Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/21

xiv the advance made since then by the economic forces of society and the transforming idea?"

Perchance, however, Marx might have indignantly repudiated such "corroboration" of his views. He might have said, in substance: "Go to, scheming logomachists! Away with your Kautsky resolution! Even that—bad as it is and contemptible economically and politically—can be no cloak at all for your treachery to the proletariat. For, while it displays extraordinary cowardice in not reprobating unconditionally and forbidding instantly, in the name of international solidarity, your ministerial "tactics" and so-called "new method," it at least disapproves of them in language sufficiently suggestive, despite its incongruities, to cause their immediate abandonment by any one of you that may still honestly claim to be a socialist; that is, by every man who, temporarily waylaid in your ministerialist ranks, is of other sort than the bourgeois politician, unscrupulous arriviste, speculating in socialism."

For analytical purposes this document may be divided into three parts, which we shall briefly consider here seriatim, omitting criticisms which, ever so important in themselves, are relatively of a second order.

The first part (literally translated, like the others, from the French text) reads as follows: