Page:Wilhelm Liebknecht - No Compromises No Political Trading (1900).pdf/32

 is pseudo-democracy. The democratic state is the only possible form of a socialistically organized society."

This truth, the inseparableness of democracy and socialism, served for the German working class as a sure guide amidst the greatest confusion of political issues, so that the dangerous shoals of state socialism were avoided towards which the Prussian reaction was headed even in the '40s; for the ideal of the garrison and police state was of course a garrison and police socialism, which is euphemistically called state socialism. The sophisms of Wagener and Schweitzer that democracy has something bourgeois about it, and that socialism, being directed against bourgeois society, must consequently be undemocratic, did, it is true, confuse many a man in Schweitzer's time; but it never found acceptance among the mass of laborers. This pseudo-logic bobbed up again recently in the well known militia debate, but has no longer any significance.

Before we go farther we must get a clear idea of the meaning of the word "compromise," otherwise every debate on it will be completely with out aim and without result, because every one will have in mind something different and consequently no one will meet the arguments of an other. If compromise is understood as a concession of theory to practice, then our entire life and activity is a compromise and all human history and the history of the race from the life of the individual up to that of nations and of mankind is an endless, unbroken chain of compromises. That conception of history according to which tabula rasa, i. e., a clean sweep, is temporarily made and must be made in order to start a new administration and arrangement