But one will scarcely say
that it has tended to clarity of thought. On the one hand, the
conservative feels confirmed in his old suspicions that there is
something inherently revolutionary in any labor movement. The extreme
radical, on the other hand, is as uncritically hopeful for a Bolshevist
upheaval in America as the conservative or reactionary is uncritically
fearful. Both forget that an effective social revolution is not the
product of mere chance and "mob psychology," nor even of propaganda
however assiduous, but always of a new preponderance of power as between
contending economic classes.
To students of the social sciences, it is self-evident that the
prolonged rule of the proletariat in Russia in defiance of nearly the
whole world must be regarded as a product of Russian life, past and
present. In fact, the continued Bolshevist rule seems to be an index of
the relative fighting strength of the several classes in Russian
society--the industrial proletariat, the landed and industrial
propertied class, and the peasantry.
It is an irony of fate that the same revolution which purports to enact
into life the Marxian social program should belie the truth of Marx's
materialistic interpretation of history and demonstrate that history is
shaped by both economic and non-economic forces.
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