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 quoted. First he confines his conclusions to the Continent. This was natural in 1871, when England was still the pattern of a purely capitalist country, without a military machine, and, in large measure, without a bureaucracy.

Hence Marx excluded England, where a revolution, even a people's revolution, could be imagined, and was then possible without the preliminary condition of the destruction "of the available machinery of the State."

To-day, in 1917, in the epoch of the first great Imperialist war, this distinction of Marx's becomes unreal, and England and America, the greatest and last representatives of Anglo-Saxon "liberty" in the sense of the absence of militarism and bureaucracy, have to-day completely rolled down into the dirty, bloody morass of military-bureaucratic institutions common to all Europe, subordinating all else to themselves, crushing all else under themselves. To-day, both in England and in America, the "preliminary condition of any real people's revolution" is the break-up, the shattering of the "available ready machinery of the State" (perfected in those countries between 1914 and 1917, according to the "European" general Imperialist standard).

Secondly, this extremely pregnant remark of Marx is worth particular attention in that it states that the destruction of the military and bureaucratic machinery of the State is "the preliminary condition of any real people's revolution." This idea of a "people's" revolution seems strange on Marx's lips. And the Russian Plekhanovists and Mensheviks, those followers of Struve who wish to be considered Marxists, might possibly consider such an expression a slip of the tongue, They have reduced Marxism to such a state of meagre "liberal" distortion that nothing exists for them beyond the distinction between capitalist and proletarian revolutions; and even that distinction becomes for them a lifeless doctrine.

If we take examples from the revolutions of the 20th century, we shall, of course, have to recognize both the Portuguese and the Turkish revolutions to be middle-class. Neither, however, is a "people's" revolution, inasmuch as the mass of the people, the enormous majority, does not make its appearance actively, independently, with its own economic and political demands, in either the one or the other. On the other hand, the Russian middle-class revolution of 1905–7, although it presented no such "brilliant" successes as at times fell to the lot of the Portuguese and Turkish revolutions, was undoubtedly a real "people's" revolution, since the masses of the people, the majority, the lowest social "depths"