all territories of the globe among the biggest
capitalist powers has been completed.” I showed that
Kautsky’s critique of imperialism is on an even lower plane
than the bourgeois, philistine critique.

Finally, in August and September 1917—that is, before the
proletarian revolution in Russia (October 25 [November 7], 1917),
I wrote a pamphlet (published in Petrograd at the beginning of
1918) entitled The State and Revolution. The Marxist Theory of
the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution .
In Chapter VI of this book, entitled “The Vulgarisation of
Marxism by the Opportunists”, I devoted special attention to
Kautsky, showing that he had completely distorted Marx’s
ideas, tailoring them to suit opportunism, and that he had
“repudiated the revolution in deeds, while accepting it in
words.”

In substance, the chief theoretical mistake Kautsky makes in
his pamphlet on the dictatorship of the proletariat lies in those
opportunist distortions of Marx’s ideas on the state—the
distortions which I exposed in detail in my pamphlet, The
State and Revolution.

These preliminary remarks were necessary for they show that I
openly accused Kautsky of being a renegade long before the Bolsheviks assumed state power and were condemned by him on
that account.

## Endnotes

[1] Lenin began work on the book The Proletarian Revolution and the
Renegade Kautsky at the beginning of October 1918, immediately
after he had read Kautsky’s The Dictatorship of the
Proletariat , which distorted and vulgarised the Marxist theory of
the proletarian revolution and slandered the Soviet state.

Lenin attached great importance to exposure of Kautsky’s
opportunist views on the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In August 1918 the magazine Sozialistische Auslandspotilih carried Kautsky’s article
in which he called upon the Social-Democratic parties to fight
the Bolsheviks. After reading excerpts from the article
published in Pravda on September 20, Lenin wrote to
V. V. Vorovsky in Stockholm:  “The disgraceful nonsense,
childish twaddle and most vulgar opportunism of Kautsky warrant
the question: Why are we doing nothing to combat Kautsky’s theoretical vulgarisation of Marxism?”  ( Collected Works ,
Vol. 35).

Lenin asked Vorovsky, the then plenipotentiary envoy of the Soviet Republic in the Scandinavian countries, to
send him Kautsky’s pamphlet on the dictatorship as soon as
it was out and also all his articles about the Bolsheviks.

Bonch-Bruyevich wrote in his reminiscences that
Lenin was carried away by his work on The Proletarian Revolution
and the Renegade Kautsky ,  “he was literally burning with
anger”,  “sitting up every day till late at night writing
this remarkably hard hitting work. . . .”  On October 9,
before the book’s completion Lenin wrote an article under
the same title, which appeared in Pravda on October 11. On October
10 he sent a note to People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs
U. V. Chicherin and his deputy L. M. Karakhan asking them to
forward his article to A. A. Joffe, Y. A. Berzin and
V. V. Vorovsky in Berlin. In the accompanying letter he wrote:
“Dear comrades, I realise only too well the defects of this
very short article against Kautsky. But it is essential to make a
stand as quickly as possible and express an opinion. Please see
that it is translated and published in leaflet form”  ( Lenin
Miscellany XXXVI , pp. 61–62). The German translation of
Lenin’s article was published in Berne in 1918 and in Vienna
in 1919. In 1919 it was also published in Milan in Italian.

In 1919 Lenin’s pamphlet The Proletarian
Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky was published in Britain,
France and Germany.

[2] Reference is to the pamphlet Socialism and War ( The Attitude
of the R.S.D.L.P. Towards the War ). Lenin decided to write
it in connection with the First International Socialist Conference
that was about to be convened. He wrote it together with Zinoviev,
but the main part of the pamphlet belongs to Lenin who also edited
it.

The pamphlet was published in Russian and
German and circulated among the delegates at the Zimmerwald
Conference which met in September 1915. After the Conference it
was also published in France, and in Norway in the Left
Social-Democratic newspaper. Lenin more than once tried, though
without success, to get it published in America in English.

## How Kautsky Turned Marx Into A Common Liberal

The fundamental question that Kautsky discusses in his pamphlet is that of the very essence of proletarian revolution, namely,
the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is a question that is
of the greatest importance for all countries, especially for the
advanced ones, especially for those at war, and especially at
the present time. One may say without fear of exaggeration that
this is the key problem of the entire proletarian class
struggle. It is, therefore, necessary to pay particular
attention to it.

Kautsky formulates the question as follows: “The contrast
between the two socialist trends” (i.e., the Bolsheviks and
non-Bolsheviks) “is the contrast between two radically different methods: the dictatorial and the democratic ”
(p. 3).

Let us point out, in passing, that when calling the non-Bolsheviks in Russia, i.e., the Mensheviks and
Socialist-Revolutionaries, socialists, Kautsky was guided by
their name , that is, by a word, and not by the actual place they
occupy in the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. What a wonderful understanding and application of
Marxism! But more of this later.

For the moment we must deal with the main point, namely, with
Kautsky’s great discovery of the “fundamental contrast” between “democratic and dictatorial
methods”. That is the crux of the matter; that is the essence of Kautsky’s pamphlet. And that is such an awful
theoretical muddle, such a complete renunciation of Marxism, that
Kautsky, it must be confessed, has far excelled Bernstein.

The question of the dictatorship of the proletariat is a
question of the relation of the proletarian state to the
bourgeois state, of proletarian democracy to bourgeois democracy. One would think that this is as plain as a
pikestaff. But Kautsky, like a schoolmaster who has become as
dry as dust from quoting the same old textbooks on history,
persistently turns his back on the twentieth century and his
face to the eighteenth century, and for the hundredth time, in a
number of paragraphs, in an incredibly tedious fashion chews the
old cud over the relation of bourgeois democracy to absolutism
and medievalism!

It sounds just like he were chewing rags in his sleep!

But this means he utterly fails to understand what is what! One
cannot help smiling at Kautsky’s effort to make it appear
that there are people who preach “contempt for democracy” (p. 11) and so forth. That is the sort of
twaddle Kautsky uses to befog and confuse the issue, for he
talks like the liberals, speaking of democracy in general, and
not of bourgeois democracy; he even avoids using this precise,
class term, and, instead, tries to speak about “presocialist” democracy. This windbag devotes
almost one-third of his pamphlet, twenty pages out of sixty-three, to this twaddle, which is so agreeable to the
bourgeoisie, for it is tantamount to embellishing bourgeois
democracy, and obscures the question of the proletarian
revolution.

But, after all, the title of Kautsky’s pamphlet is The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Everybody knows that
this is the very essence of Marx’s doctrine; and after a lot of irrelevant twaddle Kautsky was obliged to
quote Marx’s words on the dictatorship of the proletariat.

But the way in which he the “Marxist” did it was simply farcical! Listen to this:

“This view” (which Kautsky dubs “contempt for democracy”) “rests upon a single word of Karl
Marx’s”. This is what Kautsky literally says on page
20. And on page 60 the same thing is repeated even in the form
that they (the Bolsheviks) “opportunely recalled the little
word” (that is literally what he says— des
Wörtchens!!) “about the dictatorship of the proletariat which Marx once used in 1875 in a letter”.

Here is Marx’s “little word":

“Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one
into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political
transition period in which the state can be nothing but the
revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” [3]

First of all, to call this classical reasoning of Marx’s,
which sums up the whole of his revolutionary teaching, “a
single word” and even “a little word,” is an insult to and complete renunciation of Marxism. It must not be
forgotten that Kautsky knows Marx almost by heart, and, judging
by all he has written, he has in his desk, or in his head, a
number of pigeon-holes in which all that was ever written by
Marx is most carefully filed so as to be ready at hand for
quotation. Kautsky must know that both Marx and Engels,
in their letters as well as in their published works, repeatedly spoke about the dictatorship of the
proletariat, before and especially after the Paris
Commune . Kautsky must know that the formula “dictatorship of the proletariat” is merely a more
historically concrete and scientifically exact formulation of
the proletariat’s task of “smashing” the bourgeois state machine, about which both Marx and Engels, in
summing up the experience of the Revolution of 1848, and, still
more so, of 1871, spoke for forty years, between 1852 and 1891.

How is this monstrous distortion of Marxism by that
Marxist pedant Kautsky to be explained? As far as the philosophical roots of this phenomenon are concerned, it amounts
to the substitution of eclecticism and sophistry for dialectics. Kautsky is a past master at this sort of
substitution. Regarded from the point of view of practical
politics, it amounts to subservience to the opportunists, that
is, in the last analysis to the bourgeoisie. Since the outbreak
of the war, Kautsky has made increasingly rapid progress
in this art of being a Marxist in words and a lackey of the
bourgeoisie in deeds, until he has become a virtuoso at it.

One feels even more convinced of this when examining the
remarkable way in which Kautsky “interprets”
Marx’s “little word” about the dictatorship of the proletariat. Listen to this:

“Marx, unfortunately, neglected to show us in greater detail how he conceived this dictatorship. . . .” (This is
an utterly mendacious phrase of a renegade, for Marx and Engels
gave us, indeed, quite a number of most detailed indications,
which Kautsky, the Marxist pedant, has deliberately ignored.)
“Literally, the word dictatorship means the abolition of
democracy. But, of course, taken literally, this word also means
the undivided rule of a single person unrestricted by any
laws—an autocracy, which differs from despotism only insofar as
it is not meant as a permanent state institution, but as a
transient emergency measure.

“The term, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, hence not the dictatorship of a single individual, but of a class, ipso facto precludes the possibility that Marx in this
connection had in mind a dictatorship in the literal sense of the
term.

“He speaks here not of a form of government , but of a condition , which must necessarily arise wherever the
proletariat has gained political power. That Marx in this case did
not have in mind a form of government is proved by the fact that
he was of the opinion that in Britain and America the transition
might take place peacefully, i.e., in a democratic way”
(p. 20).

We have deliberately quoted this argument in full so that the
reader may clearly see the methods Kautsky the “theoretician” employs.

Kautsky chose to approach the question in such a way as to
begin with a definition of the “ word ” dictatorship.

Very well. Everyone has a sacred right to approach a question
in whatever way he pleases. One must only distinguish a serious
and honest approach from a dishonest one. Anyone who wants to be serious in approaching the question
in this way ought to give his own definition of the “word”. Then the question would be put fairly and
squarely. But Kautsky does not do that. “Literally,” he writes, “the word dictatorship means the abolition of
democracy.”

In the first place, this is not a definition. If Kautsky wanted
to avoid giving a definition of the concept dictatorship, why did
he choose this particular approach to the question?

Secondly, it is obviously wrong. It is natural for a liberal to
speak of “democracy” in general; but a Marxist will never forget to ask: “for what class?” Everyone knows,
for instance (and Kautsky the “historian” knows it too), that rebellions, or even strong ferment, among the slaves in
ancient times at once revealed the fact that the ancient state was
essentially a dictatorship of the slave owners .

Did this dictatorship abolish democracy among , and for , the slaveowners? Everybody knows that it did
not.

Kautsky the “Marxist” made this monstrously absurd and untrue statement because he “ forgot “ the
class struggle. . . .

To transform Kautsky’s liberal and false assertion into a
Marxist and true one, one must say: dictatorship does not
necessarily mean the abolition of democracy for the class that
exercises the dictatorship over other classes; but it does mean
the abolition (or very material restriction, which is also a form
of abolition) of democracy for the class over which, or against
which, the dictatorship is exercised.

But, however true this assertion may be, it does not give a
definition of dictatorship.

“. . . But, of course, taken literally, this word also means the undivided rule of a single person unrestricted by any
laws. . . .”

Like a blind puppy sniffing at random first in one direction and
then in another, Kautsky accidentally stumbled upon one true idea (namely, that dictatorship is rule unrestricted by any
laws), nevertheless, he failed to give a definition of dictatorship, and, moreover, he made an obvious
historical blunder, namely, that dictatorship means the rule of
a single person. This is even grammatically incorrect, since
dictatorship may also be exercised by a handful of persons, or
by an oligarchy, or by a class, etc.

Kautsky then goes on to point out the difference between
dictatorship and despotism, but, although what he says is
obviously incorrect, we shall not dwell upon it, as it is wholly
irrelevant to the question that interests us. Everyone knows
Kautsky’s inclination to turn from the twentieth century
to the eighteenth, and from the eighteenth century to classical
antiquity, and we hope that the German proletariat, after it has
attained its dictatorship, will bear this inclination of his in
mind and appoint him, say, teacher of ancient history at some
Gymnasium. To try to evade a definition of the dictatorship of
the proletariat by philosophising about despotism is either
crass stupidity or very clumsy trickery.

As a result, we find that, having undertaken to discuss the
dictatorship, Kautsky rattled off a great deal of manifest lies,
but has given no definition! Yet, instead of relying on his
mental faculties he could have used his memory to extract from
“pigeon-holes” all those instances in which Marx speaks of dictatorship. Had he done so, he would certainly have
arrived either at the following definition or at one in
substance coinciding with it:

Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted
by any laws.

The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won
and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against
the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.

This simple truth, a truth that is as plain as a pikestaff to
every class-conscious worker (who represents the people, and not
an upper section of petty-bourgeois scoundrels who have been
bribed by the capitalists, such as are the social-imperialists
of all countries), this truth, which is obvious to every
representative of the exploited classes fighting for their
emancipation, this truth, which is beyond dispute for every
Marxist, has to be “extracted by force” from the most learned Mr. Kautsky! How is it to be explained? Simply by
that spirit of servility with which the leaders of the Second
International, who have become contemptible sycophants in the
service of the bourgeoisie, are imbued.

Kautsky first committed a sleight of hand by proclaiming the
obvious nonsense that the word dictatorship, in its literal
sense, means the dictatorship of a single person, and then—on
the strength of this sleight of hand—he declared that “hence” Marx’s words about the dictatorship of
a class were not meant in the literal sense (but in one
in which dictatorship does not imply revolutionary violence, but
the “peaceful” winning of a majority under bourgeois— mark you—“democracy”).

One must, if you please, distinguish between a “condition” and a “form of government”. A
wonderfully profound distinction; it is like drawing a distinction
between the “condition” of stupidity of a man who reasons foolishly and the “form” of his stupidity.

Kautsky finds it necessary to interpret dictatorship as a “condition of domination” (this is the literal
expression he uses on the very next page, p. 21), because then revolutionary violence, and violent revolution,
disappear. The “condition of domination” is a condition in which any majority finds itself under
... “democracy"! Thanks to such a fraud, revolution happily disappears !

The fraud, however, is too crude and will not save Kautsky. One
cannot hide the fact that dictatorship presupposes and implies a
“condition,” one so disagreeable to renegades, of revolutionary violence of one class against another. It
is patently absurd to draw a distinction between a “condition” and a “form of government”. To
speak of forms of government in this connection is trebly stupid,
for every schoolboy knows that monarchy and republic are two
different forms of government. It must be explained to Mr. Kautsky
that both these forms of government, like all transitional “forms of government” under capitalism,
are only variations of the bourgeois state, that is, of
the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

Lastly, to speak of forms of government is not only a stupid,
but also a very crude falsification of Marx, who was very clearly
speaking here of this or that form or type of state, and
not of forms of government.

The proletarian revolution is impossible without the forcible
destruction of the bourgeois state machine and the substitution
for it of a new one which, in the words of Engels, is “no longer a state in the proper sense of the
word”. [4]

Because of his renegade position, Kautsky, however, has to befog and belie all this.

Look what wretched subterfuges he uses.

First subterfuge. “That Marx in this case did not have in
mind a form of government is proved by the fact that he was of the
opinion that in Britain and America the transition might take
place peacefully, i.e., in a democratic way.”

The form of government has absolutely nothing to do with it, for there are monarchies which are not typical of the
bourgeois state, such, for instance, as have no military
clique, and there are republics which are quite typical in this
respect, such, for instance, as have a military clique and a
bureaucracy. This is a universally known historical and political
fact, and Kautsky cannot falsify it.

If Kautsky had wanted to argue in a serious and honest manner
he would have asked himself: Are there historical laws relating to
revolution which know of no exception? And the reply would have
been: No, there are no such laws. Such laws only apply to the
typical, to what Marx once termed the “ideal,” meaning average, normal, typical capitalism.

Further, was there in the seventies anything which made England
and America exceptional in regard to what we are now discussing? It will be obvious to anyone at all familiar with
the requirements of science in regard to the problems of history
that this question must be put. To fail to put it is tantamount to
falsifying science, to engaging in sophistry. And, the question
having been put, there can be no doubt as to the reply: the
revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is violence against the bourgeoisie; and the necessity of such violence is particularly called for, as Marx and Engels have
repeatedly explained in detail (especially in The Civil War in
France and in the preface to it), by the existence of militarism and a bureaucracy. But it is precisely these
institutions that were non-existent in Britain and America in
the seventies, when Marx made his observations (they do exist
in Britain and in America now)!

Kautsky has to resort to trickery literally at every step to
cover up his apostasy!

And note how he inadvertently betrayed his cloven hoof when he
wrote: “peacefully, i.e. , in a democratic way ”!

In defining dictatorship, Kautsky tried his utmost to conceal
from the reader the fundamental feature of this concept, namely,
revolutionary violence. But now the truth is out: it is a
question of the contrast between peaceful and violent revolutions .

That is the crux of the matter. Kautsky has to resort to all
these subterfuges, sophistries and falsifications only to excuse himself from violent revolution, and to conceal his
renunciation of it, his desertion to the side of the liberal
labour policy, i.e., to the side of the bourgeoisie. That is the
crux of the matter.

Kautsky the “historian” so shamelessly falsifies history that he “forgets” the fundamental fact that
pre-monopoly capitalism—which actually reached its zenith in the
seventies—was by virtue of its fundamental economic traits, which found most typical expression in Britain and in
America, distinguished by a, relatively speaking, maximum fondness
for peace and freedom. Imperialism, on the other hand, i.e.,
monopoly capitalism, which finally matured only in the twentieth
century, is, by virtue of its fundamental economic traits, distinguished by a minimum fondness for peace and freedom,
and by a maximum and universal development of militarism. To
“fail to notice” this in discussing the extent to which a peaceful or violent revolution is typical or probable is
to stoop to the level of a most ordinary lackey of the bourgeoisie.

Second subterfuge. The Paris Commune was a dictatorship of the
proletariat, but it was elected by universal suffrage, i.e., without depriving the bourgeoisie of the franchise, i.e.,
“ democratically ”. And Kautsky says triumphantly: “. . . The dictatorship of the proletariat was
for Marx” (or: according to Marx) “a condition which necessarily follows from pure democracy, if the proletariat forms
the majority” ( bei überwiegendem Proletariat ,
S. 21).

This argument of Kautsky’s is so amusing that one truly
suffers from a veritable embarras de richesses (an embarrassment due to the wealth . . . of objections that can be made
to it). Firstly, it is well known that the flower, the General
Staff, the upper sections of the bourgeoisie, had fled from Paris
to Versailles. In Versailles there was the “socialist”
Louis Blanc—which, by the way, proves the falsity of
Kautsky’s assertion that “all trends” of socialism took part in the Paris Commune. Is it not ridiculous to
represent the division of the inhabitants of Paris into two
belligerent camps, one of which embraced the entire militant and
politically active section of the bourgeoisie, as “pure
democracy” with “universal suffrage"?

Secondly, the Paris Commune waged war against Versailles as the
workers’ government of France against the bourgeois government. What have “pure democracy” and
“universal suffrage” to do with it, when Paris was deciding the fate of France? When Marx expressed the opinion that
the Paris Commune had committed a mistake in failing to seize the
bank, which belonged to the whole of France, [5] did he
not proceed from the principles and practice of “pure democracy”?

In actual fact, it is obvious that Kautsky is writing in a
country where the police forbid people to laugh “in crowds,” otherwise Kautsky would have been killed by
ridicule.

Thirdly, I would respectfully remind Mr. Kautsky, who has Marx
and Engels off pat, of the following appraisal of the Paris
Commune given by Engels from the point of view of . . . “pure
democracy”:

“Have these gentlemen” (the anti-authoritarians)
“ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most
authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the
population imposes its will upon the other by means of rifles,
bayonets and cannon—all of which are highly authoritarian
means. And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of
the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the
Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the
authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we,
on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that
authority?” [6]

Here is your “pure democracy”! How Engels would have ridiculed the vulgar petty bourgeois, the
“Social-Democrat” (in the French sense of the forties and the general European sense of 1914–18), who took it into his
head to talk about “pure democracy” in a class-divided society!

But that’s enough. It is impossible to enumerate all
Kautsky’s various absurdities, since every phrase he utters
is a bottomless pit of apostasy.

Marx and Engels analysed the Paris Commune in a most detailed
manner and showed that its merit lay in its attempt to smash , to break up the “ready-made state
machinery”. Marx and Engels considered this conclusion to be
so important that this was the only amendment they introduced in
1872 into the “obsolete” (in parts) programme of the Communist
Manifesto . [7] Marx and Engels showed that the Paris
Commune had abolished the army and the bureaucracy, had abolished parliamentarism , had destroyed “that parasitic
excrescence, the state,” etc. But the sage Kautsky, donning
his nightcap, repeats the fairy-tale about “pure democracy,” which has been told a thousand times by liberal
professors.

No wonder Rosa Luxemburg declared, on August 4, 1914, that
German Social-Democracy was a stinking corpse.

Third subterfuge. “When we speak of the dictatorship as a
form of government we cannot speak of the dictatorship of a class,
since a class, as we have already pointed out, can only rule but
not govern. . . .” It is “organisations” or “parties” that govern.

That is a muddle, a disgusting muddle, Mr. “Muddleheaded
Counsellor”! Dictatorship is not a “form of government”;
that is ridiculous nonsense. And Marx does not speak of the
“form of government” but of the form or type of state. That is something altogether different, entirely
different. It is altogether wrong, too, to say that a class cannot
govern: such an absurdity could only have been uttered by a
“parliamentary cretin,” who sees nothing but bourgeois parliaments and notices nothing but “ruling
parties”. Any European country will provide Kautsky with
examples of government by a ruling class , for instance, by the
landowners in the Middle Ages, in spite of their insufficient
organisation.

