Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/56

 sort. Kautsky, the historian, has never heard that universal suffrage yields sometimes petty bourgeois and at other times counter-revolutionary parliaments Kautsky the Marxist historian, has never heard that the method of elections and the form of democracy are one thing and the class-content of a given institution is another thing. Yet this question about the class-content of the Constituent Assembly was raised by me, and answered in my theses. Possibly my answer was not correct. Nothing would have been so welcome to me as a Marxist criticism of my analysis by an outsider. Instead of writing silly phrases (there are plenty such phrases in Kautsky's book) about somebody, somehow, preventing a criticism of Bolshevism, he ought to have set out to make such criticism. But the point is just that he has no such criticism to offer. He does not even raise the question about the class character of the Soviets on the one hand, and of the Consituent Assembly on the other. Hence there is no possibility of discussing with Kautsky. All that remains for me to do is to show to the reader why Kautsky cannot be called by any other name than a turncoat.

The divergence between the Soviets and the Constituent Assembly has its history which even an historian who does not share the point of view of class-war could not ignore. Kautsky refuses even to touch upon this history. Kautsky has concealed from his German readers the universally known fact (which is now also suppressed by rabid Mensheviks) that the divergence between the Soviets and the "State" (that is, the bourgeois) institutions had existed even at the time of the predominance of the Mensheviks, that is, between the middle of March and October, 1917. Kautsky, in substance, takes up the position of an advocate of conciliation and co-operation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. However much Kautsky may deny this, it is a fact borne out by his whole book. We ought not to have suppressed the Constituent Assembly—that means, we ought not to have fought out the fight