Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/48

 can at present praise the charms of bourgeois democracy and talk about "pure" democracy, turning his face towards the dead past. Bourgeois democracy was an advance as compared with the Middle Ages, and it was necessary to take advantage of it. But now it is inadequate for the purposes of the working-class. Now we must look, not backward, but forward, to the substitution of a proletarian democracy in the place of a bourgeois democracy. And although the preparatory work for the proletarian revolution, the formation and the drilling of the proletarian army was possible and necessary within the framework of the bourgeois democratic State, yet, once we have come up to the decisive issue to the final battles, it is treachery to the working-class to try to confine the proletariat to this framework.

Kautsky has made himself the more ridiculous as he has repeated an argument by Martoff, without noticing that with Martoff it was based upon another argument which he, Kautsky, has not adduced. Martoff said (and Kautsky repeats it) that Russia was not yet ripe for Socialism. Hence followed the deduction that it was too early to turn the Soviets into State organizations (read: it is quite time to turn the Soviets, with the assistance of Menshevik leaders, into instruments of subjection of the workers to the Imperialist bourgeoisie). But Kautsky cannot argue directly that Europe is not ripe for Socialism. As far back as 1909, when he was not as yet a turn-coat, he argued that there was no reason to fear a premature revolution, and that he would be a traitor who should repudiate the revolution, for fear of defeat. This opinion Kautsky cannot repudiate directly, and so we get the absurdity which lays bare the entire imbecility and cowardice of the small borgeois: on the one hand, Europe is ripe for Socialism, and is on the eve of decisive battles between Capital and Labor; on the other hand, the fighting organization (which, moreover, consolidates and requires strength in battle), the organization of the proletariat which