Karl Marx
"The proletariat is revolutionary or it is nothing." - Karl Marx Being a product of bourgeois society, the socialist movement is linked to the vicissitudes of capitalist develop ment. It will assume different forms according to the changing fortunes of the capitalist system. In circumstances which are not favorable to the formation of class consciousness, it will not grow, or will practically disappear. In conditions of capitalist prosperity it tends to transform itself from a revolutionary to a reformist movement. In times of social crisis it may be totally suppressed by the ruling class. Since socialism cannot be established without a socialist movement, it follows that the destiny of the latter ultimately will determine whether socialism will ever be realized. All labor organizations form part of the general social structure and cannot be consistently anti-capitalist, except in a purely ideological sense. To acquire social importance within the capitalist system they must b!e opportunist, which means they must avail themselves of the given social processes to attain their goals, however limited the latter may be. Opportunism and 'realism' are apparently the same thing. The former cannot be defeated by a radical ideology which
In the social democratic parties it was the growing membership, the spreading party apparatus, the increasing number of votes in elections and a wider participation in existing political institutions which were thought of as growing into a socialist s!ociety. ------------------------------------------------------------------------**Bibliography**. Only those organizations that did not disturb the prevailing social relations acquired any importance. The increasing revolutionary will would not be measured by the success or failure of political parties, but by the frequency and vehemence of the strikes. (2) Lenin, like Rosa Luxemburg, saw the necessity of combatting the opportunist and reformist evolutionism of the established labor organizations and sought a return to revolutionary policies. But while Lenin saw in this the possibility of the realization of socialism by means of the party, Rosa Luxemburg feared that any minority, in the postion of! ruling class, would rapidly begin to think and act like the bourgeoisie of old. As marxism was the ideology of the dominant socialist parties, opposition to these organizations and their policies expressed itself as an opposition to marxian theory in its reformist and revisionist versions. As regards the Industrial Workers of the World, on the other hand, the growth of its own organizations into One Big Union was seen, at the same time, as "forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old. The radical socialists are destined to be miserable: they are conscious of their utopianism and they experience nothing but failures. Syndicalism and such international offspring as the Guild Socialists in England and the Industrial Workers of the World in the United States were, to some extent, reactions to the increasing bureaucratization of the socialist movement and to its class-collaborationist practices. Capitalism, according to Sorel, had already organized the whole proletariat in its industries. It seems that in order to do something now, one can only do the wrong things, and in order to avoid false steps one should undertake none at all. At the beginning of the century the traditional labor organizations--socialist parties and trade unions--were no longer revolutionary movements. In order to be free, the workers would have to resort to actions and weapons exclusively their own. To accomplish this, the proletariat was not so much in need of so-called scientific insight into necessary social trends as of a kind of intuitive conviction that revolution and socialism were the inevitable outcome of their own continuous struggles.
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