I. The Roots of World Bolshevism

When the phrase “world Bolshevism” was first used in 1918, it seemed paradoxical to many Russian Marxists. It was absurd to think that our raw provincial Russian experience could prefigure the forms and content of the revolutionary process for “the rotten West.”¹ We were all inclined to attribute Russian Bolshevism to the agrarian nature of the country, to the absence of deep political education among the broad masses, in a word, to purely national factors. It seemed extremely unlikely that the revolutionary movement in other countries—developing in significantly different social conditions—would take the ideological and political form of Bolshevism. At best, it was assumed that revolutions in similarly underdeveloped agrarian countries such as Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria might become tinged with Bolshevism.

Likewise, it seemed obvious to western European socialists that Bolshevism was ill-suited for export on the world political market. Repeatedly they insisted that this purely Russian phenomenon could not take root in western Europe. Certainty on precisely this point was one of the reasons that prominent figures of European social democracy, by praising Russian Bolshevism, paved the way for the influence of Bolshevik ideas on the working masses of their own countries. They did not foresee that in their own countries, at a certain moment, Bolshevism would emerge “like a thief in the night.” For reasons of mundane day-to-day politics, they either refused to make any criticism of the ideology and policy of Russian Bolshevism, or, without reservations, took it under their wing, protecting it from its bourgeois enemies. In doing so, they failed to separate the revolution as such from the specific phenomenon of Bolshevism, which incorporated a repudiation of the ideological heritage of the International.² Many representatives of western European socialism still follow this policy. Not long ago, when he clarified the reasons for his party’s failure in the elections to the Constituent Assembly, [Karl] Kautsky chided its leaders for persistently avoiding public criticism of Russian Bolshevism and instead providing it with political publicity.³

Such an attitude, we repeat, was possible only insofar as western European socialists were guided by the slogan “that’s not my headache” and were confident that it was not, in fact, their headache.

When, however, it became clear to everyone that “world Bolshevism” had everywhere become the most significant factor of the revolutionary process, western European Marxists turned out to be no less, if not more, unprepared than their Russian counterparts to understand the historical significance of this phenomenon and the roots that nourish it.

It became obvious after the experience of the first three months of revolution in Germany that Bolshevism was not only the product of an agrarian revolution.⁴ In fact, there was every reason to reconsider that view—which had managed to acquire the strength of prejudice—after the experience of revolution in Finland.⁵ Of course, the national characteristics of Bolshevism in Russia are largely explained by our agrarian relations. “World Bolshevism,” however, must clearly be derived from other social factors.

The role that the army plays in social life, thanks to the world war, is without any doubt the first common factor that is manifested in the revolutionary processes of countries as socially different as Russia, Germany, England, and France. There is an undeniable connection between the role of soldiers in the revolution and the Bolshevik element in that revolution. Bolshevism is not simply a “soldiers’ revolution,” but the influence of Bolshevism on the course of the revolution in each country is proportional to the participation of armed soldier masses in this revolution.

The influence of the soldier and the army environment on the revolution in Russia was, in its time, adequately analyzed. From the very first days of the Bolshevik wave, Marxists identified the “communism of the consumer” as the only social interest binding together social elements very different in their class composition and even declassed—that is, detached from their natural social milieu.

Less attention was paid to another aspect of the social revolutionary psychology of the soldier masses: that is their peculiar “anti-parliamentarism”—quite understandable in a social environment not shaped, as in the past, through the school of collective defence of its interests, but in the present drawing its strength and influence exclusively from the possession of weapons.

English newspapers reported the following curious fact. When English troops on the French front were sent ballots during the most recent parliamentary elections, in many cases soldiers burned masses of them, stating, “When we return to England, we will put things right there.” In both Germany and Russia we have seen many examples of how the soldier masses showed their first active interest in politics by expressing their desire to “put things right” through force of arms—whether that be “from the Right,” as happened in the first months of the Russian revolution and the first weeks of the German one, or “from the Left.” In both cases it is a question of a particular corporate consciousness nourished by the certainty that possession of weapons and the ability to use them makes it possible to control the destinies of the state. This outlook comes into fatal, irreconcilable conflict with the ideas of democracy and with parliamentary forms of government.

