Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/9



The pamphlet, "Dictatorship of the Proletariat," by Kautsky, which has recently been published in Vienna, offers the most palpable exhibition of that complete and most disgraceful bankruptcy of the Second International which has long been the subject of talk among all honest Socialists in all countries. In a number of States the question of the proletarian revolution is now becoming the practical question of the day, and therefore an examination of Kautsky's renegade sophisms and complete abjuration of Marxism is a matter of necessity.

It is important, first of all, to point out that the present writer has had numerous occasions since the beginning of the war to refer to Kautsky's rupture with Marxism. A number of articles published by me in the course of 1914–1916 in the "Sotsial-Democrat" and the "Kommun­ist," issued abroad, dealt with this subject. The articles were afterwards collected and published under the auspices of the Petrograd Soviet, under the title "Against the Current," by G. Zinovieff and N. Lenin, Petrograd, 1918. In a pamphlet, published at Geneva in 1915, and simultaneously translated into German and French, I wrote about Kautskianism as follows:

"Kautsky, the greatest authority of the Second International, offers an extremely typical and telling example of how a merely verbal adhesion to Marxism has brought about, in practice, its transformation into what may be called 'Struveism' or 'Brentanism' (that is, into a Liberal bourgeois doctrine sanctioning a non-revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat, as taught, particularly, by the Russian writer Peter Struve and the German Lujo Brentano). We observe this also in the case of