people, is approving the part played by the petty bourgeois in helping Capitalism to trick the workers and to harness them to the chariot of the Imperialists. Kautsky is advocating a characteristically bourgeois and Philistine-like policy, imagining (and trying to instill into the minds of the masses the absurd idea) that a watchword can alter the real position of affairs. The entire history of bourgeois democracy refutes this illusion, since the bourgeois democrats have always put forward all sorts of attractive watchwords to deceive the people. What is necessary to test their sincerity, to compare their deeds with their words, to discard the idealistic charlatan phrases, and to seek for the class actuality. An Imperialist war does not cease to be Imperialist through the mere fact that charlatans or phrase-mongers or Philistines put forward and proclaim attractive watchwords. It ceases to be such only when the class which carries on the Imperialist war, and which is connected with it by millions of economic threads (in some cases, ropes), is overthrown and is replaced at the helm by the really revolutionary class, the proletariat. There is no other way of getting out of an Imperialist war, or of the necessarily following Imperialist predatory peace.
By approving the foreign policy of the Mensheviks, and declaring it to have been Internationalist and Zimmerwaldian, Kautsky, first, proves thereby the hollowness of the opportunist Zimmerwaldian majority (from which we, the Left Zimmerwaldians, at once dissociated ourselves), and, secondly—and this is the most important thing—Kautsky passes from the position of the proletariat to that of the petty bourgeoisie, from the revolutionary to the reformist position.
The proletariat fights for the revolutionary overthrow of the Imperialist bourgeoisie, while the petty bourgeois fights for a reformist "improvement" of Imperialism, for adaptation and submission to it. When Kautsky was still a Marxist (for instance, in March, 1909, when he was
( 71 )
