ABSTRACT
THE question of what violence may lie in store for us in the future rides our thoughts like a nightmare. The prospects of violence, aside from war, are conditioned almost solely by the chances of a counter-revolutionary civil struggle. The Marxian tradition asserts with considerable finality that there are no instances in history in which a ruling class has given up its power and perquisites without making a fight of it. But there is a happy vagueness as to what induction is to be drawn from that. Fabianism may, of course, be only an excuse for standing still. It may be the rationalization that an inert leadership makes for its cowardice and its willingness at the decisive moment to betray the rank and file; and that is how it has been mainly interpreted in the writings of the revolutionary wing of Marxism.
