Kautsky loftily sweeps aside Marx's views on terror, expressed by him
in the _Neue Rheinische Zeitung_--as at that time, do you see, Marx
was still very "young," and consequently his views had not yet had
time to arrive at that condition of complete enfeeblement which is so
clearly to be observed in the case of certain theoreticians in the
seventh decade of their life. As a contrast to the green Marx of
1848-49 (the author of the _Communist Manifesto_!) Kautsky quotes the
mature Marx of the epoch of the Paris Commune--and the latter, under
the pen of Kautsky, loses his great lion's mane, and appears before us
as an extremely respectable reasoner, bowing before the holy places
of democracy, declaiming on the sacredness of human life, and filled
with all due reverence for the political charms of Schneidermann,
Vandervelde, and particularly of his own physical grandson, Jean
Longuet. In a word, Marx, instructed by the experience of life, proves
to be a well-behaved Kautskian.
From the deathless _Civil War in France_, the pages of which have been
filled with a new and intense life in our own epoch, Kautsky has
quoted only those lines in which the mighty theoretician of the social
revolution contrasted the generosity of the Communards with the
bourgeois ferocity of the Versaillese. Kautsky has devastated these
lines and made them commonplace. Marx, as the preacher of detached
humanity, as the apostle of general love of mankind! Just as if we
were talking about Buddha or Leo Tolstoy.... It is more than natural
that, against the international campaign which represented the
Communards as _souteneurs_ and the women of the Commune as
prostitutes, against the vile slanders which attributed to the
conquered fighters ferocious features drawn from the degenerate
imagination of the victorious bourgeoisie, Marx should emphasize and
underline those features of tenderness and nobility which not
infrequently were merely the reverse side of indecision. Marx was
Marx. He was neither an empty pedant, nor, all the more, the legal
defender of the revolution: he combined a scientific analysis of the
Commune with its revolutionary apology. He not only explained and
criticised--he defended and struggled. But, emphasizing the mildness
of the Commune which failed, Marx left no doubt possible concerning
the measures which the Commune ought to have taken in order not to
fail.
The author of the _Civil War_ accuses the Central Committee--_i.e._,
the then Council of National Guards' Deputies, of having too soon
given up its place to the elective Commune. Kautsky "does not
understand" the reason for such a reproach. This conscientious
non-understanding is one of the symptoms of Kautsky's mental decline
in connection with questions of the revolution generally. The first
place, according to Marx, ought to have been filled by a purely
fighting organ, a centre of the insurrection and of military
operations against Versailles, and not the organized self-government
of the labor democracy. For the latter the turn would come later.
Marx accuses the Commune of not having at once begun an attack against
the Versailles, and of having entered upon the defensive, which always
appears "more humane," and gives more possibilities of appealing to
moral law and the sacredness of human life, but in conditions of civil
war never leads to victory. Marx, on the other hand, first and
foremost wanted a revolutionary victory. Nowhere, by one word, does he
put forward the principle of democracy as something standing above the
class struggle. On the contrary, with the concentrated contempt of the
revolutionary and the Communist, Marx--not the young editor of the
_Rhine Paper_, but the mature author of _Capital_: our genuine Marx
with the mighty leonine mane, not as yet fallen under the hands of the
hairdressers of the Kautsky school--with what concentrated contempt he
speaks about the "artificial atmosphere of parliamentarism" in which
physical and spiritual dwarfs like Thiers seem giants! The _Civil
War_, after the barren and pedantic pamphlet of Kautsky, acts like
a storm that clears the air.
In spite of Kautsky's slanders, Marx had nothing in common with the
view of democracy as the last, absolute, supreme product of history.
