Karl Kautsky’s The Dictatorship of the Proletariat appeared in Vienna in 1918, a sixty-three-page pamphlet in which the leading theorist of the Second International set out to prove that the Bolsheviks had betrayed democracy. Lenin answered it in a polemic written that autumn, and the text known as The International and Soviet Russia is that answer: part close reading, part prosecution, part revolutionary catechism. It belongs to the pamphlet wars of the First World War’s final year, when the question of what a workers’ state should look like had stopped being academic.
“The proletarian revolution is now becoming a practical issue in a number of countries, and an examination of Kautsky’s renegade sophistries and his complete renunciation of Marxism is therefore essential.”
The central claim is blunt. Kautsky, in Lenin’s account, has not merely made errors of judgment but has repudiated Marxism itself, and the proof lies in a single word. Marx had written of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as the necessary form of the transition from capitalism; Kautsky dismisses the phrase as “a little word” dropped in a private letter of 1875. From that dismissal, Lenin argues, everything else follows: the preference for “pure democracy,” the refusal to distinguish bourgeois from proletarian democracy, the treatment of the Soviet state as an unfortunate deviation, and the practical advice that the Russian workers should have contented themselves with a Constituent Assembly.
From the “Little Word” to the Paris Commune
Lenin’s 1920 Preface and the Charge of Bankruptcy
Lenin opens his 1920 preface by treating Kautsky’s 1918 Vienna pamphlet, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, as documentary evidence of the “utter and ignominious bankruptcy of the Second International.” This is not a fresh quarrel, he insists: he had accused Kautsky of breaking with Marxism from the first days of the war, in articles written for Sotsial-Demokrat and Kommunist between 1914 and 1916 and later collected by Zinoviev and himself as Against the Stream. He reaches back to his 1915 Geneva pamphlet Socialism and War, where “Kautskyism” was already defined as a Marxism verbal in theory and Struvist or Brentanoist in practice—Marxism stripped of its revolutionary spirit while every other part is retained, the better to reconcile social-chauvinism, the defence of the fatherland, with sham concessions to the Left. The record is marshalled: Kautsky’s 1909 book on revolutions, his signature on the 1912 Basle Manifesto, and then the 1916 Imperialism, where Lenin had attacked Kautsky’s definition of imperialism as industrial nations annexing agrarian territory for glossing over the contradictions, and had set against it his own: monopoly and finance capital, the export of capital, the division of the world among trusts and among the great powers. The State and Revolution, written in August–September 1917 before the October insurrection, had already charged Kautsky in its sixth chapter with repudiating revolution in deeds while accepting it in words.
Dictatorship, Democracy, and the Abuse of Marx
Kautsky, Lenin says, poses the question as one of “dictatorial” versus “democratic” methods, calls the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries socialists in name only, and never notices that the dictatorship in dispute is the proletarian state against the bourgeois state. Twenty of his sixty-three pages go to “presocialist” democracy; the phrase “bourgeois democracy” is avoided. He dismisses Marx’s formula of the dictatorship of the proletariat as “a single word,” “a little word,” dropped in an 1875 letter—an insult to Marxism, Lenin says, given that Marx and Engels discussed dictatorship before and after the Paris Commune, from 1852 to 1891. The root of the error is a method: eclecticism and sophistry in place of dialectics, and behind the method, subservience to opportunism. When Kautsky says “literally” dictatorship means the abolition of democracy and the rule of one man, Lenin answers that a dictatorship may be exercised by a class or an oligarchy, and that it abolishes democracy only for the oppressed class. Dictatorship is rule resting directly on force, unrestricted by law; the proletarian dictatorship is rule won and maintained by violence against the bourgeoisie. Kautsky’s distinction between a “condition” and a “form of government” is a fraud designed to make revolutionary violence vanish from the discussion. His talk of Britain and America as possible peaceful transitions ignores that in the 1870s those countries lacked the militarism and bureaucracy they now possess. His appeal to the Paris Commune’s universal suffrage ignores that the bourgeoisie fled to Versailles—where “socialist” Louis Blanc sat—and that Paris warred against Versailles; Engels is quoted on the Commune’s own authoritarian measures. A class, Kautsky says, can rule but not govern; Lenin calls this a muddle, and concludes that Kautsky has turned Marx into a common liberal, outdoing Bernstein.
