Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/95

 like Kautsky could regard as Socialists. This petty bourgeoisie necessarily, inevitably, wavered and hesitated between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (Kerensky, Korniloff, Savinkoff), and the dictatorship of the proletariat: since the petty bourgeoisie, in virtue of its fundamental traits of character and its economic position, is incapable of any independent policy. It may be observed in passing, that Kautsky entirely runs away from Marxism by employing, in his analysis of the Russian revolution, the legal and formalistic conception (useful to the bourgeoisie as a screen for its domination over, and as a means of deceiving, the masses) of "Democracy," forgetting that "Democracy" means, in practice, sometimes the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and sometimes the impotent reformism of the petty bourgeoisie subject to that dictatorship, etc. According to Kautsky, then, there were in our capitalist conutry boiurgeois parties, and there was a proletarian party backed by the majority of the proletariat, but there were no petty bourgeois parties, that is, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries had no class roots, no petty bourgeois origins!

The hesitations and oscillations of the petty bourgeois Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries enlightened the masses and drove the overwhelming majority of them, all the "lower depths," the proletarians and semi-proletarians, away from such "leaders." Finally, the Bolsheviks obtained a majority on the Soviets (by November, 1917, so far as Petrograd and Moscow were concerned), while among the Social-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks the scissions became more pronounced.

The victorious Bolshevik revolution meant the end of all hesitations and the complete destruction of the monarchy and landlordism (which had still been in existence till the November revolution). The bourgeois revolution was carried out by us to the end. The peasantry as a whole was supporting us, since its antagonism to the Socialist proletariat could not break out at once. The