Page:Karl Radek - The Development of Socialism from Science to Action.djvu/16

 as a means of conquering complete liberty, The working class, which, up to this time, had battled only politically in parliaments, began to reflect on their role in the process of production, on the words of Freiligrath: "Every wheel shall stop, at the will of your mighty arm".

For years the leaders of the left wing of the workers discussed the conditions that would make practicable the use of the general strike. Should the leaders of the workers' organizations decide upon the strike if parliamentary action should fail, if the enemy through his reckless policy should drive the masses to despair—should it be a pistol, then, held in readiness to back up the parliamentary struggle, or should it be the actual mode of the struggle itself, emerging spontaneously out of the increasingly acute class conflicts, prepared not in the conference chambers of the leaders but preparing every hour in the shops and in the factory prisons—not only through the growing agitation, the stimulated action of the proletariat. These were the questions to which the left wing of the international labor movement devoted itself most intensively during the years, preceding the World War. And right at this point it appeared that even in this simple question the Socialist ranks, the ranks that fought under the banner of Marx, were divided, the one section under the leadership of Karl Kautsky outwardly embracing the approaching Socialist revolution, it is true, yet anxiously avoiding the intensifying of the class struggle, although the internal and. external situation of the proletariat positively demanded it.

In this struggle to find the way to power the question came up here and there, "Wherein shall the power of the victorious workers express itself?" But nowhere was the question given a positive hearing, and for very simple reasons. First upon the order of business of history came the question of the mobilization of the battalions of workers, the question of their general objective, and not of the halting-places to be passed through on the way. In order to prove the necessity of the general strike, the radical Socialists pointed to the collapse of parliamentarism. They showed how it was more and more