To sum up: Kautsky has in a most unparalleled manner distorted
the concept dictatorship of the proletariat, and has turned Marx
into a common liberal; that is, he himself has sunk to the level
of a liberal who utters banal phrases about “pure democracy,” embellishing and glossing over the class content
of bourgeois democracy, and shrinking, above all, from the use of revolutionary violence by the oppressed
class. By so “interpreting” the concept “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” as to
expunge the revolutionary violence of the oppressed class against
its oppressors, Kautsky has beaten the world record in the liberal
distortion of Marx. The renegade Bernstein has proved to be a more
puppy compared with the renegade Kautsky.

## Endnotes

[3] Karl Marx, Critique of
the Gotha Programme (Marx and Engels, Selected Works , Moscow, 1962, Vol. II, pp. 32–33).

[4] See Engels’s Letter to
A. Bebel of March 18-28, 1875 (Marx and	Engels, Selected
Correspondence , Moscow, 1955, p. 357). Further, on pp. 243, 266 of
this volume, Lenin quotes the same letter.

[5] This proposition is contained in Engels’s Introduction to Karl Marx’s The
Civil War in France (Marx and Engels, Selected Works , Moscow,
1962, Vol. I, p. 581).

[6] Marx and Engels, Selected Works , Moscow, 1962, Vol. I, p. 639.

[7] Marx and Engels, Manifesto
of the Communist Party , Moscow, 1957, pp. 8-9.

## Bourgeois And Proletarian Democracy

The question which Kautsky has so shamelessly muddled really
stands as follows.

If we are not to mock at common sense and history, it is
obvious that we cannot speak of “pure democracy” as long as
different classes exist; we can only speak of class democracy. (Let us say in parenthesis that
“pure democracy” is not only an ignorant phrase, revealing a lack of understanding both of the class
struggle and of the nature of the state, but also a thrice-empty
phrase, since in communist society democracy will wither
away in the process of changing and becoming a habit, but
will never be “pure” democracy.)

“Pure democracy” is the mendacious phrase of a liberal who wants to fool the workers. History knows of bourgeois
democracy which takes the place of feudalism, and of proletarian
democracy which takes the place of bourgeois democracy.

When Kautsky devotes dozens of pages to “proving” the truth that bourgeois democracy is progressive compared with
medievalism, and that the proletariat must unfailingly utilise it
in its struggle against the bourgeoisie, that in fact is just
liberal twaddle intended to fool the workers. This is a truism,
not only for educated Germany, but also for uneducated
Russia. Kautsky is simply throwing “learned” dust in the eyes of the workers when, with a pompous mien, he talks about
Weitling and the Jesuits of Paraguay and many other things, in
order to avoid telling about the bourgeois essence of modern, i.e., capitalist, democracy.

Kautsky takes from Marxism what is acceptable to the liberals, to the bourgeoisie (the criticism of the Middle Ages,
and the progressive historical role of capitalism in general and
of capitalist democracy in particular), and discards, passes
over in silence, glosses over all that in Marxism which is unacceptable to the bourgeoisie (the revolutionary
violence of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie for the
latter’s destruction). That is why Kautsky, by virtue of
his objective position and irrespective of what his subjective
convictions may be, inevitably proves to be a lackey of the
bourgeoisie.

Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in
comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism
is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical,
a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the
exploited, for the poor. It is this truth, which forms a most
essential part of Marx’s teaching, that Kautsky the “Marxist” has failed to understand. On this—the
fundamental issue—Kautsky offers “delights” for the bourgeoisie instead of a scientific criticism of those
conditions which make every bourgeois democracy a democracy for
the rich.

Let us first remind the most learned Mr. Kautsky of the
theoretical propositions of Marx and Engels which that pedant has
so disgracefully “forgotten” (to please the bourgeoisie), and then explain the matter as popularly as
possible.

Not only the ancient and feudal, but also “the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of
wage-labour by capital” (Engels, in his work on the state). [8] “As, therefore, the state is
only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in
the revolution, to hold down one’s adversaries by force, it
is sheer nonsense to talk of a ’free people’s state’; so long as the proletariat still needs the
state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in
order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes
possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to
exist” (Engels, in his letter to Bebel, March 28, 1875). “In reality, however, the state is nothing but a
machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in
the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy” (Engels, Introduction to The
Civil War in France by Marx). [9] ;  Universal suffrage
is “the gauge of the maturity of the work ing class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the present-day
state ”. (Engels, in his work on the state. [10] Mr. Kautsky very tediously chews over the cud in the first part of
this proposition, which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. But the
second part, which we have italicised and which is not acceptable
to the bourgeoisie, the renegade Kautsky passes over in silence!)
“The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body,
executive and legislative at the same time. . . . Instead of
deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling
class was to represent and suppress ( ver- und zertreten )
the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the
people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves
every other employer in the search for workers, foremen and
accountants for his business” (Marx, in his work on the
Paris Commune, The
Civil War in France ). [11]

Every one of these propositions, which are excellently known to
the most learned Mr. Kautsky, is a slap in his face and lays bare
his apostasy. Nowhere in his pamphlet does Kautsky reveal the
slightest understanding of these truths. His whole pamphlet is a
sheer mockery of Marxism!

Take the fundamental laws of modern states, take their administration, take freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, or
“equality of all citizens before the law,” and you will see at every turn evidence of the hypocrisy of bourgeois
democracy with which every honest and class-conscious worker is
familiar. There is not a single state, however democratic, which
has no loopholes or reservations in its constitution guaranteeing
the bourgeoisie the possibility of dispatching troops against the
workers, of proclaiming martial law, and so forth, in case of a
“violation of public order,” and actually in case the exploited class “violates” its position of slavery and
tries to behave in a non-slavish manner. Kautsky shamelessly
embellishes bourgeois democracy and omits to mention, for
instance, how the most democratic and republican bourgeoisie in
America or Switzerland deal with workers on strike.

The wise and learned Kautsky keeps silent about these things!
That learned politician does not realise that to remain silent on
this matter is despicable. He prefers to tell the workers nursery
tales of the kind that democracy means “protecting the minority”. It is incredible,
but it is a fact! In the year of our Lord 1918, in the fifth year
of the world imperialist slaughter and the strangulation of
internationalist minorities (i.e., those who have not despicably
betrayed socialism, like the Renaudels and Longuets, the
Scheidemanns and Kautskys, the Hendersons and Webbs et al.) in all
“democracies” of the world, the learned Mr. Kautsky sweetly, very sweetly, sings the praises of “protection of
the minority”. Those who are interested may read this on
page 15 of Kautsky’s pamphlet. And on page 16 this learned
. . . individual tells you about the Whigs and Tories in England in
the eighteenth century!

What wonderful erudition! What refined servility to the
bourgeoisie! What civilised belly-crawling before the capitalists
and boot-licking! If I were Krupp or Scheidemann, or Clemenceau or
Renaudel, I would pay Mr. Kautsky millions, reward him with Judas
kisses, praise him before the workers and urge “socialist
unity” with “honourable” men like him. To write pamphlets against the dictatorship of the proletariat, to talk
about the Whigs and Tories in England in the eighteenth century,
to assert that democracy means “protecting the minority,” and remain silent about pogroms against
internationalists in the “democratic” republic of
America—isn’t this rendering lackey service to the bourgeoisie?

The learned Mr. Kautsky has “forgotten” — accidentally forgotten, probably—a “trifle,”
namely, that the ruling party in a bourgeois democracy extends the
protection of the minority only to another bourgeois party, while the proletariat, on all serious, profound and
fundamental issues, gets martial law or pogroms, instead of
the “protection of the minority”. The more highly developed a democracy is, the more imminent are pogroms or civil
war in connection with any profound political divergence which is
dangerous to the bourgeoisie. The learned Mr. Kautsky could
have studied this “law” of bourgeois democracy in connection with the Dreyfus case [12] in republican
France, with the lynching of Negroes and internationalists in the
democratic republic of America, with the case of Ireland and
Ulster in democratic Britain, [13] with the baiting of the Bolsheviks and the staging of pogroms against them in April
1917 in the democratic republic of Russia. I have purposely
chosen examples not only from wartime but also from pre-war time,
peacetime. But mealy-mouthed Mr. Kautsky prefers to shut his eyes
to these facts of the twentieth century, and instead to tell the
workers wonderfully new, remarkably interesting, unusually
edifying and incredibly important things about the Whigs and
Tories of the eighteenth century!

Take the bourgeois parliament. Can it be that the learned
Kautsky has never heard that the more highly democracy is
developed, the more the bourgeois parliaments are subjected by the stock exchange and the bankers? This does not
mean that we must not make use of bourgeois parliament (the
Bolsheviks made better use of it than probably any other party in
the world, for in 1912–14 we won the entire workers’ curia
in the Fourth Duma). But it does mean that only a liberal can
forget the historical limitations and conventional nature of the bourgeois parliamentary system as Kautsky does. Even in the
most democratic bourgeois state the oppressed people at every step
encounter the crying contradiction between the formal equality proclaimed by the “democracy” of the
capitalists and the thousands of real limitations and subterfuges which turn the proletarians into wage-slaves. It
is precisely this contradiction that is opening the eyes of the
people to the rottenness, mendacity and hypocrisy of capitalism. It is this contradiction that the agitators and
propagandists of socialism are constantly exposing to the people, in order to prepare them for revolution! And now that the
era of revolution has begun, Kautsky turns his back upon
it and begins to extol the charms of moribund bourgeois
democracy.

Proletarian democracy, of which Soviet government is one of the
forms, has brought a development and expansion of democracy
unprecedented in the world, for the vast majority of the
population, for the exploited and working people. To write a whole
pamphlet about democracy, as Kautsky did, in which two pages are
devoted to dictatorship and dozens to “pure democracy,” and fail to notice this fact, means
completely distorting the subject in liberal fashion.

Take foreign policy. In no bourgeois state, not even in the
most democratic, is it conducted openly. The people are deceived
everywhere, and in democratic France, Switzerland, America and
Britain this is done on an incomparably wider scale and in an
incomparably subtler manner than in other countries. The Soviet
government has torn the veil of mystery from foreign policy in a
revolutionary manner. Kautsky has not noticed this, he keeps
silent about it, although in the era of predatory wars and secret
treaties for the “division of spheres of influence” (i.e., for the partition of the world among the capitalist
bandits) this is of cardinal importance, for on it depends the question of peace, the life and death of tens of
millions of people.

Take the structure of the state. Kautsky picks at all manner of
“trifles,” down to the argument that under the Soviet
Constitution elections are “indirect,” but he misses the point. He fails to see the class nature of the state
apparatus, of the machinery of state. Under bourgeois democracy
the capitalists, by thousands of tricks—which are the more
artful and effective the more “pure” democracy is developed— drive the people away from administrative work,
from freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, etc. The Soviet
government is the first in the world (or strictly speaking, the second, because the Paris Commune began to do the
same thing) to enlist the people, specifically the exploited people, in the work of administration. The working
people are barred from participation in bourgeois parliaments
(they never decide important questions under bourgeois democracy, which are decided by the stock exchange and the banks)
by thousands of obstacles, and the workers know and feel, see and
realise perfectly well that the bourgeois parliaments are
institutions alien to them, instruments for the oppression of the workers by the bourgeoisie, institutions of
a hostile class, of the exploiting minority.

The Soviets are the direct organisation of the working and
exploited people themselves, which helps them to organise
and administer their own state in every possible way. And in this
it is the vanguard of the working and exploited people, the urban
proletariat, that enjoys the advantage of being best united by the
large enterprises; it is easier for it than for all others to
elect and exercise control over those elected. The Soviet form of
organisation automatically helps to unite all the working and
exploited people around their vanguard, the proletariat. The old
bourgeois apparatus—the bureaucracy, the privileges of wealth, of
bourgeois education, of social connections, etc. (these real
privileges are the more varied the more highly bourgeois democracy
is developed)—all this disappears under the Soviet form of
organisation. Freedom of the press ceases to be hypocrisy, because
the printing-plants and stocks of paper are taken away from the
bourgeoisie. The same thing applies to the best buildings, the
palaces, the mansions and manorhouses. Soviet power took thousands
upon thousands of these best buildings from the exploiters at one
stroke, and in this way made the right of assembly—without
which democracy is a fraud—a million times more democratic for the people. Indirect elections to non-local Soviets
make it easier to hold congresses of Soviets, they make the entire apparatus less costly, more flexible, more
accessible to the workers and peasants at a time when life is
seething and it is necessary to be able very quickly to recall
one’s local deputy or to delegate him to a general congress
of Soviets.

Proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy; Soviet power is a million
times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois
republic.

To fail to see this one must either deliberately serve the
bourgeoisie, or be politically as dead as a doornail, unable to
see real life from behind the dusty pages of bourgeois books, be
thoroughly imbued with bourgeois-democratic prejudices, and
thereby objectively convert oneself into a lackey of the
bourgeoisie.

To fail to see this one must be incapable of presenting the
question from the point of view of the oppressed classes:

Is there a single country in the world, even among the most
democratic bourgeois countries, in which the average rank-and-file worker, the average rank-and-file farm
labourer , or village semi-proletarian generally (i.e., the
representative of the oppressed, of the overwhelming majority of
the population), enjoys anything approaching such liberty of
holding meetings in the best buildings, such liberty of using
the largest printing-plants and biggest stocks of paper to express
his ideas and to defend his interests, such liberty of promoting men and women of his own class to administer and to
“knock into shape” the state, as in Soviet Russia?

It is ridiculous to think that Mr. Kautsky could find in any
country even one out of a thousand of well-informed workers or
farm labourers who would have any doubts as to the reply. Instinctively, from hearing fragments of admissions of the
truth in the bourgeois press, the workers of the whole world
sympathise with the Soviet Republic precisely because they regard
it as a proletarian democracy, a democracy for the poor ,
and not a democracy for the rich that every bourgeois democracy,
even the best, actually is.

We are governed (and our state is “knocked into shape”) by bourgeois bureaucrats, by bourgeois members of
parliament, by bourgeois judges—such is the simple, obvious and
indisputable truth which tens and hundreds of millions of people
belonging to the oppressed classes in all bourgeois countries,
including the most democratic, know from their own experience,
feel and realise every day.

In Russia, however, the bureaucratic machine has been completely smashed, razed to the ground; the old judges have all
been sent packing, the bourgeois parliament has been dispersed—and far more accessible representation
has been given to the workers and peasants; their Soviets
have replaced the bureaucrats, or their Soviets have been
put in control of the bureaucrats, and their Soviets have
been authorised to elect the judges. This fact alone is enough for
all the oppressed classes to recognise that Soviet power, i.e.,
the present form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is a
million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois
republic.

Kautsky does not understand this truth, which is so clear and
obvious to every worker, because he has “forgotten,” “unlearned” to put the question: democracy for
which class ? He argues from the point of view of “pure” (i.e., non-class? or above-class?)
democracy. He argues like Shylock: my “pound of flesh” and nothing else. Equality for all citizens—otherwise there is no
democracy.

We must ask the learned Kautsky, the “Marxist” and “socialist” Kautsky:

Can there be equality between the exploited and the exploiters?

It is dreadful, it is incredible that such a question should have
to be put in discussing a book written by the ideological leader
of the Second International. But “having put your hand to
the plough, don’t look back,” and having undertaken to write about Kautsky, I must explain to the learned man why there
can be no equality between the exploiter and the exploited.

## Endnotes

[8] Frederick
Engels, The
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Marx and Engels, Selected Works , Moscow, 1962, Vol. II, p. 320).

[9] Karl Marx, The
Civil War in France (Marx and Engels, Selected Works , Moscow, 1962, Vol. I, p. 485).

[10] Frederick Engels, The
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Marx and Engels, Selected Works , Moscow, 1962, Vol. II, p. 332).

[11] Marx and Engels, Selected Works , Moscow, 1962, Vol. I,
pp. 520–21.

[12] In 1894 reactionary monarchist circles in France instituted
proceedings against Dreyfus, a Jewish General Staff officer, on a
trumped-up charge of espionage and high treason. The trial of
Dreyfus, who was sentenced to life imprisonment, served as a
pretext for French reactionary circles to fan anti-Semitism and
campaign against republican order and democratic liberties. In
1898 socialists and progressive bourgeois democrats ( Émile
Zola , Jean
Jaurès , Anatole France and others) started a campaign for
a reconsideration of the Dreyfus case. This gave a political
colouring to the matter and the country split into two camps—republicans and democrats on the one side and the bloc
of monarchists, clericals, anti-Semites and nationalists on the
other. In 1899, under pressure of public opinion, Dreyfus was
pardoned and in 1906 the Court of Appeal acquitted him and
reinstated him in the army.

[13] This refers to the suppression of the Irish rebellion in 1916, an
attempt at liberating the country from the British. In 1916 Lenin
wrote: “In Europe . . . there was a rebellion in Ireland, which
the ‘freedom-loving’ English . . . suppressed by executions.” ( Collected Works , Vol. 22, p. 354.)

## Can There Be Equality Between the Exploited and the Exploiter?

Kautsky argues as follows:

(1) “The exploiters have always formed only a small minority of the population” (p. 14 of
Kautsky’s pamphlet).

This is indisputably true. Taking this as the starting point,
what should be the argument? One may argue in a Marxist, a
socialist way. In which case one would proceed from the relation
between the exploited and the exploiters. Or one may argue in a
liberal, a bourgeois-democratic way. And in that case one would
proceed from the relation between the majority and the minority.

If we argue in a Marxist way, we must say: the exploiters
inevitably transform the state (and we are speaking of democracy,
i.e., one of the forms of the state) into an instrument of the
rule of their class, the exploiters, over the exploited. Hence, as
long as there are exploiters who rule the majority, the exploited,
the democratic state must inevitably be a democracy for the
exploiters. A state of the exploited must fundamentally differ
from such a state; it must be a democracy for the exploited,
“and a means of suppressing the exploiters ; and the suppression of a class means inequality for that class, its
exclusion from “democracy”.

If we argue in a liberal way, we must say: the majority
decides, the minority submits. Those who do not submit are
punished. That is all. Nothing need be said about the class
character of the state in general, or of “pure democracy” in particular, because it is irrelevant; for a
majority is a majority and a minority is a minority. A pound of
flesh is a pound of flesh, and that is all there is to it.

And this is exactly how Kautsky argues.

(2) “Why should the rule of the proletariat assume, and necessarily assume, a form which is incompatible with
democracy?” (P. 21). Then follows a very detailed and a very
verbose explanation, backed by a quotation from Marx and the
election figures of the Paris Commune, to the effect that the
proletariat is in the majority. The conclusion is: “A regime
which is so strongly rooted in the people has not the slightest
reason for encroaching upon democracy. It cannot always dispense
with violence in cases when violence is employed to suppress
democracy. Violence can only be met with violence. But a regime
which knows that it has popular backing will employ violence only
to protect democracy and not to destroy it. It would be simply suicidal if it attempted to do away with its most
reliable basis—universal suffrage, that deep source of mighty moral authority” (p. 22).

As you see, the relation between the exploited and the exploiters has vanished in Kautsky’s argument. All that
remains is majority in general, minority in general, democracy in
general, the “pure democracy” with which we are already familiar.

And all this, mark you, is said apropos of the Paris
Commune ! To make things clearer I shall quote Marx and Engels
to show what they said on the subject of dictatorship apropos of
the Paris Commune :

Marx : “. . . When the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by their revolutionary
dictatorship . . . to break down the resistance of the bourgeoisie
. . . the workers invest the state with a revolutionary and
transitional form . . .” [14]

Engels : “. . . And the victorious party” (in a revolution) “must maintain its rule by means of the
terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the
Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the
authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we,
on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that
authority? . . .” [15]

Engels : “As, therefore, the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the
revolution, to hold down one’s adversaries by force, it is
sheer nonsense to talk of a ‘free people’s state’; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it
does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold
down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak
of freedom the state as such ceases to exist. . . .” [16]

Kautsky is as far removed from Marx and Engels as heaven is
from earth, as a liberal from a proletarian revolutionary. The
pure democracy and simple “democracy” that Kautsky talks about is merely a paraphrase of the “free
people’s state”, i.e., sheer nonsense. Kautsky, with the learned air of a most
learned armchair fool, or with the innocent air of a ten-year-old
schoolgirl, asks: Why do we need a dictatorship when we have a
majority? And Marx and Engels explain:

—to break down the resistance of the bourgeoisie; —to inspire the reactionaries with fear; —to maintain the authority of the armed people against
the bourgeoisie; —that the proletariat may forcibly hold down its
adversaries.

Kautsky does not understand these explanations. Infatuated with
the “purity” of democracy, blind to its bourgeois character, he “consistently” urges that the majority,
since it is the majority, need not “break down the resistance” of the minority, nor “forcibly hold it
down”—it is sufficient to suppress cases of infringement of democracy. Infatuated with
the “purity” of democracy, Kautsky inadvertently commits the same little error that all bourgeois democrats always
commit, namely, he takes formal equality (which is nothing but a
fraud and hypocrisy under capitalism) for actual equality! Quite a
trifle!

The exploiter and the exploited cannot be equal.

This truth, however unpleasant it may be to Kautsky, nevertheless forms the essence of socialism.

Another truth: there can be no real, actual equality until all
possibility of the exploitation of one class by another has been
totally destroyed.

