class desires), that masses without organization have no will of their own and that the struggle against the powerful, terroristic, military organization of perfectly centralized powers is a long and arduous fight. Betrayed by their leaders at a critical moment the masses could not do anything. But that handful of men could have and should have voted against war credits, voiced their desire for the defeat of their government, opposed the national party truce and all attempts to justify the war, prepared an international organization for propaganda in the trenches, produced masses of "illegal" literature showing the necessity of revolutionary action, etc.[1]
Kautsky knows very well that the left wing of the German party has more or less similar plans, but cannot speak of them openly while there is a military censorship. In his desire to defend his opportunism, Kautsky is despicable enough to perch himself on the back of the censor and from that safe point of vantage, to charge the left wing men with all sorts of obvious nonsense.
VII
A serious question, a scientific and political question, which Kautsky consciously dodges by resorting to all sorts of legerdemains (an evasion which fills the opportunists with joy), is, how could the representatives of the Second International betray Socialism?
When I ask this question I dismiss all thought of those men's political biographies. Their biographers will have to treat the question from this point of view, but the Socialist movement doesn't care about it just now. What it wants to know is the historical origin, the significance and the strength of the social-chauvinist movement.
Where does social-patriotism come from? What gave it its strength? How can we fight it? These are the only questions we should ask. To let the discussion stray into personalities is pure sophistry.
- ↑ It was not necessary for every Socialist to cease publication in answer to the censor's order forbidding any mention of class hatred and the class struggle. It was low cowardice on the part of the Vorwaerts to accept such conditions. The Vorwaerts is politically dead, killed by its submissiveness. Martov was right when he pointed that out. It would have been possible to keep "lawful" papers going, by declaring that they were not party papers not Socialist papers, but devoted themselves to the technical needs of the workers, and were not therefore political papers. Why was it not possible to have "unlawful" Socialist literature discussing the war and "lawful" workingmen's literature barring all discussion of the war. printing no untruth but silent about the truth?
