aspiration, a vague protest against the open and disgraceful treachery of Noske, Ebert, Scheideniann and others, and – last but not least – a weapon of electoral and parliamentary demagogy.
The vitality of vague Kautskianism is most clearly seen in the example of the French Longuetists. Jean Longuet himself has most sincerely convinced himself, and has for long been attempting to convince others, that he is marching in step with us, and that only Clemenceau’s censorship and the calumnies of our French friends Loriot, Monatte, Rosmer, and others hinder our comradeship in arms. Yet is it sufficient to make oneself acquainted with any parliamentary speech of Longuet’s to realize that the gulf separating him from us at the present moment is possibly still wider than at the first period of the imperialist war? The revolutionary problems now arising before the international proletariat have become more serious, more immediate, more gigantic, more direct, more definite, than five or six years ago; and the politically reactionary character of the Longuetists, the parliamentary representatives of eternal passivity, has become more impressive than ever before, in spite of the fact that formally they have returned to the fold of parliamentary opposition.
The Italian Party, which is within the Third International, is not at all free from Kautskianism. As far as the leaders are concerned, a very considerable part of them bear their internationalist honors only as a duty and as an imposition from below. In 1914-1915, the Italian Socialist Party found it infinitely more easy than did the other European parties to maintain an attitude of opposition to the war, both because Italy entered the war nine months later than other Countries, and particularly because the international position of Italy created in it even a powerful bourgeois group (Giolittians in the widest sense of the word) which remained to the very last moment hostile to Italian intervention in the war.
These conditions allowed the Italian Socialist Party, without the fear of a very profound internal crisis to refuse war credits to the Government,