Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/57

 with the bourgeoisie to a finish; we ought not to have overthrown it and the proletariat ought to have effected a reconciliation with the bourgeoisie.

Bull if so, why has Kautsky suppressed the fact that the Mensheviks had been engaged in this glorious work between March and November, 1917, and had not achieved anything? If a reconciliation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat were possible, why did not the Mensheviks succeed in bringing it about? Why was the bourgeoisie holding itself aloof from the Soviets? Why did the Mensheviks themselves call the Soviets "Revolutionary Democracy," and the bourgeoisie the "propertied elements"? Kautsky has not told his German readers that it was precisely the Mensheviks who, in the period of their predominance, called the Soviets "Revolutionary Democracy," thereby admitting their superiority over all other institutions. It is only this concealment of an important} fact which has made it appear in Kautsky's book as if the divergence between the Soviets and the bourgeoisie had no history, and had arisen suddenly, without any particular cause, simply through the wickedness of the Bolsheviks. As a matter of fact, it was just the experience of the Menshevik policy of compromise, the attempts at reconciling the proletariat with the bourgeoisie, undertaken by the Mensheviks, and extending over a period of more than six months (a period which is very long for a revolution) that convinced the people of the futlity of such methods, and drove the proletariat away from the Mensheviks.

Kautsky admits that the Soviets are a most excellent fighting organization of the proletariat, and that they have a great future before them. But if so, Kautsky's position collapses like a house of cards, or like the Utopia of a petty bourgeois, who believes that one can do without an acute struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. For a revolution is one continuous, desperate struggle, while the proletariat is the advance guard of