Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/29



When the Commune of Paris was smothered in blood by the Versaillese; when the world bourgeoisie began an Indian dance of calumny around the fallen revolutionaries; when, under the influence of the campaign of slander, the worthy trade union leaders of England took fright and withdrew from the International Association—Karl Marx covered the mutilated bodies of the Communards with the flag of the International. Marx did this in spite of the fact that any expression of solidarity with the Commune threatened the young and weak First International with the greatest danger, and in spite of the circumstance that he was very skeptical of the wisdom of the Communist insurrecticn, as he saw more clearly than any other man its fatal weaknesses. He did not do it merely from a sentimental motive of solidarity with a rebellion in which thousands of proletarians with inspired enthusiasm. He did it because he, with a highly developed historical sense, saw through the chaos of the often tragi-comical errors and mistakes of the commune, through the mists of its confused ideas, through the ruins of its half-accomplished deeds, the outlines of a new era, to the building of which it had unknowingly contributed. Marx saw clearly that the beacon of the Commune demonstrated two important lessons to the proletariat. The first was that the proletariat cannot simply seize and operate the old State apparatus but must destroy it in order to create a new one; the second was that the new apparatus must differ fundamentally from bourgeois Parliamentarism with its separation of the province of law making from that of administration, and that both must be united in the workers associations of representatives which would carry out their own laws. These lessons of the