the immense majority.”  It is this “immense majority” that is to establish its dominion.  Marx expressly points out that “all previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities.”  It is the great merit of the movement of the proletariat, as he conceives it, that it is the “movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.”

Clearly, when Lenine and his followers say that they take their doctrine of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” from Marx, they pervert the truth; they take from Marx only the phrase, not their fundamental policy.  It is not to be denied that there were times when Marx himself momentarily lapsed into the error of Blanqui and the older school of Utopian, conspiratory Socialists who believed that they could find a short cut to social democracy; that by a surprise stroke, carefully prepared and daringly executed, a small and desperate minority could overthrow the existing social order and bring about Socialism.  As Jaures has pointed out,[50] the mind of Marx sometimes harked back to the dramatic side of the French Revolution, and was captivated by such episodes as the conspiracy of Babeuf and his friends, who in their day, while the proletariat was a small minority, even as it is in Russia now, sought to establish its dominion.  But it is well known that after the failure of the Paris Commune, in 1871, Marx once and for all abandoned all belief in this form of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and in the possibility of securing Socialism through the conspiratory action of minorities.  He was even rather unwilling that the Manifesto should be republished after that, except as a purely historical document.  It was in that spirit of reaction that he and Engels wrote in 1872 that passage—­to which Lenine has given such an unwarranted interpretation—­in which they say that the Commune had shown that “the working classes cannot simply take possession of the ready-made state machine and set it in motion for their own aims.”

It was no less an interpreter of Marx than his great collaborator and friend, Frederick Engels, who, in 1895, stated the reasons for abandoning all belief in the possibility of accomplishing anything through political surprises and through the action of small conscious and determined minorities at the head of unconscious masses: 

History proved that we were wrong—­we and those who like us, in 1848, awaited the speedy success of the proletariat.  It became perfectly clear that economic conditions all over the Continent were by no means as yet sufficiently matured for superseding the capitalist organization of production.  This was proved by the economic revolution which commenced on the continent of Europe after 1848 and developed in France, Austria-Hungary, Poland, and, recently, also in Russia, and made Germany into an industrial state of the first rank—­all on a capitalist basis, which shows that in