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In this respect the critics of Marxism form two very distinct groups. The first of these, the reformist or revisionist school, has a high respect for the master's theory of value, and reiterates it as an indisputable truth; whereas reformists criticise the theory of increasing misery, the theory of the concentration of capital, and above all the catastrophic vision of the[Pg 152] proletarian revolution. The writers of this school affirm, and think that in so doing they are setting up an antithesis to Marxism, that to await the millennium of the social revolution is futile utopianism; they contend, that the progressive reduction in the number of the wealthy, paralleled by the ceaseless increase in the number of more and more impoverished proletarians, a development which according to Marx's vision was to provide the apparatus destined to destroy the contemporary economy, is negatived by an actual tendency towards a more democratic distribution of commodities; and they insist, therefore, that socialism should aim at securing the triumph of its cause by means that are less violent but far more efficacious, namely by social legislation or by reforms tending to reduce inequality.

Now, without troubling to repeat what I have already said, that the Marxist dynamic of the distribution of wealth is far from being as completely negatived by contemporary facts[Pg 153] as these critics are pleased to insist, I merely propose to point out that this paying of high honour to reform and social legislation nowise conflicts with the doctrine or with the work of Marx, who, on the contrary, was the first to throw into high relief the pre-eminent value of social legislation, devoting classical chapters to the elucidation of its most memorable manifestations. In this light, therefore, revisionism or reformism, far from being a negation or correction of Marxism, is a specific application or partial realisation of the doctrine, for it brings into the lime-light one of the numerous sides of that marvellous polyhedron, and deserves credit for having explained and developed this particular aspect of Marxism.

But revisionism errs gravely in that it wishes to replace the beautiful and complex multiplicity of the Marxist system by forcing us to contemplate this unilateral aspect alone. The reformists err in that they fail to see that [Pg 154]legislative reforms, though desirable and extremely opportune, are invariably circumscribed by the prepotent opposition of the privileged classes, and can never do anything more than mitigate a few of the grosser harshnesses of the present system—whilst, precisely because they effect this mitigation, reforms tend to preserve an increasingly unstable economic order from the imminent disaster of a destructive cataclysm.

If the reformist school mutilates Marxism thus violently, by reducing the whole of Capital to the paragraphs extolling social legislation, the syndicalists inflict a yet cruder mutilation on the Marxist system by tearing a single page out of Capital, to make of this page the alpha and the omega of their revolutionary creed. It is true that Marx, in the thirty-first chapter of Capital, makes an explicit appeal to force, the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one; but this appeal is not made until it has been fully [Pg 155]demonstrated that the social revolution can only be effected at the close of a slow and lengthy evolutionary process which shall have caused complete disintegration of the existing economic order and shall have paved the way for its inevitable transformation into a superior order.

Now the syndicalists unhesitatingly sponge all this demonstration from the slate, and affirm that the proletarian masses can undertake action at any moment, can violently overthrow the prevailing economic order whenever it shall please them to do so; and they declare that it is needless for revolutionists to keep their eyes fixed upon the clock of history, in order to see if this is about to sound the knell of the present social order. It would be superfluous to demonstrate the absurdity of such a thesis, for the very school which proclaims it has assumed the task of giving it the lie in clamorous accents. For if, as the new apostles of force contend, the proletarian masses can at any moment[Pg 156] annihilate the prevailing economic order, why do they not rise against the capitalism they detest, and replace it with the co-operative commonwealth for which they long? Why is it that after so much noisy organisation, after so much declamation and delirious excitement, the utmost they are able to do is to tear up a few yards of railway track or to smash a street lamp? Do we not find here an irrefragable demonstration that force is not realisable at any given moment but only in the historic hour when evolution shall have prepared the inevitable fall of the dominant economic system?

Thus whatever they can do, it always seems that the infirm will of the disciples who demand an arbitrary renovation of the social system (whether by legal measures or by force) breaks vainly against the fatality of evolution, and that reformism and syndicalism are merely caricatures, counterfeits, or exaggerations of the many-sided and well-balanced[Pg 157] theory of the master, who proposed a threefold line of advance: by social legislation; by the activity of the organised workers; and by revolution. In face of these various forms of neo-marxism, the outcome of mutilations and of one-sided exclusivism, Marx redivivus would have excellent reason for repeating his own adage, so thoughtful and so true, "I am not a Marxist." However striking the temporary success of these new forms among the crowd or among the learned, we may confidently predict that neither reformism nor syndicalism will definitively supplant the Marxist system, which despite all and against all remains and will remain a supreme and invincible force at once of theory and of organisation for the proletarian assault upon the long-enduring fortress of property.

The value of Marx's work is, in fact, displayed in the most brilliant light by the detailed criticism of the theorists and by the contrast with opposing trends; all the more when[Pg 158] we compare the aspect of economic thought and of proletarian organisation before and after the publication of Capital. For if we study the utterances of thinkers upon these matters during the middle of the nineteenth century, we find that nearly all are dominated by the categorical idea that the social order is of an absolutely immobile character, and that none but a few utopians entertain the thought of changing that order by means of precipitate legislation inspired by their individual preconceptions. In any case, it was an idea common to all, to revolutionists as well as to conservatives, that the poverty of the masses was a negative and distressing residue from the economic system, that it was a purely passive feature of that system which must be accepted with resignation, for it could not exercise any propulsive influence in the general social movement. This is substantially the notion which emerges from Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, for poverty is here regarded as an[Pg 159] overwhelming mass of suffering for which it is impossible to assign the responsibility; it is looked upon as a load pressing with inexorable cruelty upon suffering humanity, which is unable to respond by anything more effective than complaints and tears.

But how utterly different is the notion prevailing in our own days upon this matter. Not only is the conviction now rooted in the mind of every thinker that the economic order is subject to unceasing change, is advancing towards predestined destruction; but it is considered certain that the artificer, the demiurge, the most potent factor of this destruction, will be the active resistance, the unrest, the rebellion, of the proletarians in the grasp of the capitalist machine and eager to destroy it. This conception of the dynamogenic function of poverty is the most characteristic feature of the social thought of our day, the feature wherein that thought contrasts most categorically with the ideas of an earlier age. Just as[Pg 160] the Christian sect, represented by Gibbon as a mere pathological efflorescence growing on the margin of Roman society, is by the better equipped science of our own time looked upon as having been the most potent solvent of the imperial complex and as the ferment generating a new and better life, so the proletarian masses, regarded by the science and the art of the past as a crushed and pitiful appendage of the bourgeois economy, now appear to contemporary science as the most vigorous among the forces tending to disintegrate that economy, as tending irresistibly to create a higher and better balanced form of association.