Page:Karl Radek - The Development of Socialism from Science to Action.djvu/15

 The question was answered by developments as clearly and precisely as one could wish. In France the attempt to better the condition of the workers through co-operation with the bourgeosie turned out a complete failure. Millerand's entrance into the bourgeois government was of no advantage to the working class and led to the compromising of Socialism in the eyes of the masses of workers. The result of the elections 1907 showed the workers that the bourgeois parties would unite into a solid block against them as soon as it became a question of Imperialism, that is, a question of the extension of capitalist power over weaker peoples, and of the armed competitive struggle between the capitalist states. The facts of the economic crisis of the year 1900 spoke so plainly, that so well known a Reformist as Max Schippel could not end his investigation of the course of the economic crisis in any other way than by the assertion of the intensification of the class struggle in. the whole world. Karl Kautsky summed up the entire development in the year 1908 in his work "The Road to Power", in which he proved that the whole capitalist world was moving in the direction of a frightful world crisis, that we were on the eve of the Socialist Revolution. This conviction, which became more and more rooted in the minds of the foremost ranks of the workers, faced them with this second question: What means will the workers use to defend themselves when the new situation arises, and what means will they use when they launch the attack on the fortresses of Capital? Already in 1905 the German and Austrian proletariat had worked its way through to the idea of the mass strike. Regardless of the complete ossification of the intellectual life of the leaders of the party, whose quiet, petty-bourgeois lives reflected the mood of the working class very faintly, the workers had recognized in the mass strike a means of defense against the attacks on the fundamental rights of the working class (the German Social Democracy in Jena, 1905), or even a means of attack by the proletariat against particularly obstinate opponents (the Austrian Social Democracy). The mass strike as a general strike was exalted by the French syndicalists