**Source: PSS vol 26**

The most prominent anarchists of the entire world have disgraced themselves through social-chauvinism (in the manner of Plekhanov and Kautsky) in this war no less than the opportunists have. One of the beneficial results of it will, without doubt, be that this war will kill both opportunism and anarchism.

While in no case and under no circumstances renouncing the use of even the smallest legal possibility for organizing the masses and preaching socialism, the social-democratic parties must break with their servility before legality. "Shoot first, gentlemen bourgeois," Engels wrote, alluding precisely to civil war and to the necessity of our violating legality after the bourgeoisie violates it. The crisis has demonstrated that the bourgeoisie violates it in all countries, even the most free ones, and that it is impossible to lead the masses to revolution without creating an illegal organization for propaganda, discussion, evaluation, and preparation of revolutionary means of struggle. In Germany, for example, everything that is being done honestly by socialists is being done against base opportunism and hypocritical "Kautskyism," and is being done precisely illegally. In England they are sending people to hard labor for printed appeals not to enlist in the army.

To consider it compatible with membership in the social-democratic party to deny illegal methods of propaganda and to ridicule them in the legal press is a betrayal of socialism.