Mass Action and Revolution

The political and social developments of recent years have pushed the question of mass action ever more to the fore. On the basis of the lessons of the Russian Revolution, they were theoretically recognized by the party in 1905 as a method of class struggle; in the Prussian suffrage struggle in 1908 and 1910 they suddenly emerged in a splendid practical way; and since then, only temporarily pushed aside by the needs of the election campaign, they have been the subject of detailed discussion and debate. This development is no accident. On the one hand, it is a result of the increasing power of the proletariat; on the other hand, it is a necessary result of the new manifestation of capitalism which we call imperialism.

The causes and driving forces of imperialism need not concern us here; we will simply summarise its manifestations and effects: world power politics, armaments, especially the building of the fleet, colonial conquests, the growing tax pressure, the danger of war, the growing spirit of violence and dominance among the bourgeoisie, the reaction at home, the cessation of social reform, the consolidation of the business community, the difficulty of the trade union struggle, the rise in prices. All this is putting the working class in a new position for struggle. In the past, it could sometimes indulge in the hope of advancing slowly but steadily, in the trade unions by improving working conditions, politically by social reforms and increasing its political rights. Now it must exert all its strength not to be thrown back from the heights it has reached in terms of living standards and income. Its attack has become, above all, a defence. This makes the class struggle sharper and more general; Instead of the lure of a better situation, the bitter necessity of preventing deterioration is becoming the driving force of the struggle. Imperialism threatens the masses of the people — the petty bourgeois classes as well as the workers — with new dangers and catastrophes and whips them into resistance; taxes, inflation, the threat of war make bitter resistance necessary. But they only partly have their origin in parliamentary decisions and can therefore only partly be fought in parliament. The masses themselves must step forward, assert themselves directly and put pressure on the ruling class. This must be joined by the ability of the increasing power of the proletariat; a contradiction is increasingly emerging between the impotence of parliament and our parliamentary factions to combat these phenomena and the growing awareness of power of the working class. Mass actions are therefore a natural consequence of the imperialist development of modern capitalism and are increasingly forming the necessary form of the struggle against it.

Imperialism and mass actions are new phenomena, the nature and significance of which can only gradually be grasped and intellectually mastered. This is only possible through party polemics, and most of the party polemics of recent years have been concerned with them. They bring about a change in thinking and feeling, a new orientation of minds , which goes beyond the opposition between radicalism and revisionism, which arises primarily from parliamentary combat tactics. They separate, temporarily or permanently, those who previously stood together in the closest fighting community and were not aware of any opposition, and therefore, in their first flare-up, appear as regrettable, embarrassing misunderstandings, which make the disputes particularly acute. In order to clarify the differences, it is all the more necessary to go into the foundations of the combat tactics of the proletariat. We will then continue our polemical work by referring primarily to two articles by Kautsky from last year.

I. The Power of the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat

State power is the organ of society that rules over law and order. Political power, control over state power, must therefore be the goal of every revolutionary class. The conquest of political power is the precondition for socialism. The bourgeoisie now has state power and uses it to shape and maintain law and order in its capitalist interests. But it is becoming more and more of a minority, which is also increasingly losing its economic significance, its importance for the production process. The working class forms an ever-increasing majority of the population, in whose hands lies the most important economic function; therein lies the certainty that it will be able to conquer political power.

The conditions and methods of this political revolution must be examined more closely. Why has the working class, despite its superiority in numbers and economic importance over the bourgeoisie, still not been able to gain control? How has it been possible for a small exploiting minority to dominate the large exploited mass of the people almost all through the history of civilization? Because there are many other power factors at play here.

The first of these power factors is the intellectual superiority of the ruling minority. As a class that lives from surplus value and has the direction of production in its hands, it has all intellectual education, all science; through its far-sightedness, which encompasses the whole of society, it knows how to open up new sources of help, even when it is most seriously threatened by rebellious masses, and to outwit the simple masses, sometimes through self-confidence and perseverance, sometimes through treacherous omissions. The history of every slave revolt in ancient times, every peasant war in the Middle Ages, offers examples of this. Intellectual power is the mighty power in the human world. In bourgeois society, where a certain intellectual education becomes the common property of all classes, the educational monopoly of the ruling class is replaced by its intellectual domination of the masses. Through the schools, the church, and the bourgeois press, it still infects large masses of the proletariat with bourgeois views. This intellectual dependence on the bourgeoisie is a main cause of the weakness of the proletariat.

The second and most important factor of the ruling class's power lies in its tight, solid organization. A small, well-organized number is always stronger than a large, unorganized mass. This organization of the ruling class is the state power. It appears as the totality of officials, who, scattered as authorities among the masses of the people, are directed in a certain way from the central seat of government. The unity of will that emanates from the top forms the inner strength and essence of this organization. This gives it a tremendous moral superiority, which is expressed in the self-assurance of its behavior, over the disjointed masses, each of whom wants something different. It forms, as it were, a gigantic polyp, which penetrates every corner of the country with its finest tentacles moved from the central brain, a unified organism compared to which the other people, however numerous they may be, are only powerless atoms. Every individual who does not obey is automatically seized and crushed by the ingenious mechanism; and this awareness keeps the masses in respect.

But if the spirit of rebellion takes hold of the masses and respect for the higher authorities disappears, if the atoms join together in the belief that they can easily deal with the few officials, then the state has even stronger material means of force — the police and the army. They also form only small groups, minorities, but they are equipped with murder weapons and are forged together by strict military discipline into solid, unassailable bodies that act like automatic machines in the hands of the commanders. Against their power the mass of the people is defenseless, even if it tries to arm itself.

An ascending class can conquer and retain state power because of its economic importance and power; such is the case with the bourgeoisie as the leader of capitalist production and owner of money. But the more its economic function becomes superfluous and it sinks to the level of a parasitic class, the more this factor of its power disappears. Then its prestige and intellectual superiority are also lost, and finally the only basis of its rule is its control over state power with all its means of power. If the proletariat wants to conquer power, it must defeat state power, the fortress in which the owning class has entrenched itself. The struggle of the proletariat is not simply a struggle against the bourgeoisie for state power as an object, but a struggle against state power. The problem of the social revolution is, in brief, to increase the power of the proletariat to such a high level that it is superior to the power of the state; and the content of this revolution is the destruction and dissolution of the means of power of the state by the means of power of the proletariat .

