Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/66

 Liebers, well as the Krasnoffs, who were receiving shells from the Germans through the Ukrainian and Tiflis Mensheviks, would have sat quietly waiting until we were ready with out proper criminal code, and, like the purest democrats, would have confined themselves to the role of an "opposition."

No less indignation has been aroused in Kautsky's breast by the fact that the Soviet constitution disfranchises all those who "employ hired labor with a view to profit." "A home worker or a small master," Kautsky writes, "with one single journeyman, may live and feel quite like a proletarian, but he has no vote!" (p. 36.) What a departure from bourgeois "democracy!" What an act of injustice! Up till now all Marxists thought—and proved it by thousands of facts—that the small masters were most unscrupulous exploiters of hired labor, but our Tartuffe takes not the class of small masters, of course (why keep on always recalling the mischievous theory of class war?), but single individuals, single exploiters, who "live and feel and like proletarians." The famous "thrifty Agnes," who was thought to have been long dead, is risen to life again under Kautsky's pen. This "thrifty Agnes" was invented and set going in German literature a score of years ago by that "pure" democrat, the bourgeois Liberal, Eugen Richter. He was predicting untold calamities from the dictatorship of the proletariat, from the confiscation of the capital of the exploiters, and used to ask with an innocent air, Who was a capitalist in the legal sense of the term? He took as an example the poor, thrifty seamstress, the "thrifty Agnes," who was robbed of her last coppers by the evil-minded proletarian dictators. There was a time when all German Social-Democracy was poking fun at this "thrifty Agnes" of the pure democrat, Eugen Richter. But this was a long, long time ago, when Bebel was still living, who used to tell the truth publicly that there was a large number of National-