Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/370

344 The earlier Russian Marxists passed through the school of Mihailovskii and Lavrov, already contemplating evolution as the opposite of revolution, and thus paving the way for revisionism and reformism.

I have already pointed out that these evolutionist arguments by no means exhaust the problem of reformism versus revolutionism, and that still less can they be said to solve it. Struve appeared to feel this, and he therefore attempted to rescue reformism by rejecting revolution in toto as epistemologically incomprehensible. But Struve's formula is one difficult to establish, and at any rate Struve did not succeed in establishing it. Epistemologically the revolution becomes comprehensible enough as soon as it exists. In the collective work entitled Věhy (signposts), the sometime ex-Marxists, Struve among them, took up another position. The revolution of 1905-1906 was made the occasion for the publication of their philosophical confessions, wherein not this revolution alone, but also the entire revolutionary spirit of the intelligentsia, the spirit which had animated the intelligentsia for years, were discarded as theoretical and moral confusionism. The revolution was condemned, not epistemologically, but ethically—as nihilism.

Theoretically, the revolution is comprehensible enough, but the question is whether revolution is ethically permissible. Primarily, of course, we think here of a forcible revolution attended by-bloodshed; but the question applies more generally to every revolution, in the field of theory as well. Marx and Engels have an easy task of it here with their amoralism, and Engels declares that the right of revolution is the only historic right, seeing that all modern states have in fact come into existence through revolutions.

In reality the question is less simple, but for the time being our sole concern is with the way in which the Marxists envisage the problem. The orthodox Marxists claim the "right to revolution (since they are amoralists the word right must be placed in quotation marks). Some of them, in this connection are thinking of the future definitive revolution, whilst others have in mind an uninterrupted revolutionism. But the orthodox Marxists have not yet discussed the problem of revolution in a way that can be considered even partially satisfactory.