It’s 1918 and the freshly minted Russian Soviet republic is facing invasion, sabotage, and rebellion. The monarchists, landowners, capitalists, and imperialists are incensed by the revolutionary conquest of power by the Russian workers and peasants. They’re dead set on crushing it.
In February, 53 divisions of the German Kaiser’s army rampage across the Eastern front, taking 150 miles of Russian territory in a week.
In the south, the Volunteer Army led by Tsarist generals begins a campaign of terror. Nearby, the Mensheviks invite the British imperialists into Baku to establish an anti-Soviet dictatorship.
In May, the Czechoslovak Legion inside Russia takes up arms and seizes towns and railways.
In September, anti-Bolshevik forces set up a Siberian Provisional Government in opposition to the Soviet republic. This is backed by the British imperialists, who also begin invasions in central Asia and Estonia.
In July, two Left Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs), who are supposed to be allied to the Bolsheviks, assassinate the German ambassador, hoping to provoke a further German invasion into Russia. The Left SRs then stage an uprising in Moscow against the Bolsheviks.
Surrounded on all sides by the snapping jaws of imperialists and counter-revolutionaries, the Soviet republic is fighting for its life.
Here is a scene of fire and death, of a titanic battle between the old world and the new. And into this scene waltzes an “armchair fool” by the name of Karl Kautsky.
Kautsky was once a highly respected Marxist theoretician. Some people called him the ‘Pope of Marxism’. Lenin himself learned a lot from Kautsky.
But Kautsky failed to oppose German imperialism at the outbreak of the war, and only later came out against German war aims under pressure from the masses. By 1918, he is to be found publicly attacking the Bolsheviks for leading the Russian masses to power. He has switched sides in the class struggle, and as such, Lenin brands his former teacher a ‘renegade’.
But this renegade isn’t a hardened right-wing capitalist. His treachery instead takes the form of legalistic, hand-wringing liberalism.
Kautsky looks around at the fire and death of the class struggle in Russia, 1918 and is horrified. “Why can’t we just have a nice civilised discussion instead of all this?”, he asks. “What about democracy? What about the rule of law?”
“It’s your fault,” Kautsky tells the workers and peasants of Russia, “you should’ve compromised with the monarchists, landowners, capitalists, and imperialists instead of kicking them out. Now you’ve upset them and caused this fighting.”
This is the age-old argument of liberals. They complain about the exploitation of the masses by the ruling class. But when the masses fight back, they get scared and cling to the status quo. Their natural state is idle whinging. They condemn any form of class struggle that goes beyond that.
Kautsky dresses up his liberalism in Marxist phraseology, and publishes it in a pamphlet called The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which is an attack on the Bolsheviks. If Kautsky’s arguments were to gain any traction it would mean the end of the Russian Revolution; the restoration of capitalism and landlordism; and a bloody retribution against the workers and peasants.
This opens a new, ideological, front in the war being waged by the young Soviet republic. While Trotsky is building and commanding the Red Army on the military front, Lenin leads the charge in this battle of ideas. His pamphlet, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky is his devastating response.
From ‘“A most learned armchair fool”: Lenin versus the renegade Kautsky’, Marxist.com
29 August 2024