The exploiters can be defeated at one stroke in the event of a
successful uprising at the centre, or of a revolt in the army. But
except in very rare and special cases, the exploiters cannot be
destroyed at one stroke. It is impossible to expropriate all the
landowners and capitalists of any big country at one stroke. Furthermore, expropriation alone, as a legal or political
act, does not settle the matter by a long chalk, because it is
necessary to depose the landowners and capitalists in actual fact, to replace their management of the factories
and estates by a different management, workers’ management,
in actual fact. There can be no equality between the exploiters—who for many generations have been better off
because of their education, conditions of wealthy life, and
habits—and the exploited, the majority of whom even in the
most advanced and most democratic bourgeois republics are
downtrodden, backward, ignorant, intimidated and disunited. For a
long time after the revolution the exploiters inevitably continue
to retain a number of great practical advantages: they still have
money (since it is impossible to abolish money all at once); some
movable property—often fairly considerable; they still have
various connections, habits of organisation and management;
knowledge of all the “secrets” (customs, methods, means and possibilities) of management; superior education; close
connections with the higher technical personnel (who live and
think like the bourgeoisie); incomparably greater experience in
the art of war (this is very important), and so on and so
forth.

If the exploiters are defeated in one country only—and this, of course, is typical, since a simultaneous revolution in a
number of countries is a rare exception—they still remain stronger than the exploited, for the international
connections of the exploiters are enormous. That a section of the
exploited from the least advanced middle-peasant, artisan and
similar groups of the population may, and indeed does, follow the
exploiters has been proved by all revolutions, including
the Commune (for there were also proletarians among the Versailles
troops, which the most learned Kautsky has “forgotten”).

In these circumstances, to assume that in a revolution which is
at all profound and serious the issue is decided simply by the
relation between the majority and the minority is the acme of
stupidity, the silliest prejudice of a common liberal, an attempt
to deceive the people by concealing from them a well-established historical truth. This historical truth is that
in every profound revolution, the prolonged, stubborn and
desperate resistance of the exploiters, who for a number of
years retain important practical advantages over the exploited, is
the rule. Never—except in the sentimental fantasies of the sentimental fool Kautsky—will the exploiters submit
to the decision of the exploited majority without trying to make
use of their advantages in a last desperate battle, or series of
battles.

The transition from capitalism to communism takes an entire
historical epoch. Until this epoch is over, the exploiters
inevitably cherish the hope of restoration, and this hope turns into attempts at restoration. After their first
serious defeat, the overthrown exploiters—who had not expected their overthrow, never believed it possible, never
conceded the thought of it—throw themselves with energy
grown tenfold, with furious passion and hatred grown a hundredfold, into the battle for the recovery of the
“paradise”, of which they were deprived, on behalf of their families, who had been leading such a sweet and easy life
and whom now the “common herd” is condemning to ruin and destitution (or to “common” labour . . .). In the
train of the capitalist exploiters follow the wide sections of the
petty bourgeoisie, with regard to whom decades of historical
experience of all countries testify that they vacillate and
hesitate, one day marching behind the proletariat and the next day
taking fright at the difficulties of the revolution; that they
become panic-stricken at the first defeat or semidefeat of the
workers, grow nervous, run about aimlessly, snivel, and rush from
one camp into the other—just like our Mensheviks and
Socialist-Revolutionaries.

In these circumstances, in an epoch of desperately acute war,
when history presents the question of whether age-old and
thousand-year-old privileges are to be or not to be–at such a time
to talk about majority and minority, about pure democracy, about
dictatorship being unnecessary and about equality between the
exploiter and the exploited! What infinite stupidity and abysmal
philistinism are needed for this!

However, during the decades of comparatively “peaceful” capitalism between 1871 and 1914, the
Augean stables of philistinism, imbecility, and apostasy
accumulated in the socialist parties which were adapting
themselves to opportunism. . . .

The reader will probably have noticed that Kautsky, in the
passage from his pamphlet quoted above, speaks of an attempt to
encroach upon universal suffrage (calling it, by the way, a deep
source of mighty moral authority, whereas Engels, apropos of the
same Paris Commune and the same question of dictatorship, spoke of
the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie—a
very characteristic difference between the philistine’s and
the revolutionary’s views on “authority” . . .).

It should be observed that the question of depriving the
exploiters of the franchise is a purely Russian question,
and not a question of the dictatorship of the proletariat in
general. Had Kautsky, casting aside hypocrisy, entitled his
pamphlet Against the Bolsheviks , the title would have corresponded to the contents of the pamphlet, and Kautsky would
have been justified in speaking bluntly about the franchise. But
Kautsky wanted to come out primarily as a “theoretician”. He called his pamphlet The
Dictatorship of the Proletariat—in general. He speaks about the Soviets and about Russia specifically only in the second
part of the pamphlet, beginning with the sixth paragraph. The
subject dealt with in the first part (from which I took the
quotation) is democracy and dictatorship in general. In speaking about the franchise, Kautsky betrayed himself as an opponent of the Bolsheviks, who does not care a brass farthing for theory . For
theory, i.e., the reasoning about the general (and not the
nationally specific) class foundations of democracy and
dictatorship, ought to deal not with a special question, such as
the franchise, but with the general question of whether democracy
can be preserved for the rich, for the exploiters in the
historical period of the overthrow of the exploiters and the
replacement of their state by the state of the exploited.

That is the way, the only way, a theoretician can present the
question.

We know the example of the Paris Commune, we know all that was
said by the founders of Marxism in connection with it and in
reference to it. On the basis of this material I examined, for
instance, the question of democracy and dictatorship in my
pamphlet, The State and Revolution , written before the October
Revolution. I did not say anything at all about restricting
the franchise. And it must be said now that the question of
restricting the franchise is a nationally specific and not a
general question of the dictatorship. One must approach the
question of restricting the franchise by studying the specific
conditions of the Russian revolution and the specific path of its development. This will be done later on in
this pamphlet. It would be a mistake, however, to guarantee in
advance that the impending proletarian revolutions in Europe will
all, or the majority of them, be necessarily accompanied by
restriction of the franchise for the bourgeoisie. It may be
so. After the war and the experience of the Russian revolution it
probably will be so; but it is not absolutely necessary for the exercise of the dictatorship, it is not an indispensable characteristic of the logical concept
“dictatorship”, it does not enter as an indispensable condition in the historical and class
concept “dictatorship”.

The indispensable characteristic, the necessary condition of
dictatorship is the forcible suppression of the exploiters as a class, and, consequently, the infringement of “pure democracy”, i.e., of
equality and freedom, in regard to that class.

This is the way, the only way, the question can be put theoretically. And by failing to put the question thus, Kautsky
has shown that he opposes the Bolsheviks not as a theoretician,
but as a sycophant of the opportunists and the bourgeoisie.

In which countries, and given what national features of
capitalism, democracy for the exploiters will be in one or another
form restricted (wholly or in part), infringed upon, is a question
of the specific national features of this or that capitalism, of
this or that revolution. The theoretical question is different: Is
the dictatorship of the proletariat possible without infringing democracy in relation to the exploiting class?

It is precisely this question, the only theoretically important and essential one, that Kautsky has evaded. He has
quoted all sorts of passages from Marx and Engels, except
those which bear on this question, and which I quoted above.

Kautsky talks about anything you like, about everything that is
acceptable to liberals and bourgeois democrats and does not go
beyond their circle of ideas, but he does not talk about the main
thing, namely, the fact that the proletariat cannot achieve
victory without breaking the resistance of the bourgeoisie, without forcibly suppressing its
adversaries , and that, where there is “forcible suppression”, where there is no “freedom”, there is, of course, no democracy .

This Kautsky has not understood.

We shall now examine the experience of the Russian revolution
and that divergence between the Soviets of Deputies and the
Constituent Assembly which led to the dissolution of the latter
and to the withdrawal of the franchise from the bourgeoisie.

## Endnotes

[14] See Marx’s article “L’indifferenza in materia
politica” (“On Political Indifferentism”) ( Alinanacco
Republicano for 1874).

[15] Marx and Engels, Selected Works , Moscow, 1962, Vol. I, p. 639.

[16] See Engels’s letter to A. Bebel of March 18–28, 1875 (Marx
and Engels, Selected Correspondence , Moscow, 1955, p. 357).

## The Soviets Dare Not Become State Organisations

The Soviets are the Russian form of the proletarian dictatorship. If a Marxist theoretician, writing a work on the
dictatorship of the proletariat, had really studied the subject
(and not merely repeated the petty-bourgeois lamentations against
dictatorship, as Kautsky did, singing to Menshevik tunes), he
would first have given a general definition of dictatorship, and
would then have examined its peculiar, national, form, the
Soviets; he would have given his critique of them as one of the
forms of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

It goes without saying that nothing serious could be expected
from Kautsky after his liberalistic “interpretation” of Marx’s teaching on dictatorship; but the manner in which
he approached the question of what the Soviets are and the way he
dealt with this question is highly characteristic.

The Soviets, he says, recalling their rise in 1905, created
“the most all-embracing ( umfassendste ) form of proletarian organisation, for it embraced all the
wage-workers” (p. 31). In 1905 they were only local bodies;
in 1917 they became a national organisation.

“The Soviet form of organisation,”
Kautsky continues, “already has a great and glorious history
behind it, and it has a still mightier future before it, and not
in Russia alone. It appears that everywhere the old methods of the
economic and political struggle of the proletariat are inadequate” ( versa gen ; this German expression is
somewhat stronger than “inadequate” and somewhat weaker than “impotent”) “against the gigantic
economic and political forces which finance capital has at its
disposal. These old methods cannot be discarded; they are still
indispensable for normal times; but from time to time tasks arise
which they cannot cope with, tasks that can be accomplished
successfully only as a result of a combination of all the
political and economic instruments of force of the working
class” (p. 32).

Then follows a reasoning on the mass strike and on “trade
union bureaucracy”—which is no less necessary than the trade unions—being “useless for the purpose of
directing the mighty mass battles that are more and more becoming
a sign of the times. . . .”

“Thus,” Kautsky concludes, “the
Soviet form of organisation is one of the most important phenomena
of our time. It promises to acquire decisive importance in the
great decisive battles between capital and labour towards which we
are marching.

“But are we entitled to demand more of the
Soviets? The Bolsheviks, after the November Revolution” (new
style, or October, according to our style) “1917, secured in
conjunction with the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries a majority in
the Russian Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, and after the
dispersion of the Constituent Assembly, they set out to transform
the Soviets from a combat organisation of one class, as they had been up to then, into a state
organisation. They destroyed the democracy which the Russian
people had won in the March” (new style, or February, our
style) “Revolution. In line with this, the Bolsheviks have
ceased to call themselves Social- Democrats . They call themselves Communists ” (p. 33, Kautsky’s italics).

Those who are familiar with Russian Menshevik literature will
at once see how slavishly Kautsky copies Martov, Axelrod, Stein
and Co. Yes, “slavishly”, because Kautsky ridiculously distorts the facts in order to pander to Menshevik
prejudices. Kautsky did not take the trouble, for instance, to ask
his informants (Stein of Berlin, or Axelrod of Stockholm) when the questions of changing the name of the Bolsheviks
to Communists and of the significance of the Soviets as state
organisations were first raised. Had Kautsky made this simple
inquiry he would not have penned these ludicrous lines, for both
these questions were raised by the Bolsheviks in April
1917 , for example, in my “Theses” of April 4, 1917, i.e., long before the Revolution of October 1917
(and, of course, long before the dissolution of the Constituent
Assembly on January 5, 1918).

But Kautsky’s argument which I have just quoted in full
represents the crux of the whole question of the
Soviets. The crux is: should the Soviets aspire to become state
organisations (in April 1917 the Bolsheviks put forward the
slogan: “All Power to the Soviets!” and at the
Bolshevik Party Conference held in the same month they declared
they were not satisfied with a bourgeois parliamentary republic
but demanded a workers’ and peasants’ republic of the
Paris Commune or Soviet type); or should the Soviets not
strive for this, refrain from taking power into their hands,
refrain from becoming state organisations and remain the
“combat organisations” of one “class” (as
Martov expressed it, embellishing by this innocent wish the fact
that under Menshevik leadership the Soviets were an instrument
for the subjection of the workers to the bourgeoisie )

Kautsky slavishly repeats Martov’s words, picks out fragments of the theoretical controversy between the
Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, and uncritically and senselessly
transplants them to the general theoretical and general European
field. The result is such a hodge-podge as to provoke Homeric
laughter in every class-conscious Russian worker had he read these
arguments of Kautsky’s.

When we explain what the question at issue is, every worker in
Europe (barring a handful of inveterate social-imperialists) will
greet Kautsky with similar laughter.

Kautsky has rendered Martov a backhanded service by developing
his mistake into a glaring absurdity. Indeed, look what
Kautsky’s argument amounts to.

The Soviets embrace all wage-workers. The old methods of
economic and political struggle of the proletariat are inadequate
against finance capital. The Soviets have a great role to play in
the future, and not only in Russia. They will play a decisive role
in great decisive battles between capital and labour in
Europe. That is what Kautsky says.

Excellent. But won’t the “decisive battles between capital and labour” decide which of the two classes will
assume state power?

Nothing of the kind! Heaven forbid!

The Soviets, which embrace all the wage-workers, must not
become state organisations in the “decisive” battles!

But what is the state?

The state is nothing but a machine for the suppression of one
class by another.

Thus, the oppressed class, the vanguard of all the working and
exploited people in modern society, must strive towards the
“decisive battles between capital and labour”, but must not touch the machine by means of which capital
suppresses labour!— It must not break up that machine! It must not make use of its all-embracing
organisation for suppressing the exploiters !

Excellent, Mr. Kautsky, magnificent! “We” recognise the class struggle—in the same way as all liberals recognise
it, i.e., without the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. . . .

This is where Kautsky’s complete rupture both with
Marxism and with socialism becomes obvious. Actually, it is
desertion to the camp of the bourgeoisie, who are prepared to
concede everything except the transformation of the organisations
of the class which they oppress into state organisations. Kautsky
can no longer save his position of trying to reconcile everything
and of getting away from all profound contradictions with mere
phrases.

Kautsky either rejects the assumption of state power by the
working class altogether, or he concedes that the working class
may take over the old, bourgeois state machine. But he will by no
means concede that it must break it up, smash it, and replace it
by a new, proletarian machine. Whichever way Kautsky’s arguments are “interpreted”, or
“explained”, his rupture with Marxism and his desertion to the bourgeoisie are obvious.

Back in the Communist Manifesto , describing what sort of state the victorious working class needs, Marx wrote:
“the state, i.e., the proletariat organised as the ruling
class.” [17] Now we have a man who claims still to be a Marxist coming forward and declaring that the proletariat,
fully organised and waging the “decisive battle” against capital, must not transform its class
organisation into a state organisation. Here Kautsky has betrayed
that “superstitious belief in the state” which in
Germany, as Engels wrote in 1891, “has been carried over
into the general thinking of the bourgeoisie and even of many
workers”. [18] Workers, fight!—our philistine “agrees” to this (as every bourgeois
“agrees”, since the workers are fighting all the same, and the only thing to do is to devise means of blunting the edge
of their sword)—fight, but don’t dare win !
Don’t destroy the state machine of the bourgeoisie, don’t replace the bourgeois “state organisation”
by the proletarian “state organisation”!

Whoever sincerely shared the Marxist view that the state is
nothing but a machine for the suppression of one class by another,
and who has at all reflected upon this truth, could never have
reached the absurd conclusion that the proletarian organisations
capable of defeating finance capital must not transform themselves
into state organisations. It was this point that betrayed the
petty bourgeois who believes that “after all is said and
done” the state is something outside classes or above classes. Indeed, why should the proletariat, “ one
class ”, be permitted to wage unremitting war on capital , which rules not only over the proletariat, but
over the whole people, over the whole petty bourgeoisie, over all
the peasants, yet this proletariat, this “ one class ”, is not to be permitted to transform its
organisation into a state organisation? Because the petty
bourgeois is afraid of the class struggle, and does not
carry it to its logical conclusion, to its main object .

Kautsky has got himself completely mixed up and has given
himself away entirely. Mark you, he himself admits that Europe is
heading for decisive battles between capital and labour, and that
the old methods of economic and political struggle of the
proletariat are inadequate. But these old methods were precisely
the utilisation of bourgeois democracy. It therefore follows . . .?

But Kautsky is afraid to think of what follows.

. . . It therefore follows that only a reactionary, an enemy of the
working class, a henchman of the bourgeoisie, can now turn his
face to the obsolete past, paint the charms of bourgeois democracy
and babble about pure democracy. Bourgeois democracy was progressive compared with medievalism, and it had to be
utilised. But now it is not sufficient for the working class. Now we must look forward instead of backward—to
replacing the bourgeois democracy by proletarian democracy. And while the preparatory work for the proletarian
revolution, the formation and training of the proletarian army
were possible (and necessary) within the framework of the
bourgeois-democratic state, now that we have reached the stage of
“decisive battles”, to confine the proletariat to this framework means betraying the cause of the proletariat, means
being a renegade.

Kautsky has made himself particularly ridiculous by repeating
Martov’s argument without noticing that in
Martov’s case this argument was based on another argument which he, Kautsky, does not use! Martov said (and Kautsky
repeats after him) that Russia is not yet ripe for socialism; from
which it logically follows that it is too early to transform the
Soviets from organs of struggle into state organisations (read: it
is timely to transform the Soviets, with the assistance of the
Menshevik leaders, into instruments for subjecting the workers to the imperialist bourgeoisie). Kautsky, however, cannot say outright that Europe is not ripe for
socialism. In 1909, when he was not yet a renegade, he wrote that
there was then no reason to fear a premature revolution, that
whoever had renounced revolution for fear of defeat would have
been a traitor. Kautsky does not dare renounce this outright .
And so we get an absurdity, which completely reveals the stupidity
and cowardice of the petty bourgeois: on the one hand, Europe is
ripe for socialism and is heading towards decisive battles between
capital and labour; but, on the other hand, the combat organisation (i.e., the organisation which arises, grows and
gains strength in combat), the organisation of the proletariat,
the vanguard and organiser, the leader of the oppressed, must not be transformed into a state organisation!

From the point of view of practical politics the idea that the
Soviets are necessary as combat organisations but must not be
transformed into state organisations is infinitely more absurd
than from the point of view of theory. Even in peacetime, when
there is no revolutionary situation, the mass struggle of the
workers against the capitalists—for instance, the mass strike—gives rise to great bitterness on both sides, to
fierce passions in the struggle, the bourgeoisie constantly
insisting that they remain and mean to remain “masters in
their own house”, etc. And in time of revolution, when political life reaches boiling point, an organisation like the
Soviets, which embraces all the workers in all branches of industry, all the soldiers, and all the working
and poorest sections of the rural population—such an organisation, of its own accord, with the development of the
struggle, by the simple “logic” of attack and defence, comes inevitably to pose the question point-blank . The attempt to take up a middle position
and to “reconcile” the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is sheer stupidity and doomed to miserable
failure. That is what happened in Russia to the preachings of
Martov and other Mensheviks, and that will inevitably happen in
Germany and other countries if the Soviets succeed in developing
on any wide scale, manage to unite and strengthen. To say to the
Soviets: fight, but don’t take all state power into your
hands, don’t become state organisations—is tantamount to preaching class collaboration and “social
peace” between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. It is
ridiculous even to think that such a position in the midst of
fierce struggle could lead to anything but ignominious failure. But it is Kautsky’s everlasting fate to sit
between two stools. He pretends to disagree with the opportunists on everything in theory, but in practice he
agrees with them on everything essential (i.e., on everything
pertaining to revolution).

## Endnotes

[17] Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party , Moscow, 1957,
p. 85.

[18] Lenin refers to Engels’s Introduction to The Civil War in
France by Karl Marx (Marx and Engels, Selected Works , Moscow,
1962, Vol. 1, p. 484).

## The Constituent Assembly And The Soviet Republic

The question of the Constituent Assembly and its dispersal by
the Bolsheviks is the crux of Kautsky’s entire pamphlet. He
constantly reverts to it, and the whole of this literary
production of the ideological leader of the Second International
is replete with innuendoes to the effect that the Bolsheviks have
“destroyed democracy” (see one of the quotations from
Kautsky above). The question is really an interesting and
important one, because the relation between bourgeois democracy
and proletarian democracy here confronted the revolution in a practical form. Let us see how our “Marxist
theoretician” has dealt with the question.

He quotes the “Theses on the Constituent Assembly”, written by me and published in Pravda on December 26,
1917. One would think that no better evidence of Kautsky’s
serious approach to the subject, quoting as he does the documents,
could be desired. But look how he quotes. He does not say that
there were nineteen of these theses; he does not say that they
dealt with the relation between the ordinary bourgeois republic
with a Constituent Assembly and a Soviet republic, as well as with
the history of the divergence in our revolution between
the Constituent Assembly and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Kautsky ignores all that, and simply tells the reader
that “two of them” (of the theses) “are particularly important”: one stating that a split occurred
among the Socialist-Revolutionaries after the elections to the
Constituent Assembly, but before it was convened (Kautsky does not
mention that this was the fifth thesis), and the other, that the
republic of Soviets is in general a higher democratic form than
the Constituent Assembly (Kautsky does not mention that this was
the third thesis).

Only from this third thesis does Kautsky quote a part in full,
namely, the following passage:

“The republic of Soviets is not only a higher type of democratic institution (as compared with the usual bourgeois republic crowned by a Constituent Assembly), but is the
only form capable of securing the most painless [19] transition to socialism” (Kautsky omits the word
“usual” and the introductory words of the thesis:
“For the transition from the bourgeois to the socialist
system, for the dictatorship of the proletariat”).

After quoting these words, Kautsky, with magnificent irony,
exclaims:

“It is a pity that this conclusion was arrived at only after the Bolsheviks found themselves in the minority in the
Constituent Assembly. Before that no one had demanded it more
vociferously than Lenin.”

This is literally what Kautsky says on page 31 of his book!

It is positively a gem! Only a sycophant of the bourgeoisie
could present the question in such a false way as to give the
reader the impression that all the Bolsheviks’ talk about a
higher type of state was an invention which saw light of day after they found themselves in the minority in the
Constituent Assembly! Such an infamous lie could only have been
uttered by a scoundrel who has sold himself to the bourgeoisie,
or, what is absolutely the same thing, who has placed his trust in
Axelrod and is concealing the source of his information.

