Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/100

 has produced a monstrous theoretical muddle which turns Marxism into Liberalism, and in practice amounts to a series of idle, angry, vulgar sallies against the Bolsheviks Let the reader judge for himself:

"Landownership on a large scale could no longer be maintained, and the revoultion had put an end to it. It became clear at once that it must be handed over to the peasant population" [this 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 bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie, the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries were pursuing a policy of maintaining large ownership. This has in particular been proved by S. Masloff's law and by the arrests of the members of the land committees. Without the dictatorship of the proletariat, the peasant population would not have defeated the landlords who were allied with the capitalists.] "… But on the question as to the formsmin which it should be carried out, there was no unity. Several solutions were possible. …" [Kautsky is most of all concerned about "unity" among "Socialists," whoever these "Socialists" may be. That the main classes in capitalist society are bound to come to different decisions, is a thing which he forgets.] … "From a Socialist point of view, the most rational solution would have been to turn the large estates into State property and to allow the peasants who have hitherto been employed on them as hired laborers to cultivate them in the form of co-operative societies. But this decision assumes the existence of agricultural laborers such as Russia does not know. Another solution would have been the transfer of large estates to the State and their partition into small plots, to be rented out to peasants who had not sufficient land. Some fraction of Socialism would then have been realized." …

Kautsky, as usual, operates by means of his famous "on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand." He places side by side