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c) The struggle against kautskyist centrism
The revolutionary mass strike in Russia had a considerable echo in the West, despite the assertions of the
reformists. In 1905 in Germany, 500,000 workers struck: more in one year than in whole decade 1890-1900;
more than in any years between 1848 and 1917. 221 The SPD’s 1907 electoral defeat, after the nationalist wave of
the so-called ‘Hottentot elections’ (named after a tribe in South West Africa, coveted by German imperialism),
and the weakness of the class struggle from 1907 to 1909 had allowed the reformists to gain strength and to
come out publicly in Germany. This phenomenon of strengthening reformist and revisionist currents was,
moreover, an international one. The Left in Holland had had the bitter experience. In Russia, a ‘liquidationist’
current developed in the RSDLP, in favour of legal activity and common action with the liberals. The
international Congress in Stuttgart (1907), despite a very radical amendment put forward by Lenin, Luxemburg
and Martov for the transformation of an eventual war into revolution, showed a clear evolution of the socialdemocratic
parties towards the right, on all the questions of principle.
From 1910 onwards, the debate on the mass strike and the revolution, which the SPD leadership thought it had
buried, re-emerged. Firstly, there was a renewed massive movement of strikes, under the pressure of rising
unemployment and falling wages. Secondly, as the threat of world war became ever clearer, the question of
using the mass strike as a means of mobilising the proletariat against this threat was posed in deadly earnest.
Finally, the Social-Democratic leaderships refused to use the ‘weapon’ of the mass strike, urging instead a policy
of demonstrations and general strikes for electoral reform and universal suffrage. This policy of demobilising the
class struggle onto the parliamentary terrain was being put into practice by 1909 in Germany, by 1911 in The
Netherlands (the ‘Red Tuesdays’) 222 and by 1913 in Belgium.
It was at this point that there occurred an ideological split within the orthodox Marxist current in Germany.
Kautsky took up the reformist positions of the Bebel leadership, and moved closer to Bernstein, who defended a
‘centrist’ position on the mass strike, seeing it as a ‘defensive weapon’ in the struggle. This in fact was the seed
of the future Independent tendency – which was to form the USPD in 1917 – opposed to the ‘radical left’ current
symbolised by Rosa Luxemburg and Pannekoek.
The debate on the mass strike was reopened in 1910 by Rosa Luxemburg, in an article 223 which was refused for
publication both by Vorwärts and by Kautsky’s Die Neue Zeit; Kautsky considered that the question was already
“settled”, and that any public polemic would only “reveal our own weak spots to the enemy”. 224 In fact, Kautsky
was using precisely the same arguments that the revisionists had used five years earlier against the left.
Kautsky aimed to show that the mass strike in Russia was in fact a specificity of this economically ‘backward’
country. The action of the Russian workers was the expression of the ‘desperate conditions’ which were vastly
different from those of the Western proletariat. He even affirmed – flying in the face of historical reality – that
“such strikes used as demonstrations have never yet occurred in Western Europe”. 225 The notion of a
revolutionary mass strike was “absolutely incompatible with conditions in an industrial country”, enjoying
“political rights” and better living conditions. The economic crisis, whose importance was emphasised by the
‘radicals’ in encouraging the upsurge of spontaneous class movements in the West, discouraged revolution and
221 See: Schorske, op. cit., pp. 53-54.
222 From 1910 onwards, the SDAP decided to establish a ritual, at the beginning of each year’s parliamentary session (the 3 rd
tuesday of September), of meetings, demonstrations, and petitions to the government, for universal suffrage (these were
known as ‘Red Tuesdays’). For the SDAP, these annual demonstrations were a vastly preferable substitute for the mass
strike, which it never called for.
223 R. Luxemburg, ‚Was weiter?’, in: Dortmunder Arbeiterzeitung, 14 th March 1910; reprinted in the East German edition
Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 2 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1974).
224 K. Kautsky, ‚Was nun?’, in: Die Neue Zeit, reproduced in French in: Pannekoek – Kautsky – Luxemburg: Socialisme: la
Voie occidentale, Paris: PUF, 1983, 52. Edited and introduced by Henri Weber.
225 K. Kautsky, ‚Eine neue Strategie’, in: Pannekoek–Kautsky–Luxemburg [...], op. cit., p. 152.
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