1848 the prevailing conditions were still capable of expansion.  And to-day we have a huge international army of Socialists....  If this mighty proletarian army has not yet reached its goal, if it is destined to gain its ends only in a long drawn out struggle, making headway but slowly, step by step, this only proves how impossible it was in 1848 to change social conditions by forcible means ... the time for small minorities to place themselves at the head of the ignorant masses and resort to force in order to bring about revolutions, is gone. A complete change in the organization of society can be brought about only by the conscious co-operation of the masses; they must be alive to the aim in view; they must know what they want.  The history of the last fifty years has taught us that.[51]

What Engels had in mind when he stressed the fact that history showed that in 1848 “the prevailing conditions were still capable of expansion” is the central Marxian doctrine of historical inevitability.  It is surely less than honest to claim the prestige and authority of Marx’s teachings upon the slender basis of a distorted version of his early thought, while completely ignoring the matured body of his doctrines.  It may not matter much to the world to-day what Marx thought, or how far Lenine follows his teachings, but it is of importance that the claim set up by Lenine and Trotzky and many of their followers that they are guided by the principles of Marxian Socialism is itself demonstrably an evidence of moral or intellectual obliquity, which makes them very dangerous guides to follow.  It is of importance, too, that the claim they make allures many Socialists of trusting and uncritical minds to follow them.

Many times in his long life Marx, together with Engels, found himself engaged in a fierce war against the very things Lenine and Trotzky and their associates have been trying to do.  He thundered against Weitling, who wanted to have a “daring minority” seize the power of the state and establish its dictatorship by a coup d’etat.  He was denounced as a “reactionary” by Willich and Kinkel because, in 1850, he rejected with scorn the idea of a sudden seizure of political power through conspiratory action, and had the courage to say that it would take fifty years for the workers “to fit themselves for political power.”  He opposed Lassalle’s idea of an armed insurrection in 1862, because he was certain that the economic development had not yet reached the stage which alone could make a social change possible.  He fought with all the fierce impetuousness of his nature every attempt of Bakunin to lead the workers to attempt the seizure of political power and forcibly establish their rule while still a minority.[52] He fought all these men because he had become profoundly convinced that “no social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new and higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society."[53] No “dictatorship of the proletariat,” no action by any minority, however well armed or however desperate, can overcome that great law.