Karl Kautsky Quotes

Any member of the party who … advocates crime, sabotage, or other methods of violence as a weapon of the working class to aid in its emancipation, shall be expelled from membership of the party.

After contract negotiations and organizing, playing an active role in the political process is one of a union's most important functions. Gains won at the bargaining table or through sacrifice on the picketline can be wiped out by politicians on the state or federal level.

Workers thought that the moment was ripe to take possession once [and] for all the means of production. They armed for self-defense... and began to organize production on their own.... It was the right of property abolished in fact... it was a new regime, a new form of social life that was being ushered in. And the government stood by because it felt impotent to offer opposition.

Am I allowed to suggest that we owe much to these stubborn and sectarian people, those indefatigable strikers who take over our factories and bring disorder to our streets, these obstinate creatures who ceaselessly fought for reforms while fantasizing of the Revolution, these Marxists who, marching against the current of History, disturbed the complacent sleep of capitalism? … Communism is dead. Let us rejoice.

The General Strike has taught the working class more in four days than years of talking could have done.

Very curious, at the age of about 13 years, Oswald began to study Marxism and he kept on in his writing, affirming that he was a Marxist. Probably he did want to show himself as a great, supreme Marxist.

I'm just a Bolshevik with a laptop.

The American Communists had thrived as champions of domestic reform.

Those who are today beating the drum loudest for the ‘Labor Party’ are radicals of various Marxist or pseudo-Marxist groups. These same people will tell you that they believe in the class struggle and economic action by the workers. Some will explain that parliamentary action is only a gimmick to gain a public forum, or free time on television every four years

It is impossible for any political party of "Labor" to reach power without concessions to the Right--to the middle class--at the expense of basic principles. "Labor" (or "Socialist") parties lose their identity and eventually are found to differ only on minor points from the "conservative" contenders for power. Labor Partyism is class-collaboration in the political field and it is just as disastrous for the workers as class-collaboration has been in the economic field

We must not regard what is obsolete to us as something that is obsolete to the class, to the masses...How can one say that ‘parliamentarianism is politically obsolete’, when ‘millions’ and ‘legions’ of proletarians are not only in favor of parliamentarianism in general, but are downright ‘counter revolutionary’!?

The strongest form of fight against the capitalist class is the strike. Strikes are necessary, ever again, against the capitalists’ tendency to increase their profits by lowering wages and increase the hours or the intensity of work.

In the class-struggle the conflict must always concern itself with immediate, practical objects

Solidarity Forever

Regardless of the degree of class consciousness of their members, the trade unions are, by their very nature, driven on to the revolutionary goal.

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.

Marxism today is playing dead, but it is not altogether abolished.

The Socialist Party emphatically rejects the proposal that in times of war, the workers should suspend their struggle for better conditions.

It does seem to me that the laboring classes were possessed of the Devil. I believe in the free application of rifle balls, grape and canister to mobs.

If the workers took a notion they could stop all speeding trains; every ship upon the ocean they can tie with mighty chains.

I took part in what was actually the last eruption of Marxist internationalism.

The only conclusion you can draw from the real historical movement is that by and large, in day-to-day life, what Lenin called trade union consciousness dominates the working class. I would call it elementary class consciousness of the working class.

Neither an ox nor a donkey is able to stop the progress of socialism.

The Communists were interested in getting into key positions as union officers, statisticians, economists, etc., in order to utilize the apparatus of the unions to promote the cause of revolution.

At first everyone predicted that it would be impossible to hold these divergent people together, but aside from the skilled men, some of whom belonged to craft unions, comparatively few went back to the mills. And as a whole, the strike was conducted with little violence.