To compare a continuation of the policy of struggle against feudalism and absolutism, the policy of the bourgeoisie that strives to free itself, with the continuation of the policy of a decrepit bourgeoisie, imperialist, predatory and reactionary, allied with feudal elements which are trying to oppress the proletariat is to compare an inch with a ton.
One might just as well compare Robespierre, Garibaldi and Zheliabo with Millerand, Salandra and Gutchkof, and say that they were all "representatives of the bourgeoisie." No Marxist can help feeling the deepest regard for the great bourgeois revolutionists who had the historical right to speak in the name of bourgeois society, and who urged millions of people in new nations to conquer a share of civilization by fighting the feudal system. Neither can a Marxist help feeling scorn for sophists like Plekhanov and Kautsky, who speak of "defending the fatherland" when the German imperialists are strangling Belgium or when the French, English, Russian and Italian imperialists are trying to rob Austria and Turkey.
Here is another social-patriot interpretation of Marxism: "Socialism will result from the rapid evolution of capitalism. The triumph of my country would hasten the evolution of Capitalism and hence the coming of Socialism in my country. Defeat of my country's arms would delay her economic development and therefore the coming of Socialism."
Struvism is not only a Russian but, as recent developments have proved, an international endeavor of the bourgeois theorists to kill Marxism with tenderness, to strangle it in a loving embrace, by accepting its "really scientific side" but discarding its elements of "agitation" of "demagogy" of "Blanquist Utopia"; in other words, to take every part of the Marxian lore which is helpful to the liberal bourgeoisie in its fight for reform, everything which helps in the class war (stopping short of a dictatorship of the proletariat), to accept all the "socialist ideals" and the overthrow of Capitalism in favor of "new social strata" and to discard "merely" the live part of Marxism, its revolutionary spirit.
Marxism is the theory of the emancipation movement of the proletariat. Class conscious workers must therefore watch very carefully the process whereby Marxism is being transformed into Struvism.
The forces tending to bring about that process are many and varied. We shall only mention three of them:
