Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/138

 In his preacher-like way he consoles the oppressed masses by describing all the blessings of ultra-Imperialism, although he doesn't dare to affirm that there will be such a thing. Feuerbach showed clearly to those who defended religion on the ground that it offered a consolation to men, the actual reactionary meaning of such a consolation: "Whoever," he said, '"consoles a slave instead of inciting him to revolt against slavery offers help to the slaveholder."

The exploiting classes in order to retain their domination need the services of two retainers: the hangman and the priest. The hangman crushes out the protests and the revolt of the oppressed; the priests depict to them the beautiful state of affairs (and he does that the more successfully if he doesn't insist on the possibility of such a state of affairs) which will diminish their sufferings and their sacrifice while the class domination is maintained; he reconciles them with this domination, he coaxes them away from revolutionary activity, he saps their revolutionary strength, he destroys their revolutionary determination. Kautsky has transformed Marxism into the same immoralizing kind of counter-revolutionary theory, into miserable priestlike rant.

In 1909, in his pamphlet The Road to Power he admits a fact which no one has ever tried to refute, that is, the constant, exacerbation of capitalist antagonisms, the approach of an era of war and revolutions, of a "new revolutionary era."

There cannot be, he says, a premature revolution, and it would be an absolute betrayal of our cause to refuse to count on the possibility of victory at the time of an uprising although, before the struggle begins, one cannot deny the possibility of defeat."

The war broke out. Antagonisms became even more violent. The destitution of the masses assumed terrific proportions. The war drags on and spreads more and more, and Kautsky writes pamphlet after pamphlet, meekly submitting to the pleasure of the censor, avoiding all allusions to conquest and to the horrors of war, to the scandalous profiteering of the dealers in army supplies, to the high cost of living, to the military slavery of the mobilized workers; but he keeps on consoling and consoling the proletariat, by reminding it of other wars in which the bourgeoisie showed itself revolutionary or progressive, when Marx himself wished for the victory of this or that bourgeoisie; and he offers still more consolation in the shape of columns of figures, proving the possibility of a Capitalism without colonies and without exploitation, without war and without armaments, the best evidence that "peaceful democracy" is preferable.