Page:Lenin - The Collapse of the Second International - tr. Sirnis (1919).pdf/45

 The cuckoo praises the cock because the cock praises the cuckoo!

In his servile ardour Kautsky even goes so far as to kiss the hem of Hyndman's garment, making out that the latter but yesterday went over to the side of imperialism. Yet, for many years articles have appeared in the same Neue Zeit and in dozens of S.D. papers of the whole world which told of Hyndman's imperialism! Had Kautsky been sincerely interested in the political biographies of the men he names, he would have had to recall whether or not these biographies contained traits and events which, not "in one day," but in the course of a decade prepared such a transition to imperialism. He would have recalled whether or not Vaillant had been captured by the adherents of Jaurès, and Plekhanov by the Minimalists and the revisionists. He would have recalled whether or not Guesde's revolutionary current died before the eyes of everyone in the Guesdist paper, Socialism—a model of lifelessness and incapacity, a paper which could take up no independent line on any important question. Kautsky would have recalled whether or not he himself had manifested indecision (let us add—for those who place him, and rightly so, side by side with Hyndman and Plekhanov) on the question of Millerandism, at the beginning of the struggle with Bernstein, and so forth.

But we do not see even the least attempt made to investigate, scientifically, the biographies of the leaders mentioned. No attempt is even made to examine whether these leaders defend themselves by their own arguments or by repeating the arguments of the opportunists and capitalist class, or whether, for example the actions of these leaders acquired a serious political significance in consequence of their being especially influential, or in consequence of the fact that they joined a foreign and really "influential" current supported by the military organisation, namely the bourgeois current. Kautsky makes no attempt to investigate the question; he is merely concerned with throwing dust in the eyes of the masses and with deafening them with the sound of authoritative names; and with preventing them from putting clearly