The power of the proletariat consists, firstly, of a factor independent of our actions, which has already been mentioned above: its number of people and its economic importance, both of which are constantly increasing as a result of economic development and are making the working class ever more the dominant class in society. Alongside these are the two great factors of power, the increase of which is the goal of the entire workers' movement: knowledge and organization . In its first, simplest form, knowledge is class consciousness, which gradually increases to a clear insight into the nature of the political struggle and the class struggle in general, as well as into the nature of capitalist development. Through his class consciousness the worker is freed from intellectual dependence on the bourgeoisie; through his political and social knowledge the intellectual superiority of the ruling class is broken, leaving it only with brutal material power. The history of every day shows us to what extent the vanguard of the proletariat already surpasses the ruling class in this respect.

The organization is the joining of previously fragmented individuals into a unity. Whereas previously the will of each individual was directed independently of everything else, the organization means unity, the same direction of all individual wills. As long as the forces of the individual atoms are directed in all directions, they cancel each other out and their total effect is zero; if they are all directed in the same way, the total mass stands behind this force, behind this common will. The binding agent that holds the individuals together and forces them to act together is discipline, which means that each person lets his actions be determined not by his own insight, his own inclination, his own interest, but by the will and interest of the whole. The habit of subordinating one's own activity to a whole in large-scale organized operations creates the preconditions for such an organization in the modern proletariat. The practice of class struggle builds it up, makes its scope ever larger, its internal cohesion, the discipline, ever stronger. The organization is the most powerful weapon of the proletariat. The tremendous power which the ruling minority possesses through its solid organization can only be defeated by the even greater power of the organization of the majority.

Through the constant growth of these factors: economic importance, knowledge and organisation, the power of the proletariat rises above the power of the ruling class.1 Only then is the precondition for social revolution given. Here it becomes clear in what sense the old idea of ​​a rapid conquest of political power by a minority was an illusion. It was not excluded from the outset and could then have pushed development forward with a tremendous jolt; but the essence of the revolution is something quite different. The revolution is the conclusion of a profound process of transformation which completely overturns the character and nature of the exploited mass of the people. What was previously a fragmented group of individuals, ignorant and limited, each of whom sees only his own circumstances and obeys his own interests, becomes a solid army of far-sighted fighters who are guided by the common interest. Previously powerless, submissive, a dead, inert mass in the face of the goal-conscious, organized ruling power that sets it in motion for its own ends, it becomes an organized humanity, capable of determining its own fate with conscious will and of defiantly opposing the old rulers. From a passive mass it becomes an active mass, an organism with its own life, with its own self-created grouping and structure, with its own consciousness and its own organs. The destruction of the rule of capital has as a basic condition that the proletarian mass of the people is firmly organized and filled with the spirit of socialism; if this condition is sufficiently fulfilled, then the rule of capital has become impossible. This rise of the masses, their organization and awareness, therefore already forms the essential, the core of socialism. The rule of the capitalist state, which previously sought to inhibit the free development of the new living organism with its coercive power, becomes more and more a dead shell, like an eggshell around a young bird — it is burst. No matter how enormous the work and struggle involved in this explosion and conquest of power, the essential thing that counts, its precondition and foundation, is the growth of the proletarian organism, the development of the power of the working class necessary for victory.

II. The Conquest of Political Power

The illusion of the parliamentary conquest of power is based on the basic idea that a parliament elected by the people is the most important organ of legislation. If parliamentarism and democracy prevail, if parliament has all state power and the popular majority has power over parliament, the political-parliamentary struggle, that is, the gradual winning of the popular majority through parliamentary practice, education and election campaigns, would be the direct path to the conquest of state power. But these preconditions are lacking; they are nowhere to be found, and least of all in Germany. They must first be created through constitutional struggles, above all through the conquest of the democratic right to vote. From a formal point of view, the conquest of political power consists of two parts: firstly, the creation of the necessary constitutional foundations, the winning of political rights for the masses, and secondly, the correct use of these rights, the winning of the popular majority for socialism. Where democracy already prevails, the second part is the most important; But where, on the other hand, large masses have already been won over but the rights are lacking, as here in Germany, the focus of the struggle for power lies not in the struggle by means of the existing rights, but in the struggle for political rights.

These conditions are of course not accidental; the absence of the constitutional basis for popular rule in a country with a highly developed labor movement is the necessary form of capitalist rule. It expresses the fact that actual power lies in the hands of the propertied class. As long as this power remains unbroken, the bourgeoisie cannot even offer us the formal means of peacefully maneuvering it out. It must be defeated, its power must be broken . The constitution expresses the relationship between the power of the classes; but this power must prove itself in struggle. A change in the delimitation of the constitutional rights of the classes is only possible if the means of power of the contending classes confront each other and measure themselves against each other. What is formally a struggle for important political rights is, in its deepest essence, in reality a clash of the entire power of the two classes, a struggle between their strongest means of power, which seek to weaken and ultimately destroy each other. Although the struggle may bring alternating victories and defeats, concessions or periods of reaction, it can only end when one of the combatants lies defeated on the ground, when his means of power are destroyed and political power falls into the hands of the victor.

In the struggle so far, neither of the two classes has been able to bring its strongest means of power into play. To its great chagrin, the ruling class has never been able to use its strongest weapon, its military power, in the parliamentary struggle, and has had to watch helplessly, unable to prevent it, as the proletariat steadily increased its power. Therein lies the historical significance of the parliamentary method of struggle during the time when the proletariat, still weak, was in the process of its first rise. But the proletariat has not yet brought its strongest means of power into play either; only its numbers and its political insight have been brought to bear; but neither its importance in the production process nor its enormous organizational power — which was only needed in the union struggle, not in the political struggle against the state — have been effective. The struggles so far have basically been outpost battles, while the main forces on both sides have remained in reserve. In the coming struggles for power, both classes will have to use their sharpest weapons, their strongest means of power: without these competing against each other, no decisive shift in the balance of power is possible . The ruling class will try to crush the workers' movement with bloody violence. The proletariat will resort to mass action, progressing from the simplest form of meetings to street demonstrations and the most powerful form of mass strikes.

These mass actions presuppose a strong development of power on the part of the proletariat; they are only possible at a high level of development, because they make demands on the intellectual and moral qualities, on the knowledge and discipline of the workers, which can only be the fruit of long political and trade union struggles. If mass actions are to be carried out successfully, the workers must have enough political and social insight to be able to recognize and judge the preconditions, the effects, and the dangers of such struggles, their beginning and their termination. If the owning class ruthlessly exploits its means of power, makes regular communication with the workers impossible by paralyzing the press, banning meetings, and arresting the leadership of the struggle, and tries to intimidate them by imposing a state of siege and discourage them by spreading false news — then it depends on the clear insight and firm discipline of the proletariat, on its self-confidence, its solidarity, and its enthusiasm for the great common cause, whether and to what extent it can succeed with this. The power of the bourgeois state, exerting authoritarian violence, and the power of the revolutionary virtues of the rebellious working masses are pitted against each other to see which proves to be the stronger.

