The State and Revolution

Kautsky is a popular figure, particularly in Russia, but Lenin reminds his readers that in 1914, Kautsky made the shameful decision to support Germany’s march to war. The fact that he later changed his mind only provides more evidence of his “opportunism” (6.2), and he has similarly vacillated on the question of the state. In a debate with Eduard Bernstein, he failed to show that Marx was urging the proletariat to take control of the state and smash its machinery, instead claiming that such a question may be “left to the future” (6.2).

Lenin complains that, in a supposed contest with opportunists, Kautsky showed himself to be an opportunist. Kautsky “admits the possibility of seizing power without destroying the state machine” and emphasizes “the idea of revolution” (6.2, emphasis added) rather than concrete action. In doing so, he reveals himself to be attached to the bourgeois state and bureaucracy, invalidating his professed Marxism. Lenin asserts that this helps to explain his support for the German government in 1914, and his refusal to state plainly that the state must ultimately be abolished by force.

Lenin cites Anton Pannekoek as aptly criticizing Kautsky for his “passive radicalism” (6.3), and while his own arguments had flaws, he had the “fundamental point of principle” (6.3) correct. Pannekoek correctly emphasized that, unlike anarchists, Marxists seek to seize the apparatus of state power and use it on behalf of the proletariat, at which point the state will begin to wither away. Kautsky fails to see this because he cannot imagine anything beyond the institutions of the bourgeois state, such as political parties and bureaucratic offices.

Lenin argues that not even the Commune was sufficient to show Kautsky what an alternative social structure might look like. Marx “teaches us to act with supreme boldness in destroying the entire old state machine, and at the same time he teaches us to put the question concretely” (6.3), while Kautsky settles for an outcome in which socialist parties have the leading voice in a parliament. Lenin declares that the opportunists can enjoy themselves in one another’s company, while he goes about building a mass movement to achieve the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

Lenin writes that he had intended to produce another chapter, analyzing the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, but he was unable to do so with the Bolshevik seizure of power. He still intends to write that chapter but finds that “it is more pleasant and useful to go through the ‘experience of revolution’ than to write about it” (Postscript).