Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/13

 the question of the relation between the proletarian State and the bourgeois State, between proletarian democracy and bourgeois democracy. This, it would seem, ought to be as plain as noonday. But Kautsky, like a schoolmaster who has been going over his historical text books again and again until he has become dry as dust, persistently turns his back to the twentieth, and his face to the eighteenth century, and tediously chews, for the thousand-and-first time, in a number of paragraphs the old and ancient cud about the relation between bourgeois democracy and absolutism and mediaevalism. What a fruitful occupation in our days! What a lack of understanding of the fitness of things! One cannot help smiling at Kautsky's endeavors to represent the matter in a way as if there were persons preaching "contempt for democracy" (p. 11) and so forth. It is by such twaddle that Kautsky has to gloss over and to confuse the question at issue, for he formulates it in the manner of bourgeois Liberals as if it were a question of democracy in general, and not of bourgeois democracy, and even avoids using this precise class term, speaking instead of a "pre-Socialist democracy." Almost a third of his pamphlet, twenty pages out of a total of sixty-three, is devoted by this windbag to a twaddle which must be very agreeable to the bourgeoisie, as it paints bourgeois democracy in rosy colors, and obscures the question of the proletarian revolution.

Still, the title of Kautsky's pamphlet is "Dictatorship of the Proletariat." Everybody knows that this is just the essence of Marx's teaching, and Kautsky, after all this talk beside the point, is obliged to quote Marx's words on the subject. The way, however, in which he, the so-called Marxist, has done it is simply a farce. Listen: "The whole of that view" [which Kautsky dubs "con­tempt for democracy"] "rests upon one single word of Marx." This is what Kautsky says on page 20, and on page 60 the same thing is repeated in a still more pointed form to the effect that the Bolsheviks have "just