174 THE CLASS STRUGGLE EXPLOITER AND EXPLOITED 175 Kautsky is as far from Marx and Engels as earth is from heaven, as the liberal bourgeois from the proletarian revolutionist.
The pure democracy and simple democracy of which Kautsky speaks, is only another way of expressing the conception free pea ple state, e. pure absurdity. Kautsky, with the wisdom of a book worm or the innocence of a 10 year old girl, asks: Why should dictatorship be necessary, if there is the majority? But once more we will allow Marx and Engels to explain. Dictatorship is necessary to crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie. It is necessary for the purpose of frightening. It is necessary in order that the proletariat may forcibly crush its opponents.
Kautsky does not understand these explanations. Being enamoured with the pure democracy, without perceiving its bourgeois character, he consistently takes the standpoint that the majority, because it is a majority, does not need to crush the opposition of the minority, there is no need forcibly to crush it that it is necessary to crush the incidental attempts to overthrow democracy. Adhering to this conception of pure democracy, Kautsky unexpectedly commits that same little error which is always made by all bourgeois democrats; namely that he thinks that the formal equality, altogether false and feigned under Capitalism, is a reality! small thing!
The exploiter and the exploited cannot be equal. This fact, much as Kautsky dislikes it, forms the most essential substance of Socialism.
Another fact is essential: there cannot be real equality before it is absolutely impossible for one class to oppress another class.
It is possible to overpower the exploiters with one blow by a successful revolt in the interior or by a mutiny among the troops.
But, with possibly very rare and special exceptions, the exploiting class cannot be annihilated at once. It is not possible to confiscate immediately the property of all landowners and capitalists in a great country. Further, confiscation alone, being a juridical or political measure, by no means solves the question, because it is necessary in reality to oust the landowners and capitalists, to put others in their places, to substitute workers in the administration of factories and estates. There cannot be equality between the exploiters on one side exploiters who for generations have robbed their great part of the property of common education, the prerequisites and customs of a rich life and the exploited on the other, while the great mass of the exploited are still, even in the most progressive and most democratic bourgeois republics, miserably maltreated, unlearned, crude, scattered without selfreliance. The exploiters will hold for a long time after the revolution many real, great advantages: they have in their possession money; money cannot be immediately abolished; they own moveable property, often of great value, they have relations, organization and administrative experience, they know all kinds of administrative secrets, customs, methods, means, possibilities, they own education, are in close relations with the technically highest personnel, which lives and thinks as bourgeoisie, they have more experience in war, and this is by no means unimportant.
If the exploiters are crushed only in one countryand that is, of course, the usual course of events, because a simultaneous revolution in many countries will be a rare exception they will, nevertheless, remain more powerful than the exploited, because the international relations of the exploiters are very extensive.
The fact that a part of the exploited, less developed element of the middle peasantry, artisans, etc. will go and is apt to go over to the side of the exploiters, has been a common observation during revolutions. This was the case also during the Commune.
Among the Versailles troops there were also proletarians, a fact the learned Kautsky has forgotten.
Such being the case, it is an absurdity to assume that, in a revolution that is, to any degree, determined and thoroughgoing in character, the relation between majority and minority can be a decisive factor. History has proven beyond a doubt that in every revolution worthy of the name, the new ruling class must reckon with the long continued, selfish, furious opposition of the deposed class, who for years to come, have very real advantages as compared with those of the new ruling class. Only a prejudiced liberal, or a ridiculously mawkish Kautsky, can for a moment imagine that the exploiting class will respect the decision of the exploited majority, before they have tested their superiority in a last, furious struggle.
The passing from Capitalism to Communism forms a whole historical period. While this period continues, the exploiters will not cease to hope that the former conditions will be restored, and this hope finds concrete expression in attempts to restore former conditions. After the first serious defeat, the defeated exploiters, who certainly did not anticipate defeat, will not believe, will not dare believe such a possibility, will throw themselves with tenfold strength, in a fury of hatred and rage, into the struggle to restore their lost paradise, to defend their families who once enjoyed