Polemic on General Line of International ... - From Marx to Mao

e further developed”, 1 and that “we are now bringing aboutby voting, demonstrations and similar means of pressure reformswhich would have required bloody revolution a hundredyears ago”. 2He held that the legal parliamentary road was the onlyway to bring about socialism. He said that if the workingclass has “universal and equal suffrage, the social principlewhich is the basic condition for emancipation is attained”. 3He asserted that “the day will come when it [the workingclass] will have become numerically so strong and will be soimportant for the whole of society that so to speak the palaceof the rulers will no longer be able to withstand its pressureand will collapse semi-spontaneously”. 4Lenin said:The Bernsteinians accepted and accept Marxism minusits directly revolutionary aspect. They do not regard theparliamentary struggle as one of the weapons particularlysuitable for definite historical periods, but as the main andalmost the sole form of struggle making “force”, “seizure”,“dictatorship”, unnecessary. 5Herr Kautsky was a fitting successor to Bernstein. LikeBernstein, he actively publicized the parliamentary road andopposed violent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.He said that under the bourgeois democratic systemthere is “no more room for armed struggle for the settlementof class conflicts” 6 and that “it would be ridiculous . . . to1Eduard Bernstein, The Prerequisites for Socialism and the Tasksof the Social-Democratic Party, Ger. ed., Berlin, 1923, p. 11.2Ibid., p. 197.3Eduard Bernstein, What Is Socialism? Ger. ed., Berlin, 1922, p. 28.4Eduard Bernstein, The Political Mass Strike and the Political Situationof the Social-Democratic Party in Germany, Ger. ed., Berlin, 1905,p. 37.5V. I. Lenin, “The Victory of the Cadets and the Tasks of the Workers’Party”, Collected Works, Eng. ed., FLPH, Moscow, 1962, Vol. X,p. 249.6Karl Kautsky, The Materialist Interpretation of History, Ger. ed.,Berlin, 1927, pp. 431-32.364