Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/82

 to be still regarded as a Marxist, has shown himself to be a short-sighted Philistine, unable to see the approaching revolution, like those Philistines of 1847, who were so pitilessly derided by Marx.

And here we come up to the third point: what are to be the peculiarities of a revolutionary policy at the time of a European revolutionary situation? Kautsky, having become a regenade, was too timid to ask this question, which is obligatory for every Marxist. Kautsky reasons like a typical Philistine: Has a general European revolution broken out or not? If it has, then he also is prepared to become a revolutionary. But then, we may observe, every scoundrel (after the manner of those who are now trying to ingratiate themselves with the victorious Bolsheviks) would be prepared to proclaim himself a revolutionary. But if the revolution has not arrived, Kautsky will turn away his face from it. Kautsky has no understanding at all of that truth that a revolutionary Marxist is distinguished from the ordinary Philistine by his ability and willingness to preach to the still ignorant masses the necessity of the approaching revolution, to prove its inevitableness, to explain its advantage to the people, and to prepare for it the proletariat and all the toiling and exploited masses.

Kautsky has attributed to the Bolsheviks an absurdity by saying that they had staked everything on the card that a European revolution would break out by a given date. This absurdity has turned against Kautsky himself, because what he implied was this: the tactics of the Bolsheviks would have been correct if a European revolution had broken out by August 5th, 1918, on which date, as Kautsky tells us, he was writing his pamphlet. But since, a few weeks after this August 5th, it became clear that a revolution was approaching in a number of European countries, the whole apostasy of Kautsky, his whole method of falsifying Marxism, and his inability to reason revolutionary, or even to put the question in a