Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/33

 holding meetings in the best buildings, such liberty of giving utterance to his ideas and of protecting his interests in print by means of the best printing works and largest stocks of paper, such liberty of appointing men and women of his own class to administer and to organize the State, as in Soviet Russia?

The mere thought is absurd that Mr. Kautsky could find in any country one single worker or agricultural laborer in a thousand who, on being informed of the fасts, would hesitate in replying to this question. Instinctively, through reading the bare fragments of truth in the bourgeois press, the workers of the entire world sympathize with the Soviet Republic, just because they see in it a proletarian democracy, a democracy for the poor, and not a democracy for the rich, as is the case with every bourgeois democracy, even the best. "We are ruled, and our State is run, by bourgeois bureaucrats, by capitalist parliaments, by capitalist judges"—such is the simple, indisputable, and obvious truth, which is known and felt, through their own daily experience, by tens and hundreds of millions of the exploited classes in all bourgeois countries, including the most democratic. In Russia, on the other hand, the bureaucratic apparatus has been completely smashed up, the old judges have all been driven from their seats, the bourgeois parliament has been dispersed, and instead the workers and peasants have received a much more popular representation, their Soviets have replaced the bureaucrats, or are controlling them, and their Soviets have become the authorities who elect the judges. This fact alone is enough to justify all the oppressed classes in regarding the Soviet régime, that is, the Soviet form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic.

But Kautsky does not understand this truth, so obvious to every worker, because he has forgotten how to put the question: democracy for what class? If he starts