K. Kautsky, “Patriotism, War and Social-Democracy” (Die Neue Zeit, XXIII, 2; 1905).
A soldiers’ strike = “heroic folly” (370), as are also the “attempts” of bourgeois pacifists to abolish war by arbitration. Both follies “arise from the mistake of regarding war as an isolated fact”.
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But war threatens catastrophe: “However, the catas- trophe that leads to the most complete collapse is defeat in a frivolous war” (371). The proletariat is “today hardly anywhere strong enough” to make war impossible before its outbreak by means of revolution (and a soldiers’ strike is revolution). “But in all capitalist countries it is already strong enough to ensure that every fruitless war entailing great losses be made the starting point of a revolution which establishes a proletarian regime” (371). |
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