Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/22

 France! When Marx gives his opinion that the Commune had committed a mistake in failing to seize the Banque de France, belonging to entire France, did he consider the principles and practice of "pure democracy?" Obviously, Kautsky was writing his book in a country where the people are forbidden by the police to act or even to laugh "collectively,"—else Kautsky would have been annihilated by laughter.

Third. I beg respectfully to remind Mr. Kautsky, who knows Marx and Engels by heart, of the following appreciation of the Commune by Engels from the point of view of "pure democracy":

"Have these gentry (the anti-Authoritarians) ever seen a revolution? Revolution is undoubtedly the most authoritarian thing in the world. Revolution is an act in which one section of the population imposes its will upon the other by rifles, bayonets, guns, and other such exceedingly authoritarian means. And the party which has won is necessarily compelled to maintain its rule by means of that fear which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. If the Commune of Paris had not relied upon the armed people as against the bourgeoisie would it have maintained itself more than twenty-four hours? Are we not, on the contrary justified in reproaching the Commune for having employed this authority too little?"

Here you have your "pure democracy!" What vials of ridicule would Engels have poured upon the head of that vulgar petty bourgeois, the "Social-Democrat" (in the French sense of the 'forties of last century, and in the European sense of 1914–1918), who would have talked about "pure democracy" in relation to a society divided into classes!

But enough! It is impossible to enumerate all the absurdities uttered by Kautsky, since every phrase in his mouth represents a bottomless pit of apostasy.

Marx and Engels have analyzed in a most detailed manner the Commune of Paris, showing that its merit