Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/139

 Not daring to deny that the sufferings of the masses are becoming more and more acute and that we are in reality facing a truly revolutionary situation (for the censor would not let him speak of such things), Kautsky toadies before the bourgeoisie and he depicts a "perspective" (about whose possibility he does not comment himself) of a form of struggle in the new era, entailing less suffering and fewer sacrifices. Franz Mehring and Rosa Luxemburg were well justified in calling Kautsky a prostitute (Madchen fur alle).

In August 1915 a revolutionary crisis arose in Russia. The Czar promised to the Duma "consolations" for the suffering masses. The regime which followed could be designated as "ultra-autocracy" if we can designate by the word ultra-Imperialism the refusal of the capitialists to go in for armaments and their decision to agree among themselves to insure a durable peace.

Let us suppose that tomorrow some hundred of the world's largest financiers, interested in hundreds of interlocking enterprises of colossal size should promise to the nations that they will insist on disarmament after the war. Let us suppose that for a minute so as to follow better the stupid arguments of Kautsky's theory. Even then it would be a betrayal of the proletariat to advise them against revolutionary activities, for without that activity all these promises and all this beautiful perspective would be simply an idle dream.

The war has brought to the capitalists not only huge profits and the promise of new lands to exploit in Turkey, in China, etc., of new orders and of new loans at a higher rate of interest, but it has also brought to them greater political advantages, for it has divided the proletariat against itself, it has corrupted it. Kautsky has lent his help to that perversion, he has sanctioned that schism of the struggling proletarians, in the name of a union with the opportunists of his country, with the Sudekums of every water. And there are people who cannot understand that unity among the old parties simply means the alliance of the national proletariat with its national bourgeoisie and the division of the proletariat into several nations.

The preceding chapter had been written when the Neue Zeit for May 28, 1918, came off the press, containing Kautsky's concluding remarks on the "Bankruptcy of the Social-Democracy."