situations in which the forces unloosed will sweep away anybody who seeks to stop them. Whether these forces are exclusively social and economic, or whether they are compounded with national ambitions and frustrations, religious beliefs and political ambitions, is not important as long as it is recognized that the force of individual personality is no vital part of them.
Reflection will make manifest, however, that, genuine as Trotsky’s insight is, it is limited to periods when outbursts of fear or hope sweep over large masses of people, carrying them into action against what until yesterday were the accepted symbols of authority. Where the vital needs of submerged classes are unfulfilled, where conflicts of interest are so deep that they cannot be negotiated without cutting into the vested powers of men who are firmly convinced of their divine or social right to those powers, where customary political rule becomes increasingly inept or oppressive, where the moral professions of those in the saddle sound hollow in the light of actualities—we can already feel the vibrations of discontent that may suddenly erupt into a cataclysmic flood. We can tell that it is coming, we can predict its approach though not what particular event will set it off. We can predict, in other words, the advent of a revolution or war but we cannot always tell what its outcome will be. That outcome may sometimes depend upon the characters of the leading personalities.
This Trotsky does not see, and where he catches a glimpse of the possibility he falters, not knowing whether to abandon his monistic determinism or to force the facts. What his method can explain is at best the death of a system, not what will replace it; the collapse of one culture, not the birth of another; the fall of Czarism, but not the fall of Kerensky or the rise of Bolshevism. It is as if Trotsky, after proving that under certain conditions of cumulative strain and wear an old man must die, were to point to the same conditions as proof that a new life must be born. All men are mortal. But this does not mean that there will always be men. The inescapability of the downfall of Czarism, as we shall see subsequently, does not prove by any means the inevitability of the triumph of Bolshevism.
The existence of possible alternatives of development in a historic situation is the presupposition of significant heroic action. The all-important point for our purposes is whether there are such alternatives of development—their nature and duration. The position taken so far commits us to the belief that
