In these two aphorisms, in reality, may be found the present Kautsky, complete, in his entirety – i.e., just a little over a round zero.
The waging of war, do you see, is on the whole, not a strong side of the proletariat, the more that the International itself was not created for wartime. Kautsky’s ship was built for lakes and quiet harbors, not at all for the open sea, and not for a period of storms. If that ship has sprung a leak, and has begun to fill, and is now comfortably going to the bottom, we must throw all the blame upon the storm, the Unnecessary mass of water, the extraordinary size of the waves, and a series of other unforeseen circumstances for which Kautsky did not build his marvelous instrument.
The international proletariat put before itself as its problem the conquest of power. Independently of whether civil war, “generally,” belongs to the inevitable attributes of revolution, “generally,” this fact remains unquestioned – that the advance of the proletariat, at any rate in Russia, Germany, and parts of former Austro-Hungary, took the form of an intense civil war not only on internal but also on external fronts. If the waging of war is not the strong side of the proletariat, while the workers’ International is suited only for peaceful epochs, then we may as well erect a cross over the revolution and over Socialism; for the waging of war is a fairly strong side of the capitalist State, which without a war will not admit the workers to supremacy. In that case there remains only to proclaim the so-called “Socialist” democracy to be merely the accompanying feature of capitalist society and bourgeois parliamentarism – i.e., openly to sanction what the Eberts, Scheidemanns, Renaudels, carry out in practice and what Kautsky still, it seems, protests against in words.
The waging of war was not a strong side of the Commune. Quite so; that was why it was crushed. And how mercilessly crushed!