For everyone knows that on the very day of my arrival in
Russia, on April 4, 1917, I publicly read my theses in which I
proclaimed the superiority of the Paris Commune type of state over
the bourgeois parliamentary republic. Afterwards I repeatedly stated this in print, as, for instance, in a
pamphlet on political parties, which was translated into English
and was published in January 1918 in the New York Evening
Post . [20] More than that, the Conference of the Bolshevik Party held at the end of April 1917 adopted a
resolution to the effect that a proletarian and peasant republic
was superior to a bourgeois parliamentary republic, that our Party
would not be satisfied with the latter, and that the Party
Programme should be modified accordingly.

In face of these facts, what name can be given to
Kautsky’s trick of assuring his German readers that I had
been vigorously demanding the convocation of the Constituent
Assembly, and that I began to “belittle” the honour and dignity of the Constituent Assembly only after the Bolsheviks
found themselves in the minority in it? How can one excuse such a
trick? [Incidentally, there are many Menshevik lies of this kind in Kautsky’s pamphlet! It is a lampoon
written by an embittered Menshevik.— Lenin ] By pleading that Kautsky did not know the facts? If that is the
case, why did he undertake to write about them? Or why did he not
honestly announce that he was writing on the strength of
information supplied by the Mensheviks Stein and Axelrod and Co.?
By pretending to be objective, Kautsky wants to conceal his role
as the servant of the Mensheviks, who are disgruntled because they
have been defeated.

This, however, is a mere trifle compared with what is to
come.

Let us assume that Kautsky would not or could not (?) obtain
from his informants a translation of the Bolshevik resolutions and
declarations on the question of whether the Bolsheviks would be
satisfied with a bourgeois parliamentary democratic republic or
not. Let us assume this, although it is incredible. But Kautsky directly mentions my theses of December 26, 1917, on page
30 of his book.

Does he not know these theses in full, or does he know only
what was translated for him by the Steins, the Axelrods and Co.?
Kautsky quotes the third thesis on the fundamental question of whether the Bolsheviks, before the elections to
the Constituent Assembly, realised that a Soviet republic is
superior to a bourgeois republic, and whether they told the people that. But he keeps silent about the second
thesis.

The second thesis reads as follows:

“While demanding the convocation of a Constituent
Assembly, revolutionary Social-Democracy has ever since the
beginning of the revolution of 1917 repeatedly emphasised
that a republic of Soviets is a higher form of democracy
than the usual bourgeois republic with a Constituent Assembly .

(my italics).

In order to represent the Bolsheviks as unprincipled people, as
“revolutionary opportunists” (this is a term which
Kautsky employs somewhere in his book, I forget in which
connection), Mr. Kautsky has concealed from his German readers the fact that the theses contain a direct
reference to “ repeated ” declarations!

These are the petty, miserable and contemptible methods
Mr. Kautsky employs! That is the way he has evaded the theoretical question.

Is it true or not that the bourgeois-democratic parliamentary
republic is inferior to the republic of the Paris Commune
or Soviet type? This is the whole point, and Kautsky has evaded
it. Kautsky has “forgotten” all that Marx said in his analysis of the Paris Commune. He has also “forgotten”
Engels’s letter to Bebel of March 28, 1875, in which this
same idea of Marx is formulated in a particularly lucid and
comprehensible fashion: “The Commune was no longer a state
in the proper sense of the word.”

Here is the most prominent theoretician of the Second

International, in a special pamphlet on The Dictatorship of
the Proletariat , specially dealing with Russia, where the
question of a form of state that is higher than a democratic
bourgeois republic has been raised directly and repeatedly,
ignoring this very question. In what way does this differ in
fact from desertion to the bourgeois camp?

(Let us observe in parenthesis that in this respect, too,
Kautsky is merely trailing after the Russian Mensheviks. Among the
latter there are any number of people who know “all the
quotations” from Marx and Engels. Yet not a single
Menshevik, from April to October 1917 and from October 1917 to
October 1918, has ever made a single attempt to examine the question of the Paris Commune type of
state. Plekhanov, too, has evaded the question. Evidently he
had to .)

It goes without saying that to discuss the dispersal of the
Constituent Assembly [21] with people who call themselves
socialists and Marxists, but who in fact desert to the bourgeoisie
on the main question, the question of the Paris Commune
type of state, would be casting pearls before swine. It will be
sufficient to give the complete text of my theses on the
Constituent Assembly as an appendix to the present book. The
reader will then see that the question was presented on December
26, 1917, in the light of theory, history and practical
politics.

If Kautsky has completely renounced Marxism as a theoretician
he might at least have examined the question of the struggle of
the Soviets with the Constituent Assembly as a historian. We know
from many of Kautsky’s works that he knew how to he a Marxist historian, and that such works of his will remain a
permanent possession of the proletariat in spite of his subsequent
apostasy. But on this question Kausky, even as a historian, turns his back on the truth, ignores well-known facts and behaves like a sycophant. He wants to represent
the Bolsheviks as being unprincipled and he tells his readers that
they tried to mitigate the conflict with the Constituent
Assembly before dispersing it. There is absolutely nothing wrong
about it, we have nothing to recant; I give the theses in full and
there it is said as clear as clear can be: Gentlemen of the
vacillating petty bourgeoisie entrenched in the Constituent
Assembly, either reconcile yourselves to the proletarian
dictatorship, or else we shall defeat you by “revolutionary
means” (theses 18 and 19).

That is how a really revolutionary proletariat has always
behaved and always will behave towards the vacillating petty
bourgeoisie.

Kautsky adopts a formal standpoint on the question of the
Constituent Assembly. My theses say clearly and repeatedly that
the interests of the revolution are higher than the formal rights
of the Constituent Assembly (see theses 16 and 17). The formal
democratic point of view is precisely the point of view of the bourgeois democrat who refuses to admit that the
interests of the proletariat and of the proletarian class struggle
are supreme. As a historian, Kautsky would not have been able to
deny that bourgeois parliaments are the organs of this or that
class. But now (for the sordid purpose of renouncing revolution)
Kautsky finds it necessary to forget his Marxism, and he refrains from putting the question : the organ of what class was the Constituent Assembly of Russia? Kautsky
does not examine the concrete conditions; he does not want to face
facts; he does not say a single word to his German readers about
the fact that the theses contained not only a theoretical
elucidation of the question of the limited character of bourgeois
democracy (theses 1-3), not only a description of the concrete
conditions which determined the discrepancy between the party
lists of candidates in the middle of October 1917 and the real
state of affairs in December 1917 (theses 4-6), but also a
history of the class struggle and the Civil War in
October–December 1917 (theses 7–15). From this concrete history we
drew the conclusion (thesis 14) that the slogan “All Power
to the Constituent Assembly!” had, in reality , become the slogan of the Cadets and the Kaledin men and their
abettors.

Kautsky the historian fails to see this. Kautsky the historian
has never heard that universal suffrage sometimes produces
petty-bourgeois, sometimes reactionary and counter-revolutionary
parliaments. Kautsky the Marxist historian has never heard that
the form of elections, the form of democracy, is one thing, and
the class content of the given institution is another. This
question of the class content of the Constituent Assembly is
directly put and answered in my theses. Perhaps my answer is
wrong. Nothing would have been more welcome to us than a Marxist
criticism of our analysis by an outsider. Instead of writing
utterly silly phrases (of which there are plenty in
Kautsky’s book) about somebody preventing criticism of
Bolshevism, he ought to have set out to make such a criticism. But
the point is that he offers no criticism. He does not even raise the question of a class analysis of the Soviets on
the one hand, and of the Constituent Assembly on the other. It is
therefore impossible to argue, to debate with
Kautsky. All we can do is demonstrate to the reader why
Kautsky cannot be called anything else but a renegade.

The divergence between the Soviets and the Constituent Assembly
has its history, which even a historian who does not share the
point of view of the class struggle could not have ignored. Kautsky would not touch upon this actual
history. Kautsky has concealed from his German readers the
universally known fact (which only malignant Mensheviks now
conceal) that the divergence between the Soviets and the
“general state” (that is, bourgeois) institutions existed even under the rule of the Mensheviks, i.e., from the end
of February to October 1917. Actually, Kautsky adopts the position
of conciliation, compromise and collaboration between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie. However much Kautsky may
repudiate this, it is a fact which is borne out by his whole
pamphlet. To say that the Constituent Assembly should not have
been dispersed is tantamount to saying that the fight against the
bourgeoisie should not have been fought to a finish, that the
bourgeoisie should not have been overthrown and that the
proletariat should have made peace with them.

Why has Kautsky kept quiet about the fact that the Mensheviks
were engaged in this inglorious work between February and October
1917 and did not achieve anything? If it was possible to reconcile
the bourgeoisie with the proletariat, why didn’t the
Mensheviks succeed in doing so? Why did the bourgeoisie stand
aloof from the Soviets? Why did the Mensheviks call the
Soviets “revolutionary democracy”, and the bourgeoisie the “propertied elements”?

Kautsky has concealed from his German readers that it was the
Mensheviks who, in the “epoch” of their rule (February to October 1917), called the Soviets “revolutionary
democracy”, thereby admitting their superiority over all other institutions. It is only by concealing this fact
that Kautsky the historian made it appear that the divergence
between the Soviets and the bourgeoisie had no history, that it
arose instantaneously, without cause, suddenly, because of the bad
behaviour of the Bolsheviks. Yet, in actual fact, it was the
more than six months’ (an enormous period in time of revolution) experience of Menshevik compromise, of their
attempts to reconcile the proletariat with the bourgeoisie, that
convinced the people of the fruitlessness of these attempts and
drove the proletariat away from the Mensheviks.

Kautsky admits that the Soviets are an excellent combat
organisation of the proletariat, and that they have a great future
before them. But, that being the case, Kautsky’s position
collapses like a house of cards, or like the dreams of a petty
bourgeois that the acute struggle between the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie can be avoided. For revolution is one continuous and
moreover desperate struggle, and the proletariat is the vanguard
class of all the oppressed, the focus and centre of all
the aspirations of all the oppressed for their emancipation!
Naturally, therefore, the Soviets, as the organ of the struggle of
the oppressed people, reflected and expressed the moods and
changes of opinions of these people ever so much more quickly,
fully, and faithfully than any other institution (that,
incidentally, is one of the reasons why Soviet democracy is the
highest type of democracy).

In the period between February 28 (old style) and October 25,
1917, the Soviets managed to convene two all-Russia congresses of representatives of the overwhelming majority of the
population of Russia, of all the workers and soldiers, and of 70
or 80 per cent of the peasants, not to mention the vast number of
local, uyezd, town, gubernia, and regional congresses. During this period the bourgeoisie did not succeed in
convening a single institution representing the majority (except
that obvious sham and mockery called the “Democratic
Conference” , [22] which enraged the proletariat). The
Constituent Assembly reflected the same popular mood and the
same political grouping as the First (June) All-Russia
Congress of Soviets. By the time the Constituent Assembly was
convened (January 1918), the Second (October 1917) and Third
(January 1918) Congresses of Soviets had met, both of which had demonstrated as clear as clear could be that the people
had swung to the left, had become revolutionised, had turned away
from the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, and had
passed over to the side of the Bolsheviks; that is, had
turned away from petty-bourgeois leadership, from the illusion
that it was possible to reach a compromise with the bourgeoisie,
and had joined the proletarian revolutionary struggle for the
overthrow of the bourgeoisie.

So, even the external history of the Soviets shows that the Constituent Assembly was a reactionary body and
that its dispersal was inevitable. But Kautsky sticks firmly to
his “slogan”: let “pure democracy” prevail though the revolution perish and the bourgeoisie triumph over the
proletariat! Fiat justitia, pereat mundus ! [Latin for “Let justice be done, even though
the world may perish”. —Editor .]

Here are the brief figures relating to the all-Russia congresses of Soviets in the course of the history of the Russian
revolution:

All-Russia Congress of Soviets | Number of Delegates | Number of Bolsehviks | % of Bolsheviks |
First (June 3, 1917) | 790 | 103 | 13
Second (October 25, 1917) | 675 | 343 | 51
Third (January 10, 1918) | 710 | 434 | 61
Fourth (March 14, 1918) | 1,232 | 795 | 64
Fifth (July 4, 1918) | 1,164 | 773 | 66

One glance at these figures is enough to understand why the
defence of the Constituent Assembly and talk (like
Kautsky’s) about the Bolsheviks not having a majority of the
population behind them are just ridiculed in Russia

## Endnotes

[19] Incidentally, Kautsky, obviously trying to be ironical, repeatedly
quotes the expression “most painless” transition; but as the shaft misses its mark, a few pages farther on he commits a
slight forgery and falsely quotes it as a “painless” transition! Of course, by such means it is easy to put any
absurdity into the mouth of an opponent. The forgery also helps
him to evade the substance of the argument, namely, that the most
painless transition to socialism is possible only when all the
poor are organised to a man (Soviets) and when the core of state
power (the proletariat) helps them to organise.

[20] Lenin’s pamphlet Political Parties in Russia and
the Tasks of the Proletariat was published by The
Evening Post on January 15, 1918, and by The Class
Struggle , the organ of the Left wing of the American
Socialist Party, in issue No. 4 for November–December 1917. It
also appeared as a separate edition.

The Evening Post —a bourgeois newspaper published in New York from 1801 (from 1801 to 1832 it was called The New York Evening Post ). For a number of years it
followed a liberal policy. After the October Socialist Revolution
it published the secret treaties concluded between the Allies and
the tsarist government. Subsequently it became the mouthpiece of
the most reactionary imperialist circles. It now appears as The
New York Post .

[21] On June 14 (27), 1917, the Provisional Government decided to hold
elections to the Constituent Assembly on September 17 (30),
1917. In August it postponed the elections until November 12
(25).

Elections to the Constituent Assembly took place on the appointed date, November 12 (25), after the October
Socialist Revolution. Deputies were elected according to the lists
that had been drawn up before the Revolution and in keeping with
the regulations endorsed by the Provisional Government. Elections
took place at a time when the mass of the people had not yet
appreciated the import of the October Revolution. This put the
Right Socialist-Revolutionaries at an advantage and as a result
they secured a majority of votes in areas outside the capital and
industrial centres. The Constituent Assembly met in Petrograd on
January 5 (18), 1918. By decree of the All-Russia Central
Executive Committee on January 6 (19), 1918, the Constituent
Assembly was dissolved because, through the reactionary majority,
it had rejected the Declaration of Rights of the Working and
Exploited People submitted by the All-Russia Central Executive
Committee and had refused to approve the decrees of the Second
Congress of Soviets on peace, land and the transfer of power to
the Soviets.

[22] The All-Russia Democratic Conference was called by the
Menshevik/Socialist-Revolutionary Central Executive Committee of
Soviets to decide the question of power and met in Petrograd
in September 1917. Actually, however, it was called in order to
divert people’s attention from the mounting revolution. More
than 1,500 delegates attended. The Menshevik and
Socialist-Revolutionary leaders took all steps to reduce
representation of the Soviets of Workers’ and
Peasants’ Deputies and increase the number of delegates from
various petty-bourgeois and bourgeois organisations, thereby
securing a majority for themselves. Thus, increased representation
was granted to municipalities, which sent 300 delegates; Zemstvos
sent 200 delegates and the co-operatives, which were under the
control of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, sent 120
delegates. But the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’
Deputies, which represented the overwhelming majority of the
population, had only 230 delegates. The Bolsheviks took part in
the Conference for the purpose of utilising it as a platform for
exposing the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries.

The Conference adopted a decision to establish a
Pre-Parliament (Provisional Council of the Republic). This was an
attempt to create a semblance of a parliamentary system in
Russia. According to the regulations worked out by the Provisional
Government, the Pre-Parliament was to be an advisory government
body. Lenin emphatically insisted on boycotting the
Pre-Parliament, as to stay in it would have created the impression
it could solve the tasks of the revolution. The Central Committee
of the Party discussed Lenin’s proposal and decided that
Bolsheviks should resign their seats in the Pre-Parliament. Only
Kamenev and other capitulators insisted on participating. At the
opening session of the Pre-Parliament on October 7 (20) the
Bolsheviks road their declaration and walked out.

## The Soviet Constitution

As I have already pointed out, the disfranchisement of the bourgeoisie is not a necessary and indispensable feature of
the dictatorship of the proletariat. And in Russia, the
Bolsheviks, who long before October put forward the slogan of
proletarian dictatorship, did not say anything in advance about
disfranchising the exploiters. This aspect of the dictatorship did not make its appearance “according to the
plan” of any particular party; it emerged of itself in the course of the struggle. Of course, Kautsky the historian
failed to notice this. He failed to understand that even when the
Mensheviks (who compromised with the bourgeoisie) still ruled the
Soviets, the bourgeoisie cut themselves off from the Soviets of
their own accord, boycotted them, put themselves up in opposition
to them and intrigued against them. The Soviets arose without any
constitution and existed without one for more than a year (from the spring of 1917 to the summer of 1918). The fury of the
bourgeoisie against this independent and omnipotent (because it
was all-embracing) organisation of the oppressed; the fight,
the unscrupulous, self-seeking and sordid fight, the bourgeoisie waged against the Soviets; and, lastly, the overt
participation of the bourgeoisie (from the Cadets to the Right
Socialist-Revolutionaries, from Milyukov to Kerensky) in the
Kornilov mutiny [23] —all this paved the way for the formal exclusion of the bourgeoisie from the Soviets.

Kautsky has heard about the Kornilov mutiny, but he majestically scorns historical facts and the course and forms of
the struggle which determine the forms of the dictatorship. Indeed, who should care about facts where
“pure” democracy is involved? That is why
Kautsky’s “criticism” of the disfranchisement of the bourgeoisie is distinguished by such . . . sweet
naïveté, which would be touching in a child but is repulsive in a person who has not yet been officially certified
as feeble-minded.

“. . . If the capitalists found themselves in an insignificant minority under universal suffrage they would more
readily become reconciled to their fate” (p. 33). . . . Charming, isn’t it? Clever Kautsky has seen many
cases in history, and, generally, knows perfectly well from his
own observations of life of landowners and capitalists reckoning
with the will of the majority of the oppressed. Clever Kautsky
firmly advocates an “opposition”, i.e., parliamentary struggle. That is literally what he says: “opposition”
(p. 34 and elsewhere).

My dear learned historian and politician! It would not harm you
to know that “opposition” is a concept that belongs to the peaceful and only to the parliamentary struggle, i.e., a
concept that corresponds to a non-revolutionary situation, a
concept that corresponds to an absence of revolution .
During revolution we have to deal with a ruthless enemy in civil
war; and no reactionary jeremiads of a petty bourgeois who fears
such a war, as Kautsky does, will alter the fact. To examine the
problems of ruthless civil war from the point of view of
“opposition” at a time when the bourgeoisie are prepared to commit any crime—the example of the Versailles
men and their deals with Bismarck must mean something to every
person who does not treat history like Gogol’s Petrushka [24] —when the bourgeoisie are
summoning foreign states to their aid and intriguing with them
against the revolution, is simply comical. The revolutionary
proletariat is to put on a nightcap, like “Muddle-headed Counsellor” Kautsky, and regard
the bourgeoisie, who are organising Dutov, Krasnov and Czech
counter-revolutionary insurrections and are paying millions
to saboteurs, as a legal “opposition”. Oh, what profundity!

Kautsky is exclusively interested in the formal, legal aspect
of the question, and, reading his disquisitions on the Soviet
Constitution, one involuntarily recalls Bebel’s words:
Lawyers are thoroughbred reactionaries. “In reality,”
Kautsky writes, “the capitalists alone cannot be disfranchised. What is a capitalist in the legal sense of the
term? A property-owner? Even in a country which has advanced
so far along the path of economic progress as Germany, where the
proletariat is so numerous, the establishment of a Soviet republic
would disfranchise a large mass of people. In 1907, the number of
persons in the German Empire engaged in the three great
occupational groups—agriculture, industry and commerce—together with their families amounted roughly to
thirty-five million in the wage-earners’ and salaried employees’ group, and seventeen million in the
independent group. Hence, a party might well form a majority among
the wage-workers but a minority among the population as a
whole” (p. 33).

That is an example of Kautsky’s mode of argument. Isn’t it the counter-revolutionary whining
of a bourgeois? Why, Mr. Kautsky, have you relegated all the
“independents” to the category of the disfranchised, when you know very well that the overwhelming majority of the
Russian peasants do not employ hired labour, and do not,
therefore, lose their franchise? Isn’t this falsification?

Why, learned economist, did you not quote the facts with which
you are perfectly familiar and which are to be found in those same
German statistical returns for 1907 relating to hired labour in
agriculture according to size of farms? Why did you not quote
these facts to enable the German workers, the readers of your
pamphlet, to see how many exploiters there are , and how
few they are compared with the total number of “farmers” who figure in German statistics?

You did not because your apostasy has made you a mere sycophant
of the bourgeoisie.

The term capitalist, Kautsky argues, is legally a vague
concept, and on several pages he thunders against the “arbitrariness” of the Soviet Constitution. This
“serious scholar” has no objection to the British bourgeoisie taking several centuries to work out and develop a new
(new for the Middle Ages) bourgeois constitution, but, representative of lackey’s science that he is, he will
allow no time to us, the workers and peasants of Russia. He
expects us to have a constitution all worked out to the very last
letter in a few months.