But despite the enormous role played by the soldier masses in shaping the Bolshevik element, this alone is insufficient to explain the success of Bolshevism or its ubiquity. In Russia, severe disappointment befell those who, in October 1917, with blissful optimism, declared Bolshevism to be “revolutionary praetorianism” and predicted that with the demobilization of the army the social roots of Bolshevism would disappear. On the contrary, the genuine features of Bolshevism were especially clearly manifested when the old army that had brought it to power had disappeared, replaced by a new armed force on which Bolshevism relied—an armed force that ceased to be a factor, or even a participant, in state administration. On the other hand, in both Finland and Poland—countries without national armies that have passed through the war—we have observed a Bolshevik element that is developing completely independently of any soldier’s revolution.

Therefore, the ultimate roots of Bolshevism must be sought, in the final analysis, in the state of the proletariat.

What are the essential features of proletarian Bolshevism as a world phenomenon?

The first is maximalism, that is, the desire for immediate, maximum results in the implementation of social improvements without any attention to objective conditions. This maximalism presupposes a dose of naive social optimism, the uncritical belief that such maximum results may be achieved at any time, that the resources and wealth of the society that the proletariat aspires to acquire are inexhaustible.

The second is a lack of attention to the requirements of social production—the predominance, as with the soldiers, of the consumer’s point of view over that of the producer.

The third is the propensity to resolve all issues of political struggle, the struggle for power, by the direct application of armed force, even in relations between different sections of the proletariat. This propensity arises from a skeptical attitude toward the possibilities of finding a democratic solution to social and political problems. In the literature, the objective factors that account for the prevalence of these trends in the contemporary workers’ movement have already been adequately clarified.

The working masses have changed qualitatively. The old cadres, the most class-educated, spent four and a half years at the front. Detached from productive work, they became permeated with the psychology of the trenches, spiritually dissolved into the social milieu of declassed elements. On their return to the ranks of the proletariat, they brought to it a revolutionary spirit but, at the same time, the spirit of soldiers’ rabble-rousing. During the war, these class-educated cadres had been replaced in industry by millions of new workers drawn from ruined artisans and other “little people,” rural proletarians, and working-class women. These new proletarians worked under conditions where the political movement of the proletariat had completely disappeared and the trade union movement had been reduced to pitiful dimensions. Despite the enormous growth of the war industry in Germany, it was not until the revolution that membership in the metalworkers’ union returned to the level of July 1914. Class consciousness in these new proletarian masses developed extremely slowly, as they had almost no experience in collective struggle alongside more advanced strata of the working class.

While those who had lived in the trenches for many years lost their professional skills, were detached from regular productive labour, and were exhausted by the psychologically and physically inhuman conditions of modern warfare, the masses who took their place in the factories expended tremendous energy working overtime to acquire the bare necessities whose prices had increased massively. Most of this exhausting labour was carried out to produce means of destruction, labour that was, from the social point of view, unproductive and could not contribute to generating in the working masses the consciousness of the indispensability of their labour for the existence of society. But this consciousness constitutes an extremely essential element in the class psychology of the modern proletariat.

In all the countries directly or indirectly affected by the world war, these socio-psychological factors were the prerequisites facilitating the development of the Bolshevik element.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that the factors indicated above are not enough to explain the progress made by the Bolshevik element in the world arena. If Bolshevism is putting down deep roots in the working masses not only in those countries that took part in the war but also in neutral countries, this is only because the ascendance of these factors did not encounter sufficient psychological resistance in the social and political skills and the ideological tradition of the broad masses of the proletariat.

As early as 1917–18, the same phenomenon could be seen in different countries. The working masses awakening to the class struggle showed extreme distrust for those workers’ organizations that had led their movement up to August 1914. In Germany and Austria, strike movements took place against the decisions of the unions. Here and there influential clandestine groups were formed, and these took the lead in political and economic struggles. In England, factory committees arose in opposition to the trade unions and launched powerful strikes. The same phenomena could be observed in the neutral countries, such as the Scandinavian nations and Switzerland.

