ces. Diminishing revolutionary consciousness creates a crisis for revolutionary leaders. This law is undoubtedly one of the factors that accounts for the failure of revolutionary leaders to establish a classical Dictatorship of the Proletariat over an industrially developed working class. Diminishing revolutionary consciousness is not the result of errors or shortcomings of revolutionary leaders. It is a result of the development of society's productive forces. The possibility of failure of revolutionary leaders is rooted In the contradiction between the historical level of development of the productive forces and the historical accomplishments of revolutionary organizations.
The historical accomplishment of revolutionary organizations has been to launch the primitive accumulation of Capital in regions where this development had been stunted. But the working classes of industrially developed regions already completed this historical task, under the leadership of an earlier form of revolutionary vanguard. The social relations created by Dictatorships of the Proletariat have been the modern State, developed commodity production and a sophisticated division of labor. But these are precisely the social relations that hamper and repress the further development of the industrial working class. In short, the possibility of the failure of modern socialism in the field where socialism originated—among industrial workers—is created by the historical development of socialism and of the industrial working class. At its origin socialism was a common ground, a means of discourse, for all individuals who alienate their productive activity. To the extent that slaves have a language distinct from the language of their masters, socialism was the language of those who simultaneously created and were enslaved by the State, commodity production and the division of labor. The historical accomplishment of successful revolutionary leaders has been to put the language of socialism at the service of the State, commodity production and the division of labor. This historical accomplishment makes it extremely difficult to re-introduce to the working class which had given birth to it, not socialism in its 19th century form of a struggle for the reappropriation of self-powers, but socialism in its historically successful form of an ideology of leadership. In conditions of developed productive forces, revolutionary leaders confront a working class which no longer needs the State, commodity production and the division of labor. It is to these workers that revolutionary leaders propose their program of State power, iron discipline and unquestioning obedience. And of course the leaders quickly discover that this privileged working class, this aristocracy of labor, this bourgeois proletariat has deserted to the bourgeoisie. These prisoners of bourgeois ideology do not embrace the revolutionary program as a daring and imaginative vision of the future; they regard it as a nightmare of the past.
In the perspective of modern revolutionary theory, the crisis of
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