Chap. V, The Period of Dictatorship
“

He who thinks that lasting peace can be brought about by means of war, “the last war,” is wrong. Equally wrong are those who imagine that the working class can be assured prosperity and freedom by organizing economic life an a militaristic basis. No less erroneous is it to strive for a dictatorship for the purpose of crushing the enemy and establishing the proletariat in a privileged position in the state and Society while reducing the rest of the population to the position of pariahs as a means of establishing ultimately socialist equality for all. But most objectionable of all would it be to attempt to build a regime of humanity upon the basis of brutality.

— Karl Kautsky

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "He who thinks that lasting peace can be brought about by means of war, “the last war,” is wrong. Equally wrong are those who imagine that the working class can be assured prosperity and freedom by organizing economic life an a militaristic basis. No less erroneous is it to strive for a dictatorship for the purpose of crushing the enemy and establishing the proletariat in a privileged position in the state and Society while reducing the rest of the population to the position of pariahs as a means of establishing ultimately socialist equality for all. But most objectionable of all would it be to attempt to build a regime of humanity upon the basis of brutality." in the context of "Chap. V, The Period of Dictatorship" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Source: Wikiquote: "Karl Kautsky" (Quotes, Hitlerism and Social Democracy (1934): published by the American League for Democratic Socialism, 1934) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Karl Kautsky

About Karl Kautsky

Karl Johann Kautsky (16 October 1854–17 October 1938) was a Czech-Austrian philosopher, journalist, and Marxist theoretician.  Kautsky was recognised as among the most authoritative promulgators of Orthodox Marxism after the death of Friedrich Engels in 1895 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and was called by some the "Pope of Marxism."  Following the war, Kautsky was an outspoken critic of the Bolshevik Revolution and its excesses, engaging in polemics with V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky on the nature of the Soviet state.