Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/140

 Kautsky sums up all the worn out sophisms (and a new one which he brings in) intended to defend social-patriotism, in the following paragraph"

"It is not true that the war is purely an imperialistic war, and that the alternative when the war broke out was: either Imperialism or Socialism. It is not true that the Socialist parties and the proletarian masses of Germany and France and, in many respects, those of England, listened stupidly to the call of a handful of parliamentarians, threw themselves into the arms of the imperialists, betrayed Socialism and thus brought about a failure without precedent in history."

A new sophism, a now lie to deceive the workers. The war, if you please was not a "purely'" imperialistic war.

Kautsky is terribly unsteady whenever he discusses the actual character of the present war and he dodges the precise and formal declarations of the Basel and Chemnitz conferences as carefully as a thief avoids the scene of his last robbery. In his pamphlet on National Power, etc., written in February, 1915, KauttskyKautsky [sic] states that "in the last analysis war is imperialistic'" (page 64). Now he makes a new reservation; not "purely imperialistic." What is it then?

Well, it is "nationalistic." And Kautsky comes to that conclusion by resorting to the following Plekhanovian logic:

"The present war is a child not only of Imperialism but of the Russian Revolution." Kautsky himself foresaw as early as 1904 that the Russian Revolution would give birth to a new form of Pan-Slavism, that "democratic Russia would unavoidably arouse the desire of the Austrian and Turkish Slaves for their independence. … Then the Polish question would become a burning one… Then Austria would collapse, for with the fall of Czarism the iron yoke would be removed which holds together many elements eager to draw away one from the other" (Kautsky himself cites the previous sentence from his article written in 1904). … The Russian Revolution … would give a new impetus to the nationalist aspirations of the East, and add Asiatic problems to the European problems. … All those problems are revealing their existence through violent symptoms during the present war and are exerting a powerful influence upon the temper of the popular masses, especially of the proletarian masses at a time when the ruling classes are dominated by imperialistic tendencies" (page 273, italics mine).

There is prostitution of Marxism for you! Since "'democratic Russia" would arouse the desires of the Eastern-European nations