That "anti-debate" quote from Lenin about Kautsky as "traitor to the working class" is fake

please don't trust random unsourced internet quotes

You may have seen some anti-debate leftists repeating this quote from Lenin:

Why should we bother to reply to Kautsky? He would reply to us and we would have to reply to his reply. There's no end to that. It would be quite enough for us to announce that Kautsky is a traitor to the working class, and everyone will understand everything.

It's fake. Lenin never said this; in reality, he said the opposite. This fake quote was created and promoted by conservative pundits to pretend that Lenin hated debate. Anti-debate leftists then appropriated the quote, to prove that Lenin hated debate.

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History of the fake Lenin quote

If you search for this Lenin quote on Marxists.org, you'll get nothing.

That's because Lenin didn't say it. Who did?

The earliest record of this quote on Google is a 1996 Newsweek op-ed titled "Man Of The Century, Alas", written by conservative libertarian pundit George Will. That column opens by accusing Lenin of seeking "an end to argument" and "to whole categories of tiresome people":

Lenin's patience, never plentiful, was exhausted. "Why," he demanded, "should we bother to reply to Kautsky? He would reply to us, and we would have to reply to his reply. There's no end to that. It will be quite enough for us to announce that Kautsky is a traitor to the working class, and everyone will understand everything." So in the name of a favored category of people, the working class, let's have an end to argument, and to Kautsky (a German socialist guilty of deviationism), and, while we are at it, to whole categories of tiresome people.

The full column is a litany of standard "socialism is authoritarian" talking points, from someone who supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Will uses the "why should we bother to reply" quote to prove that Lenin is an authoritarian who would rather kill his opponents than debate them.

The article is a book review of The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive [pdf], which mentions "Kaut" 4 times and "reply to" 8 times. None of these mentions contain the alleged Lenin quote.

On Google Books, the earliest record is also George Will, in a The Morning After: American Successes and Excesses 1981-1986 (1986)", for which Will provides no citation at all:

Since then, Will copy-pasted the quote many times. 1997 in The Woven Figure, and 2006 in Deseret News, and 2018 in National Review, and 2022 in The Roanoke Times. (He uses it to make a different point each time, which is pretty funny.)

This is almost certainly where leftists originally found the quote, because it appears almost nowhere else.

In short: This Lenin quote is fake, very likely fabricated by a conservative pundit, who wanted to pretend that Lenin hated debate.

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[EDIT #1]: Earlier fake source of quote found

Recently, @colbycolbear informed me that George Will was not the first to provide this Lenin quote.

Richard Mitchell was a professor of English. In a 1979 article titled "The Answering of Kautski", Mitchaell provided two quotes from Lenin, neither of which I can find elsewhere:

"Why should we bother to reply to Kautski? He would reply to us, and we would have to reply to his reply. There’s no end to that. It will be quite enough for us to announce that Kautski is a traitor to the working class, and everyone will understand everything." - Nikolai Lenin [....]

"Most of the people," Lenin wrote, not in public, of course, but in a letter, "just aren’t capable of thinking. The best they can do is learn the words." If that reminds you of those bleating sheep in Animal Farm, try to forget them[.]

Mitchell provides no citations for either quote.

George Will was a strong fan of Mitchell's, and on his death, wrote that "A cleansing fire leaps from the writings of Richard Mitchell".

In short: George Will probably didn't fabricate the quote, but did trust an unsourced quote from some English professor.

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Misuse of this fake Lenin quote to oppose debate

Anti-debate leftists have repeatedly cited this quote. For example, on 2022 September 02, YouTuber djmuel used this fake quote to "prove" that debating rightists does not work:

Their entire modus operandi seems to be that we need to convert people who think differently to us. They're obsessed with this idea, even though it was proven wrong a hundred years ago by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who said this: "Why should we bother to reply to Kautsky? He would reply to us, and we would have to reply to his reply? There's no end to that. It will be quite enough for us to announce that Kautsky is a traitor to the working class, and everyone will understand everything. And of course, [there are] multiple real instances of people that these nerds have debated who have remained steadfast in their fascist opinions so there you have it.