We must be prepared for the fact that the state will not shrink from such extreme measures. Whether in attack or in defence, the proletariat always wants to influence the state power, to influence it directly, to exert moral pressure on it, to impose its will on it. The possibility of doing so rests on the fact that the state power is highly dependent on the undisturbed continuation of economic life. If the regular continuation of the production process is disrupted by mass strikes, the state is suddenly faced with unusually difficult demands. It is supposed to restore "order", but how? It can perhaps prevent the masses from demonstrating, but it cannot force them to go back to work; at most it can try to demoralise them. If the authorities become confused in the face of these new tasks, in the face of the fear and agitation of the propertied class, which calls on the government to intervene or to give in, and if they lack a firm, unified will, then the inner strength of the state, its self-confidence, its authority, the source of its power, is undermined. The situation is even worse when transport strikes are added to this, which disrupt the connection between the local authorities and the central authority and thus dissolve the whole organization into its individual members, dismembering the huge polyp into powerless, twisting members — as was the case for a moment in the October strikes in the Russian Revolution.

At one point the government will try to use force, and then it will depend on the proletariat's determination whether it will help; at another point it will try to appease the masses with concessions and promises — then the struggle of the masses will have led to victory, either in whole or in part. Of course, the story does not end there. Once an important right has been won, there may be a period of calm during which it will be exploited to the limit of its effectiveness. But then the struggle must flare up again and again; the government cannot calmly grant political rights that give the masses a decisive position of power, or it will try to take them away again later; on the other hand, the masses cannot stop until they have the keys to state power in their hands. So the struggle starts again and again, organizational power pitted against organizational power, state power must expose itself again and again to the dissolving, disruptive effect of mass action. The struggle only stops when the end result is the complete destruction of the state organization. The organization of the majority then demonstrated its superiority by destroying the organization of the ruling minority.

But this goal can only be achieved if the mass struggles also profoundly influence and transform the proletariat itself. Like the political and trade union struggles of the past, they increase the power of the proletariat, only in a much more comprehensive, powerful and thorough manner. When mass actions occur that shake up the whole of social life to the core, all minds are aroused; even those who otherwise, once every five years, limit themselves to casting a ballot follow the rapid course of events with excitement and attention. And for those involved themselves, compelled to focus their entire minds with the keenest intensity on the political situation that determines their actions, their clear social insight and political foresight are sharpened more in a few days in such times of political crisis than they would otherwise be in years. The high demands that these struggles make themselves produce, through the practice of struggle, through the experience of victory and defeat, the means to meet them. As the struggles develop, the maturity of the proletariat increases, enabling it to take on further, more difficult struggles.

This applies not only to political insight, but also to organization. However, the opposite is often claimed. There is often a fear that the organization of the proletariat, its most important means of power, could be destroyed in this dangerous struggle; and this idea is the main reason for the aversion to the use of the mass strike among those whose entire activity is directed towards the leadership of today's large proletarian organization. They fear that in the clash between the proletarian organizations and the state organization, the former, as the weaker, must necessarily come off worse. For the state still has the power to simply dissolve the workers' organizations that dare to start a fight against it, to destroy their activities, to confiscate their coffers, to imprison their leaders; and it will certainly not allow itself to be deterred from doing so by legal or moral concerns. But such acts of violence will not help it; it can only destroy the external form, but not the inner essence. The organisation of the proletariat, which we describe as its most important means of power, is not to be confused with the form of present-day organisations and associations, in which it expresses itself under the conditions of a still solid bourgeois order. The essence of this organisation is something spiritual, it is the complete overturning of the character of the proletariat. Even if the ruling class appears to destroy the organisations through the unscrupulous use of its legislative and police power, this does not mean that the workers will suddenly become the old individualistic people who are only moved by their own whims and interests. The same spirit, the same discipline, the same cohesion, the same solidarity, the same habit of organised action will remain alive in them as before, and this spirit will create new forms of activity. Even if such an act of violence hits hard, the essential power of the proletariat will not be affected by it, any more than socialism could be affected by the Socialist Law, which prevented the regular form of association and agitation.

Conversely, the organization will be greatly strengthened by the mass struggles. Hundreds of thousands of workers who are still far from us out of indifference, fear or lack of faith in our cause will then be roused and take part in the struggle. While in the sluggish course of history of everyday struggles to date, ideological differences play a major role and divide the workers, in revolutionary times, when the struggle takes on sharper forms and brings rapid decisions, the primal class feeling breaks through irresistibly — if not at the first blow, then all the more surely afterwards. And at the same time the inner strength of the organization will be increased; put to the hardest test by the demands of such difficult struggles, discipline will also become as strong as steel, because it must be . Through these struggles themselves the power of the proletariat, which is still insufficient at present, will be increased to the level necessary to rule over society.

But will the ruling class not be able to inflict a certain defeat on the workers in such mass struggles by using its most severe weapon, bloody violence? The suffrage demonstrations in the spring of 1910 showed that it does not shrink from using such violence. But it also showed that the Schutsmann sledgehammer is powerless against a determined mass of people. It may hit individuals hard, but the aim of such violence, to intimidate the masses to such an extent that they would abandon their plan to demonstrate, could not be achieved against the determination, enthusiasm and discipline of the masses numbering hundreds of thousands.

However, things look different when the military is called out against the masses of the people; a mass of people cannot hold its demonstrations against the volleys of its heavily armed lines. But this does not help the ruling class. For the army consists of the sons of the people and, to an increasing extent, of young proletarians who have already acquired some class consciousness from their fathers. This does not mean that the masses will immediately fail in the hands of the bourgeoisie; iron discipline will, as it were, mechanically push aside all other considerations. But what was already true to some extent for the old mercenary armies, that they could not be used against the people in the long run, applies to a much greater extent for the modern people's armies. In the end, even iron discipline cannot withstand such use. Nothing breaks discipline as surely as the repeated imposition, followed a few times by action, on the people to shoot at their own class comrades when they simply want to assemble or march around peacefully. Precisely in order to keep the discipline of the army intact in the event of a revolution, the Junker government in Germany has so far avoided using the military in strikes as much as possible. This is a clever idea, but it does not save them. The reactionaries, who are always rushing to a "military solution" to the workers' question, do not suspect that they are only accelerating their own downfall. If the government is forced to use the military against the mass actions of the proletariat, this mass loses more and more of its inner strength. It is like a shining sword that commands respect and can inflict serious wounds, but as soon as it is needed, it begins to become useless. And if this mass is lost, the ruling class will have lost its last, strongest means of power, and it will be defenseless.

