Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 16 - From Marx to Mao

TWO WORLDS307bourgeois order, are not accorded parity of rights on thebasis of bourgeois law by a champion of this order? Whythe very admission that this could affront me, would showme to be unstable in my socialist convictions!And Bebel tried to drive Social-Democratic views intoFrank’s head by concrete examples. We could not be “affronted”,Bebel told Frank, by the Anti-Socialist Law; we werefilled with anger and hatred, “and if it had been in ourpower at that time, we would have flung ourselves intobattle, as we were longing to do heart and soul, we wouldhave smashed to smithereens everything that stood in ourpath” (here the verbatim report records loud cries of approval).“We would have been traitors to our cause not to havedone so” (Hear, hear!). “But it was not in our power.”I take it as an affront that a constitutional minister doesnot recognise the parity of rights of the socialists, arguesFrank. You must not be affronted, says Bebel, becauseyour parity of rights has been denied by a man who not solong ago was strangling you, riding roughshod over all“principles”, whose duty it was to strangle you in defenceof the bourgeois order, who will put a stranglehold on youtomorrow (Bebel did not say this, but he hinted at it broadlyenough; we shall explain in the proper place why Bebelso cautiously confines himself to hints). We would havebeen traitors if, having the opportunity, we had not throttledthese enemies of the proletariat.Two worlds of ideas: on the one hand, the point of viewof the proletarian class struggle, which in certain historicalperiods can proceed on the basis of bourgeois legality,but which leads inevitably to a denouement, an open collision,to the dilemma: either “smash” the bourgeois state“to smithereens” or be defeated and strangled. On the otherhand, the point of view of the reformist, the petty bourgeoiswho cannot see the wood for the trees, who cannot, throughthe tinsel of constitutional legality, see the fierce classstruggle, who forgets in the backwoods of some diminutivestate the great historical problems of the present day.The reformists imagine themselves to be realist politicians,doers of positive work, statesmen. It is in the interestsof the masters of bourgeois society to encourage thesechildish illusions in the ranks of the proletariat, but the