The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky

The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (PRRK) is a political pamphlet written in October-November 1918 by Vladimir Lenin. In this work, he defends the newly formed Soviet government against criticisms leveled against it by Karl Kautsky, a leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Second International, and also a mentor to many Bolsheviks.

The prime motivation for writing PRRK was Kautsky's pamphlet The Dictatorship of the Proletariat published earlier in 1918. Kautsky had condemned the dictatorial actions taken by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a deviation from socialist principles. Lenin responded by stating that the need for dictatorship was a core Marxist concept, found in numerous places in the works of Marx and Engels, and that Kautsky's disapproval showed how a once-great Marxist theoretician had become a "renegade".

The back-and-forth between Lenin and Kautsky was part of a worldwide debate raging among Marxists—in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution—about the role of democracy and force in the transition to socialism.

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