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"And the indifferent mass, that in peaceful days has no weight in the political balance, but becomes the decisive force in times of agitation, ought to be so fully enlightened as to the aims and the essential ideas of our party, that it would cease to fear us and can be no longer used as a weapon against us." Kautsky's is probably the prevailing opinion among German Socialists.
But Kautsky's view is that of a very large number of Socialists, especially in Germany and neighboring countries, is having an enormous influence, and deserves careful consideration. The proletariat, he says, is not afraid of the most extreme revolutionary efforts and sacrifices to win equal suffrage where, as in Germany, it is withheld.
In such times a single year will accomplish an education of the masses that would otherwise have required a generation." Kautsky's conception of the probable struggle of the future shows that, together with the millions of Socialists he represents, he expects the great crisis to develop gradually out of the present-day struggle.
Kautsky's policy of ideal revolutionism, combined with practical toleration of activities given over exclusively to non-Socialist reform, which is so widespread in the German movement under the form of a too rigid separation between theory on the one hand and tactics on the other, agrees at another point with the policy of the reformists.
Thyrsis replied by quoting Kautsky's formula: "Communism in material production, Anarchism in intellectual". He showed how the state might print and bind and distribute, while men in "free associations" might edit and publish. But one could not get very far in this exposition, because of the excitement of the elder Macintyre.
But if a goal thus has no necessary connection with immediate problems or actions, is it necessarily anything more than a sentiment or an abstraction? Kautsky's toleration of reform activities thus has an opposite origin to that of the "reformist" Socialists.
Yet Kautsky's explanation of his own meaning makes it quite clear that even the Paris resolution was revolutionary in its intent, and the Amsterdam Congresses, moreover, readopted its main proposition that "the Social Democracy could not accept any participation in government in capitalist society."
The Leipziger Folkszeitung, second in importance only to the Vorwärts nailed down a phrase in the Kaiser's speech from the throne, which stated: "We are inspired by no desire for conquest." In commenting on this phrase, Kautsky's organ said: "The part of the speech which excites most sympathy in us is the admission that Germany cherishes no lust for conquest.
The inevitable logic of Kautsky's own position is that, even if the liberals in Germany and elsewhere do undertake a broad program of reform, including all those Kautsky mentions as improbable, no sufficient ground for an alliance is at hand.
On the other hand, how was it possible to adapt a program frankly "formulated by or for the workingmen of large-scale industry" to the conditions of agriculture? The estimate of the rural population that has hitherto prevailed among the Socialists of most countries may be seen from the following language of Kautsky's:
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