Politics & Power Quote by Herman Gorter

Gorter’s line is a scalpel disguised as a shrug. He’s not forecasting an uprising; he’s mocking the paper-thin bravado of Communist media that writes as if revolution is always one leaflet away. The key move is that prim, almost bureaucratic setup - “to judge from all… papers, magazines and brochures” - which treats propaganda as data. Then he twists the knife with “one might even surmise,” a phrase so mild it becomes lethal: the understatement exposes the exaggeration. If your evidence for imminent revolt is the party’s own print ecosystem and its own rallies, you’re not reading society; you’re reading yourself.

The subtext is a critique of substitution: words standing in for conditions, slogans in for organization, a rhetorical “moment” replacing the slow grind of material reality. Western Europe’s “poor peasants” are the tell. By Gorter’s time, much of Western Europe had been industrializing and urbanizing; the romantic revolutionary subject wasn’t neatly waiting in the countryside. So the quote also skewers a kind of doctrinal ventriloquism, where ideology insists on speaking through a peasantry that may not fit the script.

As a poet, Gorter understands how language can intoxicate. He’s diagnosing the party press as a self-reinforcing genre: each brochure, each assembly, amplifies the same imminent storyline until it feels like weather. The irony lands because it’s plausible: you really could “surmise” revolt is near - if you never step outside the printed world that keeps promising it.