Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/20

 what Marx once termed "ideal," in the sense of an average, normal, characteristic capitalism.

Further, was there in the 70's of last century anything which made England and America an exception in respect of what we are considering now? Everybody familiar with the postulates of science in the domain of historical problems knows that such a question must be put, as otherwise we should falsify history as a science and should indulge in sophisms. Once this question has been put, the answer admits of no doubt; the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is violence in respect of the bourgeoisie, and the need of such violence is caused especially, as repeatedly explained by Marx and Engels in detail (particularly in "Civil War in France" and the preface to it) by the fact that there exist an army and bureacracy. But just these institutions in the 70's of last century, when Marx was making his observations, did not exist in England or America (though now they do exist).

Kautsky has had to be dishonest at every step in order to cover up his apostasy though here he has unwittingly revealed his inner thoughts, by using the phrase: "peacefully, that is, in a democratic way."

When trying to define the term "dictatorship," Kautsky employed every means to conceal from the reader the fundamental mark of this conception, namely, revolutionary violence. But now the murder is out: we see that the opposition is between a peaceful and a forcible revolution.

That is where the issue lies. Kautsky needed all these distortions, evasions, and sophisms, in order to "back out" from a forcible revolution, and to screen his repudiation of it, his desertion, bag and baggage, to the Liberal-Labor, that is, the bourgeois camp.

Kautsky, the "historian," is so shamelessly adulterating history that he forgets the fundamental fact, that capitalism of the pre-monopolistic era, of which the