MARXISM IN OUR TIME
29
5.
Marxism is so firmly based in truth that it is able to find nourishment
in
its own defeats. We must distinguish here between the social philosophy
-scientific, to speak more accurately-and its deductions for, and applica–
tions to, action. (These are actually inseparable, and this is the case not only
with Marxism but also with all those intellectual disciplines which are
closely tied to human activity.)
It
is our business neither to force events, nor
to control them, nor even to foresee them-even though we are constantly
doing all these things, with varying success; our activity, being creative,
boldly ventures into the uncertain; and, what we do not know generally
getting the better of what we know, our successes are rather astonishing
victories. As to the Marxist line of action, it would be enough to list the
prodigious success of the Bolshevik party in 1917 (Lenin-Trotsky), the
predictions of Engels about the world war of the future and its conse–
quences, some lines from the resolution adopted at the Basle Congress of
the Second International (1913)-for the Marxist line to be justified as
the most rigorously, scientifically thought-out of these
times~
But even
when it comes to the very depths of defeat, it is still the same; Do you wish
to understand your defeat? You will be able to only by means of the Marx–
ist analysis of history. Marxism showed itself impotent in Germany before
the Nazi counter-revolution; but it is the only theory that explains this
victory of a party of the declassed, paid for and supported during an in–
soluble economic crisis, by the chiefs of the big bourgeoisie. This complex
phase of the class struggle, prepared by the national humiliation at Ver–
sailles and by the massacres of proletarian revolutionists (Noske, 1918-
1921), is made completely intelligible to us only by the scientific thought
of the defeated class. And this is one of the reasons which make Marxist
thought such a threat to the victors.
It
is the same with the terrible degeneration of the dictatorship of the
proletariat in the U.S.S.R. There too, the punishment of the Old Bolsheviks,
exterminated by the regime which they have created, is no more than a
phenomenon of the class struggle. The proletariat, deposed from power
by
a caste of parvenues intrenched in the new State, can take an accounting
of the basic reasons for its defeat and can prepare itself for the struggles
of tomorrow only by means of the Marxist analysis.
(,.
The Marxism of the era of capitalist prosperity naturally lacked revo–
lutionary ardor.
It
dared neither imagine nor hope for the end of the society
in which it lived. Lacking this audacity, it disavowed itself when it became
necessary. But there are times when to live is to dare.
The Marxism of the first great revolutionary crisis of the modern
world, chiefly represented by the Russians-that is to say, by men formed
in the school of despotism-has given proof of a lack of boldness of another
sort, and one quite as ruinous: it ·has not dared to take a libertarian position.