“Arbitrariness!” Just imagine what a depth of vile subservience to the bourgeoisie and most inept pedantry is
contained in such a reproach. When thoroughly bourgeois
and for the most part reactionary lawyers in the capitalist
countries have for centuries or decades been drawing up most
detailed rules and regulations and writing scores and hundreds of
volumes of laws and interpretations of laws to oppress the
workers, to bind the poor man hand and foot and to place
thousands of hindrances and obstacles in the way of any of the
common labouring people—there the bourgeois liberals and Mr.
Kautsky see no “arbitrariness”! That is “law” and “order”! The ways in which the
poor are to be “kept down” have all been thought out and written down. There are thousands of bourgeois lawyers and
bureaucrats (about them Kautsky says nothing at all, probably just
because Marx attached enormous significance to smashing the bureaucratic machine . . . )—lawyers and bureaucrats who
know how to interpret the laws in such a way that the worker and
the average peasant can never break through the barbed-wire
entanglements of these laws. This is not “arbitrariness” on the part of the bourgeoisie, it is
not the dictatorship of the sordid and self-seeking exploiters who are sucking the blood of the people. Nothing of the
kind! It is “pure democracy”, which is becoming purer and purer every day.

But now that the toiling and exploited classes, while cut off
by the imperialist war from their brothers across the border, have
for the first time in history set up their own Soviets,
have called to the work of political construction those
people whom the bourgeoisie used to oppress, grind down and
stupefy, and have begun themselves to build a new, proletarian state, have begun in the heat of furious
struggle, in the fire of civil war, to sketch the fundamental principles of a state without
exploiters —all the bourgeois scoundrels, the whole gang of bloodsuckers, with Kautsky echoing them, howl about
“arbitrariness”! Indeed, how will these ignorant people, these workers and peasants, this “mob”, be
able to interpret their laws? How can these common labourers
acquire a sense of justice without the counsel of educated
lawyers, of bourgeois writers, of the Kautskys and the wise old
bureaucrats?

Mr. Kautsky quotes from my speech of April 28, 1918, the words: “The people themselves determine the procedure
and the time of elections.” And Kautsky, the “pure democrat”, infers from this:

”. . . Hence, it would mean that every assembly of electors
may determine the procedure of elections at their own discretion. Arbitrariness and the opportunity of getting rid of
undesirable opposition in the ranks of the proletariat itself
would thus be carried to the extreme” (p. 37).

Well, how does this differ from the talk of a hack hired by
capitalists, who howls about the people oppressing industrious
workers who are “willing to work” during a strike? Why is the bourgeois bureaucratic method of determining
electoral procedure under “pure” bourgeois democracy not arbitrariness? Why should the sense of justice among the
masses who have risen to fight their age-old exploiters
and who are being educated and steeled in this desperate struggle
be less than that of a handful of bureaucrats, intellectuals and lawyers brought up in bourgeois prejudices?

Kautsky is a true socialist. Don’t dare suspect the sincerity of this very respectable father of a family, of this
very honest citizen. He is an ardent and convinced supporter of
the victory of the workers, of the proletarian revolution. All he
wants is that the honey-mouthed, petty-bourgeois intellectuals and philistines in nightcaps should first—before the masses begin to move, before they start a furious battle with the exploiters, and certainly without civil war—draw up a moderate and precise set of
rules for the development of the revolution . . . .

Burning with profound moral indignation, our most learned Judas
Golovlyov [25] tells the German workers that on June
14, 1918, the All-Russia Central Executive Committee of
Soviets resolved to expel the representatives of the Right
Socialist-Revolutionary Party and the Mensheviks from the
Soviets. “This measure,” writes Judas Kautsky, all afire with noble indignation, “is not directed against
definite persons guilty of definite punishable offences. . . .

The Constitution of the Soviet Republic does not contain a
single word about the immunity of Soviet deputies. It is not
definite persons , but definite parties that are expelled from the Soviets” (p. 37).

Yes, that is really awful, an intolerable departure from pure
democracy, according to the rules of which our revolutionary Judas
Kautsky will make the revolution. We Russian Bolsheviks should
first have guaranteed immunity to the Savinkovs and Co., to the
Lieberdans, [26] Potresovs (“activists” [27] ) and Co., then drawn up a criminal
code proclaiming participation in the Czech counter-revolutionary war, or in the alliance with the
German imperialists in the Ukraine or in Georgia against the workers of one’s own country, to be “punishable
offences”, and only then , on the basis of this criminal code, would we be entitled, in accordance with the
principles of “pure democracy”, to expel “definite persons” from the Soviets. It goes without
saying that the Czechs, who are subsidised by the British and
French capitalists through the medium (or thanks to the agitation)
of the Savinkovs, Potresovs and Lieberdans, and the Krasnovs who
receive ammunition from the Germans through the medium of the
Ukrainian and Tiflis Mensheviks, would have sat quietly waiting
until we were ready with our proper criminal code, and, like the
purest democrats they are, would have confined themselves to the
role of an “opposition”. . . .

No less profound moral indignation is aroused in
Kautsky’s breast by the fact that the Soviet Constitution
disfranchises all those who “employ hired labour with a view
to profit”. “A home-worker, or a small master employing only one journeyman,” Kautsky writes, “may
live and feel quite like a proletarian, but he has no vote”
(p. 36).

What a departure from “pure democracy”! What an injustice! True, up to now all Marxists have thought—and
thousands of facts have proved it—that the small masters
were the most unscrupulous and grasping exploiters of hired
labour, but our Judas Kautsky takes the small masters not as a class (who invented that pernicious theory of the class
struggle?) but as single individuals, exploiters who “live
and feel quite like proletarians”. The famous “thrifty
Agnes”, who was considered dead and buried long ago, has
come to life again under Kautsky’s pen. This “thrifty
Agnes” was invented and launched into German literature some
decades ago by that “pure” democrat, the bourgeois
Eugen Richter. He predicted untold calamities that would follow
the dictatorship of the proletariat, the confiscation of the
capital of the exploiters, and asked with an innocent air: What is
a capitalist in the legal sense of the term? He took as an example
a poor, thrifty seamstress (“thrifty Agnes”), whom the wicked “proletarian dictators” rob of her last
farthing. There was a time when all German Social-Democrats
used to poke fun at this “thrifty Agnes” of the pure democrat, Eugen Richter. But that was a long, long time ago, when
Bebel, who was quite frank and open about there being many
national-liberals [28] in his party, was still alive; that
was very long ago, when Kautsky was not yet a renegade.

Now “thrifty Agnes” has come to life again in the person of the “small master who employs only one journeyman
and who lives and feels quite like a proletarian”. The wicked Bolsheviks are wronging him, depriving him of his vote. It
is true that “every assembly of electors” in the
Soviet Republic, as Kautsky tells us, may admit into its midst a
poor little master who, for instance, may be connected with this
or that factory, if, by way of an exception, he is not an
exploiter, and if he really “lives and feels quite like a proletarian”. But can one rely on the knowledge of
life, on the sense of justice of an irregular factory meeting of
common workers acting (how awful!) without a written code? Would
it not clearly be better to grant the vote to all exploiters, to all who employ hired labour, rather than
risk the possibility of “thrifty Agnes” and the “small master who lives and feels quite like a
proletarian” being wronged by the workers?

Let the contemptible renegade scoundrels, amidst the applause
of the bourgeoisie and the social-chauvinists, [29] abuse
our Soviet Constitution for disfranchising the exploiters!
That’s fine because it will accelerate and widen the split
between the revolutionary workers of Europe and the Scheidemanns
and Kautskys, the Renaudels and Longuets, the Hendersons and
Ramsay MacDonalds, the old leaders and old betrayers of
socialism.

The mass of the oppressed classes, the class-conscious and honest revolutionary proletarian leaders will be on our
side. It will be enough to acquaint such proletarians and
such people with our Soviet Constitution for them to say at once:
“These are really our people , this is a real workers’ party, this is a real workers’ government,
for it does not deceive the workers by talking about reforms in
the way all the above-mentioned leaders have done , but is fighting the exploiters in real earnest, making a
revolution in real earnest and actually fighting for the
complete emancipation of the workers.”

The fact that after a year’s “experience” the Soviets have deprived the exploiters
of the franchise shows that the Soviets are really organisations
of the oppressed and not of social-imperialists and social-pacifists who have sold themselves to the
bourgeoisie. The fact that the Soviets have disfranchised
the exploiters shows they are not organs of petty-bourgeois compromise with the capitalists, not organs
of parliamentary chatter (on the part of the Kautskys, the
Longuets and the MacDonalds), but organs of the genuinely
revolutionary proletariat which is waging a life-and-death struggle against the exploiters.

“Kautsky’s book is almost unknown here,” a well-informed comrade wrote to me from Berlin a few days ago
(today is
October 30). I would advise our ambassadors in Germany and
Switzerland not to stint thousands in buying up this book and distributing it gratis amon the class-conscious workers
so as to trample in the mud this “European”—read: imperialist and
reformist—Social-Democracy, which has long been a “stinking
corpse”.

At the end of his book, on pages 61 and 63, Mr. Kautsky
bitterly laments the fact that the “new theory” (as he calls Bolshevism, fearing to touch Marx’s and Engels’s
analysis of the Paris Commune) “finds supporters even in old
democracies like Switzerland, for instance”. “It is incomprehensible” to Kautsky “how this theory can be
adopted by German Social-Democrats”.

No, it is quite comprehensible; for after the serious lessons
of the war the revolutionary masses are becoming sick and tired of
the Scheidemanns and the Kautskys.

”We” have always been in favour of democracy, Kautsky writes, yet we are supposed suddenly to renounce it!

”We”, the opportunists of Social-Democracy, have always been opposed to the dictatorship of the proletariat,
and Kolb and Co. proclaimed this long ago. Kautsky knows
this and vainly expects that he will be able to conceal from his
readers the obvious fact that he has “returned to the fold” of the Bernsteins and Kolbs.

“We”, the revolutionary Marxists, have never made a fetish of “pure” (bourgeois) democracy. As is known,
in 1903 Plekhanov was a revolutionary Marxist (later his
unfortunate turn brought him to the position of a Russian
Scheidemann).  And in that year Plekhanov declared at our Party
Congress, which was then adopting its programme, that in the
revolution the proletariat would, if necessary, disfranchise the
capitalists and disperse any parliament that was found to
be counter-revolutionary. That this is the only view that
corresponds to Marxism will be clear to anybody even from the
statements of Marx and Engels which I have quoted above; it
patently follows from all the fundamental principles of
Marxism.

“We”, the revolutionary Marxists, never made speeches to the people that the Kautskyites of all nations love to
make, cringing before the bourgeoisie, adapting themselves to the
bourgeois parliamentary system, keeping silent about the bourgeois character of modern democracy and demanding
only its extension, only that it be carried to its logical conclusion.

“We” said to the bourgeoisie: You, exploiters and hypocrites, talk about democracy, while at every step you erect
thousands of barriers to prevent the oppressed people from taking part in politics. We take you at your word and, in the
interests of these people, demand the extension of your bourgeois democracy in order to prepare the people for
revolution for the purpose of overthrowing you, the exploiters.  And if you exploiters attempt to offer resistance to
our proletarian revolution we shall ruthlessly suppress you; we
shall deprive you of all rights; more than that, we shall not give
you any bread, for in our proletarian republic the exploiters will
have no rights, they will be deprived of fire and water, for we
are socialists in real earnest, and not in the Scheidemann or
Kautsky fashion.

That is what “we”, the revolutionary Marxists, said, and will say—and that is why the oppressed people will
support us and be with us, while the Scheidemanns and the Kautskys
will be swept into the renegades’ cesspool.

## Endnotes

[23] This refers to a counter-revolutionary conspiracy of the Russian
bourgeoisie in August 1917. Tsarist General Kornilov led the
conspirators. Relying on the top army officers, they planned to
use officer cadet and Cossack units to seize Petrograd, crush the
Bolshevik Party, dissolve the Soviets and establish military
dictatorship in the country. The workers of Petrograd and
revolutionary soldiers and sailors rose up in response to the
appeal of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party and crushed
the Kornilov revolt. Popular pressure compelled the Provisional
Government to order the arrest of Kornilov and his associates
and bring them to court. Thus the attempt of the bourgeoisie and
landowners to crush the revolution fell through. After the defeat
of the Kornilov revolt the Bolsheviks gained more influence among
the people. Bolshevisation of the Soviets began. The Bolsheviks
again advanced the slogan “All Power to the Soviets!”

[24] Petrushka —a serf servant in Gogol’s novel The
Dead Souls . He could read only by syllables and enjoyed the
process of reading, never pausing to think over the contents of a
book.

[25] Judas Golovlyov —a hypocritical and sanctimonious
feudal landowner in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel The Golovlyov
Family .

[26] Lieberdans —nickname for the Menshevik leaders Lieber and Dan
and their supporters, which stuck to them after the Moscow
Bolshevik newspaper Sotsial-Demokrat had published in its issue
No. 141 on August 25 (September 7), 1917, Demyan Bedny’s feuilleton
entitled “Lieberdan”.

[27] Activists —a group of Mensheviks who resorted to
armed struggle against Soviet power and the Bolshevik Party after
the October Revolution. They joined various counter-revolutionary
conspiratorial organisations, supported Kornilov, Kaledin and the
bourgeois nationalist Ukrainian Rada, actively participated in the
whiteguard Czech revolt and made common front with the foreign
interventionists. In 1918, under the pretext of discussing the
food situation, the “activists”, supported by the
Menshevik Party, held a number of conferences of “workers” and
their delegates which actually demanded the dissolution of the
Soviets.

[28] August Bebel spoke about this at the Magdeburg Congress of the
Social-Democratic Party of Germany on September 20, 1910. Lenin
mentions the Congress in his article “Two Worlds” ( LCW , Volume 16,
pages 305–313).

[29] I have just read a leading article in Frankfurter
Zeitung (No. 293, October 22, 1918), giving an enthusiastic summary of Kautsky’s pamphlet. This organ of
the stock exchange is satisfied. And no wonder! And a comrade
writes to me from Berlin that Vorwärts, the organ of the Scheidemanns, has declared in a special article
that it subscribes to almost every line Kautsky has written. Hearty congratulations!

## What Is Internationalism?

Kautsky is absolutely convinced that he is an internationalist and calls himself one. The Scheidemanns he calls
“government socialists”. In defending the Mensheviks (he does not openly express his solidarity with them, but he
faithfully expresses their views), Kautsky has shown with perfect
clarity what kind of “internationalism” he subscribes to. And since Kautsky is not alone, but is spokesman for a trend
which inevitably grew up in the atmosphere of the Second
International (Longuet in France, Turati in Italy, Nobs and Grimm,
Graber and Naine in Switzerland, Ramsay MacDonald in Britain,
etc.), it will be instructive to dwell on Kautsky’s “internationalism”.

After emphasising that the
Mensheviks also attended the Zimmerwald Conference (a diploma,
certainly, but . . . a tainted one), Kautsky sets forth the views of
the Mensheviks, with whom he agrees, in the following manner:

“. . . The Mensheviks wanted a general peace. They wanted
all the belligerents to adopt the formula: no annexations and no
indemnities. Until this had been achieved, the Russian army,
according to this view, was to stand ready for battle. The
Bolsheviks, on the other hand, demanded an immediate peace at any
price; they were prepared, if need be, to make a separate peace;
they tried to force it by increasing the state of disorganisation
of the army, which was already bad enough” (p. 27). In
Kautsky’s opinion the Bolsheviks should not have taken power, and should have contented themselves with a Constituent
Assembly.

So, the internationalism of Kautsky and the Mensheviks amounts
to this: to demand reforms from the imperialist bourgeois
government, but to continue to support it, and to continue to
support the war that this government is waging until everyone in
the war has accepted the formula: no annexations and no
indemnities. This view was repeatedly expressed by Turati, and by
the Kautsky supporters (Haase and others), and by Longuet and Co.,
who declared that they stood for defence of the fatherland.

Theoretically, this shows a complete inability to dissociate
oneself from the social-chauvinists and complete confusion
on the question of defence of the fatherland.  Politically, it
means substituting petty-bourgeois nationalism for internationalism, deserting to the reformists’ camp and
renouncing revolution.

From the point of view of the proletariat, recognising “defence of the fatherland” means justifying the
present war, admitting that it is legitimate. And since the war
remains an imperialist war (both under a monarchy and under a
republic), irrespective of the country—mine or some other
country—in which the enemy troops are stationed at the given
moment, recognising defence of the fatherland means, in
fact , supporting the imperialist, predatory bourgeoisie, and
completely betraying socialism. In Russia, even under Kerensky,
under the bourgeois-democratic republic, the war continued
to be imperialist war, for it was being waged by the bourgeoisie
as a ruling class (and war is a “continuation of politics”); and a particularly striking expression of the
imperialist character of the war were the secret treaties for the
partitioning of the world and the plunder of other countries which
had been concluded by the tsar at the time with the capitalists of
Britain and France.

The Mensheviks deceived the people in a most despicable manner
by calling this war a defensive or revolutionary war. And by
approving the policy of the Mensheviks, Kautsky is approving the
popular deception, is approving the part played by the petty
bourgeoisie in helping capital to trick the workers and harness
them to the chariot of the imperialists.  Kautsky is pursuing a
characteristically petty-bourgeois, philistine policy by
pretending (and trying to make the people believe the absurd idea)
that putting forward a slogan alters the position. The entire history of bourgeois democracy refutes this illusion; the
bourgeois democrats have always advanced all sorts of “slogans” to deceive the people. The point is to test their sincerity, to compare their words with their deeds, not to be satisfied with idealistic or charlatan phrases, but to get down to class reality. An
imperialist war does not cease to be imperialist when charlatans
or phrase-mongers or petty-bourgeois philistines put forward sentimental “slogans”, but only when the class
which is conducting the imperialist war, and is bound to it by
millions of economic threads (and even ropes), is really overthrown and is replaced at the helm of state by the
really revolutionary class, the proletariat. There is no other way of getting out of an imperialist war, as also out of an
imperialist predatory peace .

By approving the foreign policy of the Mensheviks, and by declaring it to be internationalist and
Zimmerwaldist, Kautsky, first, reveals the utter rottenness of the
opportunist Zimmerwald majority (no wonder we, the Left Zimmerwaldists , at once dissociated ourselves from such a
majority!), and, secondly—and this is the chief thing—passes
from the position of the proletariat to the position of the petty
bourgeoisie, from the revolutionary to the reformist.

The proletariat fights for the revolutionary overthrow of the
imperialist bourgeoisie; the petty bourgeoisie fights for the
reformist “improvement” of imperialism, for adaptation to it, while submitting to it. When Kautsky was still a
Marxist, for example, in 1909, when he wrote his Road to
Power , it was the idea that war would inevitably lead to revolution that he advocated, and he spoke of the
approach of an era of revolutions. The Basle Manifesto of
1912 plainly and definitely speaks of a proletarian revolution in connection with that very imperialist war
between the German and the British groups which actually broke out
in 1914. But in 1918, when revolutions did begin in connection
with the war, Kautsky, instead of explaining that they were
inevitable, instead of pondering over and thinking out the revolutionary tactics and the ways and means of preparing
for revolution, began to describe the reformist tactics of the
Mensheviks as internationalism. Isn’t this apostasy?

Kautsky praises the Mensheviks for having insisted on maintaining the fighting strength of the army, and he blames the
Bolsheviks for having added to “disorganisation of the army”, which was already disorganised enough as it was. This
means praising reformism and submission to the imperialist
bourgeoisie, and blaming and renouncing revolution. For under
Kerensky maintaining the fighting strength of the army meant its
preservation under bourgeois (albeit republican)
command. Everybody knows, and the progress of events has
strikingly confirmed it, that this republican army preserved
the Kornilov spirit because its officers were Kornilov men. The bourgeois officers could not help being Kornilov men;
they could not help gravitating towards imperialism and towards
the forcible suppression of the proletariat. All that the
Menshevik tactics amounted to in practice was to leave all the foundations of the imperialist war and all the foundations
of the bourgeois dictatorship intact, to patch up details
and to daub over a few trifles (“reforms”).

On the other hand, not a single great revolution has ever taken place, or
ever can take place, without the “disorganisation” of the army. For the army is the most ossified instrument for
supporting the old regime, the most hardened bulwark of bourgeois
discipline, buttressing up the rule of capital, and preserving and
fostering among the working people the servile spirit of
submission and subjection to capital.  Counter-revolution
has never tolerated, and never could tolerate, armed workers side
by side with the army. In France, Engels wrote, the workers
emerged armed from every revolution: “therefore, the disarming of the workers was the first commandment for the
bourgeoisie, who were at the helm of the state.” [30] The armed workers were the embryo of
a new army, the organised nucleus of a new social order. The first commandment of the bourgeoisie was to
crush this nucleus and prevent it from growing. The first
commandment of every victorious revolution, as Marx and Engels
repeatedly emphasised, was to smash the old army, dissolve it and
replace it by a new one. [31] A new social class, when rising to
power, never could, and cannot now, attain power and consolidate
it except by completely disintegrating the old army (“Disorganisation!” the reactionary or just cowardly
philistines howl on this score), except by passing through a most
difficult and painful period without any army (the great French
Revolution also passed through such a painful period), and by
gradually building up, in the midst of hard civil war, a new army,
a new discipline, a new military organisation of the new
class. Formerly, Kautsky the historian understood this. Now,
Kautsky the renegade has forgotten it.

What right has Kautsky to call the Scheidemanns “government socialists” if he approves of the
tactics of the Mensheviks in the Russian revolution? In supporting
Kerensky and joining his Ministry, the Mensheviks were also
government socialists. Kautsky could not escape this conclusion if
he were to put the question as to which is the ruling class that is waging the imperialist war. But Kautsky avoids
raising the question about the ruling class, a question that is
imperative for a Marxist, for the mere raising of it would expose
the renegade.

The Kautsky supporters in Germany, the Longuet supporters in
France, and Turati and Co. in Italy argue in this way: socialism
presupposes the equality and freedom of nations, their self-determination, hence , when our country is
attacked, or when enemy troops invade our territory, it is the
right and duty of socialists to defend their country. But
theoretically such an argument is either a sheer mockery of
socialism or a fraudulent subterfuge, while from the point of view
of practical politics it coincides with the argument of the quite
ignorant country yokel who has even no conception of the social,
class character of the war, and of the tasks of a revolutionary
party during a reactionary war.

