A socialist revolution is inevitable in all countries. Just look at last year's elections in Germany. The world has been trending towards socialism since 1873; I had hoped the end of the Great Depression would reverse the tide, but it has not. It is a cold, irrefutable mathematical fact; when the franchise is expanded to the proletariat, they will vote themselves revolution. If you put a piece of candy before a child, will he not take it? And so, if you put the vote, and through the vote power, before the coal miner, the factory hand, the dock worker, will he not vote to overthrow the capitalist system and take for himself the luxuries of the bourgeois? It astonishes me how anyone could think, or could have expected, otherwise.
If capitalists had wanted to preserve free enterprise, they should have opposed universal suffrage. Now, I fear it is too late. The very fact that we are even now debating womens' suffrage proves that universal manhood suffrage can never be overturned. It turns out that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction after all; not as Marx predicted, through violence, but through the very system of elections it created. I only fear what a future without free enterprise and collective ownership of all the means of production will mean.
Germany, no doubt, and perhaps a few other countries as well. But I cannot see a country like Russia undergoing a communist revolution.
