Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/61

 the disfranchisement of the bourgeoisie is, therefore, characterized by a sweet naiveté which would have been touching in a child, but which is repulsive in a person who has not yet been officially certified to be feeble-minded.

"If the capitalists under universal suffrage had found themselves an insignificant minority, they would have more easily reconciled themselves to their fate" (p. 33). Is it not charming? Clever Kautsky has seen many instances in history and, of course, knows it perfectly well by observation of real life, that there are plenty of such landlords and capitalists who are ready to obey the will of a majority of the oppressed. Clever Kautsky persists in an attitude of "opposition" that is, in an attitude derived from Parliamentary warfare. He, indeed, textually says "opposition" (p. 34 and elsewhere). Oh, what a learned historian and politican! It would have done him good to know that "opposition" is a conception belonging to the peaceful and Parliamentary warfare only; that is, a conception corresponding to a non-revolutionary situation, to a situation marked by an absence of revolution. But in time of revolution one has to deal with a ruthless enemy, a party in civil war; and no amount of reactionary lamentations on the part of a petty bourgeois, who is afraid of such a war, as Kautsky is, will alter the fact. To view a ruthless civil war when the bourgeoisie is prepared to commit all sorts of crimes (the example of the Versaillese and their deals with Bismarck must have a meaning for every sane person who does not treat history like a Simple Simon) when the bourgeoisie summons to its assistance foreign States, and intrigues with them against the revolution—to consider such a war from the point of view of Parliamentary "opposition" is simply comical. It would appear that, according to Kautsky the muddle-head, the revolutionary proletariat ought to put on a night-cap and treat the bourgeoisie, which is organizing Czecho-Slovak and