Pure Democracy and the Class Content of Parliaments
No “pure democracy” exists while classes exist; Kautsky takes from Marxism only what liberals can accept. Lenin arrays Engels against him—the state as an instrument of exploitation, the “free people’s state” as nonsense, the letter to Bebel of March 28, 1875, the introduction to The Civil War in France, universal suffrage as a gauge of working-class maturity—and Marx on the Commune as a working, not a parliamentary, body. Kautsky is silent on how American or Swiss democracy treats strikers, and rhapsodises over “protection of the minority” and the Whigs and Tories. He forgets that bourgeois democracy protects only other bourgeois parties: on fundamental questions the proletariat meets martial law or pogroms, and the more developed the democracy, the more imminent the pogrom or civil war when a profound political divergence threatens the bourgeoisie. The examples are chosen from peacetime as well as wartime—the Dreyfus case in republican France, the lynching of Negroes and internationalists in democratic America, Ireland and Ulster in democratic Britain, the baiting of Bolsheviks in April 1917 in democratic Russia. As democracy develops, parliaments are subjected by the stock exchange and the bankers; yet the Bolsheviks used the Fourth Duma better than probably any other party, winning the entire workers’ curia in 1912–14. Only a liberal forgets the historical limitations of the bourgeois parliamentary system, whose formal equality coexists with real constraints that turn proletarians into wage-slaves. Socialists expose this to prepare revolution; Kautsky now extols a moribund democracy. Proletarian democracy, of which the Soviet government is one form, expands democracy unprecedentedly for the exploited majority—and Kautsky gives it two pages against dozens for “pure democracy.”
The Veil of Foreign Policy and the Soviet State Apparatus
No bourgeois state conducts foreign policy openly; deception is widest and subtlest in democratic France, Switzerland, America and Britain. The Soviet government tore away the veil of mystery, a cardinal fact in an era of predatory wars and secret treaties for dividing spheres of influence, and Kautsky ignores it. On the state he picks at trifles like indirect elections under the Soviet Constitution while missing the class nature of the apparatus. Under bourgeois democracy capitalists use a thousand tricks to drive the people from administrative work and from freedom of press and assembly; the Soviet government is the first in the world—strictly the second, after the Paris Commune—to enlist the exploited in administration. Workers see bourgeois parliaments as alien instruments of a hostile class; the Soviets are the direct organisation of working and exploited people, with the urban proletariat, best united by large enterprises, as vanguard. The old apparatus—bureaucracy, privileges of wealth, education, connections—disappears. Freedom of the press ceases to be hypocrisy once printing-plants and paper stocks are taken from the bourgeoisie; the best buildings, palaces and manor-houses were taken at a stroke, making freedom of assembly a million times more democratic. Indirect elections to non-local Soviets make congresses easier, cheaper, more flexible, more accessible, and permit quick recall or delegation of deputies. Proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy; to miss this one must serve the bourgeoisie or be politically dead. Where in any bourgeois country does the average worker or farm labourer enjoy such liberty of meetings, printing, and promoting his own class to administer the state? Workers worldwide instinctively sympathise with the Soviet Republic as a democracy for the poor. In bourgeois countries the oppressed are governed by bourgeois bureaucrats, parliamentarians and judges; in Russia the bureaucratic machine has been smashed, old judges sent packing, the bourgeois parliament dispersed, and Soviets control bureaucrats and elect judges.
