| English term or phrase: lay the key to the pattern of... | What the ill-assorted, but after 1905 growing, radical left of rebels, grassroots trade union militants, intellectual dissidents and revolutionaries rejected was thus the mass proletarian parties, which they saw as inevitably reformist and bureaucratized by virtue of engaging in certain kinds of political action. The arguments against them were much the same whether the prevailing orthodoxy was Marxist, as it usually was on the continent, or anti-Marxist in the Fabian manner as in Britain. Instead, the radical left preferred to rely on direct proletarian action which bypassed the dangerous bog of politics, ideally culminating in something like a revolutionary general stike. 'Revolutionary syndicalism', which flourished in the last ten years before 1914, suggests by its very name this marriage between all-out social revolutionaries and decentralized trade union militancy, which was, in varying degrees, associated with anarchist ideas. It flourished, outside Spain, mainly as an ideology of a few hundred or thousand proletarian union militants and a few intellectuals, during the second phase of the movement's growth and radicalization which coincided with considerable and internationally widespread labour unrest, and considerable uncertainty in the socialist parties about what exactly they could or ought to be doing.
... For from Vienna and Prague eastwards, Marxism and Marxist intellectuals were in abundant supply. And in these regions Marxism had retained its revolutionary impulse undiluted, and the link between Marxism and revolution was obvious, if only because the prospects of revolution were immediate and real.
And here, indeed, lay the key to the pattern of labour and socialist movements, as of so much else in the history of the fifty years before 1914. They emerged in the countries of the dual revolution, and ideed in the zone of western and central Europe in which every politically minded person looked back on the greatest of revolutions, that of France in 1789, and any city-dweller born in the year of Waterloo was quite likely in the course of a lifetime of sixty years to have lived through at least two or even three revolutions at first or second hand. The labour and socialist movement saw itself as the lineal continuation of this tradition. The Austrian Social Democrats celebrated March Day (anniversary of the victims of the Vienna revolution of 1848) before they celebrated the new May Day. Yet social revolution was rapidly retreating from its original zone of incubation. And in some ways the very emergence of massive, organized and above all disciplined class-parties accelerated its retreat. The organized mass meating, the carefully planned mass demonstration or procession, the election campaign, replaced rather than prepared riot and insurrection. The sudden upsurge of 'red' parties in the advanced countries of bourgeois society was indeed a worrying phenomenon for its rulers: but few of them actually expected to see the guillotine erected in their capitals. They could recognize such parties as bodies of radical opposition within a system which, nevertheless, provided room for improvement and conciliation. These were not, or not yet, or no longer, societies in which, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary, much blood flowed. |
| Danica CvetkovićKudoZ activityQuestions: 83 ( 3 open) ( 7 without valid answers) ( 2 closed without grading) Answers: 0
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