Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/111

 swindle as that to which Kautsky has now stooped. He quotes the "theses" but is silent about the law issued by the Soviet authority. He speaks about "theoretical arguments," and is silent about the proletarian State authority which holds in its hands the factories and goods of all sorts. All that Kautsky, the Marxist, wrote in 1899 in his "Agrarian Question" about the means which the proletarian State possesses in order to effect a gradual passage of the small peasants to Socialism, has been forgotten by Kautsky, the renegade, in 1918.

Of course, a few hundred State-supported agricultural communes and Soviet farms (run at the expense of the State by associations of laborers formerly employed on large estates) are not sufficient; but can the ignoring of this fact be called a criticism? The nationalization of the land which has been carried out in Russia by the proletarian dictatorship, has guaranteed in the highest degree the carrying out of the bourgeois democratic revolution to its uttermost limits,—even if a victory of the counter-revolution should turn back from land nationalization to land division (as examined by me in a pamphlet on the agrarian programme of Marxists in the revolution of 1905). In addition, the nationalization of the land has given the proletarian State the maximum opportunities for passing to Socialism in agriculture.

To sum up, Kautsky as put before us, from a theoretical point of view, a most horrid stew, in which the complete abjuration of Marxism forms the most distinct ingredient, and in practice, a flunkeylike subserviency to the bourgeois and its reformism. A fine critic, no doubt!

His "economic analysis" of industry Kautsky begins with the following magnificent argument: Russia has a capitalist industry on a large scale. Can a Socialist system of production be built up on this foundation? "One