V. I. Lenin

Nobody, thank God, believes in miracles nowadays. Miraculous
prophecy is a fairy-tale. But scientific prophecy is a fact. And
in these days, when we so very often encounter shameful
despondency and even despair around us, it is useful to recall
one scientific prophecy which has come true.

Frederick Engels had occasion in 1887 to write of the coming
world war in a preface to a pamphlet by Sigismund Borkheim,
In Memory of the German Arch-Patriots of 1806-1807 ( Zur Erinnerung für die deutschen Mordspatrioten 1806-1807 ). (This pamphlet is No. XXIV of the
Social-Democratic Library published in
Göttingen-Zürich in 1888.)

This is how Frederick
Engels spoke over thirty years ago of the future world war:

“. . . No war is any longer possible for Prussia-Germany
except a world war and a world war indeed of an extent and
violence hitherto undreamt of. Eight to ten millions of soldiers
will massacre one another and in doing so devour the whole of
Eurepe until they have stripped it barer than any swarm of
locusts has ever done. The devastations of the Thirty
Years’ War compressed into three or four years, and spread
over the whole Continent; famine, pestilence, general demoralisation both of the armies and of the mass of the people
produced by acute distress; hopeless confusion of our artificial
machinery in trade, industry and credit, ending in general
bankruptcy; collapse of the old states and their traditional
state wisdom to such an extent that crowns will roll by dozens
on the pavement and there will be no body to pick them up;
absolute impossibility of foreseeing how it will all end and who
will come out of the struggle as victor; only one result is
absolutely certain: general exhaustion and the establishment of
the conditions for the ultimate victory of the working class.

“This is the prospect when the system of mutual outbidding
in armaments, taken to the final extreme, at last bears its
inevitable fruits. This, my lords, princes and statesmen, is
where in your wisdom you have brought old Europe. And when
nothing more remains to you but to open the last great war
dance—that will suit us all right ( uns kann es recht sein ). The war may perhaps push us temporarily into the
background, may wrench from us many a position already conquered. But when you have unfettered forces which you will
then no longer be able again to control, things may go as they
will: at the end of the tragedy you will be ruined and the
victory of the proletariat will either be already achieved or at
any rate ( doch ) inevitable.

“London, December 15, 1887

Frederick Engels”

What genius is displayed in this prophecy! And how infinitely
rich in ideas is every sentence of this exact, clear, brief and
scientific class analysis! How much could be learnt from it by
those who are now shamefully succumbing to lack of faith,
despondency and despair, if . . . if people who are accustomed
to kowtow to the bourgeoisie, or who allow themselves to be
frightened by it, could but think, were but capable of thinking!

Some of Engels’s predictions have turned out differently;
and one could not expect the world and capitalism to have
remained unchanged during thirty years of frenzied imperialist
development. But what is most astonishing is that so many of
Engels’s predictions are turning out “to the letter”. For Engels gave a perfectly exact class analysis,
and classes and the relations between them have remained
unchanged.

“. . . The war may perhaps push us temporarily into the
background. . . .” Developments have proceeded exactly along these lines, but have gone even further and even worse:
some of the social-chauvinists who have been “pushed back”, and their spineless “semi-opponents”,
the Kautskyites, have begun to extol their backward movement and
have become direct traitors to and betrayers of socialism.

“. . . The war may perhaps wrench from us many a position
already conquered. . . .” A number of “legal” positions have been wrenched from the working class. But on the
other hand it has been steeled by trials and is receiving severe
but salutary lessons in illegal organisation, in illegal
struggle and in preparing its forces for a revolutionaly
attack.

“. . . Crowns will roll by dozens. . . .” Several crowns have already fallen. And one of them is worth dozens of
others—the crown of the autocrat of all the Russias, Nicholas Romanov.

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

“. . . Hopeless confusion of our artificial machinery in
trade, industry and credit. . . .” At the end of the fourth year of war this has been fully borne out in the case of
one of the biggest and most backward of the states drawn into
the war by the capitalists—Russia. But do not the growing
starvation in Gerrnany and Austria, the shortage of clothing and
raw material and the wearing out of the means of production show
that a similar state of affairs is very rapidly overtaking other
countries as well?

Engels depicts the consequences brought about only by “foreign” war; he does not deal with internal, i.e.,
civil war, without which not one of the great revolutions of
history has taken place, and without which not a single serious
Marxist has conceived the transition from capitalism to
socialism. And while a foreign war may drag on for a certain
time without causing “hopeless confusion” in the “artificial machinery” of capitalism, it is obvious
that a civil war without such a consequence is quite inconceivable.

What stupidity, what spinelessness—not to say mercenary
service to the bourgeoisie—is displayed by those who, like
our Novaya Zhizn group, Mensheviks, Right
Socialist-Revolutionaries, etc., while continuing to call
themselves “socialists”, maliciously point to the manifestation of this “hopeless confusion” and lay
the blame for everything on the revolutionary proletariat, the
Soviet power, the “utopia” of the transition to socialism. The “confusion”, or
razrukha , [Dislocation, disruption. —Editor ] to use the excellent
Russian word, has been brought about by the war’. There
can be no severe war without disruption. There can be no civil
war—the inevitable condition and concomitant of socialist
revolution—without disruption. To renounce revolution and
socialism “in view of” the disruption, only means to display one’s lack of principle and in practice to desert
to the bourgeoisie.

