Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Class Struggle, also known as Das Erfurter Programm, is an 1892 book by Marxist theoretician Karl Kautsky. It is a commentary on the 1891 Erfurt Program of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. By 1914, it had been translated into sixteen languages and was described as the accepted popular summa of Marxism.
The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) was written by Karl Kautsky, who was also a principal author of the Erfurt Program itself. It was the first major work he completed without the direct guidance of his mentor, Friedrich Engels. His biographer Gary P. Steenson regarded this independence as significant in understanding the book's particular synthesis of Marxist theory.
By 1914, The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) had been translated into sixteen languages. Historian Donald Sassoon noted that popular works by Kautsky and August Bebel circulated more widely among socialist activists than Marx's own writings.
The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) argues that capitalism's economic laws make the victory of the proletariat historically inevitable, but that organized political struggle is still required to bring it about. Kautsky urged the SPD to win parliamentary power, equating this with the "dictatorship of the proletariat." He also argued that social revolution is a long-term process of political and economic struggle, not a single violent event.
Eduard Bernstein attacked what he characterized as a "collapse theory" and a "pauperization thesis" in The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program). Kautsky responded that the Erfurt Program contained "not a single word on the theory of collapse," insisting that Marxists meant the political and organizational maturing of the proletariat, not a mechanical economic breakdown.
Vladimir Lenin, in 1899, praised the Erfurt Program as a model for other socialist parties to emulate. Scholar Robert C. Tucker, in his introduction to a 1971 reissue of the 1910 English translation by W. E. Bohn, described the book as "one of the minor classics of Marxist thought."