Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): a reply to Karl Kantsky
Kant · en
The Independent Party in Germany, which has written on its banner the
watchword of the dictatorship of the proletariat, tolerates in its
ranks the Kautsky group, all the efforts of which are devoted
theoretically to compromise and misrepresent the dictatorship of the
proletariat in the shape of its living expression--the Soviet regime.
In conditions of civil war, such a form of co-habitation is
conceivable only and to such an extent as far and as long as the
dictatorship of the proletariat represents for the leaders of the
"Independent" Social-Democracy a noble aspiration, a vague protest
against the open and disgraceful treachery of Noske, Ebert,
Scheidemann and others, and--last but not least--a weapon of electoral
and parliamentary demagogy.
The vitality of vague Kautskianism is most clearly seen in the example
of the French Longuetists. Jean Longuet himself has most sincerely
convinced himself, and has for long been attempting to convince
others, that he is marching in step with us, and that only
Clemenceau's censorship and the calumnies of our French friends
Loriot, Monatte, Rosmer, and others hinder our comradship in arms. Yet
is it sufficient to make oneself acquainted with any parliamentary
speech of Longuet's to realize that the gulf separating him from us at
the present moment is possibly still wider than at the first period of
the imperialist war? The revolutionary problems now arising before the
international proletariat have become more serious, more immediate,
more gigantic, more direct, more definite, than five or six years ago;
and the politically reactionary character of the Longuetists, the
parliamentary representatives of eternal passivity, has become more
impressive than ever before, in spite of the fact that formally they
have returned to the fold of parliamentary opposition.
The Italian Party, which is within the Third International, is not at
all free from Kautskianism. As far as the leaders are concerned, a
very considerable part of them bear their internationalist honors only
as a duty and as an imposition from below. In 1914-1915, the Italian
Socialist Party found it infinitely more easy than did the other
European parties to maintain an attitude of opposition to the war,
both because Italy entered the war nine months later than other
countries, and particularly because the international position of
Italy created in it even a powerful bourgeois group (Giolittians in
the widest sense of the word) which remained to the very last moment
hostile to Italian intervention in the war.