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in the workers' hands, and that they would be building a Socialist society.
Last Autumn. on the very eve of the Russian Revolution, you, comrade Lenin, advised us Finlanders: "Rise; rise without delay; take all power into the hands of the organised workers." By failing to follow your wise advice in November, 1917, we made, as we know now, an historic error.
In November, 1917. there were good prospects for our Finnish Revolution. Unscrupulous profiteering had angered the Finish workers and driven them to the very verge of the class war; but one pace removed from forcible conflict. When from Russia the trumpets of proletarian revolution sounded, the Finnish workers were ready to rise. But our Social Democratic Party, the only workers' party in our country, was not prepared.
Our party was paralysed by the Bourgeois Class Administration; it dropped to the level of peaceful class rivalry, at which, for instance, the German Social Democratic Movement has always remained. It was one of those Labour Parties which try by trade union methods to better the conditions of the workers within the Capitalist state, in the programmes of which Socialism is a mere ornament, and which strive to avoid the workers' revolution, instead of making ready to fulfl the great historic mission of the working class. Therefore, after a period of hesitation and uncertainty, our party guided the revolutionary flood tide of the workers into mere general strike demonstrations, and staved off forcible conflict between the workers and the bourgeoisie. We did not believe in revolution; we did not wish to endanger our organisations and the "democratic" institutions of the country. We preferred to continue developing those institutions.
Now, looking back, it is plain to us that those tactics could at best, have led only to a temporary and relative victory; not a genuine victory of the working classes, but to a so-called democratic compromise between the capitalist parties and the majority of our Social Democratic Party. The minority would then, doubtless, have left our party to call the workers to revolutionary Socialism. A Finnish revolution last November could not have placed the working class immediately in power, but it might have taken us an historical evolutionary step in that direction. It was the duty of our party, as a class war organisation of the workers, to dash forward to that goal; not merely to lay in wait, as it did, for attack by the bourgeoisie. If we had chosen revolution then, our country;s class struggle would have been less costly than it has been. The process of evolution will in any case take its toll in human life, but the cost, if we had acted boldly, would have been smaller.
