Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/64

 their Soviets, have summoned to the work of political construction the classes which the bourgeoisie used to oppress and to stupefy, and begun themselves to build up a new porletarian State, begun, in the midst of raging battles, in the fire of civil-war, to lay down the fundamental principles of a State without exploiters, then all the scoundrels of the bourgeoisie, the entire band of blood-suckers, with Kautsky singing obligato, scream out about arbitrariness! Indeed, how can these workers and peasants, this mob, interpret their own laws? Whence are they to take the sense of justice—they, the common toilers, who are not seeking the assistance of educated lawyers, of bourgeois writers, of the Kautskys, and the wise old bureaucrats?

Mr. Kausky quotes from my speech of April 28th, 1918, the words: "The masses themselves determine the procedure and the time of elections." And Kautsky, the "pure democrat," infers: "Hence it would seem that every assembly of electors may determine the procedure of elections at their own discretion. Arbitrariness and the chance of getting rid of inconvenient oppositional elements within the ranks of the proletariat itself have thus been brought to a high level of perfection" (p. 37).

What is the difference between these remarks and the usual talk of the capitalist hack journalist who howls about the terrorism exercised in time of strikes by the men against the "industrious" and "willing" blacklegs? Why is the bureaucratic and bourgeois method of determining the electoral procedure in a purely bourgeois democracy not, arbitrariness? Why should the sense of justice be lower among the masses who have risen against their age-long exploiters, and who are being educated and hardened by this desperate struggle, than among the handful of bureaucrats, intellectuals, and lawyers brought up in bourgeois prejudices?

Kautsky is a true Socialist. You must not suspect sincerity of this most respectable family man, this