284 THE CLASS STRUGGLE THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIALISM 285 can not a day in order to liquidate these burdens and raise the expenses of re armament for the next war. They would not put an end to the confusion of the economic life of the country but only shift the consequences of this confusion upon the workers. The communistic system of economy is the utilization of all the forces of production according to a distinct plan, in the interest of the masses of the people. Just because the country has been unbelievably shattered through the war, communism is the only way by, which the workers can hope to emerge from the want and misery of the shattered capitalistic society. To forego beforeliand the chance to organize this economic life in its own interest would mean to rush into capitalistic misery for fear that the inexperienced proletariat would be incapable of directing the main forces of national economic life concentrated by capitalism. This would not only be historical suicide but is furthermore impossible practically. What does the return to capitalism mean? It means in the first place giving back the power of the state to the capitalists, for naturally a proletarian state could not undertake to protect capitalistic profits. The purpose of showing this is to reveal the whole utopianism of the solution back to capitalism.
It was certainly not chance that the Russian proletariat took the power into its hands in October 1917. The proletariat won the power because the capitalistic regime had lost all confidence not only in the eyes of the proletarian but also of the bourgeois inasses. The first representatives of Russian capital, the Guchkovs, Milyukovs, Tereshchenkos, and their Socialist fig leaves, the Tseretellis, Kerenskys, and Chernovs, were so hateful to the masses of the people that the people drove them away. Had the workers not seized the reigns of power, the representatives of capitalism would not have been one whit more able to master the situation. Russia would have sailed without a rudder into the sea of anarchy, headed for a chaos, out of which the star of Socialism could not have crystallized, but also not a capitalist regime either. Russia was simply the prey of foreign capital, which is certainly not riper, or more called upon to set in order the disrupted country in the interests of the masses of the people than is the young, but energetic Russian proletariat itself.
Austria and Italy find themselves in the same situation as Russia, and the experience of the Russian Revolution teaches that the Socialistic Revolution by no means will begin is the place where Capitalism is at its highest stage of development.
Even the strongest capitalistic organization is not able to protect the masses from the unspeakable sufferings which capitalist anarchy creates, it is much better suited, as the government of the young capitalist countries, to hold the masses down.
The Socialist Revolution starts first in those countries in which the capitalist organization is not so strong. Those capitalist countries with the most unsettled organs for oppression are the breaches where Socialism may break through, there the social revolution will begin. It is difficult for it to break through within national boundaries, because after crushing its own bourgeoisie, it is threatened by the bourgeoisie of the remaining capitalist countries. The Socialistic Revolution can only be successful if it breaks out on the entire continent; but as the Socialistic Revolution cannot wait until the proletariat of the whole world rises to one single call, on the contrary, as national. Socialistic revolutions are themselves a product of international, capitalist disintegration, they furnish the accelerating element. In this way the answer is given to the first question which confronts the international proletariat: When the Socialist Revolution begin? It can and will begin in every country in which the conditions created by capital for the working class become unbearable. The sufferings of the people jeer at the statistics of Cunow and Company, and the volcanoes of revolution are waiting until the scholastic statisticians of Also Marxism give them a signal. Whoever proves to the masses of the people by means of tables of statistics the impossibility of the Socialistic Revolution, shows that he understands Marx not at all. Friedrich Engels may have made a mistake when he thought in the 80 that the end of capitalism was at hand. But the possibility of such a mistake shows that he had nothing to do with this statistical conception of his and Marx theory. This ossification of Marx was an offense easily explained during the peaceful evolution of capitalism; after the experience of the Russian workers revolution it is not only a product of counterrevolutionary state of mind, but it is also, as the experience of the Russians shows, a counter revolutionary Utopia. All the adjurations with the falsified spirit of Marx could rot save the political necks of the Tseretellis and Dans. They were cast on the manure heap of history by the same proletariat which is still unripe for the Social Revolution, and from this place they may spit upon the revolution of the Russian working class, but cannot impede its progress. The revolution may temporarily be conquered by European capital if the European proletariat does not make use of the same weapons which the Russian proletariat made use of, within a reasonable time.
But that it is a proletarian revolution, and that it is trying to overcome heroically the anarchistic capitalistic economic