Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/108

 tendency, a desire, a preparation of the transition towards Socialism.

What then ought to be the attitude of Marxists towards the nationalization of the land? Here, too, Kautsky is unable even theoretically to formulate the question, or, what is worse, deliberately avoids it; although it has long been known that Kautsky is well aware of the old controversies among Russian Marxists on the question of nationalization, or municipalization, or partition of the land. It is a direct mockery of Marxism when Kautsky asserts that the transfer of large estates to the State and their renting out to poor peasants would have realized some "fraction of Socialism." We have already said that there would be here no trace of Socialism. But this is not all. We should not even have here the bourgeois democratic revolution carried out to the end. It has been a great calamity for Kautsky that he has confided in the Mensheviks. Hence the curiosity of Kautsky's insisting upon the bourgeois character of our revolution and accusing the Bolsheviks of having conceived the idea of proceeding to Socialism, and yet himself proposing a Liberal reform in the guise of Socialism without carrying out this reform to the point of clearing away all the survivals of mediaevalism in land tenure. In other words, instead of urging a consistent bourgeois democratic revolution, Kautsky, like his Menshevik advisers, is simply siding with the Liberal bourgeoisie which is afraid of the revolution. Indeed, why should only the large estates, and not all land, be turned into State Property? By such a half-measure the Liberal bourgeoisie attains a maximum preservation of the old (that is, the least progress in revolution), and the maximum easiness of return to that old. It is only the radical bourgeoisie, that is, the one which wants to carry out the bourgeois democratic revolution to the end, that demands the nationalization of the land.

Kautsky who, in the old days, some twenty years ago, wrote an excellent Marxist study of the agrarian