Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/47

 not make its class organization a State organization! Here Kautsky has betrayed that "superstitious faith in the State," of which Engels wrote as far back as 1891, аs "having passed in Germany into the common mind of the bourgeoisie, and even among the workers." Fight on, workers—our Philistine agrees (as every bourgeois agrees, since the workers are fighting all the same: one has only to find the means to blunt} their sword)—fight on, but dare not to win! You must not destroy the State machinery of the bourgeoisie, you must not substitute in the place of the bourgeois State organization the proletarian State organization.

One who sincerely shares the Marxist view that the State is but a machine for the suppression of one class by another, and who has reflected upon this truth, could not have reached the absurd conclusion that the proletarian organizations capable of defeating financial capital must not become state organizations. The petty bourgeois, to whom the State is something standing outside or above classes, stands here fully revealed. Why, indeed, is the proletariat, "one class only," to be permitted to wage a "decisive" struggle against capital which dominates not only the proletariat, but also the entire people, including petty bourgeoisie and the entire peasantry, and yet not be permitted to turn its organization into a State organization? For the simple reason that the petty bourgeois is afraid of the calss-struggle, and breaks it off before it reaches its end. that is, its chief object.

Kautsky has landed into a morass and has given himself away. Mark you, he himself admits that Europe is on the eve of decisive struggles between capital and labor, and that the former methods of economic and political warfare of the proletariat are inadequate. But these methods just consist in taking advantage of bourgeois democracy; hence—but Kautsky is afraid to think out what follows. But we can say: hence only a reactionary, only an enemy of the working-class, only a henchman of the bourgeoisie,