Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/94

 the revolution remained a bourgeois, a bourgeois-democratic one. hen it became a movement, in conjunction with the poorest peasantry, with the semi-proletariat, with all the exploited, against Capitalism including the village rich, the village vultures and speculators, and to that extent the revolution became a Socialist one. To attempt to put artificially a Chinese wall between the two stages, and to separate them by any other factor than the degree of the preparedness of the proletariat and of its unity with the village poor, means completely to pervert and to vulgarize Marxism and to replace it by Liberalism. It means to smuggle through a reactionary defence of the bourgeoisie against the Socialist proletariat, under the cloak of quasi-learned references to the progressive character of the bourgeoisie as compared ith mediaevalism.

It is just because the Soviets, by uniting and drawing into political life the masses of workers and peasants, constitute the most sensitive and nearest to the people (in the sense in which Marx spoke in 1871 of a really popular revolution) index of the growth and development of the political maturity and class-consciousness of the masses, that they represent an immeasurably higher form and type of democracy.

The Soviet constitution was not drawn up "according to plan." It was not drawn up in a study, and was not imposed upon the laboring masses by bourgeois lawyers. No, this constitution grew up in the course of the development of the class-struggle in proportion as the class antagonisms were becoming more intensive. This is borne out by those very facts which Kautsky himself has to admit. At first the Soviets represented the peasantry as a whole, and the result was that the mental backwardness of the poorer peasants placed the leadership in the hands of the village vultures, of the prosperous peasants, of the petty bourgeois intellectuals. This was the period of the predominance of the petty bourgeois Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, whom only fools or turncoats