Shylock’s Pound of Flesh: Equality Between Exploiter and Exploited
Kautsky argues from “pure” democracy like Shylock demanding his pound of flesh—equality for all citizens. Can there be equality between exploited and exploiter? His first argument is that exploiters have always formed a small minority. One may reason Marxist-fashion from the relation of exploited and exploiters, or liberal-fashion from majority and minority. The Marxist says exploiters transform the state into an instrument of class rule, so that the democratic state is democracy for exploiters; the state of the exploited must be democracy for the exploited and a means of suppressing exploiters, which means inequality for that class. The liberal says the majority decides and the minority submits, and nothing need be said of class character. Kautsky argues exactly so. His second argument asks why the rule of the proletariat should assume a form incompatible with democracy, and explains verbosely, with a quotation from Marx and the Commune’s election figures, that the proletariat is the majority; a regime rooted in the people has no reason to encroach on democracy, employing violence only to protect it, and it would be suicidal to abolish universal suffrage, “that deep source of mighty moral authority.” The exploited/exploiter relation has vanished, leaving majority, minority, democracy in general. Marx is quoted: when workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by their revolutionary dictatorship to break the bourgeoisie’s resistance, they invest the state with a revolutionary and transitional form. Engels: the victorious party must maintain rule by terror inspiring reactionaries; would the Commune have lasted a day without the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie—indeed it can be blamed for using it too little. Engels again: the state is a transitional institution used to hold down adversaries by force; talk of a “free people’s state” is nonsense; the proletariat needs the state not for freedom but to hold down adversaries; when freedom becomes possible the state ceases to exist. Kautsky is as far from Marx and Engels as heaven from earth, as a liberal from a proletarian revolutionary; his “pure democracy” paraphrases the “free people’s state,” sheer nonsense. Why dictatorship, given a majority? To break the bourgeoisie’s resistance, inspire reactionaries with fear, maintain the authority of the armed people, and forcibly hold down adversaries.
The Constituent Assembly and the Concealed Theses
Kautsky repeats Martov’s argument that Russia is not ripe for socialism while refusing to say Europe is not ripe; he had written in 1909 against fearing premature revolution, and his present position is an absurdity revealing petty-bourgeois stupidity and cowardice. To say Soviets should fight but not become state organisations is to preach class collaboration and “social peace,” doomed to ignominious failure; Kautsky sits between two stools, agreeing with the opportunists in practice. The Constituent Assembly is the crux of his pamphlet. He quotes Lenin’s “Theses on the Constituent Assembly” from Pravda of December 26, 1917, but omits that there were nineteen, mentioning only the fifth (on the SR split) and the third (the Soviet republic a higher democratic form), and quoting the third partially while dropping “usual” and the introductory words.
The Peasant Foundation and the Bolshevik Majority
The polemic turns to Kautsky’s opening claim that Russia rests economically on small peasant farming, with four-fifths or five-sixths of the population living from it. The author presses the obvious question Kautsky never asks: how many exploiters sit inside that vast small-producer mass? Certainly no more than a tenth. Grant even that a fifth are exploiters stripped of the franchise, and the sixty-six per cent of votes the Bolsheviks commanded at the Fifth Congress of Soviets still represented a majority of the population. Nor were the Bolsheviks alone: many Left Socialist-Revolutionaries accepted Soviet power in principle, and when a section of them rose in July 1918, two new parties split away—the Narodnik Communists, to which Zax belonged, and the Revolutionary Communists, led by Kolegayev. Kautsky, without meaning to, has refuted the fable of minority backing.
He has also forgotten a Marxist commonplace: the small peasant producer vacillates inevitably between proletariat and bourgeoisie, as modern European history confirms. That truth alone demolishes the Menshevik theory and should have barred Kautsky from denying the need for proletarian dictatorship wherever small peasants predominate.
The Dictatorship of Whom?
Kautsky concedes that Soviet power is a dictatorship, then asks whether it is the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Soviet Constitution, he notes, gives political rights to peasants, who form the majority; a proletarian dictatorship carried out consistently would therefore reveal itself as a dictatorship of the peasants—if, that is, a class could rule directly, which in reality only a party can. With a flourish he adds that socialism is most painlessly achieved when placed in peasant hands. Learned quotations from the semi-liberal Maslov are marshalled to show peasants want high grain prices and low urban wages, while the genuinely new features of the post-war countryside go unmentioned: peasants demanding goods rather than money for grain, and needing implements no sum of money can buy.
