No one believes in miracles nowadays, thank God. Miraculous prophecy is a fairy tale. But scientific prophecy is a fact. And in our day, when shameful despondency and even despair are so often to be met with around us, it is useful to recall one scientific prophecy that has been vindicated.

In 1887, Frederick Engels happened to write about the coming world war in his preface to Sigismund Borkheim’s pamphlet, *Zur Erinnerung für die deutschen Mordspatrioten 1806–1807* (“In Memory of the German Hurrah-Patriots of 1806–1807”). (This pamphlet constitutes issue XXIV of the *Social-Democratic Library* published in 1888 at Göttingen-Zurich.)

Here is how Frederick Engels, over thirty years ago, judged the coming world war:

“…For Prussia-Germany, no war is now possible but a world war. And it would be a world war of a scope and violence never before imagined. From eight to ten million soldiers will slaughter each other and in doing so devour the whole of Europe more thoroughly than a swarm of locusts has ever done. The devastation wrought by the Thirty Years’ War—compressed into the space of three or four years and spread over the whole continent; famine, epidemics, the general brutalisation of both armies and the masses of the people, provoked by acute distress; the hopeless chaos of our artificial machinery of trade, industry and credit; all this ending in universal bankruptcy; the collapse of the old states and their routine political wisdom—a collapse so complete that crowns lie in the gutter by the dozen and no one is to be found to pick them up; the absolute impossibility of foreseeing how this will all end and who will emerge as the victor from the struggle; only one result is absolutely certain: universal exhaustion and the establishment of the conditions for the final victory of the working class.

Such is the prospect if the system of mutual competition in military armaments, pushed to the extreme, finally bears its inevitable fruits. This, gentlemen kings and statesmen, is where your wisdom has brought old Europe. And if you have nothing else left but to open the last great war dance—we shall shed no tears (*uns kann es recht sein*). Though the war may perhaps push us into the background for a time, though it may wrench from us some positions already conquered. But when you have unleashed forces which you will then no longer be able to control, no matter how things go, at the end of the tragedy you will be a ruin, and the victory of the proletariat will either have been already won or will still be (*doch*) inevitable.

London, 15 December 1887."

What a genius of a prophecy! And how infinitely rich in thought is every sentence of this precise, clear, brief, scientific class analysis! How much could be learned from this by those who now indulge in shameful faint-heartedness, despondency and despair, if… if only people who are accustomed to lick the boots of the bourgeoisie or who have allowed themselves to be intimidated by it could think, were capable of thinking!

Some of what Engels predicted has turned out differently; the world and capitalism could hardly have failed to change over thirty years of frenziedly rapid imperialist development. But what is most astonishing is that so much of what Engels predicted is proceeding “as if it were written.” For Engels furnished a faultlessly precise class analysis, and the classes and their mutual relations remain the same.

“…The war may push us into the background for a time…” Things have proceeded precisely along these lines, but even further and even worse: a section of those “pushed back”—the social-chauvinists and their spineless “semi-opponents,” the Kautskyites—have begun to laud their retrograde movement, have turned into outright renegades and traitors to socialism.

“…The war may wrench from us some positions already conquered…” A whole series of “legal” positions have been wrenched from the working class. Yet it has been steeled in trials and is receiving harsh, but useful lessons in illegal organisation, illegal struggle, and in preparing its forces for a revolutionary assault.

“…Crowns lie in the gutter by the dozen…” Several crowns have already fallen, and among them one that is worth a dozen others: the crown of the autocrat of all the Russias, Nicholas Romanov.

“…The absolute impossibility of foreseeing how this will all end…” After four years of war, this absolute impossibility has become, if one may say so, even more absolute.

“…The hopeless chaos of our artificial machinery of trade, industry and credit…” By the end of the fourth year of the war, this has manifested itself fully in one of the largest and most backward states dragged into the war by the capitalists—Russia. But do not the growing famine in Germany and Austria, the shortage of clothing and raw materials, and the wearing out of the means of production show that the same situation is approaching the other countries with tremendous speed?

Engels depicts the consequences brought about solely by the “external” war; he does not touch upon the internal, i.e., civil war, without which no great revolution in history has ever taken place, and without which no serious Marxist conceived of the transition from capitalism to socialism. And if an external war may drag on for some time yet without evoking “hopeless chaos” in the “artificial machinery” of capitalism, it is obvious that a civil war is altogether inconceivable without such a consequence.

What obtuseness, what spinelessness—not to speak of self-seeking service to the bourgeoisie—is shown by those who, continuing to call themselves “socialists,” like our *Novaya Zhizn* people, Mensheviks, Right S.R.s, etc., point with venom at this manifestation of “hopeless chaos,” blaming everything on the revolutionary proletariat, on Soviet power, on the “utopia” of the transition to socialism. The “chaos,” or ruin, to use the excellent Russian expression, has been caused by the war. A severe war cannot occur without ruin. A civil war, the necessary condition and companion of the socialist revolution, cannot occur without ruin. To renounce revolution, to renounce socialism “on account of” ruin means only to display one’s lack of principle and, in practice, to go over to the side of the bourgeoisie.

