Page:Karl Kautsky - Frederick Engels - 1899.djvu/23

 bound by the contract signed by him to preserve the neutrality of the Black Sea.

If the conquerors and their friends viewed the revolution from above, the conquered naturally saw it from below. The Empire was swept away in France, and when the royalists, after the conclusion of peace attempted to betray the Republic, Paris arose in defense of its threatened freedom. The old drama of 1848 was repeated. The little bourgeois sent the proletariat into the fire in the hope that they might be frightened by their own comrades and their strength be weakened. But the proletariat of 1871 was not the proletariat of 1848–9. It had grown stronger and riper. The longer this struggle lasted in Paris the more were its burdens shifted from the little bourgeoisie to the proletariat, until the latter became the driving and supporting force of the revolutionary movement. The members of the "International" belonged to the definitely conscious and decisive portion of the Parisian proletariat. If they were not responsible for the uprising of the Commune, its guidance, at least in the economic direction, fell exclusively into their hands before the conflict had burnt itself out. The responsibility for the Commune was forced upon the "International," and so far from denying it they declared themselves solidly with the Parisian uprising. The "International," already long an object of fear and abhorrence for every "good-minded" person, was now, after the fall of the Commune, placed completely under the ban throughout all Europe. The influential English laborers quickly withdrew from it. England was not yet ready for socialism, and the English laborers were but the political hangers-on of the radical bourgeois. As the "International" had "compromised" itself by its connection with the Commune they withdrew from it. So there came a split in the "International" itself.

The socialists, prior to Marx and Engels, had no conception of the Class Struggle. This struggle naturally a political one. Its aim was the attainment of political power to be used in the interest of the laboring class. The socialists of that time, disgusted with the actions of all old parties, refused to place their Utopia into the struggle of the laboring class in opposition to the old society, and sought rather to bring it in behind the shoulders of that society and outside the sphere of its corrupt influence. They advocated abstinence from all political action, and every class struggle, in order, through isolated "Propaganda of the Deed" by certain advanced