and solidly organised working class can compel the capitalist class to remain firm in the industrial war; if a united and revolutionary proletariat confronts a rich middle class, eager for conquest, capitalist society will have reached its historical perfection.
Thus proletarian violence has become an essential factor of Marxism. Let us add once more that, if properly conducted, it will suppress the Parliamentary Socialists, who will no longer be able to pose as the leaders of the working classes and the guardians of order.
III
The Marxian theory of revolution supposes that capitalism, while it is still in full swing, will be struck to the heart, when—having attained complete industrial efficiency—it has finally achieved its historical mission, and whilst the economic system is still a progressive one. Marx does not seem to have asked himself what would happen if the economic system were on the down grade; he never dreamt of the possibility of a revolution which would take a return to the past, or even social conservation, as its ideal.
We see nowadays that such a revolution might easily come to pass: the friends of Jaurès, the clericals, and the democrats all take the Middle Ages as their ideal for the future; they would like competition to be tempered, riches limited, production subordinated to needs. These are dreams which Marx looked upon as reactionary,[1] and consequently negligible, because it seemed to him that
- ↑ "Those who, like Sismondi, would return to the just proportion of production, while preserving the existing bases of society, are reactionary, since, to be consistent, they should also desire to re-establish all the other conditions of past times. … In existing society, in the industry based on individual exchanges, the anarchy of production, which is the source of so muck poverty is at the same time the source of all progress" (Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Eng. trans., p. 41).
