"And now to the mass strike."
Are you familiar with my pamphlet about the mass strike (1906)? It deals exactly [4] with all the questions that K.K. [Karl Kautsky] has brought up. It turns out that even our best people actually did not at all absorb the lessons of the Russian revolution [of 1905].
Well, it never occurred to Kautsky to censor Luxemburg's article or to --forbid' discussion of the mass strike." ("Letter to Konrad Haenisch, [Friedenau,] June 18, 1910, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, 2011)
Kautsky's creation of a "whole new theory of the conditions for political mass strike in Russia and in Germany" ("Theory and Practice") is sinister Luxemburg surmises because it is motivated by the desire to steady the boat and prepare the workers for the voting rights campaigns already underway in Germany!
Revolution aside, the voting rights campaigns and the elections are what the party feels is good for the people! "
What happened in the 1905 Russian Revolution cannot happen in Germany, Kautsky argues. Don't look to "revolutionary examples," as Luxemburg suggests. The" conditions for the mass strike" existed in "backward" Russia but, in Germany, "they do not" because, in Germany, ""we have political freedom"! Workers are provided "various "safe' forms for their protests and struggle, and hence they are totally preoccupied with organizations, meetings, the press, and elections of all sorts'" ("Theory and Practice"). In other words, the people have "safe" as in ineffective ways of "protesting" to the government!
As a means of struggle, the political mass strike could only be employed here in a single, final battle "to the death'--and therefore only when the question, for the proletariat, was conquer or die.
"When a positive result can be expected," Karl Kautsky and the SPD will consider the possibility of allowing the people to engage in a mass strike.
This is the position of Kautsky and the SPD, Luxemburg argues. Mass strikes for "backward" Russia but not for "the strongest" government: Germany!
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