The Marsh = K. Kautsky, Huysmans, etc.
Significance of the distinction between Plekhanov, Hyndman, Heine and K. Kautsky, Vandervelde, etc. 2 distinctions of “shades”. Eclectics instead of dialectics. The “middle way”:
The difference between the conceptions “Marxist centre” (= independent policy, independent ideas, independent theory) and “Marsh” (= wavering, lack of principle, “turn table” (“Drehscheibe”), weathercock).
| Illegal organisation.
Work in the army. Support for and devel- opment of mass action. |
N.B. || | Official optimism:
the objective course of events ... everything is bound to be for the best. The “proletariat” and the “class struggle” “in general”. “Process”. |
| N.B. || | cf. Martov on the “hopeless-
ness” of socialism if ... opportunism is hopeless!!! |
Recognition of revolutionary activity along the lines indicated above, not denial of legal activity and of the struggle for reforms, should be the essence of the “struggle against the Marsh”.
The possibility of a fusion of socialism and syndicalism, should there be a new and deeper division.
Parliamentarism and a different conception of it. “Illegal parliamentarism”.
[1] The article on the struggle against the “Marsh” (Notes on Kautskyism) was apparently never written. p. 30
[2] This refers to Kautsky’s pamphlet Der Weg zur Macht (The Road to Power), published in Berlin in 1909. Lenin called it Kautsky’s “last and best work” against the opportunists.
The Basic Manifesto on war was adopted by the Extraordinary Congress of the Second International in Basle, November 24–25, 1912. It exposed the predatory aims of the war the imperialists were preparing and called on the workers of all countries to wage a vigorous struggle for peace, against the threat of war, and “to oppose to capitalist imperialism the power of international proletarian solidarity”. Should imperialist war break out, it said, socialists must take advantage of the economic and political crisis it will cause so as to advance the socialist revolution (see present edition, Vol. 21 pp. 208–17 and 307–08). The leaders of the Second Inter national (Kautsky, Vandervelde, etc.) voted for the Manifesto at the Congress, but consigned it to oblivion and supported their imperialist governments when the war broke out. p. 30
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