Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/88

 proletariat with the peasantry as a whole, since peasantry as a whole consists of small producers who adhere to the system of commodity production. Subsequently, the Bolsheviks were arguing further, the proletariat would ally with itself the semi-proletariat (that is, all those who are exploited and toil), would neutralize the middle peasantry and would overthrow the bourgeoisie: this would be the Socialist revolution, as distinguished from the bourgeois democratic revolution (see my pamphlet: "The Two Tactics," issued in 1905, and reprinted at Petrograd in 1907, in the collected volume: "Twelve Years").

Kautsky took an indirect share in this discussion in 1905, in connection with the symposium got up by Plekhanoff, then a Menshevik, and expressed the opinion which, on the main issue, was directed against Plekhanoff. This provoked at the time a particular ridicule of the Bolshevik press. But now Kautsky does not even hint at those old discussions for fear of being exposed to ridicule by his own statements, and thereby deprives the German reader of any chance of gaining an insight into the gist of the matter. Indeed, Mr. Kautsky cannot well tell the German workers in 1918 that in 1905 he had been in favor of an alliance of the workers with the peasants, and not with the Liberal bourgeoisie, and on what conditions he advocated such an alliance, and what a programme he had been proposing for it.

Having withdrawn from his old position, Kautsky, in the guise of an "economic analysis," with proud words about "historical materialism," is now advocating the subjection of the workers to the bourgeoisie, chewing, with the help of quotations from the Menshevik Masloff, the cud of the old Liberal views of the Mensheviks, the quotations serving the purpose of proving the brand-new idea about the backwardness of Russia, and helping to draw from this brand-new idea the old deduction that the proletariat in time of a bourgeois revolution must not go beyond