“…Famine, epidemics, the general brutalisation of both armies and the masses of the people, provoked by acute distress…”

How simply and clearly Engels draws this indisputable conclusion, one obvious to anyone capable of reflecting a little on the objective consequences of a protracted, severe and agonising war. And how strikingly stupid are those numerous “Social-Democrats” and wretched “socialists” who do not want, or are unable, to think about this most elementary consideration.

Is a protracted war conceivable without the brutalisation of both armies and the masses of the people? Of course not. This consequence of a protracted war, for a number of years, if not for a whole generation, is absolutely inevitable. And our “men in the shell,” those weaklings from among the bourgeois intelligentsia who call themselves “Social-Democrats” and “socialists,” echo the bourgeoisie and blame the manifestations of brutalisation, or the inevitable harshness of measures to combat particularly acute cases of brutalisation, on the revolution—although it is as clear as day that this brutalisation was created by the imperialist war and that no revolution is capable of ridding itself of such consequences of war without a long struggle and without a series of harsh repressions.

They are ready “theoretically” to accept the revolution of the proletariat and other oppressed classes—those saccharine writers of *Novaya Zhizn*, *Vperyod* or *Dyelo Naroda*—only so long as this revolution falls from the sky, and is not born and does not grow on a land soaked in blood during the four-year imperialist slaughter of nations, amidst millions upon millions of people exhausted, tormented, and brutalised by this slaughter.

They have heard and have recognised “theoretically” that revolution should be compared to an act of childbirth; but when it came down to action, they shamefully lost their nerve, and the whimpering of their rotten little souls was transformed into an echo of the bourgeoisie’s vicious attacks on the uprising of the proletariat. Take the descriptions of the act of childbirth in literature—those descriptions where the authors aimed at a truthful reproduction of all the severity, all the torments, all the horrors of this act, for example, Emile Zola’s *La joie de vivre* (“The Joy of Life”) or Veresayev’s *Confessions of a Physician*. The birth of a human being is bound up with an act that turns a woman into an exhausted, tormented, pain-crazed, bleeding, half-dead piece of flesh. But would anyone agree to recognise as a human being an “individual” who saw *only* this in love, in its consequences, in the transformation of a woman into a mother? Who on these grounds would renounce love and childbearing?

Childbirth can be easy and it can be difficult. Marx and Engels, the founders of scientific socialism, always spoke of the long birth pangs inevitably bound up with the transition from capitalism to socialism. And Engels, analysing the consequences of a world war, simply and clearly describes the indisputable and obvious fact that a revolution following in the wake of a war, connected with a war (and even more so—we would add on our own—a revolution flaring up *during* a war, compelled to grow and hold its ground in the midst of the world war surrounding it), that such a revolution is a particularly difficult case of childbirth.

With a clear consciousness of this fact, Engels speaks with particular caution of the birth of socialism from the capitalist society perishing in the world war. “Only one result [of the world war],” he says, “is absolutely certain: universal exhaustion and the establishment of the conditions for the final victory of the working class.”

This thought is expressed even more clearly at the end of the preface we are analysing:

“…At the end of the tragedy you [the capitalists and landlords, the kings and statesmen of the bourgeoisie] will be a ruin, and the victory of the proletariat will either have been already won or will still be inevitable.”

Difficult acts of childbirth increase the danger of a fatal illness or a fatal outcome many times over. But while individual human beings may perish in childbirth, the new society born from the old order cannot perish, though its birth will only be more painful, more protracted, and its growth and development slower.

The end of the war has not yet come. Universal exhaustion has already set in. Of the two direct results of the war predicted by Engels conditionally (either an already-won victory of the working class, or the establishment of the conditions for its inevitability, in spite of all difficulties), both of these conditions are now present, by the middle of 1918.

In one capitalist country, the least developed, the victory of the working class has already been won. In the rest, the conditions making this victory “still inevitable” are being created with unheard-of strain and unheard-of torments.

Let the “socialist” milksops croak, let the bourgeoisie rage and fume. Only people who close their eyes so as not to see, and stop their ears so as not to hear, can fail to notice that throughout the world, for the old capitalist society pregnant with socialism, the labour pains have begun. Upon our country, which the course of events has temporarily propelled into the vanguard of the socialist revolution, now fall the particularly severe torments of the first period of the act of childbirth that has commenced. We have every reason to look upon the future with complete firmness and absolute confidence, a future that is preparing for us new allies, new victories of the socialist revolution in a number of more advanced countries. We have the right to be proud and to count ourselves fortunate in that we have been the first to topple, in one corner of the globe, that wild beast, capitalism, which has drenched the earth in blood, brought humanity to famine and brutalisation, and which will perish inevitably and soon, no matter how monstrously beastly the manifestations of its death throes may be.

June 29, 1918

*Pravda* No. 133, July 2, 1918. Signed: N. Lenin

Printed from the text of the newspaper *Pravda*

The beginning of V. I. Lenin’s manuscript “On Democracy and the Socialist Character of Soviet Power.” – 1918 (Reduced)