Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/10

 By means of obvious sophism the living revolutionary soul is ripped out of Marxism, in which everything is accepted except the revolutionary methods of struggle, their propaganda and preparation, and the education of the masses for that purpose. Kautsky mechanically 'reconciles' the fundamental idea of Socialist-Chauvinism namely, the defense of one's fatherland in the present war, with a diplomatic—that is, verbal—concession to the 'left wing' in the form of abstention from voting the war credits and of a formal proclamation of one's opposition to the war. The same Kautsky who in 1909 wrote a book on the approach of the era of revolutions and on the connection between War and Revolution, and who in 1912 signed the Basel manifesto on the duty of taking revolutionary advantage of any future war, is now trying, in all sorts of ways, to justify and to 'deck out' the Chauvinist variety of 'Socialism,' and, like Plekhanoff, joins the bourgeoisie in pooh-poohing all idea of revolution and all steps for an immediate revolutionary struggle. … But the working class cannot attain its world revolutionary object without waging a ruthless war against such apostasy, such spinelessness, such subserviency to opportunism, and such unparallelled theoretical vulgarization of Marxism. Kautsky is not an accident, but a social product of the contradictions inherent in the Second International, which combined lip­-loyalty to Marxism with actual submisison to Opportumism." ("Socialism and the War," by G. Zinovieff and N. Lenin, Geneva, 1915, pp. 13–14.)

Again, in my book "Imperialism as the Latest Stage of Capitalism," which was written in 1916 and published in Petrograd in 1917, I examined in detail the theoretical fallacy of all the discussions of Kautsky about Imperial­ism. I quoted the definition of Imperialism given by Kautsky: "Imperialism is the product of a highly devel­oped industrial capitalism. It embodies the endeavor of every industrial capitalist nation to annex or to subject