A CENTURY'S BALANCE SHEET
with speed if the need arose-not thirty or forty years after a "be–
trayal." A capacity for handling such problems is precisely what being
"fit for political power" means after all. Without that aptitude, the
fundamental hypothesis cannot hold.
Yet, it may finally
be
conceded, if all that is true for the Euro–
pean proletariat, we must not forget the American proletariat, the
most powerful in the world; it has not yet given an accounting of
itself. This is true enough. We do have an unknown quantity here.
But it would not be very sensible to fasten upon the American prole–
tariat now a century-old hypothesis that has proved invalid on a
continent with which America, after all, has many points in common.
The end of the Second World War, out of which no movement
emerged to indicate that the proletariat was yet fit for power, has,
I believe, conclusively invalidated the fundamental hypothesis of
Marx, at least as far as Europe is concerned. What we have wit–
nessed is the end of an era. Between 1848 to 1914 it was still possible
to say that the political potential of the proletariat would continue
to grow with time. From 1914 to the end of the Second World War,
the answer to tllis question lay in the balance. But now the matter
is clear. It is no longer permissible to expect a future complex of
economic, social, and political conditions to be more favorable to
the political ripening of the proletariat than any such complex was
in the past. The whole inter-war period has now become a part of
our history, and the present political impotence of the working class
has finally given it meaning. Beyond all circumstantial explanations,
this impotence, confronting us daily, enables us to grasp the political
history of Europe since 1914.
But why blame the workingmen? some will exclaim, throwing
in a few strong words. There is no question here of blame or moral
responsibility. The political incapacity of the proletariat springs from
its status as an exploited and oppressed class, from nationalism, wars,
and misery.
If
responsibility must
be
dragged into the matter, it is
bourgeois society as a whole which is responsible for not having
given birth to a new class ready to take political power directly into
its hands.
Does the collapse of Marx's central hypothesis imply the col–
lapse of his whole doctrine? On the plane of political action-and
it is the one which interests us here-Marx's hypothesis on the exer-
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