6
Marx and … Kautsky.
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 Jaurès—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 Poincaré-Clémenceau, 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.