before his death (1895) he questioned the very possibility and need for revolution.
In Marx, therefore, and also in Engels, we have to note that a clear distinction is made. For Marx the definitive, terminal, "ultimate and decisive" revolution, the total transformation of the conditions of production and ownership, the negation of negation (in the Hegelian formula), was entirely different from lesser and indecisive revolutions. He did not clearly explain how far these lesser revolutions would be advantageous to the great revolution, but in accordance with the Communist Manifesto we may assume that such revolutions, too, were to be regarded as valuable. Granting this distinction, it is obvious that the critical question, the one that is decisive for the revolutionist, remains to be answered. When will the terminal revolution begin? How are we to recognise the decisive hour? Who shall determine that the decisive hour has struck?
To Marx it seemed self-evident that the terminal revolution must be unified, must be a mass revolution. In his literary and political contest with Stirner and Bakunin, Marx, from this outlook, sharply contrasted socialism with anarchism alike tactically and as a system. The Marxist conception of the mass movement eliminated the individual and individual consciousness, and at the same time an amoral estimate was formed of the purely objective historical process. At Amsterdam in 1872 Marx declared that in the United States of America and in England a social revolution could be effected by legal means. For England, in particular, Marx subsequently mooted the buying out of the landlords as a possibility in lieu of forcible expropriation. The catastrophic theory was thus modified in the evolutionary sense, and simultaneously a high value was placed upon a political constitution—in the case of America, upon a republic.[1]
In the frequently quoted preface to Marx's Class Struggles, Engels showed in 1895 that the revolutionist was not concerned
- ↑ In his elucidatious to the Erfurt program, Kautsky states that the definitive revolution may assume the most varied forms in accordance with changing circumstances, and will not necessarily be associated with violence and bloodshed. He admits, for example, that the transition to the collectivist organisation of society can in no case involve the expropriation of the lesser manual workers and the peasants; it is only large-scale industries that will need to be socially owned and controlled; all that Marxism demands is that the means of production shall become social property.
