A CENTURY'S BALANCE SHEET
Describing the intellectual climate of Russia at the end of the
nineteenth century, Trotsky wrote: "Protestantism and democracy,
under the aegis of which the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
revolutions of the West were accomplished, had long since become
conservative doctrines.... Intellectuals needed a new doctrine for the
struggles that lay ahead, one which nothing had compromised." That
would also seem to be what is needed today. Bolshevism, which thirty
years ago had kindled unbounded hopes, has been compromised by
Stalin no less than Jacobinism was by Napoleon.
If
the fine phrases
of the French Revolution led to the rule of the bourgeoisie, the
Bolshevik experiment has bogged down in the mire of the Stalinist
universe, with its slave labor running into the millions, its omni–
present police, its pitiless exploitation of workingmen, its inflexible
caste distinctions, its stifling of art, thought, and human feeling.
Doubtless this is not what the old Bolsheviks bargained for. But
in
the
eyes of millions of men, of the younger generations, Bolshevism-and
this is the decisive point-is no longer a new doctrine which nothing
has yet compromised. Marx and Bolshevism belong henceforth
to history no less than Rousseau and
J
acobinism.
The most to be hoped for by groups who claim to belong to
the Marxist succession (I am not speaking of Stalinists, naturally)
is for them to serve as a hyphen between past and future; to take
in a way such a role as Buonarotti played between Babeuf and
Marx.
Nothing is gained by saying: let us hold fast to the fundamental
hypothesis as long as nothing better is proposed. To receive answers
to questions, one must first raise them. It is only by openly facing
the difficulties of the fundamental hypothesis that a step to their
solution can be taken. It would be as idle to shut one's eyes on them
as to tum one's back on politics. In either case, the problem is still
there. Only by a rational and methodical scrutiny of the lessons of
the past and of present possibilities will we be enabled to work effec–
tively toward preparing for a future. Whoever is content at this late
date to go on repeating the basic hypothesis without advancing some
new and decisive argument in its favor scarcely merits a hearing.
Proposed solutions may well be widely divergent; only mutual criti–
cism will make possible an intelligent choice. But in such an endeavor
nothing can be held sacred-everything is called into question. Only
295
