Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/158

 of having their organization crushed out, their funds seized, their leaders thrown into jail by the government. In other words, Kautsky justifies the betrayal of Socialism by the fear of the unpleasant consequences revolutionary tactics might bring about. Isn't this a pure and simple prostitution of Marxism.

"They would arrest us," said one of the men who voted for the credits on August 4 at a workingmen's meeting in Berlin. And the workingmen shouted back to him: "Well, what of it?"

The best thing on earth to inspire the workers of Germany and France with a revolutionary spirit and show them the necessity of preparing for revolutionary activity, would be the arrest of a representative for making a daring speech. This would be the best appeal to united revolutionary action addressed to the proletarians of all nations. That unity of action is not an easy thing to bring about. This made it the more imperative for those that stood at the bead of the movement, and who were shaping its policies to assume the initiative.

It is not only in war times but whenever the political situation takes a critical turn that governments will threaten to crush out organized bodies, to seize their cash and jail their leaders, and to let them bear other practical consequences for their actions. What of it? Is this a valid ground to excuse the opportunists, as Kautsky does? This really amounts to transforming the Social-Democratic party into a national liberal party.

Socialists can only come to one conclusion: pure legalism, the legalism of the European parties has outlived its usefulness, and owing to the entrance of Capitalism into its imperialistic stage of development, has become simply a bourgeois labor policy. It must be supplemented by the adoption of an extra legal basis, by extra legal organization, extra legal Social-Democratic action, without however surrendering any of the legal positions occupied. How that can be done, experience will teach us, provided there is a firm desire for that sort of action and provided we realize clearly its absolute necessity. The revolutionary Social-Democrats of Russia showed in 1912–13 and 14 that it could be done. The labor deputy Muranof, hauled into court and sent by Czarism to Siberia, showed better than any one else that besides respectable parliamentarism of the ministerial timber (Henderson, Sembat, Vandervelde, Sudekum and Scheidemann are made of ministerial timber, but they are not allowed to take such lofty positions) there is also a revolutionary and extra legal variety of parliamentarism. The Kosovskys and Potresoffs may kowtow as much as they want to European