The transition from an illusory, exuberant, elemental mood to a more critical and conscious frame of mind necessarily implies a pause in revolutionary continuity. Such a progressive crisis in the mood of the masses can be overcome only by a proper party policy, that is to say, above all by the genuine readiness and ability of the party to lead the insurrection of the proletariat. SAP leader Jakob Walcher's notes on his conversation in France with Leon Trotsky of August 1933 report a discussion with Trotsky on the German October of 1923. Watcher's notes, published in Volume 2 of the Oeuvres, were not reported to have been initialled by Trotsky himself. The notes do not in, any case constitute a repudiation of Trotsky's 1924 analysis of the German events.
Defeat is ever an orphan while victory has many fathers.
Never tested in the fire of insurrection, these forces would have seemed immeasurably more terrible than they proved in action. The failure of the German party in 1923 accelerated the crystallisation of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia and decisively shaped world history in the decades that followed. The spectre of Bolshevism loomed very large for those European sectors that had even one piece of silver to rub between their grubby fingers.