Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/38



Herr Kautsky gives two examples for the benefit of German readers of the way in which democracy has influenced manners: the violent dictatorship of the Jacobins which was bound to end in defeat because it sought to realize its illusions by force, and was therefore bound to mislead and brutalize the proletariat; and against this dark picture he places the bright and moral democratic dictatorship of the Commune of 1871 which has found a warm place "in the hearts of all who long for the liberation of mankind, and not least because it was thoroughly imbued with the spirit of humanity which animated the working class of the nineteenth century." We have shown that Kautsky's presentation is a mere juggling trick. The Paris Commune of 1793 represented no proletarian dictatorship, but a bourgeois one; and it was not, "wrecked" on the impracticability of proletarian illusions, but fulfilled its great historical mission—the destruction of feudalism. The proletarian Commune of 1871, on the contrary, was wrecked after a two-months' existence by the confusion of its leaders who were full of illusions, and did not understand that the fight should have been carried beyond the walls of Paris. That which Kautsky calls the spirit of humanity was in reality the weakness of the leaders of the Commune, their irresolution in the face of an inexorable enemy. It was not the contrast between violence and democracy that was expressed in the Communes of 1793 and 1871 because the Commune of 1793 stood theoretically on the ground of democracy as much as the Commune of 1871, and the Commune of 1871 forgot democracy in practice as completely as that of 1793. The contrast lies in the strenuous fight of a class