Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/18

 worker (representing the masses, though not their top section of scoundrels bought by the capitalists such as the Socialist Imperialists of all countries are)—this truth, obvious to any representative of the exploited classes struggling for their emancipation, and indisputable for every Marxist, has to be extorted almost by main force from that most learned gentleman, Mr. Kautsky. How is such a phenomenon to be explained? Simply by that spirit of flunkeyism which has permeated the leaders of the Second International, who have become contemptible sycophants in the service of the bourgeoisie.

First Kautsky has committed a distortion of terms by proclaiming the obvious nonsense that the word dictatorship in its literal sense, means a single person, and then on the Strength of this distortion, has declared that therefore, with Marx, his phrase about dictatorship of a class must not be taken in its literal sense (but only that in which dictatorship does not connote revolutionary violence, but merely "the peaceful concquest of a majority in a bourgeois"—mark you—"democracy").

One must, if you please, distinguish between a "state" and a "form of government"! A most wonderful distinction, not unsimilar to that between the "state" of stupidity in the case of a man who talks silly nonsense, and the "form" of this stupidity!

Kautsky had to interpret dictatorship as "a state of domination" (this expression is used by him textually on page 21), since in that case revolutionary violence, or a violent revolution, disappears. A "state of domination" is a state in which any majority finds itself under a "democracy." Thanks to such a trick revolution disappears, to everybody's satisfaction. But this is too crude a trick, and will not save Kautsky. One cannot do away with the fact that a dictatorship means a "state" (very disagreeable to all renegades) of revolutionary violence of one class against another. The absurd distinction between a "state" and "form of government" becomes patent.