Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/80

 But the Bolshevik party has never been guilty of that. In my letter to the American workers on August 20th, 1918, I expressly repudiated such folly, saying that we were counting on an American revolution, but not by any given date. The same idea was more than once propounded by me in my controversy with the Left Social Revolutionaries and the Left Commnuists in January and March, 1918. Kautsky has committed a little forgery, on which he has based his criticism of Bolshevism. Kautsky has confounded a policy which counts on a European revolution, in a more or less near future date, with a policy relying upon a European revolution on a precise date. A little forgery, nothing more.

The last-named policy would have been a folly, but the first-named is obligatory on all Marxists and all revolutionary proletarians and Internationalists, because it alone takes proper and correct account in a Marxist way, of the objective situation in all European countries, which has been brought about by the war, and alone corresponds to the international duties of the proletariat. By substituting for the important question about the premises of revolutionary tactics in general the petty question about an error which the Bolshevik revolutionaries might have made, but did not, Kautsky has abjured all revolutionary policy. A renegade in practical politics, he has not been able, even in theory, to put the question about the objective prerequisites of a revolutionary policy properly.

But here we have come up to the second point.

Second, it is the duty of every Marxist to count on a European revolution, if the situation is revolutionary in tendency. It is an elementary axiom of Marxism that the policy of the Socialist proletariat must be different when the situation is revolutionary and when it is not. If Kautsky had put to himself this question, which is obligatory for every Marxist, he would have seen that the answer was absolutely against him. Long before the war, all Marxists, all Socialists, were agreed that the European