The social revolution is the process of the gradual dissolution of all the means of power of the ruling class, and in particular of the state, the process of the steady building up of the power of the proletariat to its highest perfection. At the beginning of this period the proletariat must already have achieved a fairly high level of class-conscious insight, intellectual power and solid organization in order to be capable of the more difficult struggles that follow; but all this is still imperfect. The reputation of the state and the ruling class has already been shattered among the masses, who recognize them as enemies, but their material power still remains unbroken. At the end of the revolutionary process, nothing of this power remains; the entire working people stand as a highly organized mass, which determines its own fate with clear consciousness, is capable of ruling and can begin to take the organization of production into its own hands.

III. The Action of the Mass

In the Neue Zeit from October 13 to 27, Comrade Kautsky examines the forms, conditions and effects of the actions of the great mass of the people in a series of articles entitled "The Action of the Mass". Although these articles undoubtedly arose from the fact that in recent years the party has been talking more and more about mass actions, it must be noted from the outset that the very formulation of the question does not fit with the real question at hand in practice. Kautsky stresses at the beginning that by mass action he does not mean that the actions of the organized workers become more and more mass by themselves as their organizations grow, but rather the appearance of the great "unorganized mass of the people, the 'street', which occasionally comes together and then disperses again [...]. The fact that political and economic actions are increasingly becoming mass actions does not in any way mean that we recognize that that special type of mass action, which is briefly called street action, is also destined to play an increasingly important role." For Kautsky, there are two very different forms of organization. On the one hand, the form of the workers' struggle to date, in which a small core group of the people, the organized workers, which perhaps comprises only a tenth of the entire propertyless mass, leads its political and trade union struggle. On the other hand, the action of the great unorganized mass, the "street," which rises up for some reason or other and intervenes in history. For Kautsky, the question is whether the first will be the only form of movement of the proletariat in the future, or whether the second form, mass action, will also continue to play an important role.

But when the necessity, the inevitability or the expediency of mass action was emphasized in the party discussions of recent years, this contradiction was never the issue. It meant neither the mere determination that our struggles should become more mass, nor the appearance of the unorganized mass on the political stage, but something third, a certain new form of activity of the organized workers . The development of modern capitalism has forced these pleasant forms of action upon the class-conscious proletariat. Threatened by imperialism with great dangers, in the struggle for more power in the state, for more rights, it is compelled to assert its will against the other powerful forces of capitalism in the most energetic way — more energetically than is possible through the speeches of its representatives in parliament. It must appear itself, intervene in the political struggle and try to influence the government and the bourgeoisie through the pressure of its masses. When we talk about mass actions and their necessity, we mean extra-parliamentary political activity by the organized working class, in which the working class itself has a direct influence on politics through its actions rather than through representatives. They are not the same as "street" action — although street demonstrations are one of their forms, their strongest form is precisely the mass struggle, carried out in empty streets. The trade union struggles, in which the masses themselves appear from the outset, automatically form a transition to these political mass actions as soon as they produce major political effects. In the practical question of mass actions, it is therefore simply a question of an extension of the field of activity of the proletarian organizations.

These mass actions stand in the sharpest possible contrast to the earlier popular movements in history, which Kautsky investigated as mass actions. There the masses came together for a moment, amassed by the same great social force to form a common will; then the mass disintegrated again into the fragmented individuals of before. Here the masses are already organized in advance, their action is planned and prepared in advance, and after its conclusion the organization remains together. There, in the old mass actions, the aim could only be the overthrow of a hated regime, that is, the immediate conquest of power through a single revolutionary act; but because, after this aim was achieved, the mass disintegrated again, power fell back to a small group, and even if the people tried to anchor their rule through universal suffrage, this did not prevent a new class rule. Our mass actions are also about the conquest of power, but we know that this is only possible through a highly organized, socialist mass of the people. Therefore, the immediate aim of our actions is always only a specific reform or concession, a step forward in pushing back the enemy, a step upward in building up our own power. In the past, popular power could not be built up steadily and securely; it could only rise up for a moment in sudden, violent eruptions and throw off an oppressive rule; but then it dissolved into nothing again and a new rule settled over the powerless mass of the people. The abolition of all class rule, which we have in mind, is only possible if a permanent popular power is built up gradually and unshakably, to the point that it simply crushes the state power of the bourgeoisie with its force and reduces it to nothing. In the past, popular uprisings either had to conquer the entire goal, or they failed if their power was not sufficient to do so. Our mass actions cannot fail; even if the set goal is not achieved, they are not in vain, and even temporary setbacks build up other future victories. The old mass actions always involved only a tiny part of the entire population: the uprising and mobilization of a part of the popular classes in the capital was often enough to overthrow a government, and in any case it was not possible to get more than that. Today our mass actions also only involve a minority; but as they draw in ever wider circles of the previously uninvolved population and enlist them in our army, the totality of the mass actions finally grows into the action of the great exploited mass of the people, which makes any further class rule impossible.

This sharp emphasis on the contrast between what is understood by party practice and what Kautsky understands as mass action does not make his investigation superfluous. For it is not impossible that in the future, too, sudden, violent uprisings of the millions of unorganized masses against a government may break out. Kautsky shows in detail — and quite rightly — that parliamentarism and the trade union movement, instead of making direct mass action superfluous, actually make their basic conditions a reality. Inflation and war, which in the past so often whipped up the masses to revolutionary uprisings, are now once again within reach. It is therefore of the utmost importance for us to study the nature, the foundations and the effects of such spontaneous mass actions using the factual material of history as far as possible.

However, the way in which Kautsky carries out this investigation must give rise to serious doubts. The result itself reveals this deficiency. What is the overall impression that the reader of the second article, which examines the appearance of the mass in history, is left with? The mass sometimes appears revolutionary, but it also appears reactionary; it has a destructive effect, sometimes useful, sometimes harmful, sometimes breaking out when one least expects it, sometimes failing completely when one expects it to appear.

The effects and manifestations of mass action can therefore be of the most varied kind. They are difficult to predict, because the conditions on which they depend are of a highly complicated nature. They almost always have either a surprising effect, exceeding all expectations, or a disappointing one (p. 82).

