Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/46

 classes will get possession of the power in the State? God forbid anything of the kind. In the "final" battles the organizations which embrace all the wage workers must not become State institutions.

But what is the State? The State is nothing but a machine for the suppression of one class by another. It appears, then, that the oppressed class, the advance guard of all those who labor and are exploited in modern society, must take up the final battles between capital and labor, but must not touch the machine through which labor is oppressed by capital! It must not break up that machine: It must not make use of its all-embracing organization to suppress the exploiters! Excellent, magnificent, Mr. Kautsky! "We" recognise the class-war, as it is recognized by the Liberals: that is, without the overhtrow of the bourgeoisie!

Here is where the complete rupture of Kautsky with Marxian Socialism becomes patent and obvious. This is, practically, a desertion to the camp of the bourgeoisie, which is also prepared to admit everything except the transformation of the organizations of the oppressed class into State institutions. Kautsky can no longer save his position in trying to reconcile everything and everybody and to avoid all contradiction by means of phrases. One of the two: either Kautsky rejects all transference of State power to the working-class, or he admits that the working-class may take over the old bourgeois State machinery, but objects to its being broken up and replaced by a new proletarian machine. Whether Kausky's arguments are interpreted one way or another, his break with Marxism and his desertion to the bourgeoisie are obvious.

Already in the "Communist Manifesto," when describing what sort of State a triumphant working-class needs, Marx defined it as "a State, that is, the proletariat organized as the ruling class." Now we have a man pretending to be a Marxist who says that the proletariat, organized to a man and waging a final battle against capital, must