in good time discovered a shibboleth" (the textual word is "Wörtchen") about the dictatorship of the proletariat, which Marx used once in 1875 in a private letter.
This is Marx's "shibboleth": "There lies between the capitalist and communist society a period of revolutionary transformation of one into the other. This period has a corresponding political period of transition, during which the State can be nothing else than a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."
First of all, to call this celebrated passage of Marx, which sums up all his revolutionary teaching, "one single word." and even "shibboleth," is to insult Marxism, to abjure it completely. One must not forget that Kautsky knows Marx almost by heart, and that, to judge by all his writings, he has in his desk or in his head a number of pigeon-holes, in which all that was ever written by Marx is distributed in a manner most scientific and most convenient for quotation. Kautsky cannot but know that both Marx and Engels, both in their letters and public writings, spoke repeatedly about the dictatorship of the proletariat, both before and after the Commune. Kautsky cannot but know that the formula, "dictatorship of the proletariat" is but a more historically concrete and more scientifically precise designation for that task of the proletariat in “breaking up” the bourgeois State machine, about which Marx and Engels, in summing up the experience of the revolution of 1848, and, still more so, of 1871, spoke for forty years, between 1852–1891.
How is this monstrous distortion of Marxism, by such a schoolman of Marxism as Kautsky to be explained? In terms of philosophy, this distortion is simply a substitution of eclecticism and sophistry in the place of dialectics. Kautsky is a past master in the art of such substitutions. In terms of practical politics, this distortion is simply a piece of flunkey-like subserviency to the Opportunists, that is, in the last resort, to the bourgeoisie. Advancing, since the beginning of the war, at an increasingly rapid
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