In short, one cannot really say anything about it, one cannot calculate anything definite from it, everything is accidental and uncertain. The result is therefore no result; the investigation, despite the many good and valuable individual comments, has remained fruitless. Why is that? We cannot give the reason better than by what we stated seven years ago in a critique of the teleological conception of history (“Neue Zeit”, XXII, 2, p. 423, Marxism and Teleology):

If one takes the mass in general, the whole people, one finds that when opposing views and wills are mutually abolished, nothing seems to remain but a will-less, capricious, unbridled, characterless, passive mass, vacillating back and forth between different drives, between rebellious impulses and dull indifference — as is well known, the image that liberal writers like to portray the people with. In fact, it must seem to bourgeois researchers that, given the infinite diversity of individuals, abstraction from the individual is at the same time abstraction by itself, which makes man a willing, living being, so that only a characterless mass remains. For between the smallest unit, the individual, and the very general, in which all differences are abolished, the inert mass, they know no intermediate link; they know no classes. In contrast, it is the power of socialist historical theory that it brought order and system into the infinite diversity of personalities by dividing society into classes. In every class one finds individuals who have roughly the same interests, the same will, the same views, which are opposed to those of the other classes. If one distinguishes the particular classes in the historical mass movements, then a clear struggle between the classes emerges from the previously inextricable fog, with its alternating moments of attack, retreat, defense, victory and defeat. Just compare the descriptions that Marx gave of the revolutions of 1848 with those of bourgeois authors. The class is the general in society, which at the same time has retained a particular content; if one abolishes this particular in order to arrive at something absolutely universally human, nothing specific remains. A social science can only have content if it deals with classes, where the contingency of the individual is abolished and at the same time the essence of man, a tuned will and feeling that is different from others, has remained in a pure, abstract form.

Among Marx's students, no one has demonstrated the importance of this Marxist theory as a tool for the researcher of history as clearly as Kautsky in his historical writings; the brilliant clarity which he brings everywhere is essentially due to the fact that he penetrates into the classes, their situation, their interests and views, and explains their actions on this basis. Here, however, he has left the Marxist tool to Hanse, and as a result he has reached no conclusion. Nowhere in his historical exposition is there any mention of the special class character of the masses; following and in polemics with Le Bon and Kropotkin, only the unimportant psychological element is illuminated, while the essential, the economic element, from which the differences in the form and aim of the mass movements arise, remains unconsidered. The action of the lumpenproletariat, which can only plunder and destroy without any goals of its own, the action of the petty bourgeoisie who took to the barricades in Paris, the action of modern wage workers who force political reforms through a mass strike, the action of the peasants in economically backward countries — as in Spain or Tyrol in 1808 — against the artificial imposition of modern laws, they are all different and the nature of their methods and effects can only be understood by considering the class situation and class feelings. But if you throw them all together indiscriminately as "action of the masses", all that can result is a muddle that brings the exact opposite of clarity. The portrayal of the Spanish guerrilla war as a reactionary mass action, which brought the "reactionary rabble" of "priests, Junkers and courtiers" out of control in place of the useful French, may be very sympathetic in the days of the struggle against the black-blue bloc, but it does not correspond to Kautsky's usual historical method. When he points to the June battle as a warning example of a mass action provoked by the government and smothered in blood, for the benefit of the present generation, he misses the essential fact that here two masses, one bourgeois and one proletarian, faced each other. Thus every historical event is bound to be misunderstood if one tries to fit it under the meaningless, general concept of mass action, neglecting its essential, special character.

This deficiency also has an impact when the third article examines "the historical changes in mass actions". Here, where the conditions and effects of proletarian mass movements are concerned, Kautsky again offers a wealth of valuable and important explanations; but the general basis of his statements nevertheless invites criticism. Kautsky sees that modern mass actions will have a different character from the old ones; but he seeks the reason for the difference above all in the organization and the information.

But no matter how powerful one may imagine the mass actions that can arise from this situation to be, they will no longer have quite the character that they once had. The forty years of popular political rights and proletarian organization cannot have passed without leaving a trace. The number of organized and enlightened elements in the mass has become too large for them not to assert themselves in spontaneous outbreaks, however sudden these may be, however powerful the excitement from which they arise, however much any planned direction may be eliminated (p. 115).

Here, the main contrast between the mass actions of the past and those of today and of the future is completely ignored: the completely different class composition of the modern masses. Even the unorganized masses of today must behave completely differently from the popular masses of the past, for they differ from them as proletarian masses from bourgeois masses. The historical mass movements were actions of bourgeois masses; craftsmen, peasants and petty-bourgeois workers in small businesses took part in them. Because these classes were individualistic by the nature of their economy, the mass had to break up into units again immediately as soon as the action was over. Today, the large masses capable of action consist mainly of proletarians, of workers in the service of big capital, who have a completely different class character and are completely different from the old petty bourgeoisie in their thinking, feeling and being.

In view of this difference in basic character, the contrast between organized and unorganized masses is not insignificant — for training and experience make a great difference among members of the working class with similar dispositions — but it is nevertheless a minor matter. It has been pointed out repeatedly that not all sections of the working class can be organized to the same extent. It is precisely the workers in the most highly developed and concentrated capitalist factories, in the cartelized heavy industry, in the railways, and sometimes also in the mines, who present much greater difficulties for union organization than the less concentrated large-scale industry. The reason is obvious: the power of capital — or of the state as entrepreneur — is so enormous and overwhelming against them that resistance, even by means of organization, seems hopeless. These masses are, in their deepest essence, more proletarian than any other; work in the service of capital has instilled in them an instinctive discipline. Their struggles have so far been in the nature of spontaneous outbursts; but in this they showed an astonishing discipline and solidarity and an unshakable firmness in the struggle, of which the strikes of the unorganized masses in the service of the trusts in America in recent years have shown fine examples. They do lack the experience, the endurance, the insight that can only be acquired through a long period of combat practice. But there is nothing in them of the old individualism of the unorganized petty bourgeoisie. Their class position means that they are able to grasp the lessons of organization and the socialist class struggle in a flash and know how to apply them. If one describes them as impossible or difficult to organize, this refers only to the form of today's social organization, not to combat discipline and organizational spirit, not to the ability to take part in proletarian mass actions. As soon as some event means that the power of capital no longer appears overwhelming and unassailable, they will enter the struggle, and it is not at all impossible that they will play an even greater role in the mass actions, form even more valuable battalions than the mass of those who are now organized.

The action of the unorganized mass thus automatically follows on from the action of the organized masses that we considered at the beginning. The mass actions that the organized workers decide on quickly attract wider circles of the proletariat, and thus gradually increase to actions of the entire proletarian class. The contrast between the organized and the unorganized, which often seems so great today, disappears in the process; not because the latter are now all being accepted into the cadres of the existing organizations — for it is by no means certain that these can continue to exist in their current form — but in the sense that in these forms of struggle everyone can exercise their discipline, their solidarity, their socialist insight, their devotion to their class in the same way. The task of social democracy — in the form of the present party organization or in whatever other organ it embodies itself — is to direct its action and to shape it in a unified manner as the spiritual expression of what lives in this mass.

