Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/62

 Cossack counter-revolutionary insurrections, and which is paying millions to subsidize saboteurs, as a Parliamentary "opposition." What a profound philosophy!

Kautsky is only interested in the formal and legal aspect оf the question, and, when reading his disquistions on the Soviet constitution, one is reminded, of Bebel's word that lawyers are all thorough reactionaries. Kautsky, for instance, writes: "In reality the capitalists alone cannot be disfranchised. What are they, in the legal sense of the term? Property owners? Even in a country so far advanced economically as Germany, where the proletariat is so numerous the establishment of a Soviet republic would have disfranchised large masses of the people. In 1907, in the German Empire, the number of persons occupied in earning a livelihood for themselves and their families in the three great groups, agriculture, industry, and commerce, amounted roughly to thirty-five million wage earners and salaried employees, and seventeen million independent. Hence a party could well be a majority among the wage earners, but a minority of the population" (p. 33).

This is an example of Kautsky's arguments. Is it not the counter-revolutionary whining of a bourgeois? Why have you, Mr. Kautsky, relegated all the independent earners to the class of the disfranchised, when you well know that the overwhelming majority of the Russian peasants do not employ hired labor, and do not, therefore, lose their political rights? Is it not a downright falsification? Why have you not, oh, most learned economist, quoted the facts well known to you, and to be found in the same German statistical return for 1907, relating to hired labor in agriculture according to the size of farms? Why have you not produced for the benefit of the German workers, who are your readers, these facts which would show how very few are exploiters among the total number of "farmers" who figure in the German