Life & Wisdom Quote by Herman Gorter

A question that sounds like a seminar prompt lands more like a dare: if the Western European working class is truly alone, what excuse is left for political daydreaming? Herman Gorter, the poet who turned revolutionary polemicist, uses the rhetoric of isolation to strip away the comforting fiction that the proletariat can outsource its emancipation to “allies” above it. The line is less inquiry than pressure test. Tactics aren’t abstract chess moves; they’re the forced choices you make when the board offers no reinforcements.

The subtext is a fight inside the Left. Gorter is taking aim at strategies that lean on parliamentary coalitions, middle-class reformers, or trade-union bureaucracy to deliver socialism by gradual osmosis. “No prospect of help whatsoever” isn’t just descriptive; it’s a weaponized premise meant to foreclose compromise as a path to power. If no other class will ride to the rescue, then tactics must be built for self-reliance: mass action, workers’ councils, organizational forms that don’t depend on respectable partners.

Context matters. Post-World War I Europe was a graveyard of old certainties: social democratic parties had backed the war, revolutions flared and failed, and the Russian Revolution tempted Western radicals to import a model into very different industrial societies. Gorter, associated with the communist left, is arguing that Western capitalism’s depth and the state’s resilience make “help” from other classes not merely unlikely but structurally impossible.

Even as it argues like theory, it works like poetry: the starkness of “stands all alone” turns class analysis into a scene of abandonment. That emotional compression is the point. Isolation becomes not despair, but a demand for clarity.