After the war ended and the hands of the proletariat were set free, this trend manifested itself with even greater force. In November and December 1918, there was a general desire among the broad masses in Germany to exclude the unions from any role in the leadership of the economic struggle and in the control of private production. Soviets [councils] and factory committees strove to take their place.⁶ The Haase-Ebert government had to reckon with this fact and, at the expense of the unions, extend responsibilities to these new organizational centres.⁷ In England, the press noted that the most characteristic feature of the new strike movement was the masses’ distrust of their trade union officials—the masses’ refusal to submit to official directives. In one of his speeches in the House of Commons, [the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister] Lloyd George specifically emphasized this point as one of particular concern to the government.

The class movement called into existence by the war raised up new, deeper strata of the proletarian mass, strata that had not yet passed through the long school of organized struggle. These new strata did not find the guidance of a solid bloc of advanced comrades, united by the commonality of their ends and means, their program and their tactics. Rather, they found the crumpled edifice of the old parties and unions, the old International experiencing the deepest crisis the working-class movement had ever known, an International torn apart by irreconcilable warring factions, an International shaken in its beliefs, beliefs that for decades had seemed immutable.

In these conditions, nothing other than what we are now witnessing could have been expected. The movement of new strata of the proletariat, and, partly, even of some who were already marching under the banner of social democracy in 1914, is developing as if in a vacuum in terms of ideological and political continuity. These new strata are spontaneously creating their own ideology, formed under the direct pressure of the relations and conditions of the current moment—a moment that is exceptional from the economic, political, and socio-psychological point of view. “Naked upon the bare earth” is very often how the proletariat appears today.⁸ The mass proletarian movement was brought to a complete halt for four and a half years. The intellectual life of the working class completely atrophied. But was this not the case everywhere?

After all, Burgfrieden, that sacred union, involved the cessation of all agitation dealing with the irreconcilable class contradictions of society and the cessation of all educational and revolutionary work aimed at “socialization of consciousness.”⁹ The work of the sacred union was diligently supplemented by censorship and the regime of martial law. That is why, when the masses began to stir, bewildered after the crushing blow of the world war, they did not find at hand any ideological centre with universally recognized and undisputed moral authority, a centre on which they could psychologically find a “point of support.” What they were offered was only the psychological freedom to choose between the various remnants of the old International. Is it surprising that they chose those which represented the most simplistic, most general expression of the spontaneous instinct of revolt, those which were the least attached to the bonds of ideological continuity, and could endlessly adapt themselves to the demands of the emerging strata? Is it surprising that the reciprocal action between these emerging strata and such ideological elements led to the creation of ideological retrogression in the workers’ movements of the most advanced countries, that it led to a revival of illusions, prejudices, slogans, and methods of struggle that had had their place in the period of Bakuninism, at the beginning of the Lassallean movement, or even earlier—in the movements of the proletarian elements of the sans-culottes of Paris and Lyons in 1794 and 1797?¹⁰

The fourth of August 1914—the day the social democratic majority surrendered to imperialism—witnessed a catastrophic break in the continuity of the class movement of the proletariat. On that day, the germs of all these phenomena were already present, phenomena that still surprise many people today. In those gloomy days, the thoughtful observer should already have discerned, behind the two self-satisfied figures of Scheidemann and Vandervelde, a “laughing third” figure—anarchism, ready to be reborn from the soil of ideological devastation.¹¹

