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CHAPTER VII.
Kautsky Slanders Revolutionary Socialists and
Whitewashes Opportunists.
The preceding pages were already written when No. 9 of the Neue Zeit, of May 28th, appeared with the concluding portion of Kautsky's argument on "The Collapse of Social Democracy" (paragraph 7 of his reply to Cunow). Kautsky briefly formulates all his old sophisms as well as a fresh one in defence of Socialist Chauvinism as follows:
"It is untrue that the war is a purely Imperialist war, that at the commencement of the war the choice lay between Imperialism and Socialism, or that the Socialist Parties and the proletarian masses of Germany, France, and in many respects even of England, threw themselves headlong into the arms of imperialism at the mere beck and call of a handful of Parliamentarians, thus betraying Socialism and bringing about a collapse unparalleled in history."
The new sophism and fraud perpetrated upon the workers consists in this, that the war, you see, is not "purely" imperialist war!
On the question of the character and meaning of the present war Kautsky wavers terribly, while he circumvents the precise declarations of the Basle and Chemnitz conferences as carefuly as does a thief the spot where his last theft was committed. In the pamphlet "The National State," written in February, 1915, Kautsky asserted that "in the last degree the war is an imperialist one" (p. 64). Now a fresh reservation is being made to the effect that it is not a purely imperialist war. What sort of war is it, then?
It is, it appears, also a national war! Kautsky has talked and argued until he has actually put forward the following defence, and in doing so, makes use of Plekhanov's dialectics:
