Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/128

 State ("the withering away of the State"). The eclecticism and sophistry of the Kautskys and the Vanderveldes, on the other hand, tries to please the bourgeoisie by blurring all that is concrete and precise in the class struggle, and by substituting in their place the general idea of "transition" under which they can hide (nine-tenths of the official Social-Democrats of our time do hide) their repudiation of the revolution. Vandervelde, as an eclecticist and sophist, is more skilful and more refined than Kautsky, since the phrase: "transition from the State in the narrow sense of the word, to the State in the broad sense of the word," can be made to hush up all questions of revolution, all difference between revolution and reform, and even the difference between the Marxist and the Liberal. For what European bourgeois will think of denying "in general," "transition stages" in such "general" sense?

Vandervelde declares that he agrees with Jules Guesde in that it is impossible to socialize the means of production and exchange without the previous fulfilment of the following two conditions: "(1) the transformation of the present State as organ of domination of one class over another, into what Anton Menger calls a popular Labor State, through the conquest of political power by the proletariat; (2) the separation of the State as an organ of authority, from the State as an organ of guidance, or, to use the expression of Saint Simon, of the administration of persons from the administration of things" (p. 89).

This is written by Vandervelde in italics, in order to underline the importance of these propositions. But this is the purest eclectical olla podrida, a complete rupture with Marxism! The so-called "Popular Labor State" is but a paraphrase of the "Free People’s State," with which the German Social-Democrats paraded in the 'seventies, and which Engels denounced as an absurdity. The "Popular Labor State" is a phrase worthy of the petty bourgeois democrat (after the manner of our own Left Social