[lbo-talk] Re: Philistine

Michael Pugliese debsian at pacbell.net
Thu Sep 11 14:53:51 PDT 2003


http://www.maoism.org/stalin/fnd_ln2.htm
> ...One need only contrast the Leninist policy of transforming the
> imperialist war into civil war with the treacherous policy of the Second
> International during the war to understand the utter baseness of the
> opportunist politicians and the full grandeur of the method of Leninism.

I cannot refrain from quoting at this point a passage from Lenin's book The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, in which Lenin severely castigates an opportunist attempt by the leader of the Second International, K. Kautsky, to judge parties not by their deeds, but by their paper slogans and documents: "Kautsky is pursuing a typically petty- bourgeois, philistine policy by pretending . . . that putting forward a slogan alters the position. The entire history of bourgeois democracy refutes this illusion; the bourgeois democrats have always advanced and still advance all sorts of 'slogans' in order to deceive the people. The point is to test their sincerity, to compare their words with their deeds, not to be satisfied with idealistic or charlatan phrases, but to get down to class reality. (See Vol. XXIII, p. 377.)

-- Michael Pugliese



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