Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/34

27 fact that the Commune could form merely an historical episode. The Franco-German war ended the epoch of bourgeois revolutions, and introduced the era of "peaceful" development of the consolidated capitalist States of Western and Central Europe. Not only was the working class a minority of the population, but industry was neither centralized nor concentrated. The economic backwardness of Capitalism corresponded to the intellectual backwardness of the proletariat, who although Socialist in sentiment, could not show a large number of men in any single country who knew how Socialist freedom was to be attained. The foremost section of the proletariat was split in two parts. One of these sought to emancipate itself socially by peaceful organization without the knowledge of capitalist society; the other hoped, by the conquest of political power, to reach the same goal without having any concrete plan for attaining it. When, on the 18th of March, Paris rose against the Government, it had no far-reaching aims. The workers defended their guns in the correct belief that Thiers wanted to steal them in order to disarm Paris, the Citadel of the Republic, and to open the gates to Social and Political reaction. The Government fled. The proletarians and petit-bourgeoisie of Paris rejoiced, in common with all other parties, that they were at liberty to elect their Commune, without even suspecting that the flight of the Government meant the announcement of the fact that the life-and-death struggle had begun. They could have laid Versailles in ruins but did not do so because they had no goal to aspire to beyond Paris. They wished to so arrange matters that the poor would be released from the burden of rents and mortgages, and they hoped that the provinces would follow the noble example of Paris. They did not even inaugurate an agitation in the provinces. When the siege by the Versaillese began they could not arrive at a common policy because they had no common aim. On the social field it was not only the want of time (the Commune lasted only 72 days) which prevented them from forming a far-seeing constructive policy for the transition from Capitalism to Socialism, and