Success Quote by Herman Gorter

Gorter’s line lands like a polite letter opener that’s secretly a knife. “Of course you know” is not camaraderie; it’s a trap. He flatters his interlocutor’s intelligence only to make their failure inescapable: if you knew, your mistake wasn’t ignorance, it was judgment. The phrase “as well as I do” asserts parity while quietly establishing authority, because he alone has apparently done the next, decisive step: translating analysis into strategy.

The real charge is in “failed to draw from it the conclusions.” Gorter is speaking the language of Marxist rigor, where the sin isn’t having the wrong values but botching the chain of inference from conditions to tactics. He frames politics as an argument with premises and corollaries, and he’s accusing the other writer of stopping at diagnosis. That’s a brutal criticism inside leftist polemics: theory without operational consequences is vanity, or worse, cover for opportunism.

“Western Europe” narrows the battlefield. In the post-1917 fracture of European socialism, Russia’s revolutionary model haunted every debate, but Gorter (a poet turned communist polemicist) insists geography isn’t a backdrop; it’s a determinant. Different class composition, parliamentary traditions, union structures, and state capacity change what “revolutionary” can realistically mean. The final hedge, “at least as far as I am able to judge from your works,” performs fairness while sharpening the indictment: he’s judging not your soul, but your published record - which, for an intellectual, is the same thing.