The Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Kautsky argues that Marx's phrase 'dictatorship of the proletariat' describes a state of affairs—the political dominance of the working class—not a form of government that excludes democracy. He contends that Marx used the term only once, in a letter from 1875, and never intended it to justify the suppression of political freedoms. For Kautsky, socialism and democracy are inseparable: a proletarian dictatorship that abolishes universal suffrage, press freedom, and parliamentary institutions ceases to be socialist and becomes a new form of despotism.

Lenin wrote The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918) as a direct rebuttal, accusing Kautsky of distorting Marx and betraying the revolution. Lenin argued that democracy is always class-based: bourgeois democracy is a 'paradise for the rich,' while proletarian dictatorship is the most perfect democracy for the working class. He defended the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the suppression of opposition as necessary measures in a civil war. The exchange destroyed their relationship and split international socialism.

Kautsky noted that Marx used the phrase 'dictatorship of the proletariat' only in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme, and that he never described it as a form of government. He argued that Marx and Engels consistently emphasized universal suffrage as a gauge of working-class maturity. Kautsky also pointed to Engels' later writings, which spoke of the state withering away and warned against a 'free people's state,' to argue that Marxism was fundamentally democratic.

Kautsky had been the leading authority on Marxism in the Second International, and Lenin had once praised him as a genuine Marxist. When Kautsky criticized the Bolshevik Revolution as undemocratic, Lenin saw this as an unforgivable betrayal that lent ammunition to the bourgeoisie. Lenin wrote that Kautsky had 'beaten the world record in the liberal distortion of Marx' and declared that 'the renegade Bernstein has proved to be a mere puppy compared with the renegade Kautsky.'

Scholars have noted that Kautsky's opposition to Bolshevism was a consistent application of the democratic and parliamentary conception of the state he had developed since the 1890s, not a sudden abandonment of Marxism. His biographer Massimo Salvadori argues the 'renegade' accusation was a polemical caricature. Others have criticized Kautsky for a fatalistic view of history that left his theory ill-prepared for the revolutionary upheavals after 1914.

Kautsky argues that Marx used the term to describe the political situation in which the working class holds power, not a specific institutional arrangement that replaces democracy. Just as the bourgeoisie rules through parliamentary democracy, the proletariat can rule through the same democratic forms once it wins majority support. Dictatorship, for Kautsky, refers to class dominance, not to the suspension of democratic rights—a distinction Lenin rejected as a distortion of Marxism.