Page:Studies in socialism 1906.djvu/94

44 came when he had to break away. On the 15th of September, 1850, he resigned from the central committee of London. He insisted upon justifying this act of schism by a written declaration, inserted in the report of the committee, which ran as follows:

"The majority [i.e., his opponents] has substituted the dogmatic spirit for the critical, the idealistic interpretation of events for the materialistic. Simple will-power, instead of the true relations of things, has become the motive force of revolution. While we say to the working people: 'You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and wars between nations not only to change existing conditions but to change yourselves and make yourselves worthy of political power,' you, on the contrary, say, 'We ought to get power at once, or else give up the fight.' While we draw the attention of the German workman to the undeveloped state of the proletariat in Germany, you flatter the national spirit and the guild prejudices of the German artisans in the grossest manner, a method of procedure without doubt the more popular of the two. Just as the democrats made a sort of fetish of the words 'the people,' so you make one of the word 'proletariat.' Like them, you substitute revolutionary phrases for revolutionary evolution."

I repeat it: it is Marx who is speaking. Fifty years! the time that Marx gave the workmen, not indeed to install Communism, but to make