176
PARTISAN REVIEW
has been coptinuous and disastrous; and, furthermore, the Russian
victory itself turned, within a few years, into a source of confusion,
disillusionment, and outright treachery. Clearly, what has hap.
pened is that the negative predictions of Marxism have come true,
but not its positive ones. The curse has been fulfilled, but not the
promise. In the main, events have confirmed the Marxist analysis
of bourgeois economy, of the bourgeois state, and of imperialist
wars; but so far events have failed to confirm the Marxist prog·
nosis that once objective conditions have ripened, the masses
will ,
know how to dismember the profit system in order to reconstruct
society on a more rational basis. And objective conditions, con·
sidered on an international scale, have not only been ripe but at
times rotten.ripe.
THE BETRAYERS
AND THE
BETRAYED
Now in what has the optimism of the Marxist
doctrine traditionally sought its justification?
Obviously in the hypothesis that the decline
of capitalism necessarily involves the matur·
ing of the revolutionary awareness of the working class and its
readiness to intervene in the historic process to its own advantage.
Experience, however, has shown that these two factors are by no
means so closely linked as they were once assumed to be. Capi.
talism
is
decaying, the phenomena it is producing are far more
hideous than anything forecast even by its most hostile critics, its
sole perspective is war and nothing but war-yet the workers have
been unable to act in any decisive fashion, and there exists in no
country today a workers' movement of any size or influence which
is carrying forward the revolutionary tradition and which can
be
seriously counted on to utilize the opportunities for action that
will
no doubt arise in the near future. After all, if the German prole.
tariat, which was so well organized and educated, had fought
in
1933, Hitlerism might never have come to power-and if Hitler·
ism had been repulsed in that crucial moment, the whole history
of our age would have been vastly different.
Have Marxists overestimated the revolutionary character of
the proletariat? Trotsky, surely the most formidable thinker among
living Marxists, has made a practice of absolviRg it of responsi–
bility for its own defeats and of placing the blame entirely on the
leaderships of the Stalinist and Social·Democratic parties. This
