Page:Otto Wilhelm Kuusinen - The Finnish Revolution (1919).pdf/13

 certainly have demanded more extreme measures, but the majority of our working class party, which was contented with so little, would then have been able ta stifle the real revolutionary voice of the proletariat, for having obtained satisfaction on this point, it would have opposed the revolutionary demands for a dictatorship. It would then have attained its object, or very nearly so. At this distance it now seems even more probable than it did then. In any case the Finnish bourgeois class would probably have given any for the time being before the revolutionary movement, in order the better to protect its own chief interests, which were in no way threatened by the Right S.-D.'s. The Finnish revolution in November would then most probably have become a bourgeois revolution with liberal tendencies. There would then have been a split on the ranks of the organised workers: the Right Wing would have drawn nearer to the Conservative Front with the bourgeoisie, the Left would have been the standard-bearer of Revolutionary Socialism or Communism, and would have continued to attack the bourgeois State with its partisans and powers.

It was in some such way, although not so clearly, that we "Marxists" in the Party Council had figured to ourselves the results of a revolution already continued during the week of the November general strike. But for that very reason we had two very weighty reasons for opposing the revolution: (1) We did not want to help in uniting the Right Socialists with the bourgeoisie, and (2) we wished to avoid splitting the S.-D.'s into two opposite camps. So that from this standpoint also our thought was moving in channels characteristic, not of Marxism, but of Social-Democracy.

In fact we curbed the historic evolution of things by preventing a split in the working class movement, although the beginnings of such a division were already a necessary condition if the working class movement were to advance towards a consciously revolutionary goal.

And now artifically patched up and with sections in opposition to one another, the movement was absolutely incapable of action. A division, it is true, might have been damaging to Social-Democratic action, i.e., to the success of Parliamentary and Trade Union work. Hopes of a success at the polls might have been lessened by it. But for the real progress of the working class movement, and for the