Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/35

28 not only the necessity for defence. As the transition to Socialism was impossible on account of the scattered and small scale character of the industries of Paris, the Socialism of the Commune exhausted itself in measures of social reform and generally in plans for the relief of the poor. When Kautsky declares that the "Marxian method of Socialization, which closely resembled that of the Commune, is still our method to-day," it is well to remember that if the learned Marxian prophet's ideas were clearer he would not say wherein the Marxian method of socialization consists if he had not in mind the Marxian measures for the transition period which were proposed in 1848 and which fit the policy of the Commune and the year 1919 as well as the spurious word "socialization" fits the problems of the Socialist revolution. There is one Marxian method of Socialism—that is, Marxism. Marx did not draw up recipes for concrete economic measures for all phases of the social revolution. Kautsky's admiration for the "socialization methods" of the Commune is veneration for nothing whatever in which "socialization" consists, at which Herr Kautsky, at the behest of Ebert and Scheidemann, together with his learned young man Hilferding, labored so laboriously till he discovered that his efforts were so much waste paper. Kautsky has discovered three virtues in the Commune: first, the Communards hanged no counter-revolutionaries whom they did not catch; second, they socialized nothing; and third, they were tolerant, as they did not suppress one proletarian section after another as the wicked Bolsheviks did. The tender hearted old greybeard, with his tongue in his cheek, omits to mention one thing: Proudhonists, Blanquists and Internationalists fought one another bitterly during the period of the Commune, although their views, as we now see clearly, merely constituted different aspects of the same confusion. All of them, however, bled for the Commune, for the domination of the proletariat. When, in the last days of the Commune, Vermorel, a member of the Minority of the Cummune, was transporting a wagon of munitions, he met Ferré, a representative of the Majority, before