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 with Bernstein at their head. But one fact is almost unknown, which, however, cannot be passed over if we are to apply ourselves to the task of investigating how it was that Kautsky rolled down into the disgraceful morass of confusion and defense of Social-Chauvinism at the time of greatest crisis, in 1914–1915. This fact is that before he came forward against the best-known representatives of Opportunism in France (Millerand, Jaures), and Germany (Bernstein), Kautsky had shown very great vaciliation.

The Russian Marxist journal The Dawn, which was published at Stuttgart in 1901–2, and advocated revolutionary proletarian doctrines, had to call Kautsky to account, denouncing his resolution at the Paris International Socialist Congress of 1900 as a "piece of elastic," because of its evasive, temporizing and conciliatory attitude towards the Opportunists. Letters have been published from Kautsky's pen in Germany revealing no less hesitancy before he took the field against Bernstein. Of immeasurably greater importance, however, is the circumstance that, in his very debates with the Opportunists, in his formulation of the question and his method of treating it we can observe, now that we are investigating the history of his latest betrayal of Marxism, his systematic gravitation towards Opportunism, and that precisely on this question of the State.

Let us take Kautsky's first big work against Opportunism: Bernstein and the Social-Democratic Program. Kautsky refutes Bernstein in detail; but the characteristic thing about it is this: Bernstein in his famous, or infamous, Socialist Fundamentals accuses Marx of Blanquism—an accusation since repeated thousands of times by the Opportunists and Liberals of Russia against the representatives of Revolutionary Marxism, the Bolsheviks. In this connection Bernstein dwells particularly on Marx's Civil War in France, and tries—as we saw, quite unsuccessfully—to identify Marx's view of the lessons of the Commune with that of Proudhon. He also pays particular attention to Marx's conclusion, emphasized by him in his preface of 1872 to the Communist Manifesto to the effect that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machine and set it going for its own purposes." The dictum pleased Bernstein so much that he repeated it no less than three times in his book—interpreting it in the most distorted Opportunist sense. We have seen what Marx means—that the working class must shatter, break, blow up ("sprengen," explode, is the expression used by Engels), the whole State machine; whereas, according to Bernstein, it would appear