Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/26

 all that is unacceptable to the bourgeoisie (such as the importance of the revolutionary violence of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie with a view to its destruction). That is why Kautsky, in virtue of his objective, attitude and in spite of his subjective inclinations, becomes the lackey of the bourgeoisie.

Bourgeois democracy, while constituting a great historical advance in comparison with feudalism, nevertheless remains, and cannot but remain ,a very limited, a very hypocritical institution, a paradise for the rich and a trap and a delusion for the exploited and for the poor. It is this simple truth, which forms the essential part of Marx's doctrines, that Kautsky "the Marxist," has failed to understand. On this fundamental question Kautsky gives us only what is agreeable to the bourgeoisie, and does not give us any scientific criticism of the conditions which make every bourgeois democracy only a democracy for the rich.

Let us recall to the learned mind of Mr. Kautsky the theoretical propositions of Marx and Engels, which our schoolman has so disgracefully "forgotten" (in order to please the bourgeoisie), and then we shall explain the question more popularly. Not only the ancient and feudal, but also the "representative State of to-day is an instrument of exploitation of wage-labor by capital" (Engels, in his book on the State). "Since the State is only a temporary institution which is to be made use of in revolution in order forcibly to suppress the opponents, it is perfectly absurd to talk about a free popular State; so long as the proletariat still needs the State, it needs it not in the interests of freedom, but in order to suppress its opponents and when it becomes possible to speak of freedom, the State as such ceases to exist" (Engels in his letter to Bebel March 28th, 1875). "The State is nothing but a machine for the suppression of one class by another—this, in a democratic republic no less than in a monarchy" (Engels, in his preface to Marx's "Civil War").