Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/44

 about the "trade-union bureaucracy" which is indispensable as the trade-unions themselves, but which "is not equal to the task of directing such mighty mass-battles as are becoming more and more the order of the day" … "Thus (Kauteky concludes) the Soviet organization is one of the most important phenomena of our time. It promises to acquire an importance in the great decisive battles between capital and labor which are looming in the near future." … "But are we justified in demanding of the Soviets more? The Bolsheviks who, after the November revolution obtained in conjuction with the Left Social Revolutionaries, a majority on the Soviets, after the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, set out to turn the Soviets from a militant organization of one class into a State organization. They destroyed the democracy which the Russian people had won in the March revolution, and accordingly ceased to call themselves Social-Democrats and assumed the name of Communists" (p. 33).

Persons familiar with the Russian Menshevik literature will at once see what servile fidelity Kautsky has been copying Martoff, Axelrod, Stein, and Co. Yes, "servile fidelity," because Kautsky, to a ridiculous degree, distorts the fact in order to please Menshevik prejudices. Kautsky did not take the pains, for instance, of informing himself at his source (of Stein, at Berlin, or of Axelrod at Stockholm) when the question about changing the name of the Bolsheviks and about the importance of the Soviets as State institutions was first raised. If Kautsky had done so, he would not have penned these lines which are now calculated to provoke laughter, since both these questions were raised by the Bolsheviks in April, 1917 (as for instance, in my theses of April 4–17, 1917), that is, long before the November revolution of 1917 (and therefore a fortiori before the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January, 1918).

But Kautsky's argument which I have just quoted, contains the crux of the entire question about the Soviets.