EPILOGUE
Pre-war social democrats looked upon, themselves as the
trustees of c truth' and the representatives of interests
which some time or other were bound to prevail. When ?
That did not matter very much. Left and right agreed that
a majority must be won for socialist ideas, and that once
this happened all the rest would follow. The growing
menace of a European war had led Jaures to consider the
problem of a race between socialism and war, which
socialism must win in order to prevent war ; but this idea
never decisively influenced the movement as a whole. Pre-
war socialism existed in a void and took no account of
time.1
The experience of the war led a section of the socialist
movement to see the problems of conflict and victory in
quite a different light. Thanks to their revolutionary
traditions Lenin and the bolsheviks were to the fore when
the historic moment came. Taken by surprise., like all the
other parties, by the March revolution, they plunged into
it determined to make the most of it in the time at their
disposal. They argued that a political and social movement
cannot always wait until all the perfect conditions for victory
are offered., but that circumstances may arise—the collapse
of the autocratic regime in Russia, the wear and tear of the
world war—that impose a responsibility which cannot be
postponed, even if it has not been catered for in the handbook
of the perfect marxist Then the problem of action, the
necessities of time and place have to be squarely faced.
Victory must be won in Petrograd on November 7, or the
game is lost. The problem, of the majority is no longer the
same : majorities must be gained in critical places at critical
moments. At this moment all that matters is victory over
the enemy, the creation of the c torrent' of which Gorki
speaks, and which must sweep away all resistance. In Max
Eastman's phrase the Marxist ceases to be anything but a
c technician of revolution'. The myopic and abstract
mentality of the social democrat's approach to tactical
problems gives way to a new spirit, which, before every
1 After the elections of September 1930, which saw the first great advance
of national-socialism, the German social-democratic paper Vorwarts wrote :
* The question whether a socialist majority in the Reichstag will be attained in
the next few years or in several decades is of secondary importance/