Kautsky charges the Bolsheviks with surrendering dictatorship and socialism to petty-bourgeois peasants, yet never says what a proletarian party’s attitude toward those peasants should have been. He gives himself away by sneering that the Soviets once organized peasants in general but now proclaim themselves organizations of proletarians and poor peasants, stripping the well-to-do of the suffrage and treating the poor peasant as a permanent product of socialist agrarian reform. The author calls this deadly irony—the tone of any Russian bourgeois who mocks the Republic for admitting poor peasants exist. A “socialist” jeering that four years of ruinous war have left poor peasants poor could only be born in an age of wholesale apostasy.
Grain Detachments and Tears for Profiteers
Kautsky describes the Republic’s interference between rich and poor peasants: armed worker detachments sent into the countryside to take the surplus grain of rich peasants, part for the hungry towns, part for the poorer peasants. He objects indignantly that extending this beyond the large towns’ environs—as the Bolsheviks extended it to the whole country—introduces “a new element of unrest and civil war into the process of production,” which needs peace and security to recover. The author mocks these tears over the peace and security of exploiters and grain profiteers who hoard surpluses, sabotage the grain monopoly, and starve the cities. Kautsky joins the company of Heinrich Weber in Vienna, Longuet in Paris, MacDonald in London—all socialists, Marxists, internationalists—who want a revolution that never disturbs the tranquillity of grain profiteers, dressing their subservience to capital in Marxist talk about the “process of production.”
So Kautsky accuses the Bolsheviks of palming off a peasant dictatorship as a proletarian one, and in the same breath accuses them of carrying civil war into the villages—which the author counts to their credit—and of sending worker detachments who proclaim the dictatorship of the proletariat and poor peasants, aid the poor, and confiscate hoarded grain from profiteers and rich peasants. On one side he stands for pure democracy, subordinating the revolutionary class to the majority of the population, exploiters included; on the other he explains that the revolution must be bourgeois because peasant life rests on bourgeois relations, all while claiming the proletarian, class, Marxist standpoint. Instead of economic analysis there is a hodge-podge; instead of Marxism, fragments of liberal doctrine and a preaching of servility to the bourgeoisie and kulaks. The Bolsheviks had answered the question as far back as 1905: the revolution is bourgeois so long as we march with the peasantry as a whole—a truth repeated thousands of times, with no attempt to skip the stage or abolish it by decree.
Nationalisation, Communes, and the Factory Slander
Kautsky merely repeats old positions and evades the new tasks of proletarian dictatorship—as though helping peasants obtain machines for collective farming were a mere “theoretical conviction.” On land, the Narodniks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries wrongly deny that the Bolshevik measure is nationalisation; under commodity production, abolishing private landownership is nationalisation, while “socialisation” expresses only a tendency toward socialism. Kautsky cannot even formulate the theoretical question, dodging the old Russian controversies over nationalisation, municipalisation, or division. His proposal to hand large estates to the state and rent them out in small plots mocks Marxism—neither socialist nor even a completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. Trusting the Mensheviks, he offers liberal reform disguised as socialism. Only making large estates, not all land, state property would preserve old conditions; the radical bourgeoisie champions nationalisation of all land, and Marx, against Rodbertus and in Theories of Surplus Value, called land nationalisation a consistent bourgeois slogan. Maslov denied peasants would accept it, tied to his rejection of absolute rent and his diminishing-returns theory. The revolutions of 1905 and 1917 proved the peasants wanted all land nationalised; on October 20, 1917, private landownership was abolished, the Bolsheviks helping the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries carry it through—the best foundation for capitalism and the most flexible basis for transition to socialism. On collective farming Kautsky quotes a single Bolshevik’s theses while ignoring Soviet decrees and the proletarian state’s hold on factories and goods, forgetting his own 1899 Agrarian Question; the state-supported communes and state farms are few but real. On industry he cites a distorted reading of Lenin’s August 2 speech to claim factories are being seized by individual worker groups, when they were nationalised as Republic property—a lackey’s trick. He demands statistics and freedom of the press, ignoring the Supreme Economic Council and dismissing Soviet statistical services, and suggests the proletariat gained no more under the Soviets than under a Constituent Assembly; the author notes that Kerensky, too, was a socialist of a different hue.