In the very first weeks of the war, I had occasion to write that the crisis it caused in the working-class movement was primarily a “moral crisis”: the loss of mutual trust between the various sections of the proletariat, the loss of faith within the proletarian masses in the old moral and political beliefs. For many decades, ideological bonds connected different sections of the movement—reformists and revolutionaries, at certain moments even socialists and anarchists—and all of the above with liberal and Christian workers. I could not imagine that the loss of mutual trust, the destruction of ideological bonds, would lead to a civil war among proletarians.¹² But it was clear to me that this prolonged, internal disintegration of class-based ideological unity, that this absence of a unifying ideology—which were consequences of the collapse of the International—would determine the whole picture of the reviving revolutionary movement. And it was because of the inevitability of these effects of the collapse of the International that revolutionary Marxists had the duty to work energetically to weld together the proletarian elements who had remained true to the class struggle and to react resolutely against “social-patriotism,” even at a time when the masses had not yet awakened from nationalist frenzy and military panic. To the extent that it would have been possible to achieve this welding together on an international level, there could be hope that in the spontaneous risings of the future, the ideological legacy of a half century of workers’ struggle would not sink without a trace and that it would be possible to build an ideological-organizational dam to contain the anarchist wave.

This was the objective meaning of the Zimmerwald-Kienthal approach of 1915 and 1916.¹³ Unfortunately, the goal it set itself was far from realized. This failure must not be attributed, of course, either to accidents or to the mistakes of individual “Zimmerwaldists.” Evidently, the crisis of the world labour movement was too deep for the efforts of the internationalist minorities of the time to change its course or to lessen the birth pangs of a new proletarian consciousness and new proletarian organizations. The very fact of this serves as proof of how historically inevitable the crisis was and how deeply its origins were rooted in profound changes in the historical existence of the proletariat, changes that had not yet resulted in corresponding changes in its collective consciousness.

“The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering,” Hegel said.¹⁴ Classes only begin to realize the historical significance of their movement after they have completed a certain cycle in their development. This was the case historically for the movement of classes that preceded the proletariat. It is in the movement of the proletariat that theory, for the first time—while illuminating the movement’s meaning as a link in the chain of historical development and the objective, historically necessary goals toward which it is going—has attempted to direct the movement so as to reduce to a minimum the number of victims and the loss of social energy that is characteristic of a “trial-by-error evolution.” This theory managed to do a lot, but it could not do everything. Once again, the chaos of historical development has proven stronger than theory. Once again, it has been confirmed that as long as humanity has not made a “leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom,” as long as it has yet to subdue the elements of its own social economy, it is doomed to move mostly in darkness through its own trial-by-error efforts; to learn from defeats and the bitter fruits of retreats and zigzags.¹⁵ More than is the case with the movement of any other class, the movement of the proletariat is imbued with elements of a conscious historical creativity. But, until the proletariat and the rest of humanity is the master of its own economic life, it will have to set very narrow limits to the possibilities of self-emancipation [samoosvobozhdenie]—of controlling the course of historical events with the aid of scientific theory. The depth of the collapse that occurred on 4 August 1914, its long duration and the endurance of its ideological consequences, show that at this stage of historical development, these limits are even narrower than we believed in our proud celebrations of the successes achieved by the international workers movement in the last quarter of a century, including the dominance within it of revolutionary Marxism.

The theoretical and political opponents of revolutionary teachings are rushing to gloat and proclaim, “the bankruptcy of Marxism.” Do not be so hasty to declare victory. The very “defeat” of Marxism as the practical leader of the movement has revealed its greatest triumph as the “materialist interpreter” of history. As the ideology of the conscious section of the advanced class, Marxism has shown itself to be entirely subject to the basic law of development established by Marxist theory, which governs the evolution of all ideologies within an anarchic, class-divided society. Under the influence of the historical situation, Marxist theory evolved in the consciousness of one part of the working class into the “social patriotism” of class collaboration. In the consciousness of a different part of the working class, it evolved into a rudimentary anarcho-Jacobin “communism.” But this differentiation is due precisely to the supremacy of “being” over “consciousness,” the material side of the historical process of development over ideology, a supremacy proclaimed by the teachings of Marx and Engels.

Only when the collective consciousness of the proletariat realizes the secret of its own misadventures during the present period of transition, only when it discovers for itself the historical reasons for yesterday’s downfall and the objective meaning of its current wanderings—only then will it find the means to overcome the contradictions of its current movement, the utopianism of its immediate goals, and the limitation of its methods.

