revolution is elaborately discussed in the party organs. The discussion is still far from its close.
To-day, in point of tactics, three trends may be distinguished in Marxist social democracy, for the radical opponents of reformism have split into two camps.
Kautsky, the literary opponent of revisionism, rejects reformism, and is able to appeal to Marx and Engels (first phase) on behalf of radical revolutionary tactics. Kautsky maintains the thesis that the party can for the nonce do no more than make ready for the definitive mass revolution, in order that, when the fitting moment arrives, it may be prepared to establish dictatorship and to inaugurate the social revolution.
But other representatives of a more radical tendency, other opponents of revisionist reformism, object to this outlook on the revolution (an outlook which is in the main that of orthodox Marxism), that this quiet preparation for the terminal revolution necessarily involves passivism, and that however radical it may be in theory it must inevitably in practice culminate in reformism. The representatives of the adverse conception of revolutionism demand that the need for direct action shall be continually inculcated upon the masses; they insist that the party executive must itself assume the revolutionary initiative, and must not content itself with the mere administration of the party organisation. In conformity with the revolutionary program of French syndicalism, mass action is advocated as the supplement and corrective to parliamentarism; in the trade unions and the cooperative societies and in all the democratic organisations, the revolutionary sentiment must not merely be sustained and fortified, but must be given practical expression whenever opportunity arises; in default of this radicalism, the spirit of those who advocate the terminal aim and the definitive revolution, tends to degenerate into a mere parliamentary opposition, and in the economic field into the advocacy of economic reform within the existing order.
§ 161.
IN the writings of the Russian Marxists we discern the same difficulties and uncertainties which, in respect of tactics, and above all as regards the question of revolution, perplexed Marx and Engels and their German successors—for the Russian Marxists were mainly influenced by German Marxist theory.
