Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/106

 question correctly. On the one hand, he dares not say that the proletarians ought to have parted company with the peasantry on the question of equalization, because he sees that such a rupture would have been absurd (especially when in 1905, when he was not yet a renegade, Kautsky explicitly advocated an alliance between the workers and peasants as one of the conditions of the victory of the revolution). On the other hand, he systematically quotes the Liberal platitudes of the Menshevik Masloff who "argues" against the utopian and reactionary character of a petty bourgeois equality from the point of view of Socialism, and fails to point out the progressive and revolutionary character of the petty bourgeois struggle for equality and equalized land tenure, from the point of view of a bourgeois democratic revolution.

Yet, mark you, Kautsky insists (in 1918) on the bourgeois character of the Russian revolution, and insists that we should not proceed further than the limit set by this character. At the same time he sees "something of Socialism" (for a bourgeois revolution) in the petty bourgeois reform of renting out small plots to the poor peasants (that is, in an approximation to equalized land tenure)! Make out what he means, if you can!

In addition, Kautsky displays a Philistine inability to take account of the real policy of this or that political party. He quotes the phrases of the Menshevik Masloff without any desire to see the real policy of the Menshevik party in 1917, when it practically advocated, in coalition with landlords and Cadets, a Liberal agrarian reform and compromise with the landlords (as proved by the arrests of members of the land committees and by S. Masloff’s Land Bill). Kautsky has not perceived that P. Masloff's phrases about the reactionary and Utopian character of the petty bourgeois equality in practice constituted a screen for the Menshevik policy of an agreement between the peasants and the landlords (that is, of helping the landlords to deceive the peasants), instead of the revolutionary