- Author: Lenin
- Date: Nov 1918
- Location: Russia
- Link: http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/RK18.html
- PDF: see attachment at the bottom of this page.
Kautsky's pamphlet, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, recently published in Vienna (Wien, I918, Ignaz Brand, 63 pp.) is a most lucid example of that utter and ignominious bankruptcy of the Second International about which all honest Socialists in all countries have been talking for a long time. The proletarian revolution is now becoming a practical issue in a number of countries, and an examination of Kautsky's renegade sophistries and complete renunciation of Marxism is therefore essential.
- Author: Lenin
- Date: Nov 1918
- Location: Russia
- Link: http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/RK18.html
- PDF: see attachment at the bottom of this page.
Kautsky's pamphlet, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, recently published in Vienna (Wien, I918, Ignaz Brand, 63 pp.) is a most lucid example of that utter and ignominious bankruptcy of the Second International about which all honest Socialists in all countries have been talking for a long time. The proletarian revolution is now becoming a practical issue in a number of countries, and an examination of Kautsky's renegade sophistries and complete renunciation of Marxism is therefore essential.
First of all, however, it should be emphasized that the present writer has had numerous occasions, from the very beginning of the war, to point to Kautsky's rupture with Marxism. A number of articles published in the course of 1914-16 in the Sotsial-Demokrat[1] and the Kommunist,[2] issued abroad, dealt with this subject. These articles were afterwards collected and published by the Petrograd Soviet under the title Against the Stream, by G. Zinoviev and N. Lenin (Petrograd, 1918, 550 pp.). In a pamphlet published in Geneva in 1915 and translated into German and French [3] in the same year I wrote about "Kautskyism" as follows: …