The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky

Why did Lenin call Kautsky a "renegade"?

After Engels's death Karl Kautsky was the most authoritative Marxist theorist of the Second International, and Lenin and the other Russian Social-Democrats had learned their Marxism from his books. But when the First World War broke out in 1914 and German Social Democracy backed the war, Kautsky took a middle course that stood neither for the war nor for revolutionary action against it. In Socialism and War (1915) Lenin called this "Kautskyism": the man who in 1909 had written a whole book on the approach of an era of revolutions and in 1912 had signed the Basel Manifesto now stripped Marxism of its revolutionary means of struggle. Recognising Marxism in words while following opportunism in practice was what Lenin meant by renegacy.

In August 1918 Kautsky published the pamphlet The Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Vienna, a frontal attack on the Bolshevik regime. Russia was then in the midst of civil war, foreign intervention and the Red Terror, and the Constituent Assembly had been dispersed in January. Lenin first published an article of the same title in Pravda on 11 October 1918, calling the pamphlet "a hundred times more disgraceful, more outrageous, more renegade" than Bernstein's famous Premises of Socialism. He then finished the pamphlet between October and 10 November, and it came out in December from the Kommunist publishing house in Moscow. In the preface Lenin said that, with the proletarian revolution now on the agenda in a number of countries, an analysis of Kautsky's sophistries was essential.

What did Kautsky argue in The Dictatorship of the Proletariat?

Kautsky saw the antagonism between the Bolsheviks and their opponents not as a matter of personal jealousies but as "the clashing of two fundamentally distinct methods, that of democracy and that of dictatorship" (chapter I). Marx's phrase "the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat" in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, he held, must not be read literally as the rule of one person bound by no laws: Marx spoke "not of a form of government, but of a condition which must everywhere arise when the proletariat has conquered political power" (chapter V). As evidence he cited Marx's view that the transition could be peaceful in England and America, and the Paris Commune, which Engels called the dictatorship of the proletariat and which had been elected by universal suffrage. For Kautsky the dictatorship of the proletariat was "a condition which necessarily arises from pure democracy where the proletariat predominates".

Since the working class's great weapon is its numbers, he argued, a socialism with the majority behind it has no reason to fear democracy. A minority dictatorship, by contrast, has to lean on an obedient army, drives its opponents to appeal to the bayonet instead of the ballot and so brings on civil war, and nothing harms the building of socialism more than civil war. On Russia he followed the Menshevik diagnosis that the conditions for a socialist revolution were not ripe in a backward country, and he remarked that the Bolsheviks discovered the soviets to be a higher democracy only after they found themselves in a minority in the Constituent Assembly (chapter VI). His conclusion was that a regime that set out to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat had become "the dictatorship of a party within the proletariat" (chapter VII).

How did Lenin reply?

Lenin first charged Kautsky with giving no definition of dictatorship and offered his own: "Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws." To say that dictatorship means the rule of one person was wrong even grammatically, since a handful of people, an oligarchy or a class can rule as dictators. For Lenin the indispensable feature of dictatorship was the forcible suppression of the exploiters as a class, and hence the infringement of "pure democracy", that is, of equality and freedom, in regard to that class.

Second, Lenin held that as long as classes exist there is no "pure democracy", only class democracy: Kautsky had forgotten how to ask "democracy for which class?" Bourgeois democracy was progressive compared with the Middle Ages, but as long as printing presses, paper and the best buildings belong to the capitalists, the workers' freedom of the press and of assembly remains a sham. Soviet power had taken these away and handed them to the working people, so that "proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy".

Third, he argued that for a long time after a revolution the exploiters keep great advantages in money and property, connections, managerial experience, education and military skill, and that their international connections leave them stronger than the exploited even when they are beaten in one country. To think that a deep revolution is settled by the arithmetic of majority and minority was therefore a delusion. He called the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly the "crux" of Kautsky's pamphlet and replied that ever since April 1917 he had declared a soviet republic of the Paris Commune type to be a higher form than the bourgeois parliamentary republic. Kautsky, Lenin wrote, had turned Marx into a common liberal: "The renegade Bernstein is a mere puppy compared with the renegade Kautsky."

What answer did the German revolution give?

Lenin had all but finished the book when, on the night of 9 November 1918, news came that workers' and soldiers' councils had taken power in Kiel and Berlin. In a postscript dated 10 November he wrote that the conclusion he still had to write to his pamphlet on Kautsky and the proletarian revolution had become superfluous: events had answered the objection that the revolution was not ripe in the West. Appended to the book were the theses on the Constituent Assembly and a critique of Socialism versus the State by Emile Vandervelde, chairman of the International Socialist Bureau.

The German revolution, however, took a course other than the one Lenin expected. Kautsky, a member of the Independent Social Democratic Party, joined the work of the revolutionary government as chairman of the Socialization Commission and as editor of the Foreign Office documents on war guilt, and the government chose elections to a National Assembly over a council republic. The book's question, councils or parliament, soon became a matter of practical politics in Germany.

How was the book read afterwards?

In 1919 the book appeared in Germany, Austria, Italy, Britain and France. Kautsky attacked the Bolsheviks again in Terrorism and Communism (1919), and Trotsky answered with a book of the same title in 1920. In Marxism and Bolshevism: Democracy and Dictatorship (1934) Kautsky still wrote that the Bolsheviks had merely laid the basis for a new dictatorship in place of the tsarist autocracy.

In the communist movement the book became, together with The State and Revolution, a basic text on the dictatorship of the proletariat, and Lenin's labels "renegade" and "Kautskyism" hardened into a brand for Marxism in words and opportunism in deeds. Historians of the Chinese revolution trace its influence in Mao Zedong's principle that a victorious revolution must at once dissolve the old bourgeois army and replace it with a proletarian one.

Social Democrats judge it the other way round. Kautsky's biographer Massimo Salvadori called the "renegade" charge a polemical caricature and saw Kautsky's post-1917 opposition to Bolshevism as a consistent application of the democratic and parliamentary conception of the state he had held since the 1890s, and from the late 1960s some scholars argued that the two men were closer than Lenin allowed and that in some respects Kautsky remained the more orthodox Marxist. The polemic still marks the point at which the two traditions judge each other over whether revolutionary power must be bound by majority democracy.