Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/124

 elucidation of revolutionary tactics, as distinguished from reformist, and the elucidation of the role of the proletariat of the Great Powers in sharing with the bourgeoisie to a fractional extent the latter's surplus value and surplus booty.

Let us quote a few most characteristic arguments of Vandervelde in support of his criticism. Like Kautsky, Vandervelde quotes Marx and Engels very copiously, and, like Kautsky, quotes from them everything except what is disagreeable to the bourgeoisie and what distinguishes a revolutionary from a reformist. He has got plenty to say about the conquest of political power by the proletariat, since practice has long ago enclosed it within strictly parliamentary limits. But you will look in vain for any mention of the fact that Marx and Engels, after the experience of the Commune, found it necessary to supplement the, in part, obsolete "Communist Manifesto” by an elucidation of the truth that the working-class cannot simply get hold of the available State machine, but must destroy it. Vandervelde, as well as Kautsky, as if by agreement, keep complete silence about what is most essential in the experience of the proletarian rvoluion, and what distinguished it from bourgeois reforms.

Like Kautsky, Vandervelde also speaks about the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, in order to repudiate it. Kautsky has done it by means of gross falsifications, while Vandervelde does it in a more refined way. In one of his sections (section 4), dealing with the "conquest of political power by the proletariat," he devotes one of the sub-sections to the question of the "collective Dictatorship of the Proletariat," "quotes" Marx and Engels (but omits all references to the main point, namely, to the destruction of the old bourgeois democratic State machine), and concludes:

"In Socialist circles, the Socialist revolution is commonly conceived in the following manner: a new Commune, but this time victorious, not in one centre, but in