Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/42

 not enter as a necessary condition into the historical or class conception of dictatorship. What forms a necessary aspect, or a necessary condition of dictatorship, it the forcible suppression of the exploiters as a class, and consequently an infringement of "pure democracy," that is, of equality and freedom, in respect of that class.

In this way alone can the question be theoretically discussed; and, by not doing so, Kautsky has proved that he came forward against the Bolsheviks, not as a theoretical inquirer, but as a sycophant of the opportunists and of the bourgeoisie.

The question: in what countries and under what nation, peculiarities of this or that Capitalism a wholesale or partial restriction of democracy will be applied to exploiters, is the question of just those national peculiarities of capitalism and of this or that revolution, and has nothing to do with the theoretical question at issue, which is this: is a dictatorship of the proletariat possible without an infringement of democracy in respect of the class of exploiters? Kautsky has evaded this, the only theoretically important, question. He has quoted all sorts of passages from Marx and Engels, except the one relating to the subject, and quoted by me. He talks about everything that may be pleasant to bourgeois Liberals and democrats and does not go beyond their system of ideas. As for the main thing, namely, that the proletariat cannot triumph without breaking the resistance of the bourgeoisie, without forcibly suppressing its enemies, and that where there is forcible suppression there is, of course, no "freedom," no democracy—this Kautsky did not understand.

We shall now pass to the consideration of the experience of the Russian revolution and of that divergence between the Soviets and the Constituent Assembly, which led to the forcible dissolution of the latter and to the withdrawal of the franchise from the bourgeoisie.