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 of the expropriators," or at least by the preliminary steps towards it, that is, by the passage from capitalist private ownership of the means of production to social ownership.

"The Commune [wrote Marx] realized that ideal of all bourgeois revolutions, cheap Government, by eliminating the two largest items of expenditure—the army and the bureaucracy."

From the peasantry, as from other sections of the lower middle class, only an insignificant minority "rise to the top," and "enter society," make a career in a bourgeois sense, that is, become transformed either into propertied members of the upper middle class, or into secure and privileged officials. The great majority of peasants in all capitalist countries where the peasant class does exist (and the majority of capitalist countries are of this kind), are oppressed by the Government and long for its overthrow, in the hope of a "cheap" Government. This hope can only be realized by the proletariat; and by the fact of realizing it, the proletariat makes a step forward at the same time towards the Socialist reconstruction of the State.

"The Commune [wrote Marx] was to have been not a parliamentary but a working corporation, legislative and executive at one and the same time. Instead of deciding, once in three years, which member of the ruling class was to 'represent' and repress the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, organized in communes, as a means of securing the necessary workers, controllers, clerks and so forth for its business in the same way as individual suffrage serves any individual employer in his."

This remarkable criticism of parliamentarism in 1871 is also one of those of Marx's dicta which have been conveniently "forgotten"—thanks to the prevalence of Socialist chauvinism and Opportunism. Ministers and professional politicians, "practical" Socialists and traitors of the proletariat of to-day have left all criticism of parliamentarism to the Anarchists, and, on this wonderfully intelligent ground, denounce all criticism of parliamentarism as "Anarchism." It is indeed not surprising that the proletariat of the most "advanced" parliamentary countries, being disgusted with such "Socialists" as Messrs. Scheidemann, David, Legien, Sembat, Renaudel, Henderson, Vandervelde, Stauning, Branting, Bissolati & Co., have been giving their sympathies