The picture that emerges from Kautsky's explanation looks quite different. Building on the result of his historical investigation that nothing definite can be said about a mass action, he also sees in future mass actions enormous eruptions that, completely unpredictably, break over us like a natural catastrophe, for example an earthquake. Until then, the workers' movement must simply continue with its previous practice; elections, strikes, parliamentary work, enlightenment, everything continues in the old way on a gradually increasing scale, without changing anything essential in the world — until suddenly, awakened by an external event, a huge mass uprising arises and perhaps overthrows the ruling regime. Exactly like the old master of bourgeois revolutions; only with the difference that now the party organization is ready to take power into its own hands and determine the fruits of victory and, instead of eating the chestnuts that the masses pulled out of the fire themselves as the new ruling class, it prepares them as a dish for all. It is the same theory that Kautsky put forward during the mass strike debate two years ago — the theory of the mass strike as a one-off revolutionary act designed to overthrow capitalist rule at one blow — which appears here in a new form. It is the theory of waiting without taking action — without taking action in the sense that we do not continue to work in the usual parliamentary and trade union manner, but in the sense that we allow the great mass actions to come to us passively like natural phenomena, instead of actively organizing and driving them forward at the right moment. It is the theory that belongs to the party leadership's practice of being averse to mass action, and it is from this that we can logically understand the often-criticized practice of the party leadership of remaining inactive during the great moments when the action of the proletariat was required and of putting an end to the street demonstrations as quickly as possible during the struggle for the right to vote, so that peace can be restored. In contrast to our doctrine of the revolutionary activity of the proletariat, which in a period of increasing mass action establishes its rule and increasingly erodes the power of the class state, this theory of passive radicalism expectsno change from the conscious activity of the proletariat. It agrees with revisionism that our conscious activity is exhausted in the parliamentary and trade union struggle. And so it is not strange that its practice all too often — as recently with the run-off election agreement — shows an approach to revisionist tactics. It differs from revisionism in that the former expects the change from such activity itself, the transition to socialism, and therefore intensifies it through reforms, whereas it does not share this expectation, but foresees revolutionary outbreaks as catastrophes. Which suddenly break in without our will and without our intervention, as if from another world, and put an end to capitalism. It is "the old tried and tested tactic" in its negative side elevated to a system. It is the catastrophe theory in the form in which we previously only knew it as a bourgeois misunderstanding, which has advanced to party doctrine.

Finally, Kautsky states:

"If we see the political and social situation as pregnant with catastrophes in the near future, this is due to our understanding of this particular situation, not to a general theory. But does the particularity of the situation give rise to the need for a special, new tactic? Some of our friends say so. They want to revise our tactics. We could only discuss this in more detail if they came up with specific proposals. That has not happened to date. Above all, we must know whether we are calling for new tactical principles or new tactical measures [...]" (p. 116).

The simple answer to this is that we do not need to make any suggestions. The tactics that we consider to be correct are already the tactics of the party ; without any suggestions being necessary, they have been practically implemented in the mass demonstrations. Theoretically, the party has already recognized them in the Jena Resolution, which speaks of the mass strike as a means of gaining new political rights. This is not to say that we are completely satisfied with the practice of the last few years; but one cannot propose as a new tactic that the party leadership should not see it as its task to dampen mass actions of the proletariat as much as possible or to prohibit discussions about tactics. When we sometimes talk about new tactics, it is not in the sense of proposing new principles or measures — we take it for granted that action will be taken as the situation demands in each case — but rather to provide clear theoretical insight into what is actually taking place . The tactics of the proletariat are already changing, or better still, expanding, as they incorporate new, more powerful means of struggle; our task as a party is to awaken a clear awareness of this fact in the masses, of its causes as well as of its far-reaching consequences. We must spread the message that the situation arising from the increase in mass struggles is not an accidental one, of which nothing can be said, but the permanent and normal situation of the last period of capitalism. We must point out that the mass actions taken so far are only the beginning of a period of revolutionary class struggles in which the proletariat, instead of passively waiting until catastrophes from outside shake the world, must itself build up its power and freedom through constant attack and forward pressure, through hard, sacrificial work. This is the "new tactic", which could also be quite rightly called the natural continuation of the old tactic in its positive aspect.

IV. Conclusion

We have described the constitutional struggle above as a struggle in which the means of power of the two classes compete against each other in order to weaken each other. But it is clear that the object, the basic political rights, are only the external form, only the cause, while the essential content of the struggle consists in the classes bringing their means of power into play against each other and each trying to destroy that of the opponent. Therefore the same struggle can also flare up for other reasons; it is not certain that these great power struggles will arise only from the Prussian or Reichstag electoral law, although of course the destruction of the power of the bourgeoisie automatically brings with it a democratic constitution. Imperialist development creates ever new reasons for violent revolts of the exploited classes against the rule of capital, in which their entire power is shattered. The most important of these reasons is the threat of war .

Sometimes one comes across the view that we should not simply speak of a danger here. Wars have always been great world-changing forces, forerunners of revolutions. While the masses would otherwise endure the rule of capital patiently for a long time without exerting any energy to resist it, because they still consider this rule to be inviolable, a war, especially if it goes badly, whips them into action, weakens the authority of the ruling regime, exposes its weakness and allows it to easily collapse under the onslaught of the masses. This is undoubtedly true, and this is the reason why the presence of a revolutionary-minded working class has been the strongest force in peace in recent decades. The indifference and apathy of the masses, these strongest pillars of the rule of capital, disappear in times of war; In a proletariat in which socialist doctrines are firmly rooted, the heightened passion will not be transformed into nationalistic excitement, as in the unenlightened masses, but into revolutionary determination, and will turn against the government at the first opportunity. Big capital knows this too, and will therefore be careful not to frivolously conjure up a European war, which at the same time means a European revolution. But this does not mean that we should secretly wish for a war. Even without war, the proletariat will be able to overthrow the rule of capital by constantly increasing its actions. Only those who despair of the proletariat's ability to act independently can see war as the necessary precondition for revolution.

The situation is exactly the opposite. We must not rely too much on the awareness of the revolutionary danger among those in power to keep war at bay. The imperialist lust for plunder and the disputes that result from it can draw them into a war that they did not directly want. And if the revolutionary movement in a country has become so dangerous that it is a direct threat to the rule of capital, then it has nothing worse to fear from a war and will only too easily try to divert the danger from itself. For the working class, however, war is the worst of all evils. A war in our modern capitalist world is a terrible catastrophe that destroys the welfare and lives of countless masses to a far greater extent than all previous wars. The working class has to experience all the suffering of this catastrophe and will therefore have to do everything in its power to prevent war. The question is not: what will happen after the war? must dominate their thoughts, but the question: in what way will it be possible for us to make the outbreak of war impossible?

