Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/53

 quotes my third thesis on the fundamental question whether the Bolsheviks were of the opinion, before the elections to the Constituent Assembly that the Soviet Republic was of a higher type than the bourgeois republic, and whether they said so to people. But he does not quote the second thesis, which ran as follows: "While demanding the summoning of a Constituent Assembly, the revolutionary Social-Democracy has repeatedly, since the very beginning of the revolution of 1917, emphasized, the view that the Soviet republic is a higher form of democracy than the ordinary bourgeois republic with a Constituent Assembly."

In order to represent the Bolsheviks as bereft of all principles, as "revolutionary opportunists" (this is a term which Kautsky employs somewhere in his book in some connection which I now no longer remember), Mr. Kautsky has concealed from his German readers the fact that there was in the theses a direct reference to repeated declarations. Such are the contemptible, petty methods employed by Mr. Kautsky! He has thus once more avoided the theoretical side of the question. Is it, or is it not true that the bourgeois democratic parliamentary republic is a lower form than a republic of the Commune or Soviet type? This is the essential question and Kautsky has avoided it. All that Marx gave us in his analysis of the Commune of Paris has been forgotten by Kautsky. He has also forgotten Engels's letter to Bebel on March 28th, 1875, in which the same idea of Marx is formulated in a practical, terse, and clear fashion: "The Commune was no longer a State in the proper sense of the word."

Here you have the most prominent theorist of the Second International, who, in a special pamphlet on the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat," in a special discussion on Russia, where the question of a higher form of State than a democratic bourgeois republic was raised repeatedly in a direct manner, avoiding again and again the issue. In what does this procedure differ from desertion to the