About the “the radical republican transformation of the existing state”, this involves for example replacement of the army/police (today things like ICE?) by militia, a demand which the post-1918 Kautsky still upheld. Another demand, that has never been fulfilled (since the Chartists raised it), is the reduction of parliamentary terms to a single year (the Erfurt Program demanded two year periods). An elevation of parliament’s power over the executive, would I think in practice resemble a system like the Soviets, or face similar problems: both are representative organs, Soviets in practice had their own executive organ, and there was an upper Soviet (with a similar number of members as bourgeois parliaments). A functioning parliament necessitates the creation of many parliamentary commissions (or councils), which allow for the participation/control/influence of workers (“society”) in them.

About strategy, it is said that we shouldn’t generalize the experience of the initial “success” of the insurrectionary October 1917 revolution in Russia, but then, to be fair, we shouldn’t be allowed to generalize from its subsequent “failure” either. The post-1918 Kautsky recognized the need and power of mass strikes, lying in their unexpectedness (something which the labour unions by their nature are unable to match). This is partly the meaning I think for his so-called “passive radicalism”; we can’t “make” revolution, ie determine when it breaks out. Furthermore he recognized councils would play a key role for the future in workers’ movement, as organs of struggle for power (and not as some model “participatory democracy” of harmless cogs in a state). Eric admits that Kautsky never dismissed “insurrection” as a possibility, but surely we can see even today in plenty of “popular” (non-socialist, not to say anti-socialist) revolts that street battles are characteristic feature (in Ukraine Madian, or in Syria they quickly were a fully armed insurrection). Plenty of American right-wingers already dream of or prepare for an upcoming civil war in the US. Btw, not only Russia October 1917, but also the German 1918 revolution was an insurrection, requiring preparation many months in advance, if we’re to believe Emil Barth, leader of the revolutionary shop stewards.

Blanc finds Kautsky’s “radical strategy…compelling” in that it posits “fight[ing] to win a socialist universal suffrage electoral majority.” This would seem to also require fighting for a universal suffrage electoral system. But as i recall from the Luxemburg biographies by Paul Frolich and by J.P. Nettl, Luxemburg first became an open political opponent of Kautsky when Kautsky refused to join with Luxemburg in fighting for universal suffrage democratic reforms in Prussia in 1909/10. Charlie Post wrote about this recently at the Jacobin magazine: “The ‘Best’ of Karl Kautsky Isn’t Good Enough” https://jacobinmag.com/2019/03/karl-kautsky-socialist-strategy-german-revolution

My understanding is that revolutionary socialists base our evaluation of socialist activists and leaders primarily on their practice, not on what they’ve preached. Isn’t “centrism” defined by revolutionary stance in word but compromise and retreat in deed? What is the political purpose and motivation behind writing an article for Jacobin magazine themed “Why Kautsky was right (and why you should care)” which draws attention to and applauds political stances Karl Kautsky took only prior to 1910? What was Kautsky’s role in revolutionary times?

I have posed this question to Eric before but perhaps he has not seen it. A clear answer might help advance the discussion. Are you aware that Lenin’s “State and Revolution” is in large part a polemic against Kautsky’s views? In rejecting what you call (falsely in my view) an “insurrectionary strategy,” are you also rejecting the conclusions Lenin outlined in what has long been considered a fairly basic work of Marxism?

Are you aware that “State and Revolution” is based primarily on reviewing the lessons Marx and Engels drew from the experience of the Paris Commune? Do you consider those conclusions either false or “outdated”?

Eric writes:

“One of the reasons why Kautsky’s radical strategy remains compelling is that it posits that to overthrow capitalism a) socialists should fight to win a socialist universal suffrage electoral majority in government/parliament and b) socialists must expect that serious anti-capitalist change will necessarily require extra-parliamentary mass action like a general strike and a revolution to defeat the inevitable sabotage and resistance of the ruling class.”

However that is not accurate. Or at least it was not Lenin’s view of Kautsky’s position. And Eric’s account of the fourth congress of the Comintern notwithstanding, Lenin’s views on how the working class can take political power were the starting point for the fourth congress discussion, not Kautsky’s.

In “State and Revolution” Lenin quotes Kautsky as follows specifically with respect to the tactic of the general strike:

“Its object [the object of the mass strike],” Kautsky continues, “cannot be to destroy the state power; its only object can be to make the government compliant on some specific question, or to replace a government hostile to the proletariat by one willing to meet it half­way [entgegenkommende]… But never, under no circumstances can it [that is, the proletarian victory over a hostile government] lead to the destruction of the state power; it can lead only to a certain shifting [verschiebung] of the balance of forces within the state power…. The aim of our political struggle remains, as in the past, the conquest of state power by winning a majority in parliament and by raising parliament to the ranks of master of the government.”

Lenin then answers:

“This is nothing but the purest and most vulgar opportunism: repudiating revolution in deeds, while accepting it in words. Kautsky’ s thoughts go no further than a ‘government… willing to meet the proletariat half­way—a step backward to philistinism compared with 1847, when the Communist Manifesto proclaimed ‘the organization of the proletariat as the ruling class'”.

“Kautsky will have to enjoy the pleasant company of …[those ]who are quite willing to work for the ‘shifting of the balance of forces within the state power’, for ‘winning a majority in parliament’, and ‘raising parliament to the ranks of master of the government’. A most worthy object, which is wholly acceptable to the opportunists and which keeps everything within the bounds of the bourgeois parliamentary republic.

“We, however, shall break with the opportunists; and the entire class ­conscious proletariat will be with us in the fight—not to ‘shift the balance of forces’, but to overthrow the bourgeoisie, to destroy bourgeois parliamentarism, for a democratic republic after the type of the Commune, or a republic of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, for the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”

The very title of Eric’s most recent article, poses the question falsely, in my view: “The democratic road to socialism: A reply to Mike Taber”

As if Mike — in defending Lenin and the conclusions of the first four congresses of the Comintern — has opted for the “undemocratic road.”

So I will end by citing these words, not because they are another volley from Lenin, but because they express clearly what has always separated genuine Marxism from what today is known as social democracy:

“Kautsky has not understood at all the difference between bourgeois parliamentarism, which combines democracy (not for the people) with bureaucracy (against the people), and proletarian democracy, which will take immediate steps to cut bureaucracy down to the roots, and which will be able to carry these measures through to the end, to the complete abolition of bureaucracy, to the introduction of complete democracy for the people.”

Furthermore, there is no “insurrectionary/dual power” strategy as such. Marxist strategy flows from concrete conditions in the class struggle. We are so far removed from such conditions in the USA, despite Sophia Burns, that it makes no sense to refute a strategy that nobody supports in the here and now. As for Kautsky’s declaration for the need for a revolution, I don’t know what to make of that. Every self-proclaimed Marxist in history has been for revolution, including Stalin–the greatest counter-revolutionary outside of the capitalist state.

In referring us to Kautsky’s writings, Blanc leaves us with slim pickings Empty declarations about the need for socialist revolution are practically useless. I discovered that long ago when I ran into the articles of Daniel De Leon.