The rupture in tradition, the loss of faith by the masses in the old leaders and the old organizations—this made it extremely easy to imbue the new revolutionary movement with those anarchistic ideological and psychological themes that now characterize it everywhere. The change in the social composition of the proletariat, the four-year school of war and the resulting degradation, coarsening, and “simplification” of the European spiritual physiognomy created fertile ground for the revival of ideas and methods thought to have been irrevocably outmoded.

The dominance of “consumer communism” over the intention to organize production on a collective basis—that is, disdain for the tasks of maintaining and ensuring the development of the forces of production—can now be seen everywhere among the proletarian masses. That is a great evil, one that marks a decisive step backward in the social development of the proletariat, in the process of its formation into a class capable of leading society. One of the principal tasks of Marxist social democracy is to combat this trend of the revolutionary movement—a trend that so obviously feeds Bolshevism. But, while combating it, one should not lose sight of the perspectives of historical development. We should not forget the ground on which the popular masses acquired this disregard for the development of the forces of production. Over a four-year period, the ruling classes set about destroying the forces of production, destroying the accumulated social wealth, solving all the problems of maintaining economic life through the crude method of “plunder what has been plundered”—i.e., by requisitions, indemnities, confiscations, and forced labour imposed on the defeated.¹⁶ Should we be astonished that, deprived of any political education for four years, the popular masses, when called upon to make history, began where the ruling classes left off? An examination of past revolutions makes it possible to assert that, in past centuries, extreme revolutionary parties also settled problems of economic policy with requisitions, confiscations, and indemnities, borrowing these methods from the arsenal of the wars of their time.

For years on end, the capitalist classes recklessly destroyed the forces of production, squandered the accumulated wealth, and diverted the best workers from their productive labour. They reassured themselves that this temporary destruction of the national heritage and its sources would (in the event of victory) lead to such a flourishing of the national economy through the conquest of world hegemony, annexations, and the like, that all the sacrifices would be repaid a hundredfold. None of the statesmen of the imperialist coalitions could furnish any serious evidence to support this opinion. Similarly, none of them could provide any serious arguments against the obvious truth that the world war, with its gigantic expense and destruction, would inevitably throw the world economy (or at least that of Europe) a considerable degree backward. In the end, these statesmen, as well as the bourgeois masses, shrugged off all their doubts in the naive belief that “everything would turn out all right” and that the elements of economic development would somehow heal the wounds inflicted by the “creativity” of the imperialist classes.

Is it any wonder that the working masses are also full of a similar unconscious faith when they try to radically improve their situation without taking into account the continuing destruction of the forces of production? The fatalism that overwhelmed the world bourgeoisie on the day it gave free rein to the monster of war in turn infected the popular masses. Insofar as they reflected on the consequences of anarchy, the masses also unconsciously hoped that the curve of historical development would end up leading them to their destination and that the complete victory of the working class over its opponents would, in and of itself, heal the wounds inflicted on the national economy by the struggle for this victory.

Insofar as this is so, the proletarian masses today stand only a little higher than the petit-bourgeois masses who made a revolution in England in the seventeenth century and in France in the eighteenth.¹⁷ As then, the conscious struggle of these masses provides no guarantee that their efforts will result in the system to which they aspire, and not, in fact, in a completely different kind of system. This, of course, is a sad sign of retrogression within the workers’ movement. The whole historical meaning of the immense work carried out by that movement since 1848 was to bring the conscious creativity of the proletariat in line with the laws of historical development that had been discovered, and thereby, for the first time in history, to ensure that the objective results of the revolutionary process were in line with the subjective aims pursued by the revolutionary class.¹⁸

Yes, it is a retrogression. But when this retrogression is denounced, and when right-wing socialists base their policy on denouncing it, we cannot forget that it was with their assistance that this retrogression was prepared. Where were they during the great war, when for the first time in history there was a need to teach humanity a lesson about respect for the forces of production? Did they not, tailing after the bourgeois patriots, convince the popular masses that by means of the systematic, intensive destruction of the [enemy country’s] forces of production, within a certain time it would be possible to create the conditions for an unprecedented flourishing of these same forces in their own country? “Through unlimited destruction, toward development at the highest level”—did not this slogan of the world war become the slogan of world Bolshevism?

