Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/30

23 were, 1n the opinion of Marx and Engels, of the greatest importance because they showed to them the essential nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Everything else in the Commune was for them a particular or transient circumstance; that was the general and permanent: it was that which stamped the Commune of 1871, with all its defects, as a mighty step forward, although its immediate results were nothing but ruins and meant the setting back of the French worker's movement for fifty years. Kautsky and Bernstein, upon whom devolved the task of continuing the work of Marx, did not understand that they would have to begin with these lessons. Splashing around in the waters of the opening Parliamentary epoch, or grubbing for worms in the sands, they did not grasp these lessons and withheld them from the knowledge of the proletariat. We see how, today, in the face of the Russian and German revolutions, Karl Kautsky knew to begin with the lessons of the Commune.

He devotes forty pages to this task. In these forty pages he seeks to represent it as an instance of a model dictatorship which he is prepared to accept. The Paris Commune finds favor in his eyes. It was elected on the basis of universal suffrage and therefore does not transgress the sacred laws of democracy. Herr Kautsky is triumphant. "And yet Friedrich Engels wrote on 18th March, 1891, on the twentieth anniversary of the Paris Commune: 'Gentlemen, do you want to know what the dictatorship of the proletariat is like? Then look at the Paris Commune! That was the dictatorship of the proletariat!' It can be seen, therefore, that by dictatorship Marx and Engels by no means meant the abolition of equal universal suffrage, or of democracy in general." Hail to thee, laurel-crowned victor! Karl Kautsky triumphs. In another place he cites my remarks from the introduction to Bucharin's pamphlet on the program where I infer that, considered in the abstract, the bourgeoisie can be left in possession of the franchise, even under the dictatorship of the proletariat. "But the revolution consists in this, that it is a civil war, in which classes, which fight with cannons and