Lenin: How Engels would have ridiculed the vulgar petty bourgeois, the 'Social Democrat' (in the French sense of the ‘forties and the general European sense of 1914-18), who took it into his head to talk about 'pure democracy' in a society divided into classes! But enough. It is impossible to enumerate all the various absurdities Kautsky goes to the length of, since every phrase he utters is a bottomless pit of apostasy. Marx and Engels analyzed the Paris Commune in a most detailed manner and showed that its merit lies in its attempt to smash, to break up the 'ready-made state machinery.' Marx and Engels considered this condition to be so important that this was the only amendment they introduced in 1872 in the 'obsolete' (in parts) program of the Communist Manifesto.10 Marx and Engels showed that the Paris Commune had abolished the army and the bureaucracy, had abolished parliamentarism, had destroyed 'that parasitic excrescence, the state,' etc.; but the sage Kautsky donning his nightcap repeats the fairy tale about 'pure democracy,' which has been told a thousand times by liberal professors. wordsmith.social/protestation/…