36
Marxism simply summarized the experience of the working classes when it warned them against rioting. That it was their sense of weakness and not the influence of Marxism that was the deciding factor is shown by the fact that in countries where the influence of Marxism was so weak as in Italy, France and England there was no serious disturbance in the last ten years. That the working class of any country did not attempt to seize power before the war, and that it was not anywhere brought practically face to face with the question of the use of force, was due to objective conditions which, after 1871 and still more after 1890, originated in the period of the consolidation of the capitalist States and their economic expansion.
Marxism was never really practically brought face to face with the question of force, and the merit which Herr Kautsky claims for it as a great restraining influence exists for the most part only in his imagination. At the same time it should not be denied that Marxism, true to its nature, was always careful in treating of the use of force, and made the guiding star of its policy the advice to comrades to refrain from provocative measures, and so became a restraining factor in the last decade where the working class was faced with the problems of violence through the policy of Imperialism. The world war has made the problem a question for the working class movement. Indeed for years the prophet of the Second International has done nothing else than prove to this generation, which has grown up in the period of the "peaceful development" of Capitalism, any real sense of historical development in stormy revolutionary times has been lost. We saw this in Kautsky's treatment of the greatest bourgeois revolution, and the first proletarian revolution of the epoch of so-called "democracy"; we shall see it in a more repulsive form in his treatment of the great Russian Workers' revolution.
