Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/55

 petty bourgeoisie, who had obtained a majority in the Constituent Assembly: either accept the proletarian dictatorship or we shall crush you by revolutionary methods (theses 18 and 19). Such has ever been and will ever be the action of a really revolutionary proletariat in its relations to the halting and wavering petty bourgeoisie.

Kautsky adopts, on the question of the Constituent Assembly, a purely formal standpoint, whereas I say in my theses repeatedly and plainly that the interests of the revolution are above the formal rights of the Constituent Assembly (theses 16 and 17). The formal democratic point of view is just the point of view of a bourgeois democrat, who does nob recognize that the interests of the proletariat and of the proletarian class-war stand above everything else. As an historian, Kautsky would not have been able to deny that bourgeois parliaments are the organs of this or another class: but now Kautsky wanted (in the interests of the dirty cause of abandoning the revolution) to forget his Marxism, and therefore he carefully avoids asking the question as to what class the Consituent Assembly in Russia was the organ of. Kautsky does not examine the concrete conditions; he does not want to face the facts; he does not mention by one single word to his German readers that my theses contained not only a theoretical elucidation of the question about the limited character of the bourgeois democracy (theses 1–3), not only an outline of the concrete conditions which had determined discrepancy between the party lists in the middle of October, 1917, and the real state of affairs in December, 1917 (theses 4–6), but also a history of the class struggle and civil war in October-December, 1917 (theses 7–13). I then drew from this concrete history the conclusion (thesis 14) that the watchword: "All power to the Consituent Assembly," had become in reality a watchword of the Cadets, the Kaledinites, and their myrmidons.

Kautsky, the historian, does not see anything of that