PARTISAN REVIEW
single and final cause of the stagnation. Before it, we had
Soci~'I
Democracy. And now, the degeneration of the Trotskyite Fourth Inter–
national, although without practical importance, is still an extremely
bad sign. Stalinism is, after all, only the most monstrous link in a
chain of bankruptcies. Finally, it is as much an effect as a cause,
or it
1s
a disease which attacks an already feeble organism to make
it still more feeble.
The crisis of Stalinism would mean the rebirth of many hopes.
This does not mean, however, that it would be possible to forget all
past ignominies like some vanishing nightmare. In the first place,
the after-effects of Stalinism would still be felt for years to come.
And then, one could never
think
of it as having been "unreal."
It
is no good trying to explain the continuance and even extension of
Stalinism in and across the international working-class movement
on the grounds that the workers mistook Stalin's Russia for the Oc–
tober Revolution. The causes lie much deeper and are precisely such
as to call the political capacity of the proletariat into question. But
even if one wanted to think of the whole business as little more than
a fraud, a fraud that has been successfully engaged in for the last
twenty years-and what a twenty years-that still presupposes a
capacity on the part of somebody for being tricked for twenty years.
And if the trickster were finally unmasked, would that mean that
his victims were then and there "fit for political power"? To turn
a deaf ear to such a question would be both foolish and dangerous.
But the further objection may be made that the strength of the
proletariat can only be measured against that of the bourgeoisie; that
it is purely relative. Since the bourgeoisie continues to reveal its in–
creasingly hopeless bankruptcy, may we not expect one day to see
the political triumph of the proletariat, even if we assume that it has
already passed the zenith of its absolute strength? The bankruptcy
of the · European ruling classes is as complete as one could have
imagined a hundred years ago. But
if
this fact is a necessary condition
to the seizure of power by the proletariat, it is by no means a suffi–
cient condition. The question is
not
merely one of relative strength.
To seize and hold power the proletariat would have to demonstrate
a minimum, a rather high minimum at that, of political capacity;
more exactly, it would have to show a capacity to "secrete" a devoted
and perspicacious leadership, to control that leadership, to change it
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