This quote is fake. More importantly, even if Lenin had said it, a sassy riposte to Kautsky cannot not "prove wrong" the idea that leftists should "convert people who think differently".

In reality, evidence overwhelmingly shows that persuasion works. For example, these three large-sample experimental studies strongly suggest that factual corrections change minds:

• Wood et al 2018: there is no evidence for a consistent "backfire effect"; telling people facts generally changes their minds; among 10100 adults, the effect of factual correction was ~1/3 as large as the effect of ideology on stated belief

• Schmid and Betsch 2019: experimental study: among 1661 adults, topic rebuttal (oppose misinformation with facts) and technique rebuttal (refute the methods that science deniers use to mislead their audience) substantially and significantly reduced the influence of science deniers (by about 1/3 of a standard deviation), especially among individuals who vulnerable to antiscience beliefs

• Tappin 2021: against "partisan motivated reasoning": among 5071 adults, evidence changed minds in a sample of 24 policy issues; no significant difference between "evidence + contrary party leader cue" (purple) vs "evidence alone" (black)

There's less evidence for debate as a specific factual correction method. but I recommend this video, "In Defense of Debate", which overviews many of the strengths and limits of debate for this purpose.

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Lenin loved to critique his opponents

We can also know the Lenin quote to be fake by knowing who Lenin was: In reality, Lenin loved to argue with people, especially other socialists. (He was truly a leftist.) He frequently critiqued his opponents in detail and at length.

For example, Lenin wrote a whole pamphlet, "Dead Chauvinism and Living Socialism" (1914), in order to attack an article by Kautsky, "Social Democracy In Wartime" (1914). Kautsky supported defencism while Lenin supported defeatism.

To briefly contextualize why the two socialists disagreed so strongly, I've provided three short quotes from both Kautsky and Lenin.

Kautsky argued for three central points in favor of what would be called "defencism":

1. Socialists would be repressed if they fully opposed the war: "Never is a government so strong, never the parties so weak, as at the outbreak of war."

2. Defensive war (defencism) is just: "[T]he proletariat of every country have an urgent interest in preventing their country's enemy from crossing its borders, thus preventing the horrors and devastation of war in its most terrible form".

3. Social patriotism is unjust: "Social Democracy in every nation is obliged to consider the war only as a war of defence, and to set as its goal only defending itself against the enemy, not of 'punishing' or belittling the enemy".

Lenin called Kautsky a "chauvinist" and "opportunist" and rejected each of these views in favor of what would be called "defeatism":

1. Socialists are more powerful at the outbreak of war (because the government is disorganized and preoccupied): In 1909 Kautsky voiced the undisputed opinion held by all revolutionary Social-Democrats when he said that revolution in Europe cannot now be premature and that war means revolution. [....] We have undoubtedly entered a revolutionary period.

2. All war is unjust: An International does not mean [....] German socialists justifying the German bourgeoisie’s call to shoot down French workers, and in French socialists justifying the French bourgeoisie’ call to shoot down German workers in the name of the “defence of the fatherland”!

3. Civil war against the ruling class (revolutionary defeatism) is just: The International consists in the coming together (first ideologically, then in due time organisationally as well) of people who, in these grave days, are capable of defending socialist internationalism in deed, i.e., of mustering their forces and “being the next to shoot” at the governments and the ruling classes of their own respective “fatherlands”.

(In general, I think Kautsky's overall stategy of "revolutionary social democracy" was closer to truth than Lenin's revolutionary vanguardism, but I don't know enough about WW1 and its socialist revolutionary potential to know who was contextually correct about defencism/defeatism.)

