Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/29

 accidentally—one little thing; namely, that the protection of minorities is extended by the ruling party in a bourgeois democracy only to the other bourgeois parties, while on all serious, fundamental issues, the working-class gets, instead of the "protection of minorities," martial law and pogroms. The more developed democracy is, the nearer at hand is the danger of a pogrom or civil war in connection with any profound political divergence which threatens the existence of the bourgeoisie. This "law" of bourgeois democracy the learned Mr. Kautsky could have studied in connection with the Dreyfus affair in the republic of France, with the lynching, of negroes and internationalists in the democratic republic of America, with the conflicts between Ireland and Ulster in democratic England, with the hunting down of the Bolsheviks and the organization of pogroms against them, in July, 1917, in the democratic republic of Russia. I have purposely chosen these examples from among the incidents not only of war, but also of pre-war time. But sweet Mr. Kautsky finds it more pleasant to shut his eyes to these facts of the twentieth century, and to tell the workers, instead, the wonderfully novel, the remarkably exciting, the extraordinary, the instructive, and highly important facts about the Tories and Whigs of the eighteenth century!

Or take the bourgeois parliaments. Is it to be sup­posed that learned Mr. Kautsky has never heard of the fact that the more democracy is developed, the more do the bourgeois parliaments fall under the control of the Stock Exchange and the bankers? This, of course, does not mean that bourgeois parliamentarism ought not to be made use of; the Bolsheviks, for instance, made, perhaps, more successful use of it than any party in the world, having in 1912–14 captured the entire Labor representation in the fourth Duma. But it does mean that only a Liberal can forget the historical limitation and relativeness of bourgeois parliamentarism in the manner in which Kautsky does. At every step, even in the most democratic