Socialism is opposed to violence against nations. That is
indisputable. But socialism is opposed to violence against men in
general. Apart from Christian anarchists and Tolstoyans, however,
no one has yet drawn the conclusion from this that socialism is
opposed to revolutionary violence. So, to talk about “violence” in general, without examining the
conditions which distinguish reactionary from revolutionary
violence, means being a philistine who renounces revolution, or
else it means simply deceiving oneself and others by sophistry.

The same holds true of violence against nations. Every war is
violence against nations, but that does not prevent socialists
from being in favour of a revolutionary war.  The class
character of war—that is the fundamental question which
confronts a socialist (if he is not a renegade). The imperialist
war of 1914–18 is a war between two groups of the imperialist bourgeoisie for the division of the world, for the
division of the booty, and for the plunder and strangulation of
small and weak nations. This was the appraisal of the impending
war given in the Basle Manifesto in 1912, and it has been
confirmed by the facts. Whoever departs from this view of war is
not a socialist.

If a German under Wilhelm or a Frenchman under Clemenceau says,
“It is my right and duty as a socialist to defend my country
if it is invaded by an enemy”, he argues not like a socialist, not like an internationalist, not like a revolutionary
proletarian, but like a petty-bourgeois nationalist. Because this argument ignores the revolutionary
class struggle of the workers against capital, it ignores the
appraisal of the war as a whole from the point of view of
the world bourgeoisie and the world proletariat, that is, it
ignores internationalism, and all that remains is miserable and
narrow-minded nationalism. My country is being wronged, that
is all I care about—that is what this argument amounts to,
and that is where its petty-bourgeois, nationalist narrow-mindedness lies. It is the same as if in regard to
individual violence, violence against an individual, one were to
argue that socialism is opposed to violence and therefore I would
rather be a traitor than go to prison.

The Frenchman, German or Italian who says: “Socialism is
opposed to violence against nations, therefore I defend
myself when my country is invaded”, betrays socialism and internationalism, because such a man sees
only his own “country”, he puts “his own” . . . bourgeoisie above everything else and does
not give a thought to the international connections which
make the war an imperialist war and his bourgeoisie a link in the
chain of imperialist plunder.

All philistines and all stupid and ignorant yokels argue in the
same way as the renegade Kautsky supporters, Longuet supporters,
Turati and Co.: “The enemy has invaded my country, I don’t care about anything else. [32]

The socialist, the revolutionary proletarian, the internationalist, argues differently. He says: “The
character of the war (whether it is reactionary or revolutionary)
does not depend on who the attacker was, or in whose country the
‘enemy’ is stationed; it depends on what class is waging the war, and on what politics this war is a
continuation of. If the war is a reactionary, imperialist war,
that is, if it is being waged by two world groups of the
imperialist, rapacious, predatory, reactionary bourgeoisie, then
every bourgeoisie (even of the smallest country) becomes a
participant in the plunder, and my duty as a representative of the
revolutionary proletariat is to prepare for the world proletarian revolution as the only escape from the
horrors of a world slaughter. I must argue, not from the point of
view of ‘my’ country (for that is the argument of a wretched, stupid, petty-bourgeois nationalist who does not
realise that he is only a plaything in the hands of the
imperialist bourgeoisie), but from the point of view of my share in the preparation, in the propaganda, and in the acceleration of
the world proletarian revolution.”

That is what internationalism means, and that is the duty of
the internationalist, the revolutionary worker, the genuine
socialist. That is the ABC that Kautsky the renegade has
“forgotten”. And his apostasy becomes still more obvious when he passes from approving the tactics of the
petty-bourgeois nationalists (the Mensheviks in Russia, the
Longuet supporters in France, the Turatis in Italy, and Haase and
Co. in Germany) to criticising the Bolshevik tactics. Here is his
criticism:

“The Bolshevik revolution was based on the assumption that it would become the starting-point of a
general European revolution, that the bold initiative of Russia
would prompt the proletarians of all Europe to rise.

“On this assumption it was, of course, immaterial what forms the Russian separate peace would take, what
hardships and territorial losses (literally: mutilation or
maiming, Verstümmelungen ) it would cause the
Russian people, and what interpretation of the self-determination of nations it would give. At that time it
was also immaterial whether Russia was able to defend herself or
not. According to this view, the European revolution would be the
best protection of the Russian revolution, and would bring
complete and genuine self-determination to all peoples inhabiting the former Russian territory.

“A revolution in Europe, which would establish and consolidate socialism there, would also become the
means of removing the obstacles that would arise in Russia in the
way of the introduction of the socialist system of production
owing to the economic backwardness of the country.

“All this was very logical and very sound—only if the main assumption were granted, namely,
that the Russian revolution would infallibly let loose a European
revolution. But what if that did not happen?

“So far the assumption has not been justified. And the proletarians of Europe are now being accused of
having abandoned and betrayed the Russian revolution. This is an
accusation levelled against unknown persons, for who is to be held
responsible for the behaviour of the European proletariat?”
(P. 28.)

And Kautsky then goes on to explain at great length that Marx,
Engels and Bebel were more than once mistaken about the advent of
revolution they had anticipated, but that they never based their
tactics on the expectation of a revolution “ at a definite
date ” (p.  29), whereas, he says, the Bolsheviks “staked everything on one card, on a general European
revolution”.

We have deliberately quoted this long passage to demonstrate to
our readers Kautsky’s “skill” in counterfeiting
Marxism by palming off his banal and reactionary philistine view
in its stead.

First, to ascribe to an opponent an obviously stupid idea and
then to refute it is a trick practised by none too clever
people. If the Bolsheviks had based their tactics on the
expectation of a revolution in other countries by a definite date that would have been an undeniable stupidity. But the Bolshevik
Party has never been guilty of such stupidity. In my letter to
American workers (August 20, 1918), I expressly disown this
foolish idea by saying that we count on an American revolution,
but not by any definite date. I dwelt at length upon the very same
idea more than once in my controversy with the Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries and the “Left
Communists” (January–March 1918). Kautsky has committed a slight . . . just a very slight forgery, on which he in
fact based his criticism of Bolshevism. Kautsky has confused
tactics based on the expectation of a European revolution in the
more or less near future, but not at a definite date, with tactics
based on the expectation of a European revolution at a definite
date. A slight, just a very slight forgery!

The last-named tactics are foolish. The first-named are obligatory for a Marxist, for every revolutionary proletarian
and internationalist— obligatory , because they alone take
into account in a proper Marxist way the objective situation
brought about by the war in all European countries, and they alone
conform to the international tasks of the proletariat.

By substituting the petty question about an error which the
Bolshevik revolutionaries might have made, but did not, for the
important question of the foundations of revolutionary tactics in
general, Kautsky adroitly abjures all revolutionary tactics!

A renegade in politics, he is unable even to present the
question of the objective prerequisites of revolutionary
tactics theoretically.

And this brings us to the second point.

Secondly, it is obligatory for a Marxist to count on a European
revolution if a revolutionary situation exists. It is the ABC of Marxism that the tactics of the socialist proletariat
cannot be the same both when there is a revolutionary situation
and when there is no revolutionary situation.

If Kautsky had put this question, which is obligatory for a
Marxist, he would have seen that the answer was absolutely
against him. Long before the war, all Marxists, all socialists
were agreed that a European war would create a revolutionary
situation. Kautsky himself, before he became a renegade, clearly
and definitely recognised this—in 1902 (in his Social
Revolution ) and in 1909 (in his Road to Power ). It was also admitted in the name of the entire Second International
in the Basle Manifesto. No wonder the social-chauvinists
and Kautsky supporters (the “Centrists”, i.e., those who waver between the revolutionaries and the opportunists) of all
countries shun like the plague the declarations of the Basle
Manifesto on this score!

So, the expectation of a revolutionary situation in Europe was
not an infatuation of the Bolsheviks, but the general opinion of all Marxists. When Kautsky tries to escape from
this indisputable truth using such phrases as the Bolsheviks
“always believed in the omnipotence of violence and will”, he simply utters a sonorous and empty phrase to cover
up his evasion, a shameful evasion, to put the question of a
revolutionary situation.

To proceed. Has a revolutionary situation actually come or not?
Kautsky proved unable to put this question either. The economic
facts provide an answer: the famine and ruin created everywhere by
the war imply a revolutionary situation. The political facts also
provide an answer: ever since 1915 a splitting process has been
evident in all countries within the old and decayed socialist parties, a process of departure of the mass of
the proletariat from the social-chauvinist leaders to the left, to
revolutionary ideas and sentiments, to revolutionary leaders.

Only a person who dreads revolution and betrays it could have
failed to see these facts on August 5, 1918, when Kautsky was
writing his pamphlet. And now, at the end of October 1918, the
revolution is growing in a number of European countries,
and growing under everybody’s eyes and very rapidly at that. Kautsky the “revolutionary”, who still wants to
be regarded as a Marxist, has proved to be a short-sighted
philistine, who, like those philistines of 1847 whom Marx
ridiculed, failed to see the approaching revolution!

Now to the third point.

Thirdly, what should be the specific features of revolutionary
tactics when there is a revolutionary situation in Europe? Having
become a renegade, Kautsky feared to put this question, which is
obligatory for a Marxist. Kautsky argues like a typical petty
bourgeois, a philistine, or like an ignorant peasant: has a
“general European revolution” begun or not? If it has, then he too is prepared to become a revolutionary! But
then, mark you, every scoundrel (like the scoundrels who now
sometimes attach themselves to the victorious Bolsheviks) would
proclaim himself a revolutionary!

If it has not, then Kautsky will turn his back on revolution!
Kautsky does not display a shade of understanding of the truth
that a revolutionary Marxist differs from the philistine and
petty bourgeois by his ability to preach to the uneducated masses that the maturing revolution is necessary, to prove that it is inevitable, to explain its
benefits to the people, and to prepare the proletariat and all the working and exploited people for it.

Kautsky ascribed to the Bolsheviks an absurdity, namely, that
they had staked everything on one card, on a European revolution
breaking out at a definite date. This absurdity has turned against
Kautsky himself, because the logical conclusion of his argument is
that the tactics of the Bolsheviks would have been correct if a
European revolution had broken out by August 5, 1918! That is the
date Kautsky mentions as the time he was writing his pamphlet.
And when, a few weeks after this August 5, it became clear that
revolution was coming in a number of European countries, the whole
apostasy of Kautsky, his whole falsification of Marxism, and his
utter inability to reason or even to present questions in a
revolutionary manner, became revealed in all their charm!

When the proletarians of Europe are accused of treachery,
Kautsky writes, it is an accusation levelled at unknown
persons.

You are mistaken, Mr. Kautsky! Look in the mirror and you will
see those “unknown persons” against whom this accusation is levelled. Kautsky assumes an air of
naïveté and pretends not to understand who levelled the accusation, and its meaning. In reality,
however, Kautsky knows perfectly well that the accusation has
been and is being levelled by the German “Lefts”, by the Spartacists, by Liebknecht and his friends.  This accusation expresses a clear
appreciation of the fact that the German proletariat betrayed the
Russian (and world) revolution when it strangled Finland, the
Ukraine, Latvia and Estonia. This accusation is levelled primarily
and above all, not against the masses , who are always downtrodden, but against those leaders who, like the Scheidemanns and the Kautskys, failed in their duty to carry on
revolutionary agitation, revolutionary propaganda, revolutionary
work among the masses to overcome their inertness, who in fact
worked against the revolutionary instincts and aspirations which are always aglow deep down among the mass of the
oppressed class. The Scheidemanns bluntly, crudely, cynically, and
in most cases for selfish motives betrayed the proletariat and
deserted to the side of the bourgeoisie. The Kautsky and the
Longuet supporters did the same thing, only hesitatingly and
haltingly, and casting cowardly side-glances at those who were
stronger at the moment. In all his writings during the war Kautsky
tried to extinguish the revolutionary spirit instead of
fostering and fanning it.

The fact that Kautsky does not even understand the enormous theoretical importance, and the even greater agitational
and propaganda importance, of the “accusation” that the proletarians of Europe have betrayed the Russian revolution
will remain a veritable historical monument to the philistine
stupefaction of the “average” leader of German official Social-Democracy! Kautsky does not understand that, owing
to the censorship prevailing in the German “Reich”, this “accusation” is perhaps the only form in which
the German socialists who have not betrayed socialism—Liebknecht
and his friends—can express their appeal to the German workers to throw off the Scheidemanns and the
Kautskys, to push aside such “leaders”, to free themselves from their stultifying and debasing propaganda, to rise
in revolt in spite of them, without them, and march over their heads towards revolution !

Kautsky does not understand this. And how could he understand
the tactics of the Bolsheviks? Can a man who renounces revolution
in general be expected to weigh and appraise the conditions of the
development of revolution in one of the most “difficult” cases?

The Bolsheviks’ tactics were correct; they were the only internationalist tactics, because they were based,
not on the cowardly fear of a world revolution, not on a
philistine “lack of faith” in it, not on the narrow nationalist desire to protect one’s “own”
fatherland (the fatherland of one’s own bourgeoisie), while
not “giving a damn” about all the rest, but on a correct (and, before the war and before the apostasy of the
social-chauvinists and social-pacifists, a universally accepted) estimation of the revolutionary situation in
Europe. These tactics were the only internationalist tactics,
because they did the utmost possible in one country for the
development, support and awakening of the revolution in all
countries . These tactics have been justified by their enormous success, for Bolshevism (not by any means because of the
merits of the Russian Bolsheviks, but because of the most profound
sympathy of the people everywhere for tactics that are revolutionary in practice) has become world Bolshevism, has
produced an idea, a theory, a programme and tactics which differ
concretely and in practice from those of social-chauvinism and
social-pacifism. Bolshevism has given a coup de grâce to the
old, decayed International of the Scheidemanns and Kautskys, Renaudels and Longuets, Hendersons and MacDonalds ,
who from now on will be treading on each other’s feet, dreaming about “unity” and trying to revive a
corpse. Bolshevism has created the ideological and tactical foundations of a Third International, of a really
proletarian and Communist International, which will take into
consideration both the gains of the tranquil epoch and the
experience of the epoch of revolutions , which has begun .

Bolshevism has popularised throughout the world the idea of the
“dictatorship of the proletariat”, has translated these words from the Latin, first into Russian, and then into all the languages of the world, and has shown by the
example of Soviet government that the workers and poor peasants, even of a backward country, even with the least
experience, education and habits of organisation, have been
able for a whole year, amidst gigantic difficulties and
amidst a struggle against the exploiters (who were supported by
the bourgeoisie of the whole world), to maintain the power of the working people, to create a democracy that is
immeasurably higher and broader than all previous democracies in
the world, and to the creative work of tens of millions of workers
and peasants for the practical construction of socialism.

Bolshevism has actually helped to develop the proletarian
revolution in Europe and America more powerfully than any party in
any other country has so far succeeded in doing. While the workers
of the whole world are realising more and more clearly every day
that the tactics of the Scheidemanns and Kautskys have not
delivered them from the imperialist war and from wage-slavery to the imperialist bourgeoisie, and that these
tactics cannot serve as a model for all countries, the mass of
workers in all countries are realising more and more clearly every
day that Bolshevism has indicated the right road of escape from
the horrors of war and imperialism, that Bolshevism can serve
as a model of tactics for all.

Not only the general European, but the world proletarian revolution is maturing before the eyes
of all, and it has been assisted, accelerated and supported by the
victory of the proletariat in Russia. All this is not enough for
the complete victory of socialism, you say? Of course it is not
enough. One country alone cannot do more. But this one country,
thanks to Soviet government, has done so much that even if Soviet
government in Russia were to be crushed by world imperialism
tomorrow, as a result, let us say, of an agreement between German
and Anglo-French imperialism—even granted that very worst
possibility—it would still be found that Bolshevik tactics
have brought enormous benefit to socialism and have assisted the
growth of the invincible world revolution.

## Endnotes

[30] Lenin quotes from Engels’s Introduction to Karl Marx’s The
Civil War in France (Marx and Engels, Selected Works , Moscow, 1962, Vol. I, p. 475).

[31] Karl Marx, The
Civil War in France (Marx and Engels, Selected
Works , Moscow, 1962, Vol. I, pp.  518–19).

[32] The social-chauvinists (the Scheidemanns, Renaudels,
Hendersons, Gomperses and Co.)  absolutely refuse to talk
about the “International” during the war. They regard the
enemies of “ their ” respective bourgeoisies as “traitors” to . . . socialism. They support the
policy of conquest pursued by their respective bourgeoisies. The social-pacifists (i.e., socialists in
words and petty-bourgeois pacifists in practice) express all
sorts of “internationalist” sentiments, protest against annexations, etc., but in practice they continue
to support their respective imperialist bourgeoisies. The
difference between the two types is unimportant; it is like the
difference between two capitalists—one with bitter, and the
other with sweet, words on his lips.

## Subservience To The Bourgeoisie In The Guise of “Economic Analysis”

As has already been said, if the title of
Kautsky’s book were properly to reflect its contents, it
should have been called, not The Dictatorship of the
Proletariat , but A Rehash of Bourgeois Attacks on the
Bolsheviks .

The old Menshevik “theories” about the bourgeois character of the Russian revolution, i.e., the old distortion of
Marxism by the Mensheviks ( rejected by Kautsky in 1905!),
are now once again being rehashed by our theoretician. We must
deal with this question, however boring it may be for Russian
Marxists.

The Russian revolution is a bourgeois revolution, said all the
Marxists of Russia before 1905. The Mensheviks, substituting
liberalism for Marxism, drew the following conclusion from this:
the proletariat therefore must not go beyond what is acceptable to
the bourgeoisie and must pursue a policy of compromise with
them. The Bolsheviks said this was a bourgeois-liberal theory. The
bourgeoisie were trying to bring about the reform of the state on
bourgeois, reformist , not revolutionary lines, while preserving the monarchy, the landlord system, etc., as far as
possible. The proletariat must carry through the bourgeois-democratic revolution to the end, not allowing itself to
be “bound” by the reformism of the bourgeoisie. The
Bolsheviks formulated the alignment of class forces in the bourgeois revolution as follows: the proletariat, winning over
the peasants, will neutralise the liberal bourgeoisie and utterly
destroy the monarchy, medievalism and the landlord system.

It is the alliance between the proletariat and the peasants in general that reveals the bourgeois character of the
revolution, for the peasants in general are small producers who
exist on the basis of commodity production. Further, the
Bolsheviks then added, the proletariat will win over the
entire semi-proletariat (all the working and exploited people), will neutralise the middle peasants and overthrow the
bourgeoisie; this will be a socialist revolution, as distinct from
a bourgeois-democratic revolution. (See my pamphlet Two Tactics ,
published in 1905 and reprinted in Twelve Years , St. Petersburg, 1907.)

Kautsky took an indirect part in this controversy in 1905, when, in reply to an inquiry by the then
Menshevik Plekhanov, he expressed an opinion that was essentially against Plekhanov, which provoked particular ridicule in
the Bolshevik press at the time. But now Kautsky does not say a single word about the controversies of that time (for fear
of being exposed by his own statements!), and thereby makes it
utterly impossible for the German reader to understand the essence
of the matter. Mr. Kautsky could not tell the German workers in 1918 that in 1905 he had been in favour of an alliance
of the workers with the peasants and not with the liberal
bourgeoisie, and on what conditions he had advocated this
alliance, and what programme he had outlined for it.

Backing out from his old position, Kautsky, under the guise of
an “economic analysis”, and talking proudly about “historical materialism”, now advocates the
subordination of the workers to the bourgeoisie, and, with the aid
of quotations from the Menshevik Maslov, chews over the old
liberal views of the Mensheviks. Quotations are used to prove the
new idea of the backwardness of Russia. But the deduction drawn
from this new idea is the old one, that in a bourgeois revolution
one must not go farther than the bourgeoisie! And this in spite of
all that Marx and Engels said when comparing the bourgeois
revolution of 1789–93 in France with the bourgeois revolution of
1848 in Germany! [Karl Marx, The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution (Marx         and Engels, Selected Works , Moscow, 1962, Vol. I, pp. 66–69).]

Before passing to the chief “argument” and the main content of Kautsky’s “economic analysis”, let us
note that Kautsky’s very first sentences reveal a curious
confusion, or superficiality, of thought.

“Agriculture, and specifically small peasant farming,” our “theoretician” announces,
“to this day represents the economic foundation of
Russia. About four-fifths, perhaps even five-sixths, of the
population live by it” (p. 45). First of all, my dear theoretician, have you considered how many exploiters there may be
among this mass of small producers? Certainly not more than
one-tenth of the total, and in the towns still less, for there
large-scale production is more highly developed. Take even an
incredibly high figure; assume that one-fifth of the small
producers are exploiters who are deprived of the franchise. Even
then you will find that the 66 per cent of the votes held by the
Bolsheviks at the Fifth Congress of Soviets represented the majority of the population . To this it must be added that
there was always a considerable section of the Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries who were in favour of Soviet power—in
principle all the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were in
favour of Soviet power, and when a section of them, in July 1918,
started an adventurous revolt, two new parties split away from the
old party, namely, the “Narodnik Communists” and the “Revolutionary Communists” [33] (of the
prominent Left Socialist-Revolutionaries who had been nominated for important posts in the government by the old party,
to the first-mentioned belongs Zax, for instance, and to the
second Kolegayev). So, Kautsky has himself—inadvertently—refuted
the ridiculous fable that the Bolsheviks only have the backing of
a minority of the population.

Secondly, my dear theoretician, have you considered the fact
that the small peasant producer inevitably vacillates between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie? This Marxist truth,
which has been confirmed by the whole modern history of Europe,
Kautsky very conveniently “forgot”, for it simply demolishes the Menshevik “theory” that he keeps
repeating! Had Kautsky not “forgotten” this he could not have denied the need for a proletarian dictatorship in a
country in which the small peasant producers predominate.

Let us examine the main content of our theoretician’s “economic analysis”.

That Soviet power is a dictatorship cannot be disputed, says
Kautsky. “But is it a dictatorship of the proletariat ?” (P. 34.)

