5
tration long tried, rather to restrain. than to encourage the revolutionary tendency of the towards Socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The goal of the revolution seemed to us to be, not the Socialism, but social reforms, not the annihilation of the bourgeois State and the creation of a workers' dictatorship, but reformation by the idle way of general democracy, not the establishment of "revolution as a lasting state," to which Marx pointed, but the getting rid of revolution as soon as possible, as though it were some horrid nightmare.
This was the logical outcome of our conceited Social Democratic teaching and of the long tramping by the ways of Parliamentarianism and trade unionism, which has paralysed the revolutionary. Socialist impulse of our workers. When we had actually to face the effective historical process; the proletarian, revolution, which, even in our Social Democratic programme was ever the most shining ornament, and the preparation for which should have been the highest object of the earlier Labour movement, and from which, at last, the Labour movement should hurry to gather the long awaited fruits—then it became apparent that Social Democracv's vaunted "high stage of development" was half-blind, half-lame. To revolutionary workers it was rather an obstacle than a banner of victory. The Social Democratic Party had not made use of the blossoming time of democracy within the capitalist State to prepare for that which is the highest stage of the class struggle, the armed revolution, at the outbreak of which sees having finished its task, is, doomed to perish.
When our workers' democracy tardily and unwillingly came, at last, to revolution, the inner logic of the struggle led us on to the workers' dictatorship and the socialisation of industry. When we stepped in the revolutionary path, in reality to avoid revolution; our mental conflict and unreadiness lent a mischievous uncertainty to our movements from which crew up a general discontent with the leaders of the revolutionary army. It is tragic that, perhaps, these mistakes of ours were responsible for the defeat of the workers' cause when the scales of victory or defeat were hanging in the balance. But if the working class had been victorious in the conflict we might have sailed on on the waves of uncertainty, face to face with the greatest tragedy possible to the Labour movement; the tragedy in which the Russian Mensheviki have been engulfed, that of struggling, weapon in hand, against the workers' revolution. The disastrous defeat of our Finish workers' revolution was not the outcome of the leaders' mistakes.
The revolution was crushed by the beast of
