Life & Wisdom Quote by Herman Gorter

Gorter’s line reads like a drab inventory, and that’s the point: it’s political writing that deliberately refuses lyric uplift. A poet here adopts the cadence of a ledger to argue that Europe’s social reality doesn’t match the simplified map many radicals carried in their heads. By naming “four or five million poor peasants in France” and then rattling off Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, and parts of Scandinavia, he’s building a geographic rebuttal: look, the continent is not uniformly factory-blackened and proletarian. It’s mottled, agrarian, and dominated by small and medium enterprise.

The specific intent is tactical. In Marxist debates of Gorter’s era, strategy hinged on what kind of capitalism you were facing: concentrated industry supposedly produced a cohesive working class primed for mass party politics; dispersed production and peasantry complicated that story. Gorter’s insistence that “everywhere” smaller-scale industry “prevails” signals impatience with grand theories that glide past the stubborn texture of rural life, family labor, and local markets. The subtext is a warning: if you misread the economic base, you will misbuild the movement - mistaking France for an industrial mirror of Germany, or assuming parliamentary tactics travel cleanly across borders.

It also reveals a poet’s ear for how authority works. Numbers (“four or five million”) and the roll-call of nations function as rhetorical ballast, lending inevitability to his claim. The effect is almost anti-romantic: no heroic class in a single, photogenic setting, just a sprawling Europe whose uneven development refuses easy slogans.