that, side by side with such definite declarations regarding the revolutionary era already upon us, Kautsky, in the pamphlet which—he says himself—is devoted to precisely the "political revolution," again quite passes over the question of the State.
The sum total of these evasions of the subject, omissions and shufflings inevitably led to that complete surrender to opportunism of which we shall soon have to speak.
German Social-Democracy, as it were, in the person of Kautsky, declared: I still uphold revolutionary views (1899); I recognize, in particular, the inevitability of the social revolution of the proletariat (1902); I recognize that a new revolutionary era is upon us (1909); still I disavow that which Marx said so early as 1852—if once the question is definitely raised as to the tasks confronting a proletarian revolution in respect to the State (1913).
It was precisely in this bald form that the question was put in the debate with Pannekoek.
3. The Debate Between Kautsky and Pannekoek.
Pannekoek came out against Kautsky as one of the representatives of the "Left Radical" group, which counted in its ranks Rosa Luxembourg, Karl Radek and others, which, while upholding revolutionary tactics, was united in the conviction that Kautsky was passing over to a "central" position, wavering, without principle, between Marxism and Opportunism. The correctness of this view has been fully proved by the war, when this "central" current of Kautskianism, wrongly called Marxist, revealed itself in all its pitiful helplessness.
In an article touching en the question of the State, entitled "Mass Action and Revolution" (Neue Zeit, 1912, xxx., 3), Pannekoek characterized Kautsky's position as an attitude of "passive radicalism," as "a theory of inactive expectancy." "Kautsky does not want to see the process of revolution" (p. 616). In treating this subject, Pannekoek approached the problem which interests us, of the tasks of a proletarian revolution in relation to the State.
"The struggle of the proletariat (he wrote), is not merely a struggle against the capitalist class to control the State, but a struggle against the State. … The essence of a proletarian revolution is the destruction of the organized forces of the State, and their forcible suppression (Ablösung) by the organized forces of the proletariat. … Until the entire State organization is destroyed, the struggle will not end. That is its aim. The organiza-
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