Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/112

 might have thought so if Socialism meant that the workers of the various factories and mines should appropriate them in order to carry on independent production at each factory or mine. … Just to-day, on August 5th, when I am perusing these lines" [Kautsky adds], "Moscow reports a speech delivered by Lenin on August 2nd, in which he is stated to have declared: 'All the workers firmly hold the factories in their hands, and the peasants will not restore the land to the landlords.' The demand that the factories should belong to the workers, and the land to the peasants was up till now an Anarcho-Syndicalist, not a Social-Democratic, demand" (pp. 52–53).

I have quoted these arguments in full in order that the Russian workers, who formerly justly respected Kautsky, might judge for themselves of these methods of the deserter to the bourgeois camp. Only think: on August 5th, when numerous decrees about the nationalization of factories in Russia had been issued, transferring all factories to the public ownership of the Republic and no single factory had been appropriated by the workers—on that August 5th Kautsky, on the strength of an obviously dishonest interpretation of a sentence in a speech of mine, was suggesting to the German readers that in Russia the factories were being handed over to individual workers! And after that Kautsky at great length continues to chew the cud, repeating that the factories must not be handed over to single workers. This is not criticism, but the method of a lackey to the bourgeoisie, who is paid by it to libel the workers' revolution.

Again and again Kautsky writes that the factories must be handed over to the State or to the municipalities, or to co-operative societies, and lastly adds: "In Russia they are now attempting to enter upon this path. … " Now, what does this mean? In August? Surely, Kautsky could have commissioned one of his friends, Stein or Axelrod, or some other flunkey of the Russian bourgeoisie, to