(1919)

In a recent article entitled Democracy versus Dictatorship, Comrade Kautsky opposed the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry as it has been established in Russia by the bolshevist overthrow of the state authority. He expressed his dissent from the views of those socialists who have contended that in existing circumstances this dictatorship is historically justified. Substantially Kautsky’s opinions are identical with those recently published by Martoff, a menshevik comrade, in his writing Marx and the Problem of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. My answer to Kautsky’s criticism of the bolsheviks runs as follows: