Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/68

 Such proletariats and such masses will only have to peruse our Soviet constitution, and they will at once say, here are our real men; here is a real labor party; here is a real workers' government, for it has not gulled the workers by talk about revolutions, as we used to be gulled by those leaders, and is really waging a war against the exploiters, is really carrying on a revolution, is really fighting for the complete emancipation of the working class!

If the exploiters have been disfranchised by the Soviets after twelve months' experience, it means that the Soviets are really organizations of the oppressed masses, and not organizations of Social Imperialists and Social Pacifists, who have sold themselves to the bourgeoisie. If the Soviets have disfranchised the exploiters, it means that they are not organs of petty bourgeois compromise with the capitalists, not parliamentary talking-shops after the heart of the Kautskys and the Macdonalds, but the organs of a real revolutionary proletariat who are waging a life-and-death struggle against the exploiters.

"Kautsky's pamphlet is almost unknown here," a well-informed comrade has written to me from Berlin a couple of days ago (to-day is October 30th). I should advise our ambassadors in Germany and Switzerland not to stint money in buying up this book and in distributing it gratis among the class-conscious workers, in order to trample in the mud the so-called European—that is, the Imperialist and reformist—Social-Democracy, which has long become a whited sepulchre.

At the end of his book, on pages 61 and 63, Mr. Kautsky laments over the fact that “the new theory [as he calls Bolshevism, in his fear even to approach the analysis o! the Commune of Paris made by Marx and Engels] "finds supporters even in old democracies, like, for instance, a Switzerland." Kautsky finds it unintelligible "how this theory could also be adopted by German Social-Democrats.

No; it is quite intelligible, as the revolutionary masses