Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/60

 proletarian standpoint, to avoid all possible provocation and yet always maintain the consciousness that we are a fighting party, conducting an irreconcilable war upon all existing social institutions.

The above paragraphs were written in 1893. They also contain a prophecy that has since been fulfilled. What I feared in 1893 appeared a few years later. In France a portion of our party membership became temporarily a government party. The masses received the impression that the Socialists had renounced their revolutionary principles. They lost faith in the party. Not a small section of them fell under the influence of the latest variety of anarchism—syndicalism—which, like the old anarchism, follows the propaganda of the deed not so much to strengthen the proletariat as unnecessarily to frighten the bourgeoisie, to arouse its rage and provoke immature, inopportune tests of strength, to which the proletariat is not adequate in the existing conditions.

It is just the revolutionary Marxists among French Socialists who have presented the most determined opposition to this tendency. They fight syndicalism as energetically as ministerialism, and consider one just as injurious as the other.

The revolutionary Marxists are still standing today upon the standpoint developed by Engels and myself in the articles just quoted, written in 1892–1895.

We are neither men of legality at any price, nor are we revolutionists at any price. We know that we cannot create historical situations to suit our desires, and that our tactics must correspond to such situations.

At the beginning of the '90s I had recognized that further peaceful development of the proletarian organizations and the proletarian class struggle, upon the then existing governmental foundations, would best advance the proletariat in the situation existing at that time. Neither can I be accused of being drunk with