In fact, it's possible that the fake Lenin quote "why should we bother to reply to Kautsky" is a poor paraphrase of this reply from "Dead Chauvinism":

It would be disrespectful towards the reader were we to treat Kautsky’s arguments [for defencism] in earnest and try to analyse them: if the European war differs in many respects from a simple “little” anti-Jewish pogrom, the “socialist” arguments in favour of participation in such a war fully resemble the “democratic” arguments in favour of participation in an anti-Jewish pogrom. One does not analyse arguments in favour of a pogrom; one only points them out so as to put their authors to shame in the sight of all class-conscious workers.

In brief, Lenin says Kautsky's arguments for defencism are so morally reprehensible that they don't need detailed refutation on the facts. But, as noted above, Lenin also disagreed with Kautsky on the facts.

Another possible source of the fake Lenin quote "why should we bother to reply" is a paraphrase of a quote from his 1917 Jan letter to Inessa Armand:

P.S. Trotsky has sent in a silly letter. We shall neither print it nor reply to him.

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[EDIT #2]: Probable origin of quote found

Recently, @colbycolbear also informed me of another possible source of the fake/mangled Lenin quote.

In 1918, Lenin wrote a pamphlet titled "The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky", which sharply criticized Kautsky again. Lenin justified his description of Kautsky as a "renegade" with the following passaege:

Instead of writing utterly silly phrases (of which there are plenty in Kautsky’s book) about somebody preventing criticism of Bolshevism, he ought to have set out to make such a criticism. But the point is that he offers no criticism. He does not even raise the question of a class analysis of the Soviets on the one hand, and of the Constituent Assembly on the other. It is therefore impossible to argue, to debate with Kautsky. All we can do is demonstrate to the reader why Kautsky cannot be called anything else but a renegade.

I also checked the original Russian, and it lines up with the translation above:

Вместо того, чтобы писать совсем глупые фразы (их много у Каутского) насчет того, будто кто-то мешает критике большевизма, Каутскому следовало бы приступить к такой критике. Но в том-то и дело, что критики у него нет. Он даже и не ставит вопроса о классовом анализе Советов, с одной стороны, и Учредительного собрания, с другой. И поэтому нет возможности спорить, дискутировать с Каутским, а остается только показать читателю, почему нельзя Каутского назвать иначе, как ренегатом.

And, finally, here's that fake Lenin quote again:

Why should we bother to reply to Kautsky? He would reply to us and we would have to reply to his reply. There's no end to that. It would be quite enough for us to announce that Kautsky is a traitor to the working class, and everyone will understand everything.

Note how different these quotes are:

• Real quote: In the middle of a long response to Kautsky, Lenin says it is "impossible [....] to debate with Kautsky" because Kautsky "offers no [real] criticism" of Lenin's beliefs -- Lenin says "I can't respond, there's no substance". Instead, his job is to "demonstrate to the reader why Kautsky cannot be called anything else but a renegade". That's not Lenin refusing to debate Kautsky -- that's Lenin saying he's already won, and it's his job to highlight that!

• Fake quote: Lenin simply says he won't "bother to reply to Kautsky", and will simply "announce that Kautsky is a traitor to the working class". Reminder: That's not what Lenin did! He wrote a whole goddamn pamphlet shitting on Kautsky!

Nobody cites this quote. Google search returns just 23 references, all on Marxist literature hosting sites.

In short: This is almost certainly the (very mangled) source of the fake Lenin quote. In the real quote, Lenin says nearly the exact opposite of the fake quote.

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Conclusion and shilling

In short: The popularly cited "why should we bother to reply to Kautsky" quote is fake. The fake quote was created and promoted by conservative pundits to pretend that Lenin hated debate. The fake quote was then promoted by anti-debate leftists to pretend that Lenin hated debate.

In the real quote on which the fake quote is based, Lenin said the opposite of the fake quote. In the real world, Lenin spent his literary career writing in defense of his beliefs and arguing against those who disagreed.

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