Page:Friedrich Engels - The Revolutionary Act - tr. Henry Kuhn (1922).pdf/9

 forces of capitalism, as enumerated by Engels, is true several hundred per cent at this day and hour. Not only would the revolutionary "mass-actionist" be met with improved guns and cannons, but with additional military improvements that Engels had never dreamed of; bombs thrown from aeroplanes, tanks, poison gas, tear gas and a number of other infernal things now accessible for use against the "rabble rot" of "riotous" workmen.

The fact that Engels looked to the German Social Democracy of his day as the model Socialist political organization and that the Social Democracy has since, at the crucial moment, proven utterly ineffectual, inadequate, yes, traitorous to the movement, does not alter the general truth and sound reasoning of Engels's argument. Curious enough, it was the Socialist Labor Party, the advocate of the civilized political method, that, in the decade immediately before the War, was the most severe; yes, perhaps the only real and consistent critic of the Social Democracy of Germany. This criticism, however, was not directed at it because it was political but because its leaders had become "socialist" politicians, parliamentarians, "socialist" reformers, log-rolling and temporizing with capitalist society. We criticized the Social Democracy because we perceived the tendency to swing away from revolutionary Socialism, because in exchange for reforms under the present system, it was sacrificing the Revolution. It was gathering voters by the thousands and millions, but the