CHAPTER VI.
THE VULGARIZATION OF MARX BY THE
OPPORTUNISTS
The question of the relation of the State to the Social Revolution, and of the Social Revolution to the State, like the question of revolution generally, was little considered by the best known theoreticians of the Second International (1889–1914). But the most characteristic thing in that process of the gradual growth of Opportunism, which led to the collapse of the Second International in 1914, is this that even when they actually came into contact with this question they did their best to evade it, or else to pass it by unnoticed.
It may be said, in general, that the evasiveness on this question of the relation of the proletarian revolution to the State, an evasiveness which was both convenient to the Opportunists and which bred and fed them—resulted in a distortion of Marxism and in its complete vulgarization.
To characterize this lamentable process, if only in brief, let us take the best-known theoreticians of Marxism: Plekhanoff and Kautsky.
1. The Controversy Between Plekhanoff and the Anarchists.
Piekhanoff devoted a special pamphlet to the question of the relation of Socialism to Anarchism, entitled Anarchism and Socialism, published in Germany in 1894. He managed somehow to treat this question without touching on the most vital controversial point, the essential point politically, in the struggle with the Anarchists: the relation of the Revolution to the State, and the question of the State in general. His pamphlet may be divided into two parts: one, historico-literary, containing valuable material for the history of the ideas of Stirner, Proudhon and others; the second, ignorant and narrow minded, containing a clumsy disquisition on the theme "that an Anarchist cannot be distinguished from a bandit," an amusing combination of subjects and most characteristic of the entire activity of Plekhanoff on the eve of Revolution and during the revolutionary period in Russia." Indeed,
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