solely with the question of revolution, but must also be a politician and tactician. Parliamentary activity, everyday political work upon the basis of universal suffrage, were proclaimed to be the "sharpest weapon," whilst street fighting was declared practically impossible. "The revolutionist would be insane who should select for the erection of barricades the new working-class districts of the north and east of Berlin." The immediate task of the party, said Engels, was to be found in "the slow work of propaganda and in parliamentary activity." The right to revolution might be left to foreign comrades. "We, 'the revolutionaries,' can advance far more rapidly by legal means than by extra-legal and revolutionary tactics."
These explanations of Engels were interpreted at the time, and are still interpreted, in various senses by orthodox scholastics of Marxist trend; but even the ultraorthodox Kautsky and Mehring wrote contemptuously in the "Neue Zeit" of "revolutionary romanticism" and of "revolutionary philistinism," whilst the revisionists unhesitatingly advocated reformism and rejected revolutionism.
Concomitantly with their recognition of parliamentarism, the Marxists came more and more to advocate the economic organisation of the workers, to promote trade union and cooperative organisation, and to encourage self-help among the working classes. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the seizure of political power, politism in general, receded into the background as the new economism came to occupy the stage.[1]
Connected with the discarding of revolutionism is the remarkable silence of orthodox Marxists concerning communism. Communism is the most essential, or at least the most important, social demand of Marxism, but to-day this demand is hardly voiced; or at any rate finds no place in the foreground of the program.
Within the social democracy there is an opposition movement against revisionist reformism, and the question of
- ↑ In his work, Le vie nuove del socialismo, the reformist Bonomi points out that Marx advocated the ultimate seizure of political power in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the precondition of the economic transformation of society in the socialist sense, simply because it was impossible for him to foresee the material uplifting of the proletariat that would be effected by the trade union movement and by the gradual conquest of political power through the working of universal suffrage. It was not true, as Marx had contended, that the state was merely the executive organ of the bourgeoisie, for the state could likewise serve the labour party.
