Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/30

 bourgeois States, the oppressed masses come across the crying contradiction between the formal equality proclaimed by the "democracy" of the capitalists and the thousand and one de facto limitations and restrictions which make the proletarians wage-slaves. It is this contradiction which opens the eyes of the masses to the rottenness, hypocrisy, and mendacity of Capitalism. It is this contradiction which the agitators and propagandists of Socialism are constantly showing up to the masses, in order to prepare them for the revolution. And when the era of revolution has begun, Kautsky turns his back upon it and starts to extol the charms of moribund bourgeois democracy!

Proletarian democracy, of which the Soviet régime constitutes one of the forms, has given to the world a hitherto unknown expansion and development of democracy for the gigantic majority of the population, for the exploited and laboring masses. To have written a whole pamphlet about democracy, as Kautsky has done (who devotes two pages to the question of dictatorship and scores of pages to that of "pure democracy") and not to have noticed this fact, means simply that he has distorted the facts, after the approved Liberal manner.

Or take foreign policy. In no bourgeois State, not even in the most democratic one, is it carried out openly. Everywhere the masses are deceived—in democratic France, Switzerland, America, or England in an incomparably more refined and wholesale manner than in other countries. It was the Soviet Government which by a revolutionary act has torn off the veil of mystery from foreign policy. But Kautsky has not noticed this, and passes it over in silence, although in the present era of predatory wars and secret treaties about spheres of influence (that is, about the partition of the world between the capitalist bandits), the subject is one of cardinal importance, on which the happiness and the life and death of millions depends.