This is one of the most important tactical questions of international social democracy, which has occupied many congresses and received a wide variety of opinions. Kautsky deals with this in his May title of last year: "War and Peace" ("Neue Zeit", XXIX, 2, p. 97). He poses the question whether the workers can prevent a war or nip it in the bud by means of a mass strike ("a dispute of the entire mass of workers"), and he answers: under certain circumstances this is certainly possible; where a frivolous and stupid government is the only reason for war and there is no threat of enemy invasion — as, for example, in the Spanish war against Morocco — the overthrow of this government by a mass strike can lead to peace — unfortunately the Spanish proletariat was too weak for this. Now it is clear that this case only applies to very undeveloped capitalist conditions, where not the mass of the bourgeoisie but only a small group is interested in the war adventure, so that another bourgeois party is ready to take the place of the overthrown government and the proletariat is weak and harmless. Where the proletariat is strong enough to carry out a mass strike of this force, all of these conditions are generally lacking. However, Kautsky does not address these class relations, but sets up another contrast:

“The situation is quite different where a population feels threatened by its neighbour, whether rightly or wrongly, where it sees the cause of war in that neighbour and not in its own government, and where the neighbour is not as harmless as Morocco, for example, which could never wage war on Spain, but where the danger of its invasion threatens. Nothing fears a people more than an enemy invasion. The horrors of today's war are horrific for each of the belligerents and for the victor. But they are doubly and trebly horrific for the weaker party into whose territory the war is brought. The thought that torments the French and the English today in equal measure is the fear of invasion by the overpowering German neighbour.

It has come to the point where the population sees the cause of war not in its own government but in the evil of its neighbour — and which government has not tried to instill this view in the masses of the population with the help of its press, its parliamentarians and its diplomats! — if war breaks out under such circumstances, then the whole population unanimously feels a strong need to secure the border against the malicious enemy, to protect it from invasion. First of all, everyone becomes a patriot, even the internationally minded, and if individuals have the superhuman courage to rebel against it and to try to prevent the military from rushing to the border and being supplied with ample war material, the government would not have to lift a finger to neutralize them. The angry mob would kill them themselves." (p. 104.)

If we had not seen another example of this kind of historical reflection in the reflection on the action of the masses, it would be hard to believe that these sentences came from the pen of Kautsky. The most powerful reality of social life, the basic fact of socialist insight, the existence of classes with their particular opposing interests and views, has completely disappeared here. There are no differences between proletarians, capitalists, and petty bourgeois; they have all become a "whole population" which stands "unanimously" against the malicious enemy. And not only the instinctive class feeling, but also the tenets of socialism, inculcated for decades, have dissolved into nothing; the Social Democrats — who are referred to here with the shameful term "internationally minded" — have all, with only a few exceptions, become patriots. Everything they knew up to now about the interests of capital as the cause of wars has been forgotten. The Social Democratic press, which informs its more than a million readers about the motives of war, seems to have suddenly disappeared or to have lost all its influence as if by magic. The Social Democratic workers, who form the majority of the population in the big cities, have become a "crowd" which furiously kills those who dare to resist the war. While it is superfluous to prove that this whole representation has nothing to do with reality, it is important to examine how it is possible and from what basis it springs.

It arises from a conception of war which reflects the conditions and effects of war in the past, but no longer fits in with modern conditions. Since the last great European war, the structure of society has changed completely. At the time of the Franco-Prussian War, Germany was an agrarian country, as was France, with only a few industrial districts scattered throughout it; the peasant economy and the petty bourgeoisie dominated the character of the people. The effects of war, as they still live in people's minds, recur in all descriptions, and dominate Kautsky's account too, are its effects on the peasant economy and the petty bourgeoisie . For these classes, the horror of war consists, apart from the danger to the lives of those conscripted, above all in the enemy invasion, which tramples on their fields, devastates their houses, imposes the heaviest burdens and contributions on them, and thereby destroys their hard-earned welfare. The regions where the war takes place are ravaged in the worst possible way; But where the war does not reach, people suffer relatively little. Economic life there continues in the usual way; women, young people and old people can work the fields if necessary, and only the loss or crippling of those who have gone to war can hit individual families hard economically.

That was the case in 1870. Today, the situation is quite different for the large states, especially Germany. Highly developed capitalism has turned economic life into an intricate, artistic organism, in which every part is closely connected with the whole. The time when villages and small towns were self-sufficient, almost independent of the rest of the world, is over; peasants and petty bourgeois have been drawn into the circle of capitalist commodity production. Any disturbance of this sensitive production mechanism affects the great mass of the population. The effects of war, its effects on the proletariat and on all those who depend on capitalism, have thus become quite different from the old traditional ones. Its horrors no longer consist in a few devastated fields and burned villages, but in the standstill of the entire economic life. A European war, whether it be a land war that calls several million young men to the battlefield, or a naval war that hinders trade and thus the supply of raw materials and foodstuffs for industry, means an economic crisis of tremendous force, a catastrophe that buries the sources of life of the widest sections of the population, even in the most remote parts of the country; our highly developed social organism is paralyzed, while at the same time enormous masses of armed men destroy each other with modern, perfected weapons of war, as if by machine. In this crisis, capital values ​​are destroyed, compared to which the value of the burned houses and the trampled fields is trifles and which perhaps exceeds the direct costs of the war. The horror of such a war is not limited and hardly concentrated to the areas where the battles are fought, but extends to the whole country. Even if the enemy stays outside, the catastrophe in one's own country is no less great. For a modern capitalist country, the great misfortune is not the invasion of the enemy, but war itself , which primarily whips up the proletarian masses, who suffer most from the crisis, to counter-action. The aim of this action, which rouses the masses to the highest passion, is not to keep the enemy away , as in the old peasant times, but to prevent war .

This aim has always been the main objective of the workers' movement; the international congresses never asked whether we should try to prevent war or rush to the borders like good patriots, but rather how we could best prevent war. But when considering the actions intended for this purpose, a mechanical approach prevails all too often, as if they could be decided in advance, put into effect at the right time and run like clockwork. Instead of being the expression of the passion of the proletarian masses whipped up by the deepest class interests, social democracy appears as the "sixth great power" which, like a huge secret society, appears on the scene at the moment when the cannons are about to go off and seeks to thwart the military operations of the other great powers by its cleverly devised maneuvers. This mechanical conception is the basis of the idea, formerly advocated by the anarchists and recently reprised in Copenhagen by the French and English, of playing a nasty trick on the war-mongering government by means of a strike by the transport workers and the munitions factories. Kautsky is quite right in opposing this idea and stressing that only action by the whole class can influence the government.

