Today the perspective of time enables us to understand where Marx and Lenin went wrong. Essentially, both men made the same error. They assumed that capitalism was a closed-end system whereas actually it is open-end. They thought it would die of its defects, that its "contradictions" would kill it. Actually, capitalism has thrived on its contradictions, resolving them, absorbing freely new social theories and practices and moving forward to new vistas.
Lenin was too shrewd not to realize that the world had not precisely conformed to the pattern which Marx foresaw. Yet he was not astute enough to perceive the real source of the phenomena which so shocked his social consciousness and which he attributed to the capitalist systemthe brutalization of labor, the incredibly long hours in the mills, the child labor in the mines, the prostitution of the women, the pitiful wages, the hovels and the huts, the tuberculosis, the gin and the vodka and their counterparts, the fabulous profits of the entrepreneurs, the cruelty of their exploitation, the callous ostentation of the super-rich and the subordination of the whole machinery of the state—police, army, courts, laws, constitutions, congresses, political parties, the gallows and the whip—to support the then new industrial order.
In truth, all these were symptoms of social transition. They were peculiar to nascent industrialization. As soon as Stalin set about to give Russia a modern industrial system the same horrible manifestations with only a few modifications promptly appeared in Socialist Russia.
Industrialization, whether it occurs in 1830 in the north of England or in 1930 in the Urals, whether directed by capitalist entrepreneurs or Communist planners, is paid for by the worker. After forty years this lesson is becoming more evident despite the glittering legend of a Communist utopia that was born in those November days in Petrograd.
No really adequate account of the birth of that legend has yet been written. The diarist Sukhanov caught some of the drama of the moment but almost drowned it in petty detail. There is no other version in Russian, either historical or literary, which is even touched with genius. When the Soviet press this autumn wanted to publish something about the events of forty years ago, the choice inevitably fell to a translation of John Reed's "Ten Days That Shook the World." The hasty impressions of
a radical young Harvard graduate, haphazardly organized, factually inaccurate and often purpled with rhetoric, come closer to capturing the spirit of the revolutionary days—and of what men then thought of them —than any other document.
What Reed lacked in historical preception he made up for in excitement, intuition and the same naïve conviction of the Bolsheviks themselves —that this was the watershed in the history of the Western world.
Watershed, indeed, it was, although not precisely that which Reed envisaged as he wandered into the Winter Palace the night of Nov. 7, trailing after the wide-eyed peasant soldiers who tiptoed through the malachite corridors (lest they damage the people's new property); or as he watched the roundup of the pathetic women's battalion and the tearful junker cadets, almost the only remaining supporters of Kerensky, who himself had already fled.
Reed's conviction deepened as he went on the next evening to the smoky assembly room in the Smolny Institute and listened to Lenin's deliberately symbolic words: "We will now proceed to construct the Socialist order." Reed, like the Bolsheviks, believed what Lenin said to be true —that a new social order more advanced, more humane, more progressive than any man had known before was being born on earth. Of course, there were birth pangs—what birth is without pain? But when the pain and the suffering were over, the New Jerusalem, bright and shining, would remain.
But if the men who made the revolution were mistaken in the nature of what they had created, neither they nor the onlookers in Russia and in the Western world were mistaken in their instinct that the Russian revolution was the event of a lifetime, indeed of a century. As the French Revolution and its legacy of political doctrine dominated the nineteenth century, so the Russian Revolution has been the political touchstone of the twentieth. It is literally true that the life of every man, woman and child on earth has been changed by the spin which Lenin gave to the roulette wheel of history.