Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/27

20 Materialism.") In order finally to abolish feudal property and to trample the feudal restoration in the dust it was necessary for the bourgeois revolution to lay violent hands on bourgeois private property. It was bound to be wrecked in the long run, but its task—the destruction of feudalism—could not have been accomplished without terrorism. Whoever asserts that it thereby "fooled" the proletariat and "brutalized" them, "without bringing them one step nearer to their freedom," claims that the liberation of the proletariat is possible without overthrowing feudalism and absolutism. Such a one has indeed remained true to the high type of our ancestors, the apes, who, "for the most part, lived on a vegetable diet" (chewing the cud of the Marxian A. B. C.) this nourishment being “now and then supplemented by smaller animals, caterpillars, worms, reptiles and even unfledged birds" (the slaughter of social-reformist professors and Revisionists) but will never understand a revolution—not even a bourgeois revolution let alone a proletarian one.

It was not always so with Kautsky. In his polemic against Eisner after the Amsterdam Congress he wrote as follows of the epoch of the Jacobin Terror: "In the struggle of 1789–90 the lower masses of the people, especially in Paris, learned their power. They conquered, but the fruits of their victory were gathered by the possessing classes. The lower classes could not then stand aside. They had again to set forth on the path of liberty and equality in order to emerge from their poverty and oppression. But as the bourgeoisie resisted with all their power there was soon bound to be a desperate struggle between the two classes. The antagonism between the classes had grown more acute, thanks to the war which the allied monarchs of Europe waged against revolutionary France. ''In this war France could only win by the exertion of all her strength, and this could only be brought about through the reckless hatred of private property which animated the masses of the people. Then (1792–93) the monarchy was uprooted, universal suffrage proclaimed, the''