“According to the Soviet Constitution, the peasants form the majority of the population entitled to
participate in legislation and administration. What is presented
to us as a dictatorship of the proletariat would prove to
be—if carried out consistently, and if, generally speaking,
a class could directly exercise a dictatorship, which in reality
can only be exercised by a party—a dictatorship of the peasants ” (p. 35).

And, highly elated over so profound and clever an argument, our
good Kautsky tries to be witty and says: “It would appear,
therefore, that the most painless achievement of socialism is best
assured when it is put in the hands of the peasants” (p. 35).

In the greatest detail, and citing a number of extremely
learned quotations from the semi-liberal Maslov, our theoretician
labours to prove the new idea that the peasants are interested in
high grain prices, in low wages for the urban workers, etc.,
etc. Incidentally, the enunciation of these new ideas is the more
tedious the less attention our author pays to the really new
features of the post-war period—for example, that the peasants
demand for their grain, not money, but goods, and that they have
not enough agricultural implements, which cannot be obtained in
sufficient quantities for any amount of money. But more of this
later.

Thus, Kautsky charges the Bolsheviks, the party of the proletariat, with having surrendered the dictatorship, the work of
achieving socialism, to the petty-bourgeois peasants. Excellent,
Mr. Kautsky! But what, in your enlightened opinion, should have
been the attitude of the proletarian party towards the petty-bourgeois peasants?

Our theoretician preferred to say nothing on this score—evidently
bearing in mind the proverb: “Speech is silver, silence is gold.” But he gives himself away by the following
argument:

“At the beginning of the Soviet Republic, the peasants’ Soviets were organisations of the peasants in general. Now this Republic proclaims that the
Soviets are organisations of the proletarians and the poor peasants. The well-to-do peasants are deprived of the suffrage in
the elections to the Soviets. The poor peasant is here recognised
to be a permanent and mass product of the socialist agrarian
reform under the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’
” (p. 48).

What deadly irony! It is the kind that may be heard in Russia
from any bourgeois: they all jeer and gloat over the fact that the
Soviet Republic openly admits the existence of poor peasants. They
ridicule socialism. That is their right. But a “socialist” who jeers at the fact that after four
years of a most ruinous war there remain (and will remain for a
long time) poor peasants in Russia—such a “socialist” could only have been born at a time of wholesale apostasy.

And further:

“. . . The Soviet Republic interferes in the relations between the rich and poor peasants, but not by
redistributing the land. In order to relieve the bread shortage in
the towns, detachments of armed workers are sent into the
countryside to take away the rich peasants’ surplus stocks
of grain. Part of that stock is given to the urban population, the
other—to the poorer peasants” (p. 48).

Of course, Kautsky the socialist and Marxist is profoundly
indignant at the idea that such a measure should be extended
beyond the environs of the large towns (and we have extended it to
the whole of the country). With the matchless, incomparable and
admirable coolness (or pigheadedness) of a philistine, Kautsky the
socialist and Marxist sermonises: . . . “It [the expropriation
of the well-to-do peasants] introduces a new element of unrest and
civil war into the process of production” . . . (civil war
introduced into the “process of production”—that is something supernatural!) . . . “which stands in urgent need
of peace and security for its recovery” (p. 49).

Oh, yes, of course, Kautsky the Marxist and socialist must sigh
and shed tears over the subject of peace and security for the
exploiters and grain profiteers who hoard their surplus stocks,
sabotage the grain monopoly law, and reduce the urban population
to famine. “We are all socialists and Marxists and internationalists,” the Kautskys, Heinrich Webers [34] (Vienna), Longuets (Paris),
MacDonalds (London), etc., sing in chorus. “We are all in
favour of a working-class revolution. Only . . . only we would like
a revolution that does not infringe upon the peace and security of
the grain profiteers! And we camouflage this sordid subservience
to the capitalists by a ‘Marxist’ reference to the
‘process of production’. . . . ” If this is
Marxism, what is servility to the bourgeoisie?

Just see what our theoretician arrives at. He accuses the
Bolsheviks of presenting the dictatorship of the peasants as the
dictatorship of the proletariat. But at the same time he accuses
us of introducing civil war into the rural districts (which we
think is to our credit ), of dispatching into the countryside armed detachments of workers, who publicly proclaim
that they are exercising the “dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasants”, assist the latter and
confiscate from the profiteers and the rich peasants the surplus
stocks of grain which they are hoarding in contravention of the
grain monopoly law.

On the one hand, our Marxist theoretician stands for pure
democracy, for the subordination of the revolutionary class, the
leader of the working and exploited people, to the majority of the
population (including, therefore, the exploiters). On the other
hand, as an argument against us, he explains that the revolution must inevitably bear a bourgeois character—bourgeois,
because the life of the peasants as a whole is based on bourgeois
social relations—and at the same time he pretends to uphold the
proletarian, class, Marxist point of view!

Instead of an “economic analysis” we have a first-class hodge-podge. Instead of Marxism we have fragments of
liberal doctrines and the preaching of servility to the
bourgeoisie and the kulaks.

The question which Kautsky has so tangled up was fully explained by the Bolsheviks as far back as 1905. Yes, our
revolution is a bourgeois revolution as long as we march with the peasants as a whole. This has been as
clear as clear can be to us; we have said it hundreds and
thousands of times since 1905, and we have never attempted to skip
this necessary stage of the historical process or abolish it by
decrees. Kautsky’s efforts to “expose” us on this point merely expose his own confusion of mind and his fear to
recall what he wrote in 1905, when he was not yet a renegade.

Beginning with April 1917, however, long before the October
Revolution, that is, long before we assumed power, we publicly
declared and explained to the people: the revolution cannot now
stop at this stage, for the country has marched forward,
capitalism has advanced, ruin has reached fantastic dimensions,
which (whether one likes it or not) will demand steps forward, to socialism. For there is no other way of
advancing, of saving the war-weary country and of alleviating the sufferings of the working and exploited
people.

Things have turned out just as we said they would. The course
taken by the revolution has confirmed the correctness of our
reasoning. First , with the “whole” of the peasants against the monarchy, against the landowners, against
medievalism (and to that extent the revolution remains bourgeois,
bourgeois-democratic). Then , with the poor peasants, with
the semi-proletarians, with all the exploited, against capitalism , including the rural rich, the kulaks, the
profiteers, and to that extent the revolution becomes a socialist one. To attempt to raise an artificial Chinese
Wall between the first and second, to separate them by anything else than the degree of preparedness of the
proletariat and the degree of its unity with the poor peasants,
means to distort Marxism dreadfully, to vulgarise it, to
substitute liberalism in its place. It means smuggling in a
reactionary defence of the bourgeoisie against the socialist
proletariat by means of quasi-scientific references to the
progressive character of the bourgeoisie in comparison with
medievalism.

Incidentally, the Soviets represent an immensely higher form
and type of democracy just because, by uniting and drawing the mass of workers and peasants into political life, they
serve as a most sensitive barometer, the one closest to the
“people” (in the sense in which Marx, in 1871, spoke of a real people’s revolution [35] ), of the growth and
development of the political, class maturity of the people. The
Soviet Constitution was not drawn up according to some “plan”; it was not drawn up in a study, and was not
foisted on the working people by bourgeois lawyers. No, this
Constitution grew up in the course of the development of the class struggle in proportion as class
antagonisms matured. The very facts which Kautsky himself has
to admit prove this.

At first, the Soviets embraced the peasants as a whole. It was
owing to the immaturity, the backwardness, the ignorance of the
poor peasants that the leadership passed into the hands of the
kulaks, the rich, the capitalists and the petty-bourgeois
intellectuals. That was the period of the domination of the petty
bourgeoisie, of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries (only
fools or renegades like Kautsky can regard either of these as
socialists). The petty bourgeoisie inevitably and unavoidably
vacillated between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (Kerensky,
Kornilov, Savinkov) and the dictatorship of the proletariat; for
owing to the basic features of its economic position, the petty
bourgeoisie is incapable of doing anything independently. Kautsky,
by the way, completely renounces Marxism by confining himself in
his analysis of the Russian revolution to the legal and formal
concept of “democracy”, which serves the bourgeoisie as a screen to conceal their domination and as a means of
deceiving the people, and by forgetting that in practice
“democracy” sometimes stands for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie , sometimes for the impotent reformism of
the petty bourgeoisie who submit to that dictatorship, and so
on. According to Kautsky, in a capitalist country there were
bourgeois parties and there was a proletarian party (the
Bolsheviks), which led the majority, the mass of the proletariat,
but there were no petty-bourgeois parties! The Mensheviks
and Socialist-Revolutionaries had no class roots , no petty-bourgeois roots!

The vacillations of the petty bourgeoisie, of the Mensheviks
and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, helped to enlighten the people
and to repel the overwhelming majority of them, all the
“lower sections”, all the proletarians and semi-proletarians, from such “leaders”. The Bolsheviks
won predominance in the Soviets (in Petrograd and Moscow by
October 1917); the split among the Socialist-Revolutionaries and
the Mensheviks became more pronounced.

The victorious Bolshevik revolution meant the end of vacillation, meant the complete destruction of the monarchy and of
the landlord system (which had not been destroyed before
the October Revolution). We carried the bourgeois revolution to its conclusion . The peasants supported us as a
whole. Their antagonism to the socialist proletariat could
not reveal itself all at once. The Soviets united the peasants in general. The class divisions among the peasants had
not yet matured, had not yet come into the open.

That process took place in the summer and autumn of
1918. The Czech counter-revolutionary mutiny roused the kulaks. A
wave of kulak revolts swept over Russia. The poor peasants
learned, not from books or newspapers, but from life itself , that their interests were irreconcilably antagonistic
to those of the kulaks, the rich, the rural bourgeoisie. Like
every other petty-bourgeois party, the “Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries” reflected the vacillation of the
people, and in the summer of 1918 they split: one section joined
forces with the Czechs (the rebellion in Moscow, when Proshyan,
having seized the Telegraph Office—for one hour!—announced to
Russia that the Bolsheviks had been overthrown; then the treachery
of Muravyov, [36] Commander-in-Chief of the army that was fighting the Czechs, etc.), while the other section, that
mentioned above, remained with the Bolsheviks.

The growing food shortage in the towns lent increasing urgency
to the question of the grain monopoly (this Kautsky the
theoretician completely “forgot” in his economic analysis, which is a mere repetition of platitudes gleaned ten
years ago from Maslov’s writings!).

The old landowner and bourgeois, and even democratic-republican, state had sent to the rural districts armed
detachments which were practically at the beck and call of the
bourgeoisie. Mr. Kautsky does not know this! He does not regard
that as the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”—Heaven forbid! That is “pure democracy”, especially if
endorsed by a bourgeois parliament! Nor has Kautsky “heard” that, in the summer and autumn of 1917,
Avksentyev and S. Maslov, in company with the Kerenskys, the
Tseretelis and other Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks,
arrested members of the Land Committees; he does not say a word
about that!

The whole point is that a bourgeois state which is exercising
the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie through a democratic republic
cannot confess to the people that it is serving the bourgeoisie;
it cannot tell the truth, and has to play the hypocrite.

But the state of the Paris Commune type, the Soviet state,
openly and frankly tells the people the truth and declares that it is the dictatorship of the proletariat and the
poor peasants; and by this truth it wins over scores and scores of
millions of new citizens who are kept down in any democratic
republic, but who are drawn by the Soviets into political life,
into democracy , into the administration of the state. The
Soviet Republic sends into the rural districts detachments of
armed workers, primarily the more advanced, from the capitals. These workers carry socialism into the countryside, win
over the poor, organise and enlighten them, and help them to suppress the resistance of the bourgeoisie.

All who are familiar with the situation and have been in the
rural districts declare that it is only now, in the summer and
autumn of 1918, that the rural districts themselves are
passing through the “October” (i.e., proletarian)
Revolution. Things are beginning to change. The wave of kulak
revolts is giving way to a rise of the poor, to a growth of the
“Poor Peasants’ Committees”. In the army, the number of workers who become commissars, officers and commanders
of divisions and armies is increasing. And at the very time that
the simple-minded Kautsky, frightened by the July (1918)
crisis [37] and the lamentations of the bourgeoisie, was running after the latter like a cockerel, and
writing a whole pamphlet breathing the conviction that the
Bolsheviks are on the eve of being overthrown by the peasants; at
the very time that this simpleton regarded the secession of the
Left Socialist-Revolutionaries as a “narrowing” (p. 37) of the circle of those who support the Bolsheviks at
that very time the real circle of supporters of
Bolshevism was expanding enormously , because scores and
scores of millions of the village poor were freeing themselves
from the tutelage and influence of the kulaks and village
bourgeoisie and were awakening to independent political
life.

We have lost hundreds of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries,
spineless intellectuals and kulaks from among the peasants; but we
have gained millions of poor people. [At the
Sixth Congress of Soviets (November 6–9, 1918), there were 967
voting delegates, 950 of whom were Bolsheviks, and 351 delegates
with voice but no vote, of whom 335 were Bolsheviks, i.e., 97 per
cent of the total number of delegates were Bolsheviks.]

A year after the proletarian revolution in the capitals, and
under its influence and with its assistance, the proletarian
revolution began in the remote rural districts, and it has finally
consolidated the power of the Soviets and Bolshevism, and has
finally proved there is no force in the country that can withstand
it.

Having completed the bourgeois-democratic revolution in
alliance with the peasants as a whole, the Russian proletariat
finally passed on to the socialist revolution when it succeeded in
splitting the rural population, in winning over the rural
proletarians and semi-proletarians, and in uniting them against
the kulaks and the bourgeoisie, including the peasant bourgeoisie.

Now, if the Bolshevik proletariat in the capitals and large
industrial centres had not been able to rally the village poor
around itself against the rich peasants, this would indeed have
proved that Russia was “unripe” for socialist revolution. The peasants would then have remained an
“integral whole”, i.e., they would have remained under the economic, political, and moral leadership of the kulaks, the
rich, the bourgeoisie, and the revolution would not have passed
beyond the limits of a bourgeois-democratic revolution. (But, let
it be said in parenthesis, even if this had been the case, it
would not have proved that the proletariat should not have taken
power, for it is the proletariat alone that has really carried the
bourgeois-democratic revolution to its conclusion, it is the
proletariat alone that has done something really important to
bring nearer the world proletarian revolution, and the proletariat
alone that has created the Soviet state, which, after the Paris
Commune, is the second step towards the socialist state.)

On the other hand, if the Bolshevik proletariat had tried at
once, in October–November 1917, without waiting for the class
differentiation in the rural districts, without being able to prepare it and bring it about, to “decree” a
civil war or the “introduction of socialism” in the rural districts, had tried to do without a temporary bloc with the
peasants in general, without making a number of concessions to the
middle peasants, etc., that would have been a Blanquist [38] distortion of Marxism, an attempt by
the minority to impose its will upon the majority; it would
have been a theoretical absurdity, revealing a failure to
understand that a general peasant revolution is still a
bourgeois revolution, and that without a series of transitions , of
transitional stages , it cannot be transformed into a socialist
revolution in a backward country.

Kautsky has confused everything in this very important theoretical and political problem, and has, in practice, proved to
be nothing but a servant of the bourgeoisie, howling against the
dictatorship of the proletariat.

Kautsky has introduced a similar, if not greater, confusion
into another extremely interesting and important question, namely:
was the legislative activity of the Soviet Republic in the sphere of agrarian reform—that most difficult and yet most
important of socialist reforms—based on sound principles and then
properly carried out? We should be boundlessly grateful to any
West-European Marxist who, after studying at least the most
important documents, gave a criticism of our policy, because he would thereby help us immensely, and would also help
the revolution that is maturing throughout the world. But instead
of criticism Kautsky produces an incredible theoretical muddle,
which converts Marxism into liberalism and which, in practice, is
a series of idle, venomous, vulgar sallies against the
Bolsheviks. Let the reader judge for himself:

“Large landed estates could not be preserved. This was a
result of the revolution. That was at once clear. The transfer of
the large estates to the peasant population became inevitable. . . .”
(That is not true, Mr. Kautsky. You substitute what is “clear” to you for the attitude of the different classes towards the question. The history of the
revolution has shown that the coalition government of the
bourgeois and the petty bourgeois, the Mensheviks and the
Socialist-Revolutionaries, pursued a policy of preserving big
landownership. This was proved particularly by S. Maslov’s
bill and by the arrest of the members of the Land Committees. [39] Without the dictatorship of the
proletariat, the “peasant population” would not have vanquished the landowners, who had joined forces with the
capitalists.)

“But as to the forms in which it was to take place, there
was no unity. Various solutions were conceivable. . . .”
(Kautsky is most of all concerned about the “unity” of the “socialists”, no matter who called themselves by
that name. He forgets that the principal classes in capitalist
society are bound to arrive at different solutions.)
“. . . From the socialist point of view, the most rational
solution would have been to convert the large estates into state
property and to allow the peasants who hitherto had been employed
on them as wage-labourers to cultivate them in the form of
co-operative societies. But such a solution presupposes the
existence of a type of farm labourer that did not exist in
Russia. Another solution would have been to convert the large
estates into state property and to divide them up into small plots
to be rented out to peasants who owned little land. Had that been
done, at least something socialistic would have been achieved. . . .”

As usual Kautsky confines himself to the celebrated: on the one
hand it cannot but be admitted, and on the other hand it must be
confessed. He places different solutions side by side without a thought—the only, realistic and Marxist thought—as to
what must be the transitional stages from capitalism to
communism in such-and-such specific conditions. There are
farm labourers in Russia, but not many; and Kautsky did not touch
on the question which the Soviet government did raise—of
the method of transition to a communal and co-operative form of
land cultivation. The most curious thing, however, is that Kautsky
claims to see “something socialistic” in the renting out of small plots of land. In reality, this is a petty-bourgeois slogan, and there is nothing “socialistic” in it. If the “state” that
rents out the land is not a state of the Paris Commune type, but a parliamentary bourgeois republic (and that is exactly
Kautsky’s constant assumption), the renting of land in small
plots is a typical liberal reform.

Kautsky says nothing about the Soviet government having
abolished all private ownership of land. Worse than that:
he resorts to an incredible forgery and quotes the decrees of the
Soviet government in such a way as to omit the most essential.

After stating that “small production strives for complete
private ownership of the means of production”, and that the
Constituent Assembly would have been the “only authority” capable of preventing the dividing up of the land
(an assertion which will evoke laughter in Russia, where everybody
knows that the Soviets alone are recognised as authoritative by
the workers and peasants, while the Constituent Assembly has
become the slogan of the Czechs and the landowners), Kautsky
continues:

“One of the first decrees of the Soviet
Government declared that: (1) Landed proprietorship is abolished
forthwith without any compensation. (2) The landed estates, as
also all crown, monastery and church lands, with all their
livestock, implements, buildings and everything pertaining
thereto, shall be placed at the disposal of the volost Land
Committees of the uyezd Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies pending the settlement of the land question by the Constituent
Assembly.”

Having quoted only these two clauses , Kautsky concludes:

“The reference to the Constituent Assembly has remained a
dead letter. In point of fact, the peasants in the separate
volosts could do as they pleased with the land” (p. 47).

Here you have an example of Kautsky’s “criticism”! Here you have a “scientific”
work which is more like a fraud. The German reader is induced to
believe that the Bolsheviks capitulated before the peasants on the
question of private ownership of land, that the Bolsheviks
permitted the peasants to act locally (“in the separate
volosts”) in whatever way they pleased!

But in reality, the decree Kautsky quotes—the first to be
promulgated, on October 26, 1917 (old style)—consists not of two,
but of five clauses, plus eight clauses of the Mandate, which, it
was expressly stated, “shall serve as a guide”.

Clause 3 of the decree states that the estates are transferred
” to the people ”, and the “exact inventories of all property confiscated” shall be drawn up
and the property “protected in the strictest revolutionary
way”. And the Mandate declares that “private ownership of land shall be abolished for ever”, that “lands on
which high-level scientific farming is practised . . . shall not
be divided up ”, that “all livestock and farm implements of the confiscated estates shall pass into the
exclusive use of the state or a commune, depending on size and
importance, and no compensation shall be paid for this”, and
that “all land shall become part of the national land fund”.

Further, simultaneously with the dissolution of the Constituent
Assembly (January 5, 1918), the Third Congress of Soviets adopted
the Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited
People, which now forms part of the Fundamental Law of the Soviet
Republic. Article 2, paragraph 1 of this Declaration states that
“private ownership of land is hereby abolished”, and that “model estates and agricultural enterprises are
proclaimed national property”.

So, the reference to the Constituent Assembly did not remain a dead letter, because another national representative
body, immeasurably more authoritative in the eyes of the peasants,
took upon itself the solution of the agrarian problem.

Again, on February 6(19), 1918, the land socialisation law was
promulgated, which once more confirmed the abolition of all
private ownership of land, and placed the land and all private stock and implements at the disposal of the Soviet
authorities under the control of the federal Soviet government . Among the duties connected with the disposal of
the land, the law prescribed:

“the development of collective farming as more advantageous from the point of view of economy of labour and
produce, at the expense of individual farming, with a view to
transition to socialist farming” (Article 11, paragraph
e).

The same law, in establishing the principle of equal land tenure, replied to the fundamental question: “Who has a
right to the use of the land?” in the following manner:

(Article 20.) “Plots of land surface within the borders
of the Russian Soviet Federative Republic may be used for public
and private needs. A. For cultural and educational purposes: (1)
by the state as represented by the organs of Soviet power
(federal, as well as in regions, gubernias, uyezds, volosts, and
villages), and (2) by public bodies (under the control, and with
the permission, of the local Soviet authorities); B. For
agricultural purposes: (3) by agricultural communes, (4) by
agricultural co-operative societies, (5) by village communities,
(6) by individual families and persons. . . .”

The reader will see that Kautsky has completely distorted the
facts, and has given the German reader an absolutely false view of
the agrarian policy and agrarian legislation of the proletarian
state in Russia.

