AnarchismCapitalismCommunismDemocracyMarxismRussian RevolutionSocialismWorkers MovementWorking ClassWorld War

280 THE CLASS STRUGGLE THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIALISM 281 accratic forms of the capitalistic state and must create new organs of power of the working people in the fires of the proletarian revolution, he was accused by Karl Kautsky, the most authoritative Marxian theoretician, of being an anarchist. However correct the answer of Pannekoek may have been, it was only half an answer. It pointed to the fact that the organs of compulsion used by the capitalist state must be destroyed, but it did not show what organs of control the proletariat must build in order to carry on and assure its victory.
While the majority of even the revolutionary Socialists saw in democracy the means by which Socialists would gain the victory, the Syndicalists representing the revolutionary theory of those countries in which the bankruptcy of democracy had brought about the complete disillusionment of the masses of the people, pointed to the labor unions as the agency which should win the power and become the wielders of the power of the masses.
This problem, as has been said, was put only sporadically by those intellects who were able to see beyond the confines of the present time and could not be answered by them. The historic solutions are never found by the theoreticians of the working class, they can only be discovered by the revolutionary struggle of the masses; to the theoretician is left only the duty to grasp the practical measures of the proletariat, to make them common knowledge and to make them the universal object of the struggle of the proletariat, the solution of its struggle.
The Lessons of the World War upon the workers since the end of the last century, did not suffice to encourage the workers to aspire to more tivity than the first timid steps forward. The opportunistic policy of the leaders of the workers movement lulled the front ranks of the workers aristocracy to sleep, a sleep which proved that the elite of the workers found themselves in a very favorable condition. The lower strata of the working class though were too ignorant, too helpless, to be in a position to throw themselves into a revolution withont the bureaucracy of the party and the unions, or against its will. So there came the long awaited beast of war and began to teach the proletariat with its claws that lesson which it had not understood when revolutionary Socialism was preaching it.
The Russian people is the first which has understood this lesson and has drawn from it the consequences, and this it accomplished by means of the revolution. The Russian Revolution is the first response of the proletariat to the World War, it is the advocate and the forerunner of the international Revolution, it gives the answer to the riddles which the Sphinx of the Revolution has been giving Socialism to solve for the last century, to the question which the working class must answer, if it does not wish to be torn to pieces by it. The fact that the Russian proletariat through its Revolution is making the first steps on the road of the development of Socialism from science into action means that at the same time that Revolution marks a mighty stride in the development of the science of Communism. Communism is the theory of the conditions of the victory of the working class. These conditions become clearest in the process of victory, on that account the comprehension of the Russian Revolution is a preliminary condition of the development of Communism from a science into action.
Before the working class could be confronted with the problem of its organs of power, they first were compelled to experience all the consequences of their powerlessness in the literal sense physically. They had to wade through the horrors of war, to be torn in pieces by grenades; they had to bleed to death for the interests of the capitalists, they had to heap up mountains of corpses, in order that the lesson: Capitalism leads to the bloodiest anarchy, to the destruction of the few cultural achievements which have been created, to the deepest misery of the masses, to its literal enslavement, so that this lesson might be converted out of a theoretical thesis into a crying and burning certainty, at least in the minds of the front ranks of the working class.
The theoretical propaganda of the revolutionary Social Democrats, experience, the defeats, which capital had inflicted THE LESSONS OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION The Ripening of Capitalism and the Socialist Revolution The first question of the Socialist Revolution which confronts the working class is this: When can the Social Revolution come? As Marxism showed the workers that the victory of Socialism is dependent on the development of the forces of production, a perverted conception became rooted in the ranks of the Marxists that the Social Revolution would only then become possible when capitalism had the entire economic life of the nation in its grasp, when, so to say, it had divided it relentlessly into a small group of capitalists and an oppressed proletariat. Yes, those who were the most