Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/93

 to the majority of the population (including therefore, the exploiters.) On the other hand, he insists, as against ourselves, upon the inevitableness of the bourgeois character of the revolution—bourgeois because the peasantry as a whole is still in the grip of bourgeois social relations—and yet pretends to defend the proletarian, the class and Marxist point of view! Instead of an "economic analysis," we have a first-class olla podrida. Marxism is replaced by all sorts of fragments of Liberal doctrines, and by a propaganda in favor of flunkey-like subserviency to the bourgeoisie and the village vultures.

The question so hopelessly muddled up by Kautsky, was elucidated by the Bolsheviks so far back as 1905. Yes, our revolution is a bourgeois revolution as long as we go hand in hand with the peasantry as a whole. We were fully aware of this, had repeated it a thousand times from 1905 onwards, and never attemptted either to skip over this necessary stage of the historical process, or to "abolish" it by decrees. Kautsky's endeavors to convict us on this point has in fact convicted his own confusion of mind and his own fear to recall what he wrote in 1905, when he was not yet a turncoat.

But in 1917, from April onwards, and long before the November revolution, that is, long before we assumed power, we said and explained publicly to the people: the revolution would no longer be able to stop at this stage, as the country had gone beyond that, as capitalism had advanced and as ruin had attained such gigantic dimensions as to demand, whether one wanted it or not, a further advance towards Socialism. For there was no other way of advancing, of saving the country, worn out by the war, and of relieving the sufferings of the workers and the exploited. It turned out just as we had predicted. The course of the revolution bore out the truth of our cratic one. Then it became a movement, in conjunction with the entire peasantry, against the monarchy, against the landlords, against mediaevalism, and to that extent