Kiel, Berlin, and the Two Appendices
A postscript dated November 9–10, 1918 records the news that arrived as the work closed: revolution victorious in Kiel and Berlin, power passing to the Councils. The intended conclusion became superfluous. Two appendices follow. The first sets out nineteen theses on the Constituent Assembly: the demand was legitimate, but a Republic of Soviets is higher; the October 1917 election lists could not reflect the people’s will, since the Socialist-Revolutionary Party split in November, the significance of October 25 was not yet known, class forces had regrouped, and the Cadet-Kaledin civil war had destroyed formal democratic solutions—”All Power to the Constituent Assembly!” had become a Cadet-Kaledin slogan, and new elections were the only painless way out. The second finds in Vandervelde’s Socialism versus the State a parallel bankruptcy to Kautsky’s: both omit Marx’s teaching that the working class must smash the ready-made state machinery, both evade the suppression of exploiters, both substitute eclecticism for dialectics, hiding renunciation of revolution behind talk of transitional stages.
Two Democracies, Not One
The conceptual engine of the book is the distinction Kautsky refuses to make. There is no “pure democracy,” Lenin insists, while classes exist; there is only democracy for one class or another. Bourgeois democracy, however formally equal, protects only bourgeois parties on fundamental questions—the Dreyfus affair in republican France, the lynching of Negroes and internationalists in democratic America, the Ulster campaign in democratic Britain, the baiting of Bolsheviks in Russia in April 1917. The more developed the democracy, the more swiftly it turns to martial law or pogrom when a profound political divergence threatens the bourgeoisie. Parliament itself, as democracy develops, is subjected by the stock exchange and the bankers. Against this, proletarian democracy—of which the Soviet form is one instance—expands democracy unprecedentedly for the exploited majority. The best buildings and palaces were taken at a stroke, printing-plants and paper stocks removed from the bourgeoisie, so that freedom of press and assembly ceased to be hypocrisy. Indirect elections to non-local Soviets make congresses cheaper, more flexible, and subject to recall. Lenin’s yardstick is concrete: in which bourgeois country does the average worker or farm labourer enjoy such liberty of meeting, printing, and promoting his own class to administer the state?
Kautsky’s reply, as Lenin reconstructs it, is that exploiters have always been a small minority, that the proletariat is the majority, and that a regime rooted in the people has no reason to encroach on democracy. Lenin calls this arguing like a liberal from majority and minority rather than like a Marxist from exploited and exploiter. The state of the exploited must be democracy for the exploited and an instrument for suppressing exploiters—which means inequality for that class, deliberately. Kautsky’s “pure democracy” is a paraphrase of the “free people’s state” Engels had already ridiculed as nonsense. Why dictatorship, if the majority rules? Because, Marx and Engels answer, the bourgeoisie must be broken down, reactionaries inspired with fear, and the armed people’s authority maintained against adversaries. The Commune, Engels wrote, could be blamed for using that authority too little.
The Constituent Assembly and the Swing to the Left
The crux, Lenin says, is the Constituent Assembly. Kautsky quotes the third of Lenin’s nineteen theses on it, omitting the word “usual” and the introductory clauses, and ironises that the Bolsheviks discovered the Assembly’s inferiority only after they had lost their majority in it. Lenin calls this an infamous lie: he had proclaimed the Paris Commune type superior on April 4, 1917, repeated it in print, and the late-April party conference had resolved for a proletarian and peasant republic. Kautsky’s information, Lenin notes, came from the Mensheviks Stein and Axelrod. The theses themselves—printed in full in the appendix—argue that the elections of October 1917 could not reflect the people’s will because the Socialist-Revolutionary Party split in November, because the significance of October 25 was not yet known, and because the Cadet-Kaledin civil war had destroyed formal democratic solutions; “All Power to the Constituent Assembly!” had become a Cadet and Kaledin slogan.
