The text argues Liebknecht's colleagues were "perfectly right" to engage in "detailed work that alone makes parliamentary action effective." Explain the practical advantages gained by Socialists participating fully in parliamentary work, and, conversely, what perceived risks or "compromises" might Liebknecht have initially feared by engaging with the existing system?

From the book

rmulas, and when he and his friends had entered Parliament, he still kept a memory of his early uncompromising attitude. He reminds us, in the fragment quoted in Vorwärts , that he had objected to a representative of the Socialist group becoming one of the "steering ​ committee" that regulates parliamentary work. His colleagues did not follow his advice, and they were perfectly right; because what good would it have done to enter Parliament, if, on the pretext of not wishing to compromise themselves, the Socialists had held aloof from the detailed work that alone makes parliamentary action…

ms and the essential ideas of our Party, that it will cease to fear us and can be no longer used as a weapon against us. ​ "All the legislative measures which we shall support if the opportunity is given us, ought to have for their object to prove the fitness of Socialism to serve the common good , and to destroy current prejudice against us." Thus Liebknecht imagines a whole period of legislative action during which Socialism will have the opportunity of proving its large view of things, when the blindest will be forced to see in it the party of the common good, and during which it will…

ords he had spoken in the past, Liebknecht at one time took the attitude of being in Parliament as if he were not in it. When, on the other hand, be was considering the conditions under which Socialism could be put into practice, when he tried to read the future in all sincerity and seriousness, he arrived at a very broad-minded conception: he saw Socialism penetrating the democracy little by little, and, by partial and successive conquests, imposing itself even on the government of middle-class society in the transition stage. Then he was troubled and recaptured by his early habits of…

there will be shades of difference, degrees, and numberless forms, of this Socialistic participation in the government. As the Socialist party is more or less powerful and well organised, as it is able to exercise a more profound influence or inspire more real apprehension, its share of power will be more or less extended, more or less effective; its action on all the non-Socialist members of the government with which it will be associated will be more or less decisive, and the reforms themselves will have a more or less marked Socialistic tendency, a more or less distinct proletarian…

themselves? In other words, does the question take for granted that we shall have the governing power in our own hands? "Or does it simply mean that we shall have an influence over a government formed entirely or very largely by the other parties? It is evident that we should act very differently in the two cases. "And within each of the two possibilities we have suggested there are endless degrees and ​ shades of difference, each one of which would call for a different kind of action." According to Liebknecht, then, writing in 1881, there are two main hypotheses which can be legitimately…