shall fulfill the functions of control and superintendence, so that all shall become "bureaucratic" for a time, and no one should, therefore, have the opportunity of becoming "bureaucrat" at all.
Kautsky has not reflected at all on Marx's words: "The Commune was not a parliamentary but a working corporation, at one and the same time making the laws and executing them." He has not in the least understood the difference between a middle-class parliament combining democracy (not for the people) with bureaucracy (against the people), and proletarian democracy, which will take immediate steps to cut bureaucracy down at the roots, and which will be able to carry out measures to their logical conclusion, to the complete destruction of bureaucracy, and the final establishment of democracy for the people. Kautsky reveals here again the same old "superstitious respect" for the State, and "superstitious faith" in bureaucracy.
Let us pass to the last and best of Kautsky's works against the Opportunists, his pamphlet The Road to Power, published in 1909. This pamphlet constitutes a considerable step in advance, inasmuch as it does not treat of the revolutionary program in general (as in the book of 1899 against Bernstein), nor of the problems of a social revolution independently of the time of its occurrence (as in the pamphlet The Social Revolution, of 1902), but of the concrete conditions which compel us to recognize that the revolutionary era is approaching.
The author distinctly points out the intensification of class antagonisms in general and the growth of Imperialism, which plays a particularly important part in this connection. After the "revolutionary period of 1789–1871" in Western Europe an analogous period begins for the East in 1905. A world-war is coming nearer with threatening rapidity. "The proletariat can no longer talk of a premature revolution." "We have entered upon a revolutionary period." "The revolutionary era is beginning."
These declarations are perfectly clear. The pamphlet offers us a measure of comparison between the high promise of German Social-Democracy before the Imperialist war and the depth of degradation to which it fell—carrying with it Kautsky himself—when the war broke out. "The present situation," Kautsky wrote in the pamphlet under review, "contains this danger, that we, the German Social-Democracy may easily be considered more moderate than we are in reality." But when it came to the test, the German Social-Democratic Party turned out even more moderate and opportunist than it had seemed. It is the more characteristic
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