Page:Boris Souvarine - The Third International.djvu/11

 ing forward the movement, was a dangerous method to employ.

Nevertheless, if Socialism decided to carry on the political struggle, there was nothing to indicate that this struggle must of necessity be identified with parliamentarism. On the contrary our interpretation only looked upon electoral action as a means of agitation, and parliamentary action as an adjunct to direct action.

Electoral appeals and parliamentarism were only to be means of propaganda, only special aspects of political action.

Jules Guesde, at the period when he still drew his inspiration from Marxism, remarked that the struggle at the ballot box was only the preparation for the armed struggle (Congress of Nancy, 1907). This formula and many others remained merely platonic.

Reformism, which had been apparently overcome at the International Congress of Amsterdam, triumphed over those who had overthrown it, by inoculating them with it. Electoral successes intoxicated the parties to the extent of giving them a sort of feeling of security and of assurance of certain victory by means of the normal and progressive growth of votes, and of the number of elected Socialists. They forgot the lessons of history which Marx had underlined, the decisive role of "midwife helping the new order in its birth pangs," the ever-increasing oppression of the State, as day by day the transference of power from one class to another becomes more imminent, the inevitability of a gesture of conservative will power on the part of the privileged on the approach of real danger.

Lulled into false repose, they did not give to imperialism and to the threats of war the attention that a more rigorous logic should have demanded. Instead of looking upon imperialism as an attribute of capitalism, inseparable from the régime to which its fate is linked, our parliamentary chiefs looked upon it merely as an error of bourgeois politics, a mistake which the governing classes would renounce whenever we should prove to them that it was harmful to their interests. Reformism was the cause of the birth of a vague sub-conscious, but real notion, that it was possible to reform bourgeois society and politics.