This culture of disdain for the future of the national economy and for the maintenance of the forces of production—a disdain cultivated with the assistance of the right-wing socialists—permeates the whole psychology of the society that lived through the world war. This is true to such an extent that the social groups that today most fanatically oppose Bolshevism in the name of safeguarding and reconstructing these forces of production proceed regularly to employ means that are just as destructive from the economic point of view as are the methods of Bolshevism itself. We can observe this in both Ukraine and the Volga region, where the bourgeoisie preferred to destroy food stockpiles, railways, warehouses of supplies, and factory equipment rather than see them pass into the hands of the Bolsheviks. And, during the “sabotage” at the end of 1917, we observed how the right wing of democracy could denounce the Bolshevik revolution for economic vandalism while completely ignoring the blows that the successes of this “sabotage” would have inevitably inflicted on the national economy, much more than they would have inflicted on Bolshevik rule.¹⁹

We are now witnessing the same thing in Germany. There is perhaps no idea as popular in modern Germany as the idea that labour discipline is the only thing capable of saving the productive forces of the country. In the name of this idea, the bourgeois and right-wing socialist parties denounce the Spartacist elements of the proletariat for their tendency to provoke permanent strikes and to thus undermine any possibility of regular productive labour.²⁰ Objectively, they are right: the German economy is in such a critical state that a “strike epidemic” could in itself lead to a catastrophe. But what is interesting is that, when the bourgeoisie and the elements grouped around the right-wing socialists resist Bolshevism, it is increasingly by means of strikes. Recently, in the struggle against the Spartacist movement, “bourgeois strikes”—strikes of all the liberal professions as well as of state and local public servants—are becoming commonplace. All at the same moment, doctors and other medical personnel leave their hospitals, railway employees suspend rail traffic.

And the reasons they advance to justify these actions! Here in one of the eastern cities, the soldiers’ council [soviet] decides to disarm a division whose mood it considers counter-revolutionary. An assembly of representatives of the bourgeois professions finds that the division has furnished proof of its loyalty to the republic. They protest against the disarmament as constituting a weakening of the eastern front in the face of a possible invasion by the Russian Bolsheviks. As a result of this, they decide to proclaim a strike until the Council [Soviet] annuls the decision. Cases of this kind are not uncommon.²¹

Obviously it was not Bolshevism—i.e., the “extremist” current of the far-left-wing tendency of the class movement of the proletariat—which gave rise to the triumph of the “consumerist” point of view over the “productivist” one. It was not Bolshevism that caused the neglect of the development of the forces of production and the consumption of the surplus economic wealth accumulated from past production. On the contrary, the growth of this tendency of the proletariat’s class movement, so clearly opposed to the very spirit of Marxist socialism, is the consequence of the disease with which capitalist society was afflicted from the moment it was hit by the crisis. Historians of the future will therefore see the triumph of Bolshevik doctrines in the workers’ movement of the advanced countries, not as a sign of an excess of revolutionary consciousness, but as proof of the proletariat’s insufficient emancipation from the psychological atmosphere of bourgeois society.

It is for this reason that a policy that seeks to cure society of the economic vandalism of Bolshevism through an alliance with or capitulation to the bourgeoisie is a policy that is fundamentally false. We have seen in Russia—in Ukraine, in Siberia—that, after having defeated the Bolsheviks by force of arms, the bourgeoisie has been unable to put an end to the economic devastation. In Europe, we are already seeing that, if it succeeds in defeating the proletarian revolution—in spite of all “League of Nations” labels—the bourgeoisie will construct such a system of international relations, such a body of armour on the economic organism, such customs barriers, that the national economy will be condemned to reconstitute itself on the volcano of new armed conflicts, threatening even greater devastation than that which the world has just experienced. In these conditions, it is more than doubtful that the world bourgeoisie will be able to bring Europe back to the level of economic development from which it was toppled by the war. Either the victory of reason over chaos within the framework of the proletarian revolution or economic and cultural regression for a fairly long period: there can be no other outcome from the present situation.

