The mass strike is the first natural, impulsive form of every great
revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and the more highly developed
the antagonism is between capital and labour, the more effective and
decisive must mass strikes become. The chief form of previous bourgeois
revolutions, the fight at the barricades, the open conflict with the
armed power of the state, is in the revolution today only the
culminating point, only a moment on the process of the proletarian mass
struggle. And therewith in the new form of the revolution there is
reached that civilising and mitigating of the class struggle which was
prophesied by the opportunists of German social democracy – the
Bernsteins, Davids, etc. It is true that these men saw the desired
civilising and mitigating of the class struggle in the light of petty
bourgeois democratic illusions – they believed that the class struggle
would shrink to an exclusively parliamentary contest and that street
fighting would simply be done away with. History has found the solution
in a deeper and finer fashion: in the advent of revolutionary mass
strikes, which, of course, in no way replaces brutal street fights or
renders them unnecessary, but which reduces them to a moment in the long
period of political struggle, and which at the same time unites with
the revolutionary period and enormous cultural work in the most exact
sense of the words: the material and intellectual elevation of the whole
working class through the “civilising” of the barbaric forms of
capitalist exploitation.