The development of bourgeois society itself, out of which contemporary
democracy grew up, in no way represents that process of gradual
democratization which figured before the war in the dreams of the
greatest Socialist illusionist of democracy--Jean Jaures--and now in
those of the most learned of pedants, Karl Kautsky. In the empire of
Napoleon III, Marx sees "the only possible form of government in the
epoch in which the bourgeoisie has already lost the possibility of
governing the people, while the working class has not yet acquired
it." In this way, not democracy, but Bonapartism, appears in Marx's
eyes as the final form of bourgeois power. Learned men may say that
Marx was mistaken, as the Bonapartist empire gave way for half a
century to the "Democratic Republic." But Marx was not mistaken. In
essence he was right. The Third Republic has been the period of the
complete decay of democracy. Bonapartism has found in the Stock
Exchange Republic of Poincare-Clemenceau, a more finished expression
than in the Second Empire. True, the Third Republic was not crowned by
the imperial diadem; but in return there loomed over it the shadow of
the Russian Tsar.
In his estimate of the Commune, Marx carefully avoids using the worn
currency of democratic terminology. "The Commune was," he writes, "not
a parliament, but a working institution, and united in itself both
executive and legislative power." In the first place, Marx puts
forward, not the particular democratic form of the Commune, but its
class essence. The Commune, as is known, abolished the regular army
and the police, and decreed the confiscation of Church property. It
did this in the right of the revolutionary dictatorship of Paris,
without the permission of the general democracy of the State, which at
that moment formally had found a much more "lawful" expression in the
National Assembly of Thiers. But a revolution is not decided by votes.
"The National Assembly," says Marx, "was nothing more nor less than
one of the episodes of that revolution, the true embodiment of which
was, nevertheless, armed Paris." How far this is from formal
democracy!
"It only required that the Communal order of things," says Marx,
"should be set up in Paris and in the secondary centres, and the old
central government would in the provinces also have yielded to the
_self-government of the producers_." Marx, consequently, sees the
problem of revolutionary Paris, not in appealing from its victory to
the frail will of the Constituent Assembly, but in covering the whole
of France with a centralized organization of Communes, built up not on
the external principles of democracy but on the genuine
self-government of the producers.
Kautsky has cited as an argument against the Soviet Constitution the
indirectness of elections, which contradicts the fixed laws of
bourgeois democracy. Marx characterizes the proposed structure of
labor France in the following words:--"The management of the general
affairs of the village communes of every district was to devolve on
the Assembly of plenipotentiary delegates meeting in the chief town of
the district; while the district assemblies were in turn to send
delegates to the National Assembly sitting in Paris."
Marx, as we can see, was not in the least degree disturbed by the many
degrees of indirect election, in so far as it was a question of the
State organization of the proletariat itself. In the framework of
bourgeois democracy, indirectness of election confuses the demarcation
line of parties and classes; but in the "self-government of the
producers"--_i.e._, in the class proletarian State, indirectness
of election is a question not of politics, but of the technical
requirements of self-government, and within certain limits may present
the same advantages as in the realm of trade union organization.
The Philistines of democracy are indignant at the inequality in
representation of the workers and peasants which, in the Soviet
Constitution, reflects the difference in the revolutionary roles of
the town and the country. Marx writes: "The Commune desired to bring
the rural producers under the intellectual leadership of the central
towns of their districts, and there to secure to them, in the workmen
of the towns, the natural guardians of their interests." The question
was not one of making the peasant equal to the worker on paper, but of
spiritually raising the peasant to the level of the worker. All
questions of the proletarian State Marx decides according to the
revolutionary dynamics of living forces, and not according to the play
of shadows upon the market-place screen of parliamentarism.
In order to reach the last confines of mental collapse, Kautsky denies
the universal authority of the Workers' Councils on the ground that
there is no legal boundary between the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie. In the indeterminate nature of the social divisions
Kautsky sees the source of the arbitrary authority of the Soviet
dictatorship. Marx sees directly the contrary. "The Commune was an
extremely elastic form of the State, while all former forms of
government had suffered from narrowness. Its secret consists in this,
that in its very essence it was the government of the working class,
the result of the struggle between the class of producers and the
class of appropriators, the political form, long sought, under which
there could be accomplished the economic emancipation of labor." The
secret of the Commune consisted in the fact that by its very essence
it was a government of the working class. This secret, explained by
Marx, has remained, for Kautsky, even to this day, a mystery sealed
with seven seals.
