266 THE CLASS STRUGGLE KARL MARX 267 sources.
gress of events in the British labor movement possess any significance, it is that we have emerged from the period of petty social and political reforms into an era of revolutionary social upheavals.
The revolutionary upheaval of society by the abolition of the capitalist state has ceased to be an academic question. It has come into a stage of living actuality and will henceforth demand the most intense attention of the socialist movement and of the International. Under these circumstances it is particularly interesting to recall the words that Marx has written of the coming revolution. His Capital contains the most concise description of the revolution and the characteristics Marx believed it must ultimately assume. What now remains to be expropriated is no longer the independent workingman, but the capitalist exploiter of many workingmen. This expropriation will be enforced by the laws of capitalist production itself, by the concentration of capitalist industries. One capitalist kills may others. The number of capitalist magnates who usurp and monopolize all benefits that result from this upheaval constantly decreases. And in the same measure suffering, oppression, enslavement, degradation and exploitation, increase, and with it there grows the revolt of the united and organized working class, trained by the mechanism of capitalist productive processes. Capitalist production becomes a fetter to the productive process that has grown up with and under its protection. The concentration of the means of production and the socialization of labor reach a point where the capitalist shell becomes unbearable. It will be rent asunder.
The hour of capitalist private property will strike. The expro priator will be expropriated.
According to Marx, then, it depends only upon the one consideration, whether or not the point has been reached when production by private capitalists will release production, e. when the Revolution will come of its own accord. Por of course it cannot be hastened, it must break its own way, as a historic necessity. Marx did not mean an ordinary industrial crisis.
Undoubtedly he had in mind a crisis of extraordinary dimensions, a crisis that would spread out over all of the most important industrial nations, because this social revolution can come only from economic, not from purely, or even mainly political He means, in other words, the world catastrophe, that checks all industrial production by wiping out all markets, that depreciates capital and so staggers the economic foundation of present day society that its proud capitalist superstructure will fall into tottering ruins. Even terrified capitalist economists are beginning to see that a few more years of war will inevitably result in the overthrow of the existing social state.
In this paragraph Marx mentions another outward characteristic that will mark the great social revolution: the expropriation of the smaller capitalist by the larger, and the development of a working class united and organized, schooled by the process of production itself, a class to which he referred at another time as the only revolutionary class. The revolution itself will be the expropriation of the expropriator, at the command of the revolutionary working class through a new social order.
In other words, Marx never believed in the possibility of a gradual revolution that would lead to the great expropriation, for he was never so childish as to believe that the monopolists would submit peacefully to gradual expropriation. He knew that this expropriation can come only in one great upheaval, and that it must come when the processes of production in all countries where modern industry exists, have been so completely dominated by its masters that the pressure of their power becomes unbearable.
According to Marx, the education, organization and unification of the working class to revolutionary action will be, in the main, the work of the capitalist class. This has been interpreted to mean that Marx attached no importance to the propaganda work of the socialists and their parties. In a man who was himself the organizer of international socialist propaganda, this would be a peculiar contradiction. What Marx actually wished to express was this: that even when socialist propaganda seems