Kautsky proved even unable to formulate the theoretically
important fundamental questions!

These questions are:

(1) Equal land tenure and (2) Nationalisation of the land—the relation of these two
measures to socialism in general, and to the transition from
capitalism to communism in particular.

(3) Farming in common as a transition from small scattered
farming to large-scale collective farming; does the manner in
which this question is dealt with in Soviet legislation meet the
requirements of socialism?

On the first question it is necessary, first of all, to
establish the following two fundamental facts: (a) in reviewing
the experience of 1905 (I may refer, for instance, to my work on
the agrarian problem in the First Russian Revolution), the
Bolsheviks pointed to the democratically progressive, the
democratically revolutionary meaning of the slogan “equal
land tenure”, and in 1917, before the October
Revolution, they spoke of this quite definitely; (b) when
enforcing the land socialisation law—the “spirit” of which is equal land tenure—the Bolsheviks most explicitly and
definitely declared: this is not our idea, we do not agree with
this slogan, but we think it our duty to enforce it because this
is the demand of the overwhelming majority of the peasants. And
the idea and demands of the majority of the working people are
things that the working people must discard of their own
accord : such demands cannot be either “abolished” or “skipped over”. We Bolsheviks shall help the peasants to discard petty-bourgeois slogans, to pass from them as quickly and as easily as possible to socialist
slogans.

A Marxist theoretician who wanted to help the working-class
revolution by his scientific analysis should have answered the
following questions: first, is it true that the idea of equal land
tenure has a democratically revolutionary meaning of carrying the bourgeois -democratic revolution to its conclusion? Secondly, did
the Bolsheviks act rightly in helping to pass by their votes (and
in most loyally observing) the petty-bourgeois equal land tenure
law?

Kautsky failed even to perceive what, theoretically, was the crux of the problem!

Kautsky will never be able to refute the view that the idea of
equal land tenure has a progressive and revolutionary value in the
bourgeois-democratic revolution. Such a revolution cannot go
beyond this. By reaching its limit, it all the more clearly, rapidly and easily reveals to the people the inadequacy of bourgeois-democratic solutions and the
necessity of proceeding beyond their limits, of passing on to socialism .

The peasants, who have overthrown tsarism and the landowners,
dream of equal land tenure, and no power on earth could have
stopped the peasants, once they had been freed both from the
landowners and from the bourgeois parliamentary republican state. The workers say to the peasants: We shall help
you reach “ideal” capitalism, for equal land tenure is the idealisation of capitalism by the small producer. At the same
time we shall prove to you its inadequacy and the necessity of
passing to farming in common.

It would be interesting to see Kautsky’s attempt to disprove that this kind of leadership of the peasant
struggle by the proletariat was right.

Kautsky, however, preferred to evade the question altogether . . .

Next, Kautsky deliberately deceived his German readers by
withholding from them the fact that in its land law the
Soviet government gave direct preference to communes and
co-operative societies.

With all the peasants right through to the end of the bourgeois-democratic revolution; and with the poor, the
proletarian and semi-proletarian section of the peasants, forward
to the socialist revolution! That has been the policy of the
Bolsheviks, and it is the only Marxist policy.

But Kautsky is all muddled and incapable of formulating a
single question! On the one hand, he dare not say that the workers should have parted company with the peasants over the
question of equal land tenure, for he realises that it would have
been absurd (and, moreover, in 1905, when he was not yet a
renegade, he himself clearly and explicitly advocated an alliance
between the workers and peasants as a condition for the victory of
the revolution). On the other hand, he sympathetically quotes the
liberal platitudes of the Menshevik Maslov, who “proves” that petty-bourgeois equal land tenure is
utopian and reactionary from the point of view of socialism, but
hushes up the progressive and revolutionary character of the
petty-bourgeois struggle for equality and equal tenure from
the point of view of the bourgeois-democratic revolution .

Kautsky is in a hopeless muddle: note that he (in 1918) insists on the bourgeois character of the Russian revolution.
He (in 1918) peremptorily says: Don’t go beyond these limits! Yet this very same Kautsky sees “something socialistic ” (for a bourgeois revolution) in the petty-bourgeois reform of renting out small plots of land to
the poor peasants (which is an approximation to equal land
tenure)!!

Understand this if you can!

In addition to all this, Kautsky displays a philistine inability to take into account the real policy of a definite
party. He quotes the empty phrases of the Menshevik
Maslov and refuses to see the real policy the Menshevik
Party pursued in 1917, when, in “coalition” with the landowners and Cadets, they advocated what was virtually a liberal agrarian reform and compromise with the
landowners (proof: the arrest of the members of the Land
Committees and S. Maslov’s land bill).

Kautsky failed to notice that P. Maslov’s phrases about
the reactionary and utopian character of petty-bourgeois equality
are really a screen to conceal the Menshevik policy of compromise between the peasants and the landowners (i.e.,
of supporting the landowners in duping the peasants), instead of
the revolutionary overthrow of the landowners by the peasants.

What a “Marxist” Kautsky is!

It was the Bolsheviks who strictly differentiated between the
bourgeois-democratic revolution and the socialist revolution: by
carrying the former through, they opened the door for the
transition to the latter. This was the only policy that was
revolutionary and Marxist.

It would have been wiser for Kautsky not to repeat the feeble
liberal witticism: “Never yet have the small peasants anywhere adopted collective farming under the influence of
theoretical convictions” (p. 50).

How very smart!

But never as yet and nowhere have the small peasants of any
large country been under the influence of a proletarian state.

Never as yet and nowhere have the small peasants engaged in an
open class struggle reaching the extent of a civil war between the
poor peasants and the rich peasants, with propagandist,
political, economic and military support given to the poor by a
proletarian state.

Never as yet and nowhere have the profiteers and the rich
amassed such wealth out of war, while the mass of peasants have
been so utterly ruined.

Kautsky just reiterates the old stuff, he just chews the old
cud, afraid even to give thought to the new tasks of the
proletarian dictatorship.

But what, dear Kautsky, if the peasants lack implements for small-scale farming and the proletarian state helps them to obtain machines for collective farming—is
that a “theoretical conviction”?

We shall now pass to the question of nationalisation of the
land. Our Narodniks, including all the Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries, deny that the measure we have adopted
is nationalisation of the land. They are wrong in theory. Insofar
as we remain within the framework of commodity production and
capitalism, the abolition of private ownership of land is
nationalisation of the land. The term “socialisation” merely expresses a tendency, a desire, the preparation for the
transition to socialism.

What should be the attitude of Marxists towards nationalisation
of the land?

Here, too, Kautsky fails even to formulate the theoretical
question, or, which is still worse, he deliberately evades it,
although one knows from Russian literature that Kautsky is aware
of the old controversies among the Russian Marxists on the
question of nationalisation, municipalisation (i.e., the transfer
of the large estates to the local self-government authorities), or
division of the land.

Kautsky’s assertion that to transfer the large estates to
the state and rent them out in small plots to peasants who own
little land would be achieving “something socialistic” is a downright mockery of Marxism. We have already shown that
there is nothing socialistic about it. But that is not all; it
would not even be carrying the bourgeois-democratic revolution
to its conclusion. Kautsky’s great misfortune is that he placed his trust in the Mensheviks. Hence the curious position
that while insisting on our revolution having a bourgeois
character and reproaching the Bolsheviks for taking it into their
heads to proceed to socialism, he himself proposes a liberal
reform under the guise of socialism, without carrying this reform to the point of completely clearing away all the survivals of
medievalism in agrarian relations! The arguments of Kautsky, as of
his Menshevik advisers, amount to a defence of the liberal
bourgeoisie, who fear revolution, instead of defence of consistent
bourgeois-democratic revolution.

Indeed, why should only the large estates, and not all the
land, be converted into state property? The liberal bourgeoisie
thereby achieve the maximum preservation of the old conditions
(i.e., the least consistency in revolution) and the maximum
facility for a reversion to the old conditions. The radical
bourgeoisie, i.e., the bourgeoisie that want to carry the
bourgeois revolution to its conclusion, put forward the slogan of nationalisation of the land .

Kautsky, who in the dim and distant past, some twenty years
ago, wrote an excellent Marxist work on the agrarian question,
cannot but know that Marx declared that land nationalisation is in
fact a consistent slogan of the bourgeoisie . [40] Kautsky cannot but be aware of
Marx’s controversy with Rodbertus, and Marx’s remarkable passages in his Theories of Surplus Value where the revolutionary significance—in the bourgeois-democratic
sense—of land nationalisation is explained with particular
clarity.

The Menshevik P. Maslov, whom Kautsky, unfortunately for
himself, chose as an adviser, denied that the Russian peasants
would agree to the nationalisation of all the land (including the
peasants’ lands). To a certain extent, this view of
Maslov’s could be connected with his “original” theory (which merely parrots the bourgeois critics of Marx),
namely, his repudiation of absolute rent and his recognition of
the “law” (or “fact”, as Maslov expressed it) “of diminishing returns”.

In point of fact, however, already the 1905 Revolution revealed
that the vast majority of the peasants in Russia, members of
village communes as well as homestead peasants, were in favour of
nationalisation of all the land. The 1917 Revolution confirmed
this, and after the assumption of power by the proletariat this
was done. The Bolsheviks remained loyal to Marxism and never tried
(in spite of Kautsky, who, without a scrap of evidence, accuses us
of doing so) to “skip” the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The Bolsheviks, first of all, helped the most radical,
most revolutionary of the bourgeois-democratic ideologists of the
peasants, those who stood closest to the proletariat, namely, the
Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, to carry out what was in effect
nationalisation of the land. On October 20, 1917, i.e., on the
very first day of the proletarian, socialist revolution, private
ownership of land was abolished in Russia.

This laid the foundation, the most perfect from the point of
view of the development of capitalism (Kautsky cannot deny this
without breaking with Marx), and at the same time created an
agrarian system which is the most flexible from the point
of view of the transition to socialism. From the bourgeois-democratic point of view, the revolutionary peasants in
Russia could go no farther : there can be nothing “more
ideal” from this point of view, nothing “more radical” (from this same point of view) than nationalisation
of the land and equal land tenure. It was the Bolsheviks, and only
the Bolsheviks, who, thanks only to the victory of the proletarian revolution, helped the peasants to carry the
bourgeois-democratic revolution really to its conclusion. And only
in this way did they do the utmost to facilitate and accelerate
the transition to the socialist revolution.

One can judge from this what an incredible muddle Kautsky
offers to his readers when he accuses the Bolsheviks of failing to
understand the bourgeois character of the revolution, and yet
himself betrays such a departure from Marxism that he says
nothing about nationalisation of the land and presents the
least revolutionary (from the bourgeois point of view) liberal
agrarian reform as “something socialistic”!

We have now come to the third question formulated above,
namely, to what extent the proletarian dictatorship in Russia has
taken into account the necessity of passing to farming in
common. Here again, Kautsky commits something very much in the
nature of a forgery: he quotes only the “theses” of one Bolshevik which speak of the task of passing to farming in
common! After quoting one of these theses, our “theoretician” triumphantly exclaims:

“Unfortunately, a task is not accomplished by the fact that it is called a task. For the time being,
collective farming in Russia is doomed to remain on paper
only. Never yet have the small peasants anywhere adopted collective
farming under the influence of theoretical convictions” (p. 50).

Never as yet and nowhere has a literary swindle been perpetrated equal to that to which Kautsky has stooped. He quotes
“theses”, but says nothing about the law of the Soviet government. He talks about “theoretical
convictions”, but says nothing about the proletarian state
power which holds in its hands the factories and goods! All that
Kautsky the Marxist wrote in 1899 in his Agrarian
Question about the means at the disposal of the proletarian
state for bringing about the gradual transition of the small
peasants to socialism has been forgotten by Kautsky the renegade
in 1918.

Of course, a few hundred state-supported agricultural communes
and state farms (i.e., large farms cultivated by associations of
workers at the expense of the state) are very little, but can
Kautsky’s ignoring of this fact be called “criticism”?

The nationalisation of the land that has been effected in
Russia by the proletarian dictatorship has best ensured the
carrying of the bourgeois-democratic revolution to its conclusion—even in the event of a victory of the
counter-revolution causing a reversion from land nationalisation
to land division (I made a special examination of this possibility
in my pamphlet on the agrarian programme of the Marxists in the
1905 Revolution). In addition, the nationalisation of the land has
given the proletarian state the maximum opportunity of passing to
socialism in agriculture.

To sum up, Kautsky has presented us, as far as theory is
concerned, with an incredible hodge-podge which is a complete
renunciation of Marxism, and, as far as practice is concerned,
with a policy of servility to the bourgeoisie and their
reformism. A fine criticism indeed!

Kautsky begins his “economic analysis” of industry with the following magnificent argument:

Russia has a large-scale capitalist industry. Cannot a socialist system of production be built up on this foundation?
“One might think so if socialism meant that the workers of
the separate factories and mines made these their property”
(literally appropriated these for themselves) “in order to
carry on production separately at each factory” (p. 52),
“This very day, August 5, as I am writing these lines,” Kautsky adds, “a speech is reported from
Moscow delivered by Lenin on August 2, in which he is stated to
have declared: ‘The workers are holding the factories firmly
in their hands, and the peasants will not return the land to the
landowners.’ Up till now, the slogan: the factories to the
workers, and the land to the peasants, has been an anarcho-syndicalist slogan, not a Social-Democratic one”
(pp. 52–53).

I have quoted this passage in full so that the Russian workers,
who formerly respected Kautsky, and quite rightly, might see for
themselves the methods employed by this deserter to the bourgeois
camp.

Just think: on August 5, when numerous decrees on the nationalisation of factories in Russia had been issued—and
not a single factory had been “appropriated” by the workers, but had all been converted into the property of
the Republic—on August 5, Kautsky, on the strength of an
obviously crooked interpretation of one sentence in my speech,
tries to make the German readers believe that in Russia the
factories are being turned over to individual groups of workers!
And after that Kautsky, at great length, chews the cud about it
being wrong to turn over factories to individual groups of
workers!

This is not criticism, it is the trick of a lackey of the
bourgeoisie, whom the capitalists have hired to slander the
workers’ revolution.

The factories must be turned over to the state, or to the
municipalities, or the consumers’ co-operative societies,
says Kautsky over and over again, and finally adds:

“This is what they are now trying to do in Russia. . . .”
Now! What does that mean? In August? Why, could not Kautsky have commissioned his friends Stein or Axelrod,
or any of the other friends of the Russian bourgeoisie, to
translate at least one of the decrees on the factories?

“How far they have gone in this direction, we cannot yet tell. At all events, this aspect of the activity of
the Soviet Republic is of the greatest interest to us, but it
still remains entirely shrouded in darkness. There is no lack of
decrees. . . .” (That is why Kautsky ignores their content , or
conceals it from his readers!) “But there is no reliable
information as to the effect of these decrees. Socialist
production is impossible without all-round, detailed, reliable and
rapidly informative statistics. The Soviet Republic cannot
possibly have created such statistics yet. What we learn about its
economic activities is highly contradictory and can in no way
be verified. This, too, is a result of the dictatorship and the
suppression of democracy. There is no freedom of the press, or of
speech” (p. 53).

This is how history is written! From a “free” press of the capitalists and Dutov men Kautsky would have received
information about factories being taken over by the workers. . . .
This “serious savant” who stands above classes is magnificent, indeed! About the countless facts which show that the
factories are being turned over to the Republic only , that they
are managed by an organ of Soviet power, the Supreme Economic
Council, which is constituted mainly of workers elected by the
trade unions, Kautsky refuses to say a single word. With the
obstinacy of the “man in the muffler”, he stubbornly keeps repeating one thing: give me peaceful democracy, without
civil war, without a dictatorship and with good statistics (the
Soviet Republic has created a statistical service in which the
best statistical experts in Russia are employed, but, of course,
ideal statistics cannot be obtained so quickly). In a word, what
Kautsky demands is a revolution without revolution, without fierce
struggle, without violence. It is equivalent to asking for strikes
in which workers and employers do not get excited. Try to find the
difference between this kind of “socialist” and common liberal bureaucrat!

So, relying upon such “factual material”, i.e., deliberately and contemptuously ignoring the innumerable facts,
Kautsky “concludes”:

“It is doubtful whether the Russian proletariat has obtained more in the sense of real practical
gains, and not of mere decrees, under the Soviet Republic than it
would have obtained from a Constituent Assembly, in which, as in
the Soviets, socialists, although of a different hue, predominated” (p. 58).

A gem, is it not? We would advise Kautsky’s admirers to
circulate this utterance as widely as possible among the Russian
workers, for Kautsky could not have provided better material for
gauging the depth of his political degradation. Comrade workers,
Kerensky, too, was a “socialist”, only of a “different hue”! Kautsky the historian is satisfied
with the name, the title which the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries
and the Mensheviks “appropriated” to themselves. Kautsky the historian refuses even to listen to the
facts which show that under Kerensky the Mensheviks and the Right
Socialist-Revolutionaries supported the imperialist policy and
marauding practices of the bourgeoisie: he is discreetly silent
about the fact that the majority in the Constituent Assembly
consisted of these very champions of imperialist war and bourgeois
dictatorship. And this is called “economic analysis”!

In conclusion let me quote another sample of this “economic analysis”:

“. . . After nine months’ existence, the Soviet
Republic, instead of spreading general well-being, felt itself
obliged to explain why there is general want” (p. 41).

We are accustomed to hear such arguments from the lips of the
Cadets. All the flunkeys of the bourgeoisie in Russia argue in
this way: show us, after nine months, your general well-being—and
this after four years of devastating war, with foreign capital
giving all-round support to the sabotage and rebellions of the
bourgeoisie in Russia. Actually , there has remained absolutely no
difference whatever, not a shadow of difference, between Kautsky
and a counter-revolutionary bourgeois. His honeyed talk, cloaked in
the guise of “socialism”, only repeats what the
Kornilov men, the Dutov men and Krasnov men in Russia say bluntly,
straightforwardly and without embellishment.

The above lines were written on November 9, 1918. That same
night news was received from Germany announcing the beginning of a
victorious revolution, first in Kiel and other northern towns and
ports, where power has passed into the hands of Councils of
Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, then in Berlin, where, too, power has passed into the hands of a Council.

The conclusion which still remained to be written to my
pamphlet on Kautsky and on the proletarian revolution is now
superfluous.

November 10, 1918

## Endnotes

[33] Two new parties—Narodnik Communists and Revolutionary
Communists—separated from the Left Socialist-Revolutionary
Party after the provocative assassination by Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries of the German Ambassador, Count Mirbach,
and their revolt on July 6–7, 1918.

The Narodnik Communists condemned the anti-Soviet activity of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and
formed their own party at a conference in September 1918.
Their programme “Manifesto” was published in the newspaper Znamya Trudovoi Kommuny ( The Banner of the Labour
Commune ) on August 21. They approved the Bolshevik course for
an alliance with the middle peasants. Many of the Narodnik
Communists were members of Soviet bodies and some of them, for
example G. D. Zaks, sat on the All-Russia Central Executive
Committee. On November 6, 1918, at its extraordinary congress the party decided to dissolve and merge with the Russian
Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

The Party of Revolutionary Communism was founded at a congress of the newspaper Volya Truda ( Freedom of Labour ) supporters held in Moscow, September
25–30, 1918. The first issue of the paper appeared on
September 14, carrying a policy statement for the coming congress,
whose authors denounced terrorist acts by the Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries and their attempts to torpedo the
Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty. The Inaugural Congress of the party
went on record for co-operation with Soviet power. The programme
of the “Revolutionary Communists” was very contradictory.
While recognising that the Soviets created the prerequisites for the establishment
of socialism, it denied the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat during the transition from
capitalism to socialism. After the Second Congress of the
Communist International had adopted a decision that there must be
only one Communist Party in every country, the Party of
Revolutionary Communism decided in September 1920 to affiliate to the R.C.P.(B.). In October of the same year the
Central Committee of the R.C.P.(B.) allowed Party organisations to
admit into their ranks former members of the Party of
Revolutionary Communism.

[34] Heinrich Weber—Otto Bauer.

[35] Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence , Moscow, 1955,
pp. 318–19

[36] The treachery of M. A. Muravyov, Commander of Soviet troops on the
Eastern Front, was closely connected with the revolt of Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries in July 1918. According to the plans of
the mutineers, Muravyov was to raise a revolt against Soviet power
and, joining forces with the whiteguard Czechs, to march on
Moscow. On July 10 Muravyov arrived in Simbirsk and stated he did
not recognise the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty and declared war on
Germany. The misguided troops occupied the Post, Telegraph and
Radio Station and surrounded the building of the Executive
Committee and the staff of the Simbirsk army group. Muravyov sent
wireless messages calling on the whiteguards and interventionists
between Samara and Vladivostok to march on Moscow.

The Soviet Government took urgent measures to defeat Muravyov’s venture. The Communists of Simbirsk
carried out extensive explanatory work among the garrison troops
and the townsmen. The army units which had formerly supported
Muravyov now declared they were ready to fight him. On the night
of July 11 Muravyov was summoned to the meeting of the Simbirsk
Executive Committee. He interpreted this as the Executive
Committee’s surrender. When his treacherous messages about
the cessation of hostilities against interventionists and
whiteguards were read at the meeting, the Communists demanded his
arrest. Muravyov resisted and was shot; his associates were
arrested.

[37] By the July crisis, Lenin means kulak counter-revolutionary
revolts in the central gubernias, in the Volga area, the Urals and
Siberia in the summer of 1918, which were organised by Mensheviks
and Socialist-Revolutionaries with the assistance of foreign
interventionists.

[38] Blanquism —a trend in the French socialist movement
led by the prominent revolutionary and exponent of French utopian
communism, Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881). Lenin wrote about
Blanquism: “Blanquism expects that mankind will be emancipated
from wage-slavery, not by the proletarian class struggle, but
through a conspiracy hatched by a small minority of intellectuals”