to understand that Plehanov's main demand for Russia was that there should be a revolution in men's minds.
Without an effective revolution in men's minds, in millions and millions of minds, the radical program of socialism cannot be realised. Whereas, in his comments on the Gotha program of 1875, Marx had justified the failure of that program to demand a democratic republic for Germany, as regards the Russia of the years 1905 to 1913 the question was debated whether the demand for a socialist or at least for a democratic republic ought not to form a permanent rubric of political agitation.
Plehanov's great merit was that he laid bare the weaknesses of the revolutionary parties, and in especial the weaknesses of the social democracy; and that he counterposed blind radicalism with his realistic criticism of the existing situation and of the factors of political power. He laid due stress upon the consideration that evolution has a law-abiding character and a constancy, in virtue of which (in accordance with a well-known saying) the labour pains attending the birth of the new social order, though they can be mitigated and though their duration can be reduced, can never be wholly avoided.
Involuntarily, therefore, Plehanov was led to give his support to the reformism of the revisionists. Emphasising the reign of law in socio-political no less than in capitalistic evolution, condemning terrorists tactics, exposing the blindness of the incautious radicalism which would not look ahead, and recommending cooperation with the liberals, he reinforced constitutionalism and its advocates, and assisted the revisionists in maintaining their program of reformism.
It is this that makes Plehanov's relationship to Russian reformism so interesting. Struve, who simultaneously with Plehanov during the middle nineties took the field as a Marxist against the narodniki, found his main argument against revolutionism and terrorism in his insistence upon the constancy of historical evolution. Nature, he said, makes no leaps; the variations in social life are not discontinuous variations. In addition, Struve contested the validity of Marx's theory of increasing misery, and he was of course right in maintaining that it was impossible for a degenerate class to effect the great social revolution. In essentials this argument is identical with the evolutionary conception.