But the same mechanical view also shines through in his own reflections, when he tries to find out under what external conditions a mass strike to prevent war can achieve its goal or not. The proletariat must therefore decide; either the situation is in our favour, we hold a mass strike and spoil the government's plan — or the conditions are unfavourable for such an action; then we do nothing, then we act like the Berliners in November 1848, who cleverly thwarted the violent plans of the reaction by calling up the troops without resistance and allowing themselves to be disarmed. Then we do not put anything in the way of the governments and willingly allow ourselves to be sent to the border. Now the process may take place in some theory or in the heads of leaders who believe that their wisdom is called upon to protect the proletariat from stupidity. But in the reality of the class struggle, where the passionate will of the masses asserts itself, there cannot be such a choice. In a highly capitalist country, where the proletarian mass feels its power as the great people's power, it will simply have to take action when it sees the worst catastrophe coming upon it. It must try to prevent war by all means possible; if it were to cleverly avoid the decision, it would be a surrender without a fight and worse than defeat; and only when it is beaten and defeated in this attempt can it acknowledge its weakness.

Of course, the question is not whether this is good and advisable or not. The subject of this discussion is not how the workers should act , but how they will act . The decisions and resolutions of the executive committees of bureaucratic bodies or even of the organizations themselves are not decisive, but the profound effects that events have on the masses. When we speak of "must" above, this does not mean that in our opinion it cannot be otherwise, but that it will prevail by natural necessity. In normal times there is always a bit of tradition in party views, "which weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." Times of war, like times of revolution, are times of the greatest intellectual tension; then the sloppiness of everyday life is broken, and habitual thoughts lose their power in the face of class interests, which come to the consciousness of the violently aroused masses with primal clarity. Next to these new views and aims, which arise spontaneously from the powerful impact of the great upheavals, the traditional party programs pale in comparison, and the parties and groups often emerge completely transformed from the crucible of such critical periods. An instructive example of this is the effect of the war of 1866 on the German bourgeoisie; it recognized then that the beautiful progressive program did not correspond to its deepest class interests; a section of the voters abandoned the liberal parliamentarians, a section of the parliamentarians abandoned the program and embraced nationalism and government reaction.

This is not to say that the decisions of the party are something indifferent. They do not, of course, dictate the future and merely express the clarity with which the party sees the future. But the better the party understands the inevitable course of development and its own expenditure in it, the more successful and coherent the proletarian actions will be. The task of the party is to organize the actions of the proletarian masses in a unified manner by becoming clearly aware of what passionately moves the masses, by correctly recognizing what is necessary at any given moment, by placing itself at the forefront and thereby giving the action a tremendous impetus. If it did not fulfill this task, it would not be able to prevent outbreaks of the masses which would overwhelm it, but due to the conflict between party discipline and proletarian fighting energy, due to the lack of unity between the leadership and the masses, the actions would become confused, disjointed, fragmented and would lose enormously in power and effect. Party decisions, programs and resolutions do not determine historical development, but are determined by our insight into the inevitable historical development — this truth must always be held up to those who believe that the party can either make or prevent a revolutionary movement, especially to the bourgeois opponents who denounce the Social Democracy with great clamor, as if it had the plans to prevent a war ready in a secret drawer, like a mobilization order. But we must not forget that the party, with its decisions, by its very nature, also forms a living, active part of historical development, that it can be nothing other than the core of every proletarian unit and therefore rightly attracts all the hatred with which the defenders of capitalism persecute every revolutionary movement.

From various sides — from our own spokesmen in defence against nationalist attacks, from foreign comrades as a criticism — the fact that the German working class has so far refused to speak out in favour of specific means of preventing war has often been emphasised as being of particular importance. In contrast, one can point to the Stuttgart Resolution, which leaves open the use of all expedient means. But even otherwise it would be wrong to attach too much importance to this. More than the decisions of the party, the spirit that fills the masses depends here. The previous cautious standpoint did indeed correspond to the spirit of the masses, who instinctively felt that they were not up to a fight against the full power of the strongest military state. But with the steady rise of proletarian power, a change must occur at some point, the signs of which have already become apparent repeatedly. A working class that has gone through forty years of intensive fundamental socialist enlightenment will no longer allow itself to be dragged out to the battlefield with a feeling of complete powerlessness. The German proletariat, which is the world leader in organizational power, can neither remain idly silent in the face of the machinations of international big capital, nor rely on the supposed tendencies towards peace in the bourgeois world. It will have no choice but to intervene as soon as the danger of war arises and to oppose its power to the means of government.

The form these actions will take depends essentially on the circumstances, the magnitude of the danger and the actions of the enemy, the ruling class. In its simplest form, it is linked to the fact that capital is deterred from war above all by consideration for the proletariat. If the proletariat is powerless, indifferent, and does not move, the bourgeoisie does not consider the danger to be great and will more easily risk war. The protest actions of the proletariat therefore have, in their first form, the character of a warning, so that the ruling class is aware of the danger and warned to be cautious. Against the warmongering of the interested capitalist circles, it must exert pressure on the governments through international demonstrations in order to intimidate them. But the more threatening the danger of war becomes, the more emphatically the broadest sections of the population must be aroused, the more energetic and sharp the demonstrations will be, especially if the opposing side tries to suppress them by force. Because this is a question of the life of the proletariat, it will ultimately have to resort to the strongest means possible, such as mass strikes. Thus the struggle between the bourgeoisie's desire for war and the proletariat's desire for peace develops into a piece of enormous class struggle, to which everything that was said previously about the conditions and effects of mass action to win democratic voting rights applies. The actions against the war will enlighten the widest circles, mobilize them and draw them into battle, weaken the power of capital, and increase the power of the proletariat. The prevention of war, which in the mechanical view seemed to be a cleverly considered plan in advance, can in an emergency only be the final result of a class struggle that increases with each action to the greatest intensity, from which the power of the state will emerge weakened to the greatest extent possible and the power of the proletariat increased to the greatest extent possible.

Kautsky sets up the contrast: only when we rule will the danger of war be eliminated; as long as capitalism rules, war cannot be absolutely prevented. In this sharp contrast between two forms of society which merge into one another without mediation, as it were through a sudden change, Kautsky overlooks the process of revolution in which, through the active intervention of the proletariat, its own power is gradually built up and the rule of capital crumbles piece by piece. Therefore, we set up the third case of "revolutionary practice" against his contrast: precisely the struggle for war, the inevitable attempt of the proletariat to prevent war, becomes an episode in the process of revolution, an essential part of the proletarian struggle to conquer power.

• 1We will leave aside here how these factors are constantly growing through the parliamentary and trade union struggles and refer to our paper: “The tactical differences in the workers’ movement”, where this has been dealt with in detail.