Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/40

 the proletariat, and to-morrow taking fright at the difficulties of the revolution, succumbing with panic after the first defeat or semi-defeat of the workers, giving way to "nerves," whining, running hither and thither, deserting from one camp to another—just like our Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries!

And in face of this condition of things, at the time of a most desperate war, when history is placing on the order of the day the question of the life and death of age-long privileges—at this time to talk about majority and minority, about pure democracy, about the superfluity of the dictatorship, and equality between the exploiter and the exploited—what bottomless stupidity and philistinism are needed to do it! But, of course, the decades of comparatively "peaceful" Capitalism between 1871 and 1914 had accumulated in the opportunist-minded Socialist parties whole Augean stables of Philistinism, imbecility, and mockery.

The reader will have noticed that Kautsky, in the above-quoted passage from his pamphlet, speaks of an attempt against uinversal suffrage (extolling it, by the way, as a deep source of mighty moral authority, as against Engels who a propos of the same Commune and of the same question of dictatorship spoke of the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie—a very characteristic difference between the Philistine's and the revolutionst's view of "authority"). One may say in this connection that the question about the suppression of the franchise of the exploiter is entirely a Russian question, and not at all one of the dictatorship of the proletariat in general. If Kautsky, without hypocrisy, had entitled his pamphlet: "Against the Bolsheviks," the title would have corresponded to the contents of the pamphlet, and Kautsky would have been justified in speaking of the question of franchise. But Kautsky wanted to write as a "theoretician." He called his pamphlet "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat." He speaks about the Soviets and about