Far from it! Headed by Kautsky, the German Social Democrats have become "wretched counter-revolutionary windbags",[40] as Marx called those Social-Democrats who, after the publication of the Anti-Socialist Law, behaved "in accord with the circumstances", in the manner of Haase, Kautsky, Südekum and Co. today.
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No, our quotation is from a magazine of petty-bourgeois Christian democrats published by a group of kind-hearted little churchmen in Zurich (Neue Wege, Blätter für religiöse Arbeit,[*] September, 1914). That is the limit of humiliation we have come to: God-fearing philistines go as far as to say that it would not be bad to turn weapons against those who "are urging people into the war", while "authoritative" Social-Democrats like Kautsky "scientifically" defend the most despicable chauvinism, or, like Plekhanov, declare the propaganda of civil war against the bourgeoisie a harmful "utopia"!
Indeed, if such "Social-Democrats" wish to be in the majority and to form the official "International" (= an alliance for international justification of national chauvinism), then is it not better to give up the name of "Social-Democrats", which has been besmirched and degraded by them, and return to the old Marxist name of Communists? Kautsky once threatened to do that when the opportunist Bernsteinians[41] seemed to be close to conquering the German party officially. What was an idle threat from his lips will perhaps become action to others.
* New Ways, Pages for Religious Work. -- Ed.