Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/23

 consisted in the attempt to break, to smash up, the existing State machine. Marx and Engels considered this point to be of such importance that they introduced it in 1872, as the only amendment, into the partly "obsolete" programme of the "Communist Manifesto." Marx and Engels showed that the Commune was abolishing the army and the bureaucracy, was destroying parliamentarism, was cutting out "that parasitical incubus, the State," and so forth; but the all-wise Kautsky, having put his head into his night-cap, repeats the fairy-tale about a "pure democracy," which has been told thousands of times by Liberal professors. Not unjustly did Rosa Luxembourg declare on August 4th, 1914 that German Social-Democracy was now a whited sepulchre.

Third trick: “When we speak of the dictatorship as a form of government we cannot speak of the dictatorship of a class since a class, as we have already pointed out, can only dominate but not govern." It is, forsooth, organizations or parties which govern!

You are talking nonsese, sheer nonsense, Mr. Muddle-Head. Dictatorship is not a "form of government." This is ridiculous nonsense. And Marx himself speaks not of a form of government, but of a form or type of State. This is altogether a different thing. Nor is it in any way true to say that a class cannot govern. Such an absurdity can only be uttered by a parliamentary crétin who sees nothing but bourgeois parliaments and government Parties. Any European country will show Kautsky instances of government by a ruling class, as for instance, by the land-owners in the Middle Ages, in spite of their insufficient organization.

The sum-total is that Kautsky has distorted in a most unprecedented manner the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat by turning Marx into a humdrum Liberal, and that he himself has rolled down to the level of a Liberal who talks banalities about "pure democracy," disguises under attractive veils the class character of bourgeois