Luxemburg challenges the absurdity of Kautksy's logic:
How Social Democracy, on the other hand, should in all seriousness come to acknowledge a government to be "the strongest' which "nothing but a military despotism embellished with parliamentary forms, alloyed with a feudal admixture, obviously influenced by the bourgeoisie, shored up with a bureaucracy, and watched over by the police' --I find that somewhat hard to grasp.
Contradictions!
Kautsky's Germany is not populated with happy workers benefiting from "the strongest" government Somehow, she writes, Kautsky has forgotten
the quite enormous slave herds of Prusso-German state employers, railroad workers and postal workers, as well as the farm workers, who unfortunately enjoy very limited measure of that contented preoccupation with "organizations, meetings, and options of all sorts" as long as the right to organize is legally or practically denied them.
Whole categories of workers, Luxemburg continues, "live politically as well as economically in genuine "Russian' conditions"not to mention miners--will find it impossible, in the midst of a political convulsion, to maintain their slavish obedience or to refrain from presenting their special bill of reckoning in the form of giant mass strikes."
But Kautsky further claims that "the strongest" government has experienced the "'glory of almost a century of continuous victories over the strongest great powers in the world.'" And--"a strike in Germany would result in failure." German worker could "'take up the strike as a means of struggle only when he has the prospect of attaining definite successes with it. If these successes fail to appear, the strike has failed its purpose.'"
This is the gospel according to Karl Kautsky--not Karl Marx! Participate in the elections, not in strikes and street protests! And, of course, Kautsky is a self-declared Marxist at the time he writes, "A New Strategy."
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