Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): a reply to Karl Kantsky
Kant · en
These conditions allowed the Italian Socialist Party, without the fear
of a very profound internal crisis to refuse war credits to the
Government, and generally to remain outside the interventionist block.
But by this very fact the process of internal cleansing of the party
proved to be unquestionably delayed. Although an integral part of the
Third International, the Italian Socialist Party to this very day can
put up with Turati and his supporters in its ranks. This very powerful
group--unfortunately we find it difficult to define to any extent of
accuracy its numerical significance in the parliamentary group, in the
press, in the party, and in the trade union organizations--represents
a less pedantic, not so demagogic, more declamatory and lyrical, but
none the less malignant opportunism--a form of romantic Kautskianism.
A passive attitude to the Kautskian, Longuetist, Turatist groups is
usually cloaked by the argument that the time for revolutionary
activity in the respective countries has not yet arrived. But such a
formulation of the question is absolutely false. Nobody demands from
Socialists striving for Communism that they should appoint a
revolutionary outbreak for a definite week or month in the near
future. What the Third International demands of its supporters is a
recognition, not in words but in deeds, that civilized humanity has
entered a revolutionary epoch; that all the capitalist countries are
speeding towards colossal disturbances and an open class war; and that
the task of the revolutionary representatives of the proletariat is to
prepare for that inevitable and approaching war the necessary
spiritual armory and buttress of organization. The internationalists
who consider it possible at the present time to collaborate with
Kautsky, Longuet and Turati, to appear side by side with them before
the working masses, by that very act renounce in practice the work of
preparing in ideas and organization for the revolutionary rising of
the proletariat, independently of whether it comes a month or a year
sooner or later. In order that the open rising of the proletarian
masses should not fritter itself away in belated searches for paths
and leadership, we must see to it to-day that wide circles of the
proletariat should even now learn to grasp all the immensity of the
tasks before them, and of their irreconcilability with all variations
of Kautskianism and opportunism.