rectly in carrying through by their votes (and by observing most loyally) the petty bourgeois law on equalization?
Kautsky did not even see where, theoretically, the crux of the problem lay. He would never have been able to refute the view that the idea of "equalization" has a progressive and revolutionary importance in a bourgeois democratic revolution, since such a revolution cannot go beyond it, and by doing so (the revolution having reached its limit), must necessarily demonstrate to the masses, at once and with perfect clearness and ease, the inadequacy of the bourgeois democratic solutions, and the necessity of proceeding beyond them towards Socialism.
Having overthrown Tsardom and militarism, the peasantry was dreaming about "equalized" land tenure, and no power on earth would have been able to kill this dream in the peasantry, as it became free from landlordism and from the bourgeois parliamentary republican State. The proletarians were saying to the peasants: We shall help you to attain this "ideal" form of Capitalism (since equalization of land tenure is the idealization of Capitalism from the point of view of the small producer); but by doing so, we shall demonstrate to you its inadequacy, and the necessity of passing to the social tillage of the land.
It would have been interesting to see how Kautsky would have attempted to prove the fallacy of such a direction of the peasant movement by the proletariat. But Kautsky preferred to avoid this question altogether. In addition, he directly deceived his German readers by withholding from them the fact that in its land law the Soviet authority has given a direct preference to communes and co-operative associations by putting them in the first place. With the peasantry to the end of the bourgeois democratic revolution, and with the poorest, the proletarian and semi-proletarian section of the peasantry to the Socialist revolution,—such has been the policy of the Bolsheviks, and such is the only Marxist policy. But Kautsky is at sixes and sevens, and cannot even formulate a single
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