The Pharisees of democracy speak with indignation of the repressive
measures of the Soviet Government, of the closing of newspapers, of
arrests and shooting. Marx replies to "the vile abuse of the lackeys
of the Press" and to the reproaches of the "well-intentioned bourgeois
doctrinaries," in connection with the repressive measures of the
Commune in the following words:--"Not satisfied with their open waging
of a most bloodthirsty war against Paris, the Versaillese strove
secretly to gain an entry by corruption and conspiracy. Could the
Commune at such a time _without shamefully betraying its trust_,
have observed the customary forms of liberalism, just as if profound
peace reigned around it? Had the government of the Commune been akin
in spirit to that of Thiers, there would have been no more occasion to
suppress newspapers of the party of order in Paris than there was to
suppress newspapers of the Commune at Versailles." In this way, what
Kautsky demands in the name of the sacred foundations of democracy
Marx brands as a shameful betrayal of trust.
Concerning the destruction of which the Commune is accused, and of
which now the Soviet Government is accused, Marx speaks as of "an
inevitable and comparatively insignificant episode in the titanic
struggle of the new-born order with the old in its collapse."
Destruction and cruelty are inevitable in any war. Only sycophants
can consider them a crime "in the war of the slaves against their
oppressors, _the only just war in history_." (Marx.) Yet our dread
accuser Kautsky, in his whole book, does not breathe a word of the
fact that we are in a condition of perpetual revolutionary
self-defence, that we are waging an intensive war against the
oppressors of the world, the "only just war in history."
Kautsky yet again tears his hair because the Soviet Government, during
the Civil War, has made use of the severe method of taking hostages.
He once again brings forward pointless and dishonest comparisons
between the fierce Soviet Government and the humane Commune. Clear and
definite in this connection sounds the opinion of Marx. "When Thiers,
from the very beginning of the conflict, had enforced the humane
practice of shooting down captured Communards, the Commune, to protect
the lives of those prisoners, _had nothing left for it_ but to
resort to the Prussian custom of taking hostages. The lives of the
hostages had been forfeited over and over again by the continued
shooting of the prisoners on the part of the Versaillese. _How could
their lives be spared any longer_ after the blood-bath with which
MacMahon's Pretorians celebrated their entry into Paris?" How
otherwise we shall ask together with Marx, can one act in conditions
of civil war, when the counter-revolution, occupying a considerable
portion of the national territory, seizes wherever it can the unarmed
workers, their wives, their mothers, and shoots or hangs them: how
otherwise can one act than to seize as hostages the beloved or the
trusted of the bourgeoisie, thus placing the whole bourgeois class
under the Damocles' sword of mutual responsibility?
It would not be difficult to show, day by day through the history of
the civil war, that all the severe measures of the Soviet Government
were forced upon it as measures of revolutionary self-defense. We
shall not here enter into details. But, to give though it be but a
partial criterion for valuing the conditions of the struggle, let us
remind the reader that, at the moment when the White Guards, in
company with their Anglo-French allies, shoot every Communist without
exception who falls into their hands, the Red Army spares all
prisoners without exception, including even officers of high rank.
"Fully grasping its historical task, filled with the heroic decision
to remain equal to that task," Marx wrote, "the working class may
reply with a smile of calm contempt to the vile abuse of the lackeys
of the Press and to the learned patronage of well-intentioned
bourgeois doctrinaires, who utter their ignorant stereotyped
common-places, their characteristic nonsense, with the profound tone of
oracles of scientific immaculateness."
If the well-intentioned bourgeois doctrinaires sometimes appear in the
guise of retired theoreticians of the Second International, this in no
way deprives their characteristic nonsense of the right of remaining
nonsense.
7