Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/25



The question so unscrupulously distorted by Kautsky is in reality as follows: It is obvious, if we are not to indulge in mockery over commmonsense and history, that one cannot speak of "pure democracy" so long as different classes exist. One can only speak of class democracy. (One may remark in passing that "pure democracy" is not only an ignorant phrase showing lack of understanding both of the struggle of classes and of the nature of the State, but also a hollow phrase, since in Communist society democracy will gradually become a habit, and finally wither away, but never will be "pure democracy.") In fact, "pure democracy" is the mendacious phrase of a Liberal who wants to dupe the working-class. History only knows a bourgeois democracy which replaces feudalism, and a proletarian democracy which replaces bourgeois democracy. When Kautsky devotes scores of pages to the proof of the fact that bourgeois democracy is a progressive order in comparison with the mediaeval one and must be made use of by the proletariat in its struggle against the bourgeoisie, he is just indulging in the usual Liberal twaddle which has for its object to gull the workers. For it is a bare truism not only in educated Germany, but also in uneducated Russia, Kautsky is simply throwing "learned" dust into the eyes of the workers when he tells them with an air of importance about Weitling and the Jesuits of Paraguay and many other things, In order to hide from their sight the bourgeois essence of modern, that is, capitalist, democracy.

Kautsky takes from Marxism only what is acceptable to Liberals, to the bourgeoisie (viz., the criticism of the Middle Ages, and the progressive historical part played by capitalism in general, and capitalist democracy in particular) and eliminates, suppresses, hushes up in