Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/123



It was not until I finished reading Kautsky's book that I had occasion to see Vandervelde's book "Socialism versus the State" (Paris, 1918). A comparison of the two books suggests itself automatically. Kautsky was the theoretical leader of the Second International (1899-1914), while Vandervelde, in his capacity as President of the International Socialist Bureau, was its formal representative. The two represent the utter bankruptcy of the Second International, and both of them, with the skill of experienced journalists, "artfully" hide this bankruptcy, and their own collapse and desertion to the bourgeoisie, under Marxist shibbolets. The one is typical for German Opportunism, ponderous, academic, grossly adulterating Marxism by cutting away from it all that is unacceptable to the bourgeoisie. The other is typical for the Latin—one may ven say, for the Western European—variety of prevailing opportunism, which is more flexible, less ponderous, and adulterates Marxism by a similar method, but in a more refined manner. Both fundamentally distort the teachings of Marx on the State and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Vandervelde dwelling more on the State and Kautsky on the Dictatorship. Both are at pains to obscure the very close, almost inseparable connection between the two subjects. Both of them are revolutionaries and Marxists in words, but both are renegades in practice, bending all their energies in order to get away from the revolution. In neither of them do we find even a trace of what pervades all the works of Marx and Engels, and of what distinguishes Socialism from the bourgeois caricature of it, namely, the elucidation of the problems of revolution, as distinguished from those of reform, the