“. . . Famine, pestilence, general demoralisation both of
the armies and of the mass of the people produced by acute
distress. . . .”

How simply and clearly Engels draws this indisputable conclusion, which must be obvious to everyone who is at all
capable of reflecting on the objective consequences of many
years of severe and agonising war. And how astonishingly stupid
are these numerous “Social-Democrats” and pseudo-Socialists who will not or cannot realise this most
simple idea.

Is it conceivable that a war can last many years without both
the armies and the mass of the people becoming demoralised ? Of course not. Such a consequence of a long war is
absolutely inevitable over a period of several years, if not a
whole generation. And our “men in mufflers”, the bourgeois intellectual snivelers who call themselves
“Social-Democrats” and “Socialists”, second the bourgeoisie in blaming the revolution for the
manifestations of demoralisation or for the inevitable severity
of the measures taken to combat particularly acute cases of
demoralisation—although it is as clear as noonday that this demoralisation has been produced by the imperialist war,
and that no revolution can rid itself of such consequences of
war without a long struggle and without a number of stern
measures of repression.

Our sugary writers in Novaya Zhizn , Vperyod or
Dyelo Naroda are prepared to grant a revolution of the proletariat and other oppressed classes
“theoretically”, provided only that the revolution drops from heaven and is not born and bred on earth soaked in
the blood of four years of imperialist butchery of the peoples,
with millions upon millions of people exhausted, tormented and
demoralised by this butchery.

They had heard and admitted “in theory” that a revolution should be compared to an act of childbirth; but when
it came to the point, they disgracefully took fright and their
fainthearted whimperings echoed the malicious outbursts of the
bourgeoisie against the insurrection of the proletariat. Consider the descriptions of childbirth given in
literature, when the authors aim at presenting a truthful
picture of the severity, pain and horror of the act of travail,
as in Emile Zola’s La joie de vivre ( The Joy of Life ), for instance, or in Veresayev’s Notes of a Doctor. Human child birth is an act which transforms
the woman into an almost lifeless, bloodstained heap of flesh,
tortured, tormented and driven frantic by pain. But can the
“individual” that sees only this in love and its sequel, in the transformation of the woman into a mother, be
regarded as a human being? Who would renounce love and procreation for this reason?

Travail may be light or severe. Marx and Engels, the founders of
scientific socialism, always said that the transition from
capitalism to socialism would be inevitably accompanied by
prolonged birth pangs. And analysing the consequences of a world
war, Engels outlines simply and clearly the indisputable and
obvious fact that a revolution that follows and is connected
with a war (and still more—let us add for our part—a revolution which breaks out during a war, and which is obliged
to grow and maintain itself in the midst of a world war) is a
particularly severe case of childbirth.

Clearly realising this, Engels speaks with great caution of
socialism being brought to birth by a capitalist socicty which
is perishing in a world war. “Only one result [of a world
war],” he says, “is absolutely certain: general exhaustion and the establishment of the conditions for
the ultimate victory of the working class.”

This thought is expressed even more clearly at the end of the
preface we are examining.

“. . . At the end of the tragedy you (the capitalists and
landowners, the kings and statesmen of the bourgeoisie) will be
ruined and the victory of the proletariat will either be already
achieved or at any rate inevitable.”

Severe travail greatly increases the danger of grave illnes or
of a fatal issue. But while individuals may die in the act of
childbirth, the new society to which the old system gives birth
cannot die; all that may happen is that the birth may be more
painful, more prolonged, and growth and development slower.

The war has not yet ended. General exhaustion has already set
in. As regards the two direct results of war predicted by Engels conditionally (either the victory of the working class
already achieved, or the establishment of conditions which will
make this inevitable, despite all difficulties ) as regards these two conditions, now, in the middle of 1918, we
find both in evidence.

In one, the least developed, of the capitalist countries, the
victory of the working class is already achieved. In the others, with unparalleled pain and effort, the conditions
are being established which will make this victory “at any
rate inevitable”.

Let the “socialist” snivelers croak, let the bourgeoisie rage and fume, but only people who shut their eyes
so as not to see, and stuff their ears so as not to hear, can
fail to notice that all over the world the birth pangs of the
old, capitalist society, which is pregnant with socialism, have
begun. Our country, which has temporarily been advanced by the
march of events to the van of the socialist revolution, is
undergoing the particularIy severe pains of the first period of
travail. We have every reason to face the future with complete
assurance and absolute confidence, for it is preparing for us
new allies and new victories of the socialist revolution in a
number of the more advanced countries. We are entitled to be
proud and to consider ourselves fortunate that it has come to
our lot to be the first to fell in one part of the globe that
wild beast, capitalism, which has drenched the earth in blood,
which has reduced humanity to starvation and demoralisation, and
which will assuredly perish soon, no matter how monstrous and
savage its frenzy in the face of death.

June 29, 1918
N. Lenin