Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/129

 Revolutionaries), a phrase which replaces class conceptions by extra-class ones. Vandervelde puts side by side the conquest of State power by the proletariat, that is, by one class, and a "popular" State, without noticing the resulting muddle. Kautsky with his "pure democracy," arrives at the same confusion, at the same anti-revolutionary, philistine disregard of the problems of the class revolution, of the class (the proletarian) dictatorship, of the class (the proletarian) State.

Further, the administration of persons will only disappear and make room for the administration of things, when all State will have disappeared. By means of this comparatively distant future Vandervelde walls up, or pushes to the background the problem of to-morrow, namely, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Such a method, again, is equivalent to subserviency to the Liberal bourgeoisie. The Liberal is perfectly willing to discuss things which will happen when there will be no need to administer persons. Why not indulge in such innocent dreams? But as to the suppression by the proletariat of the resistance of the bourgeoisie, which fights against being expropriated,—well, silence is golden, and serves the class interests of the bourgeoisie.

"Socialism versus the State." This is Vandervelde's bow to the proletariat. It is not difficult to make a bow; every "democratic" politician can make a bow to his electors, and under the cover of such a bow we can smuggle through an anti-revolutionary and anti-proletarian cargo.

Vandervelde quotes copiously the Russian Ostrogorsky to show what an amount of deceit, brutal force, corruption, mendacity, hypocrisy, and oppression of the poor is hidden under the civilized, polished, and perfumed exterior of modern bourgeois democracy; but he draws no conclusion therefrom. He does not notice that bourgeois democracy suppresses and oppresses the laboring and exploited masses, and that in its turn, proletarian democracy will have to suppress the bourgeoisie. Kautsky and