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By Root 1063 0

was the answer of both to the terrible riddle posed by the Nineteenth Century: that the greater the material progress, the wider and deeper the resulting poverty. Marx drew from the riddle the central theme of his system: that this inherent contradiction within capitalism would bring about its breakdown. He proved it from the economic analysis of history. The effect of the Industrial Revolution had been to transform the worker from an independent producer who owned his own tools into a factory hand, a propertyless, destitute member of society, dependent for his livelihood on the capitalist who owned the means of production. Through the capitalist’s accumulation of profits derived from the surplus value of the worker’s product, the exploiters were becoming richer and the exploited poorer. The process could only end in the violent collapse of the existing order. Trained in class consciousness and prepared for this event, the working class would, at the moment of ripeness, rise in revolution to usher in the new order.

This Marxian doctrine of Verelendung (pauperization, or increasing misery) and Zusammenbruch (collapse) was the religious formula of Socialism, equivalent to “God is One” of another religion. It afflicted Socialism and the labour movement with a chronic schism between the necessity of collapse and revolution on the one hand and the possibility of gradual reform of the existing order on the other. As a schism between the future Absolute and the present Possible, it was present from birth, when the founders of 1889 split into two Congresses over the issue whether to permit cooperation with the bourgeois political parties. The true Marxists accused the French Possibilists of lying in wait at the Paris railroad stations to lead unsuspecting delegates from the provinces to the wrong Congress. Throughout the next twenty-five years the schism affected every act, decision and formulation of policy in the working-class movement, dividing negotiated gains from uncompromising class war, pragmatists from theorists, trade unions from parliamentary parties, the workers themselves, who wanted improvements in wages, hours and safety today, from the leaders, who agitated in their behalf for political power tomorrow.

The Marxian premise built into Socialism a chronic dilemma as well as a schism. As a movement on behalf of the working class it needed working-class support, which could only be obtained by showing practical results. Yet every practical result slowed or arrested the process of impoverishment. When walking with a friend who reached in his pocket to give money to a beggar, Johannes Miquel, in his youth an ardent Socialist, stopped him, saying, “Don’t delay the Revolution!” This was the logical extreme of Marxism. Any reform inferred a common ground between the contesting classes; revolution assumed the absence of it. If there was no common ground, what then was the use of anything short of revolution? Orthodox Socialists skirted this gaping hole in the creed by contending that reforms should continue to be wrung from the possessing class in order to strengthen the workers for the final struggle. The several national parties always stated a minimum program of reforms to be obtained within the existing system and a maximum program for the destruction of capitalism and triumph of the class struggle. Increasingly the moderates, or “opportunists,” as their opponents called them, concentrated on the minimum program and the acquisition of political power necessary to put it through, while the orthodox refused to concede that any interim successes interfered with the truth of “increasing misery.”

On the final necessity of revolution the Socialist party programs were imprecise. They glossed over it both in order to appeal to the voters and because it remained a disputable point. Socialism was not a hard gemlike doctrine impervious to modification, but varied, depending on time, country, situation and faction. Whether or not a Socialist believed in revolution was largely a matter of temperament. For some it was “nothing if