Page:Karl Radek - The Development of Socialism from Science to Action.djvu/18

 problem of its organs of power, they first were compelled to experience all the consequences of their powerlessness—physical powerlessness in the literal sense. 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 and their 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 upon the workers since the end of the last century, did not suffice to encourage the workers to aspire to more activity than the first timid step 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 without the bureaucracy of the party and the unions, or against their 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. The fact that the Russian proletariat through its Revolution is making the