Typical of the movement whose ideology is world Bolshevism is a disregard for the production apparatus bequeathed from the old society. Accompanying this is a similar disdain for the intellectual culture of the old society, a readiness in the revolutionary process to ignore the positive elements of this culture. Here, too, the masses, now entering the historical arena as creators of the revolution, stand an entire stage below those masses that represented the core of the class movement of the proletariat in the previous peaceful era. And here, too, there can be no doubt that this retrogression must be entirely attributed to the influence of the four-year war.

In 1794, on the occasion of the execution of Lavoisier, the sans-culottes of Paris were already saying, “The Republic does not need scientists!” Robespierre, supporting the choice of [Jean-Paul] Marat over the English materialist philosopher [Joseph] Priestley as the Paris delegate to the National Convention, declared that there were “too many philosophers” in the representative assemblies.²² Modern sans-culottism in its communist sense is not so far removed from these examples in its attitude to the scientific heritage bequeathed by bourgeois society. But then again, it is only “scribes and Pharisees” who can be outraged by this and not remember the militarism whose orgies only yesterday they celebrated, before which they bowed down, or to which they cowardly surrendered. Need it be recalled that militarism hardly treated science and philosophy any better, and that it is they who cultivated the contempt for science and philosophy among the popular masses who are now trying to make history. If German and French militarism pitilessly sent professors and scientists to dig trenches and to contribute their clerical labour to the great cause of the “defence of the fatherland” without worrying about the temporary decline in the country’s intellectual productivity, what right have we to be indignant if, in an identical spirit of irrational waste, professors and scientists are used to clean cesspools or dig graves for the dead?

To the people who were indignant over the German troops’ destruction of the marvellous Reims Cathedral, Bernard Shaw sarcastically said, “You cannot have both a ‘beautiful’ war and beautiful monuments of art.” A. V. Lunacharsky came to the same conclusion on his own—that one cannot keep in one’s heart the cult of “beautiful” civil war and care for the beautiful Basil the Blessed.²³

The best people of the European bourgeoisie—the Norman Angells and Romain Rollands—warned the old society against the devastating consequences, for economic and intellectual culture, of an imperialist war.²⁴ They were ridiculed by rabid gangs of bourgeois chauvinists or even denounced as backstabbers and traitors. A society intoxicated by patriotism gloated at their isolation. Is it any wonder that the “patriots” of the revolutionary element see Kautsky and the like—with their appeals to the proletariat to adopt a careful attitude to the economic and cultural resources that have escaped the catastrophe—as ridiculous pedants? Intoxicated by their successes, the most ardent [of the revolutionary patriots] deem the most frank to be “backstabbers and traitors.”

“You wanted it, you wanted it, George Dandin. [. . . You got just what you deserve].”²⁵ In 1914–15, the bourgeoisie proved its still inexhaustible power of influence over the working class. It showed that the intellectual world of the proletariat was still subordinate to it. Today, the bourgeoisie is up against a working class that is itself shaped by four years of “wartime” education that led to the degeneration of a proletarian culture that had been developed over long decades of class struggle.

There was fertile soil within the working masses of the advanced capitalist countries for the new heyday of the unsophisticated [pre-Marxist] communist ideas of equal distribution that prevailed in the labour movement at the beginning of its development. That is precisely why, at this stage of the revolution, the role of inspirer and hegemon of the revolution could be assumed by the country where the roots of this simplistic conception of socialism go deep into the soil of primary accumulation and primordial social relations untouched by capitalist culture.

Imperialism brought western Europe back to the economic and cultural level of the European East. Should it be a surprise that the latter is now imposing its ideological forms on the revolutionized masses of the West? World Bolshevism, which the European bourgeois and social-nationalists regard with apocalyptic horror, is perhaps the first gift from the East to triumphant imperialism of the West, a gift of revenge for the devastation and arrested economic development caused by the West.