Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/37

 Engels: "As the State is only a temporary institution which is to be made use of in the revolution, in order forcibly to suppress the opponents, it is a perfect absurdity to speak about the free popular State: so long as the proletariat still needs the State, it needs it, not in the interest 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."

The distance between Kautsky, on the one hand, and Marx and Engels, on the other, is as great as between heaven and earth, as between the bourgeois Liberal and the proletarian revolutionary. Pure democracy, or simple "democracy," of which Kautsky speaks, is but a paraphrase of the "free popular State," that is, a perfect absurdity. Kautsky, with the learned air of a most learned arm-chair fool, or else with the innocent air of a ten-year-old girl, is asking: Why do we need a dictatorship, when we have a majority? And Marx and Engels explain: In order to break down the resistance of the bourgeoisie; in order to inspire the reactionaries with fear; in order to maintain the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie; in order that the proletariat may forcibly suppress its enemies!

But Kautsky does not understand these explanations. He is infatuated with the "pure democracy," he does not see its bourgeois character, and "consistently" urges that the majority, once it is the majority, has no need "to break down the resistance" of the minority, has no need "forcibly to suppress" it: it is sufficient to suppress cases of infraction of the democrcay. Infatuated with the "purity" of democracy, Kautsky unwittingly commits the same little error which is committed by all bourgeois democrats, namely, he accepts the formal equality, which under Capitalism is only a fraud and a piece of hypocrisy, at its face value as a de facto equality. Quite a bagatelle!

But the exploiter cannot be equal to the exploited. This is a truth which, however disgraceful to Kautsky, is