Polemic on General Line of International ... - From Marx to Mao

preach a violent political overthrow”. 1 He attacked Lenin andthe Bolshevik Party by comparing them to “an impatientmidwife who uses violence to make a pregnant woman givebirth in the fifth month instead of the ninth”. 2Kautsky was hopelessly afflicted with parliamentary cretinism.He made the well-known statement:The aim of our political struggle remains, as hitherto, theconquest of state power by winning a majority in parliamentand by converting parliament into the master of thegovernment. 3He also said:The parliamentary republic — with a monarchy at thetop on the English model, or without — is to my mind thebase out of which proletarian dictatorship and socialistsociety grow. This republic is the “state of the future”toward which we must strived. 4Lenin severely criticized these absurd statements ofKautsky’s.In denouncing Kautsky, Lenin declared:Only scoundrels or simpletons can think that the proletariatmust win the majority in elections carried outunder the yoke of the bourgeoisie, under the yoke of wageslavery,and that it should win power afterwards. This isthe height of folly or hypocrisy; it is substituting voting,under the old system and with the old power, for classstruggle and revolution. 51Karl Kautsky, Social Democracy Versus Communism, Eng. ed.,Rand School Press, New York, 1946, p. 117.2Karl Kautsky, The Proletarian Revolution and Its Programme, Ger.ed., Berlin, 1922, p. 90.3Karl Kautsky, “New Tactics”, Die Neue Zeit, No. 46, 1912.4Karl Kautsky, Letter to Franz Mehring, July 15, 1893.5V. I. Lenin, “Greetings to the Italian, French and German Communists”,Collected Works, Russ. ed., Moscow, 1950, Vol. XXX, p. 40.365