Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/107

 overthrow of the landlords by the peasants. What a wonderful Marxist this Kautsky is!

The Bolsheviks alone had drawn a distinct line of demarcation between the bourgeois-democratic and the Socialist revolution, and by carrying through the former to the end, they opened the door for passing to the second. This was and is the only revolutionary and the only Marxist policy, and Kautsky in vain repeats the old Liberal platitudes that "the small peasants have never and nowhere yet passed to collective production under the infuence of theoretical arguments" (p. 15). How smart! But never as yet and nowhere have the small peasants of a large country been under the influence of a proletarian State! Never as yet and nowhere have the small peasants proceeded to engage in an open class struggle between the poor and the rich among them, to a civil war among them, with the propagandist, political, economic and military assistance of the poor by a proletarian State authority! Never as yet and nowhere has such an enrichment taken place of speculators and profiteers simultaneously with the utter ruin of the masses of the peasantry as the result of a war.

Kautsky is simply repeating and chewing the old cud, being afraid even to contemplate the new problems of proletarian dictatorship. What, for instance, if the peasants lack implements for small production, and the proletarian State helps them to obtain agricultural machinery for collective farming—what is it, dear Mr. Kautsky? A "theoretical argument"?

Or take the question of the nationalization of the land. Our Populists, including all the Left Social Revolutionaries, deny that the measure we have passed constitutes the nationalization of the land. They are theoretically wrong. In so far as we remain within the framework of commodity production and capitalism, the abolition of private property in land constitutes simply land nationalization, and the term "socialization" only expresses a