Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/43



The Soviets are the Russian form of proletarian democracy. If a Marxist theoretician, writing on the dictatorship of the proletariat, seriously set himself to study the subject (and not merely to repeat the petty bourgeois lamentations over dictatorship, as Kautsky does in repeating the Menshevik elegies) he would first give a general definition of dictatorship, and then examine its peculiar national form, the Soviets, and give a criticism of them as one of the forms of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

It goes without saying that nothing of this kind is to be expected from Kautsky after his Liberal interpretation of Marx's theory of the dictatorship. It is, however, highly interesting to see how he approached the question of what the Soviets are, and how he dealt with it.

The Soviets, he says, recalling their rise in 1905, have created "a form of proletarian organization which is the most embracing of all, since it includes all wage workers" (p. 31). In 1905 they were local bodies, in 1917 they became national organizations for the entire country. "Already now" (Kautsky continues) "the Soviet organization has behind it a great and glorious history, and it has a still more mighty future before it, and this not in Russia alone. It appears everywhere that the old methods of economic and political warfare are no longer effectvie against the gigantic forces which financial capital has at its disposal, both politically and economically. The old methods cannot be discarded; they are still needed for normal times. But from time to time problems arise with which they are unable to cope, and which can only successfully be dealt with by the concentration of all the political and economic weapons of the working-class."

Then follows a disquisition about the mass-strike, and