Page:Left-Wing Communism.djvu/111

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
109

dictatorship of the proletariat. The real nature of these leaders has asserted itself repeatedly during the German Kornilov period—i.e., during the Luttwitz-Kapp coup d'etat. The short articles of Karl Kautsky serve as a miniature, but vivid, example. These are entitled "Decisive Moments" and appear in the Freiheit, the organ of the Independents (March 30, 1920). There is also the article by Arthur Crispien entitled "The Political Situation" (ibid April 14, 1920). These men are absolutely incapable of thinking and reasoning like revolutionaries. They are sentimental middle-class democrats, who are a thousand times more dangerous to the proletariat when they proclaim themselves to be adherents of the Soviet system and of proletarian dictatorship; for, as a matter of course, they will, upon every critical and difficult occasion, commit acts of treason—"sincerely" confident all the time that they are assisting the proletariat! Is it not a fact that, when the Hungarian Social-Democrats quailed and whined before the agents of the Entente capitalists and the Entente executioners, they claimed that all the time their one desire was to "assist" the proletariat? And these were men who had undergone a Communist baptism, but who, owing to their cowardice and lack of character, considered the position of the Soviet Government in Hungary as hopeless.