* I have just read a leading article in the Frankfurter Zeitung
[29] (No. 293, October 22, 1918), giving an enthusiastic summary of Kautsky's pamphlet. This organ of the Stock Exchange is satisfied. And no wonder! And a comrade writes to me from Berlin that
Vorwärts,[30] the organ of the Scheidemanns, has declared in a special article that it subscribes to almost every line Kautsky has written. Hearty congratulations!
not deceive the workers by talking about reforms in the way all the above-mentioned leaders have done, but is fighting the exploiters in real earnest, is making a revolution in real earnest and is actually fighting for the complete emancipation of the workers."
The fact that after a year's "experience" the Soviets have deprived the exploiters of the franchise
shows that the Soviets are really organizations of the oppressed masses and not of social-imperialists and social-pacifists who have sold themselves to the bourgeoisie. The
fact that the Soviets have disfranchised the exploiters shows that they are not organs of petty-bourgeois compromise with the capitalists, not organs of parliamentary chatter (on the part of the Kautskys, the Longuets and the MacDonalds), but organs of the genuinely revolutionary proletariat which is waging a life and death struggle against the exploiters.
"Kautsky's book is almost unknown here," a well-informed comrade in Berlin wrote to me a few days ago (today is October 30). I would advise our ambassadors in Germany and Switzerland not to stint thousands in buying up this book and
distributing it gratisamong the class-conscious workers in order to trample in the mud this "European" -- read: imperialist and reformist -- Social-Democracy, which has long been a "stinking corpse."
* * *
At the end of his book, on pages 61 and 63, Mr. Kautsky bitterly laments the fact that the "new theory" (as he calls Bolshevism, fearing even to touch Marx's and Engels' analysis of the Paris Commune) "finds supporters even in old democracies like Switzerland, for instance." "It is incomprehensible" to Kautsky "how this theory can be acdopted by German Social-Democrats."
No, it is quite comprehensible; for after the serious lessons of the war the revolutionary masses are becoming sick and tired of the Scheidemanns and the Kautskys.
"We" have always been in favour of democracy, Kautsky writes, yet we are supposed suddenly to renounce it!
"We," the opportunists of Social-Democracy, have always been opposed to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and Kolbs and Co. proclaimed this
long ago. Kautsky knows this and vainly expects that he will be able to conceal from his readers the obvious fact that he has "returned to the fold" of the Bernsteins and Kolbs.
"We," the revolutionary Marxists, have never made a fetish of "pure" (bourgeois) democracy. As is known, in 1903 Plekhanov was a revolutionary Marxist (before his unfortunate turn, which brought him to the position of a Russian Scheidemann). And in that year Plekhanov declared at the congress of our Party, which was then adopting its program, that in the revolution the proletariat would, if necessary, disfranchise the capitalists and disperse any parliament that was found to be counter-revolutionary. That this is the only view that corresponds to Marxism will be clear to anybody even from the statements of Marx and Engels which I have quoted above; it follows obviously from all the fundamental principles of Marxism.
"We," the revolutionary Marxists, never made the speeches to the people that the Kautskyites of all nations love to make, cringing before the bourgeoisie, adapting themselves to bourgeois parliamentarism, keeping silent about the bourgeois character of modern democracy and demanding only its extension, only that it be carried to its logical conclusion.
"We" said to the bourgeoisie: You, exploiters and hypocrites, talk about democracy, while at every step you erect thousands of barriers to prevent the
oppressed masses from taking part in politics. We take you at your word and, in the interests of these masses, demand the extension of
y o u r bourgeois democracy in order to prepare the masses for revolution for the purpose of overthrowing you, the exploiters. And if you exploiters attempt to offer resistance to our proletarian revolution we will ruthlessly suppress you; we will deprive you of all rights; more than that, we will not give you any bread, for in our proletarian republic the exploiters will have no rights, they will be deprived of fire and water for we are Socialists in real earnest, and not in the Scheidemann, Kautsky fashion.
That is what "we," the revolutionary Marxists, said, and will say -- and that is why the oppressed masses will support us and be with us, while the Scheidemanns and the Kautskys will be swept into the renegades' cesspool.