that the presence in the movement of
semi-Socialist or non-Socialist elements, which is both the cause and
the effect of reformism and compromise, is a mere accident, or that
there is any device by which they may either be kept out or
eliminated--until the time is ripe. The presence of opportunists and
reformists in all Socialist parties is as much an inevitable result at a
certain stage of social evolution as the appearance of Socialism itself.
The time will come when these "Mitlauefer," as the Germans call them,
will either become wholly Socialist or will desert the movement, as has
so often happened, to become a part of the rising tide of "State
Socialism," but that day has not yet arrived.

The division of the organization at a certain stage into two wings is
held by the able Austrian Socialist, Otto Bauer, to be a universal and
necessary process in its development. The first stage is one where all
party members are agreed, since it is then merely a question of the
propaganda of general and revolutionary _ideas_. The second stage (the
present one) arises when the party has already obtained a modest measure
of power which can be either _cashed in_ and utilized for immediate and
material gains or saved up and held for obtaining more power, or for
both objects in degrees varying according as one or the other is
considered more important. Bauer shows that these two policies of
accumulating power and of spending it arise necessarily out of the
social composition of the party at its present stage and the general
social environment in which it finds itself.

At the third stage, he says, when the proletariat has come to form the
overwhelming majority of the population, their campaign for the conquest
of political power appears to the possessing classes for the first time
as a threatening danger. The capitalist parties then unite closely
together against the Social Democracy; what once separated them now
appears small in comparison to the danger which threatens their profits,
their rents, and their monopolistic incomes. So there arises again at
this higher stage of capitalist domination, as was the case at its
beginning, "a Social Democracy in battle _against all the possessing
classes, against the whole power of the organized state_." (Italics
mine.)[186] When the third stage arrives, these reformists who do not
intend to leave the revolutionary movement, begin to get ready to follow
it. Already the most prominent reformis