To be sure individual cases of exceptional difficulty and intricacy do occur, when it is possible to determine the real character of such a compromise only with the greatest effort; just as there are cases of murder in which it is anything but easy to decide whether the murder was full justifiable, and, in fact, necessary (as, for example, legitimate self-defense), or an unpardonable piece of negligence, or, again, a skilfully premeditated treacherous plan. Of course, in politics, involving sometimes very intricate national or international relationships between classes and parties, many cases will arise much more difficult than the question of a lawful compromise during a strike, or the treasonable compromise of a strike-breaker, a traitorous leader, etc. To invent such a formula or general rule as "No Compromises," which would serve in all cases, is an absurdity. One must keep one's head in order not to lose oneself in each separate case. Therein, by the way, lies the importance of a party organization and of party leaders worthy of the name, that, in long, stubborn, varied, and variform struggle, all thinking representatives of a given class may work out the necessary knowledge, the necessary experience, and, apart from all knowledge and experience, the necessary political instincts for the quick and correct solution of intricate political problems.[1]
Naive and quite inexperienced persons imagine that it is sufficient to recognize the permissibility of compromise in general, and all differences between opportunism on the one hand (with which we do and must wage uncompromising war) and revolutionary Marxism or Communism on the other will be obliterated. But for those people who do not yet know that all distinctions in nature and in society are unstable (and, to a certain extent, arbitrary), nothing will do but a long process of training, education, enlightenment, political and everyday experience. In practical questions of the policy appropriate to each separate or specific historic movement it
- ↑ So long as classes exist, so long as non-class society has not fully entrenched and consolidated itself, has not developed itself on its own foundation, there inevitably will be in every class, and even in the most enlightened countries, class representatives who neither think nor are capable of thinking. Capitalism would not be the oppressor of the masses that it is, were this not so.
