Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/87



As I have said already, Kautsky's book ought to have been called, if the title had faithfully reflected its contents, "Variations on the bourgeois attacks against the Bolsheviks," and not "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat."

The old Menshevik theories about the bourgeois character of the Russian revolution—that is, the old misinterpretation of Marxism by the Mensheviks which was rejected by Kautsky in 1905—are now once more warmed up by our theoretician. However tedious the process may be for Russian Marxists, we must stop to dwell upon this subject.

The Russian revolution would be a bourgeois revolution, so said all the Marxists in Russia before 1905. The Mensheviks, however, adulterated Marxism by Liberalism, in that they reasoned therefrom that the proletariat must not go beyond what was acceptable to the bourgeoisie, and must pursue a policy of compromise with it. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, argued that that was a bourgeois Liberal theory. The bourgeoisie they said, was trying to effect a change of the State, on bourgeois, on reformist, not on revolutionary lines, by preserving so far as possible, the monarchy, landlordism, etc. The proletariat must not allow itself to be crippled by the reformism of the bourgeoisie, but must carry through the bourgeois democratic revolution to the end. As for the class correlation of strength in the time of a bourgeois revolution, the Bolsheviks gave the following formula: the proletariat, by gaining the adhesion of the peasantry, would neutralize the Liberal bourgeoisie, and would raze to the ground the monrachy, landlordism, and all the survivals of the Middle Ages. The bourgeois character of the revolution will be manifested precisely in this alliance of the