Two-way Tactical Battle

A few months ago, the attention of the comrades was taken up by a debate on the tactics of the party, which revolved above all around the use of the mass strike. Comrade Rosa Luxemburg, in particular, emphasized that the struggle for Prussian suffrage must now be the main task of the party, and she attacked the leading party authorities who wanted to postpone this struggle against the Reichstag election. As a result of the behavior of the Baden parliamentary group, a completely different tactical question suddenly came to the forefront of the party's interest, the old struggle between revisionism and radicalism. Naturally, these different struggles were now linked to each other. Kurt Eisner sought to invoke Comrade Luxemburg in defense of the Badeners: since the Prussian suffrage struggle is of all-dominant importance, why should the party waste its time on the tiny Baden question, which is meaningless for the workers' movement? Conversely, this is now being used by the “Vorwärts” and by Kautsky to create a mood against Comrade Luxemburg's position in the mass strike debate, as if by attacking the party leadership she were making herself the helper of the Badeners, a third party in the alliance with Kolb and Eisner. It may therefore be appropriate to take a closer look at the real relationship between these two battles over tactics.

The struggle between radicalism and revisionism takes place entirely within the field of parliamentarism; it is entirely a product of the parliamentary period of the proletarian liberation struggle. However, revisionism as a theory, as a bourgeois world view, goes beyond the framework of parliament and represents an abandonment of the sharp class standpoint and a rapprochement with the bourgeois world in every field where the proletariat asserts itself, in the trade unions, the cooperatives, the education system. But in its decisive practice this struggle is a struggle over parliamentary tactics; it is a struggle, as now again in the Baden dispute, over the attitude towards governments and bourgeois parties, in elections as well as in parliament.

The mass strike debate, on the other hand, is about extra-parliamentary tactics, about the question of the extent to which other means of struggle are necessary to supplement the parliamentary struggle and whether the time has already come to use such means. The old debates on tactics all revolve around the question of how we can best achieve power and domination in parliament. The new debate on tactics has grown out of the realization that the proletariat cannot conquer power at all by purely parliamentary means. Neither the radical nor the revisionist tactics in parliament can bring state power into our hands as long as a democratic right to vote is not conquered by extra-parliamentary means of struggle.

Although the two tactical debates are on quite different terrain, they nevertheless involve the same opposing views. The same revolutionary insight sprouting from Marxism into the necessity of class struggle for the conquest of political power, which in the political struggle leads to the fierce struggle against all bourgeois parties and to the rejection of bloc politics, also brings with it the realization that without the extra-parliamentary struggle of the organized working masses the goal itself cannot be achieved. Conversely, the consequent revisionism, which does not want to fight against the whole bourgeois world, but wants to unite with one part against the other, must be opposed to a revolutionary mass movement. It regards parliament as the only place of political struggle, and what must appear impossible to the proletariat fighting alone here, it believes it can achieve through electoral alliances. In this way, it seems, the opposing parties must coincide in the old as well as in the new debate on tactics. In reality, however, we see something quite different: radicals and revisionists are on one side and on the other in the mass strike debate: the new tactical question has obviously caused a new division of minds, the boundary of which crosses the old dividing line.

On closer inspection, there is nothing wonderful in this. Radical tactics in the parliamentary struggle need not necessarily be an expression of revolutionary sentiment or thorough Marxist training. It is the only possible tactic for every worker against a reactionary bourgeoisie and a violent government. To a Berlin worker who has become acquainted with the reactionary character of the Berlin Freisinn, the imposition of entering into an alliance with this Freisinn must appear monstrous, whereas he would easily be won over to a revisionist policy while living in southern German petty-bourgeois conditions. Such a radicalism without Marxist insight will cling to the “tried and tested tactics” and oppose a revolutionary further development of our tactics just as fiercely as Bernstein's revision of radical tactics.

Conversely, a commitment to revisionist tactics can go very well with a revolutionary attitude. Kolb has invoked the mass strike question in the Baden affair, declaring that there are only two ways to achieve positive results: either one must go forward with mass strikes or, if one cannot or will not do so, one must gain advantages through liberal alliances. Kolb does not seem to realize that we reject his tactics precisely because of their hopelessness. If it is not yet possible to gain decisive advantages by extra-parliamentary means, this is no reason to take a course that brings us no advantages and nothing but disadvantages. So while Kolb's evidence is worth nothing as an argument for his cause, it does lead us to the cause that gave revisionism its following in working-class circles. In many cases, it was a thirst for action that could not be satisfied with waiting, with letting conditions mature, but wanted to be active in all areas and achieve immediate results. Due to a lack of theoretical education, such comrades did not see why our results could initially only consist of an increase in internal power. At the same time, they were presented with a distorted image of Marxism as a kind of fatalism that expects everything from conditions, nothing from people, and therefore leads to inactive waiting, which finds its practice in the radical rejection of “positive work”. This mood, combined with this misunderstanding, explains the spread of revisionism in working-class circles. But at the same time it is clear that such revisionists were in the forefront of the practical struggle for Prussian suffrage on the streets. But to the extent that the working masses recognize this struggle as the means to set the old ossified conditions in motion, to achieve positive successes and to make real progress, they will turn away from the deceptive revisionist methods of chasing positive successes. When the power of the proletariat has risen to the point where it can open the attack on the enemy's decisive positions of power, the old discontent of the period of seemingly fruitless preparation will disappear, and the masses' thirst for action will find a field of the most fruitful satisfaction. The Prussian suffrage struggle, waged by extra-parliamentary means, draws revisionism into the working class.

Here lies the real connection between the two intersecting tactical issues. The Prussian suffrage struggle – even if the settlement of the Baden affair takes up all attention for the moment – also proves to be the most important matter in the sense that it makes the old tactical dispute more and more irrelevant. Not in the sense, as Eisner thinks, that the correct parliamentary tactics would be an indifferent side issue; as long as the parliamentary struggle itself is not a side issue, there can be no question of that. But as long as the proletariat is forced to fight on purely parliamentary ground, the attempts to chase positive successes by revising radical tactics will not cease. For this reason, it can be asserted without hesitation that Comrade Luxemburg's agitation to make the Prussian suffrage struggle the main task of the party contributes most to digging up the ground for revisionism in the future, while those comrades who push the Reichstag elections into the foreground against her raise expectations from which revisionism draws ever new nourishment.