The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade/Preface
PREFACE.
The pamphlet, "Dictatorship of the Proletariat," by Kautsky, which has recently been published in Vienna, offers the most palpable exhibition of that complete and most disgraceful bankruptcy of the Second International which has long been the subject of talk among all honest Socialists in all countries. In a number of States the question of the proletarian revolution is now becoming the practical question of the day, and therefore an examination of Kautsky's renegade sophisms and complete abjuration of Marxism is a matter of necessity.
It is important, first of all, to point out that the present writer has had numerous occasions since the beginning of the war to refer to Kautsky's rupture with Marxism. A number of articles published by me in the course of 1914–1916 in the "Sotsial-Democrat" and the "Kommunist," issued abroad, dealt with this subject. The articles were afterwards collected and published under the auspices of the Petrograd Soviet, under the title "Against the Current," by G. Zinovieff and N. Lenin, Petrograd, 1918. In a pamphlet, published at Geneva in 1915, and simultaneously translated into German and French, I wrote about Kautskianism as follows:
"Kautsky, the greatest authority of the Second International, offers an extremely typical and telling example of how a merely verbal adhesion to Marxism has brought about, in practice, its transformation into what may be called 'Struveism' or 'Brentanism' (that is, into a Liberal bourgeois doctrine sanctioning a non-revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat, as taught, particularly, by the Russian writer Peter Struve and the German Lujo Brentano). We observe this also in the case of Plekhanoff. By means of obvious sophism the living revolutionary soul is ripped out of Marxism, in which everything is accepted except the revolutionary methods of struggle, their propaganda and preparation, and the education of the masses for that purpose. Kautsky mechanically 'reconciles' the fundamental idea of Socialist-Chauvinism namely, the defense of one's fatherland in the present war, with a diplomatic—that is, verbal—concession to the 'left wing' in the form of abstention from voting the war credits and of a formal proclamation of one's opposition to the war. The same Kautsky who in 1909 wrote a book on the approach of the era of revolutions and on the connection between War and Revolution, and who in 1912 signed the Basel manifesto on the duty of taking revolutionary advantage of any future war, is now trying, in all sorts of ways, to justify and to 'deck out' the Chauvinist variety of 'Socialism,' and, like Plekhanoff, joins the bourgeoisie in pooh-poohing all idea of revolution and all steps for an immediate revolutionary struggle. … But the working class cannot attain its world revolutionary object without waging a ruthless war against such apostasy, such spinelessness, such subserviency to opportunism, and such unparallelled theoretical vulgarization of Marxism. Kautsky is not an accident, but a social product of the contradictions inherent in the Second International, which combined lip-loyalty to Marxism with actual submisison to Opportumism." ("Socialism and the War," by G. Zinovieff and N. Lenin, Geneva, 1915, pp. 13–14.)
Again, in my book "Imperialism as the Latest Stage of Capitalism," which was written in 1916 and published in Petrograd in 1917, I examined in detail the theoretical fallacy of all the discussions of Kautsky about Imperialism. I quoted the definition of Imperialism given by Kautsky: "Imperialism is the product of a highly developed industrial capitalism. It embodies the endeavor of every industrial capitalist nation to annex or to subject all the extensive agrarian (the italics are Kautsky's) areas, irrespectively of the nations by which they are peopled." I showed how utterly incorrect this definition was, and how it aimed at glossing over the most profound contradictions of Imperialism, and thus at effecting a reconcilition with Opportunism. I quoted my own definition of Imperialsm, as follows: "Imperialism is Capitalism in that stage of development in which monopolies and financial capital have attained a preponderating influence, the export of capital has acquired great importance, the international trusts have begun the partition of the world, and the biggest capitalist countries have completed the division of the entire terrestrial globe among themselves." I showed in this connection that Kautsky's criticism of Imperialism is even beneath bourgeois criticism.
Lastly, in August and September, 1917—that is, before the proletarian Revolution in Russia (which took place on November 7th, 1917)—I wrote a book (published in Petrograd at the beginning of 1918), "The State and Revolution: The Marxist teaching on the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution," in which I devoted a special chapter, under the title, "The Vulgarization of Marx by the Opportunists," to Kautsky, showing that he had completely distorted the doctrines of Marx, that he had adulterated them in conformity with the demands of Opportunism, and that, "he had abjured the revolution in practice, while recognizing it in words."
As a matter of fact, the chief theoretical mistake of Kautsky in his pamphlet on the dictatorship of the proletariat lies just in this opportunist distortion of Marx's theories of the State which were pointed out by me in my book "The State and Revolution."
It was necessary to make these preliminary observations in order to prove that Kaustky had been publicly charged by me with apostasy long before the Bolsheviks assumed State power, and were condemned on that account by him.