Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/63

 returns? I will tell you why: because you are a renegade, and have become a sycophant of the bouigeoisie.

"Capitalist," don’t you see, is a vague legal term, and Kautsky thunders forth, for the space of several pages, against the "arbitrariness" of the Soviet constitution. This great scholar permits the British bourgeoisie to elaborate, during several centuries, a new bourgeois constitution, but we, the workers and peasants of Russia, are not to be given any time by this representative of servile science: we must produce a constitution, worked out to the last detail, in the space of a few months!

Arbitrariness! Only think what a depth of meanest subserviency to the bourgeoisie, and of the most idiotic pedantry, is contained in such a reproach. When thoroughly bourgeois and, for the most part, even reactionary jurists of capitalist countries have in the course of, we may almost say, centuries, been drawing up rules and regulations and writing up hundreds of volumes of various codes and laws, and of interpretations of them to oppress the workers, to bind hand and foot of the poor man and to place a hundred and one hindrances and obstacles in the way of the simple and toiling mass of the people—when this is done the bourgeois Liberals and Mr. Kautsky can see no "arbitrariness"! It is all law and order! It has all been thought out and written down, how the poor man is to be kept down and squeezed. There are thousands and thouands of bourgeois lawyers and officials able so to interpret the laws that the worker and average peasant can never break through their barbed wire entanglements. This, of course, is not any arbitrariness; this, of course, is not a dictatorship of the filthy and profit-seeking exploiters who are drinking the blood of the people. Oh, it is nothing of the kind. It is but "pure democracy." which is becoming purer and purer every day. But when the toiling and exploited masses for the first time in history, separated by an Imperialist war from their brothers across the frontier, have