Against Kautsky’s claim that the Soviets were excellent combat organisations but no basis for a state, Lenin sets the record of the congresses. The First All-Russia Congress of Soviets in June 1917 counted 103 Bolsheviks among 790 delegates, thirteen per cent. The Second, on October 25, counted 343 of 675, fifty-one per cent. The Third, in January 1918, 434 of 710; the Fourth, 795 of 1,232; the Fifth, in July 1918, 773 of 1,164—sixty-six per cent. The people had swung left; the Soviets had reflected every shift faster than any other institution, which is precisely why Lenin calls Soviet democracy the highest type. Kautsky’s slogan, he writes, amounts to “pure democracy though the revolution perish.”
The Peasant Question and the Charge of Apostasy
The later sections turn on the peasantry, where Kautsky believes he has found the contradiction that destroys Bolshevism: a dictatorship of the proletariat resting on a population four-fifths or five-sixths small peasant, with peasants enfranchised and the bourgeoisie not. Lenin’s answer is double. First, the figures refute the fable of minority backing—even granting that a fifth of small producers are exploiters, the sixty-six per cent Bolshevik vote at the Fifth Congress represented the majority of the population, and the split of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries in July 1918 produced two new peasant parties, the Narodnik Communists and the Revolutionary Communists, that favoured Soviet power. Second, Kautsky forgets the Marxist commonplace that the small producer vacillates between proletariat and bourgeoisie—which is exactly why the proletarian party must lead, and why the poor peasant is recognised as a permanent product of socialist agrarian reform under the dictatorship.
Kautsky’s tears over the “peace and security of the process of production,” shed for grain profiteers who hoard surplus and sabotage the monopoly, place him in Lenin’s gallery alongside Heinrich Weber in Vienna, Longuet in Paris, and MacDonald in London—socialists who want a revolution that never infringes the comfort of the kulak. On nationalisation Kautsky is simply behind the times: abolishing private landownership under commodity production is nationalisation, as Marx had called it a consistent bourgeois slogan; the decree of October 20, 1917, carried it out, and the Bolsheviks helped the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries do it, laying the best foundation for capitalism and the most flexible basis for the transition to socialism. Kautsky’s alternative—large estates to the state, rented in small plots—is neither socialism nor the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, but a liberal reform in Marxist dress.
Why the Pamphlet Still Bites
The book closes on a note of triumph that its author did not plan. The postscript of November 9–10, 1918, records the news from Kiel and Berlin: power passing to the Councils, and the intended conclusion rendered superfluous. What had been written as a defence of a besieged and isolated revolution became, overnight, a general reckoning with European Social-Democracy—the “stinking corpse,” as Lenin calls it, of the parties that had voted war credits and now mourned the Soviets. The second appendix extends the indictment to Vandervelde, whose Socialism versus the State runs parallel to Kautsky’s: both omit Marx’s teaching that the working class must smash the ready-made state machinery, both evade the suppression of exploiters, both substitute eclecticism for dialectics and hide renunciation of revolution behind talk of transitional stages.
Read a century on, the pamphlet’s interest is not only historical. It is a case study in how a revolutionary tradition argues with its own former teachers, and in what happens when the question “dictatorship or democracy?” is answered by asking, first, whose democracy and whose dictatorship. Kautsky, Lenin concludes, turned Marx into a common liberal and outdid Bernstein in the process. Whether or not one accepts the verdict, the cross-examination—the “little word,” the Commune, the congress figures, the grain detachments—remains one of the sharpest polemics the socialist movement produced, and a reminder that the argument over what the state is for has never been settled by good intentions.
