Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/22

Rh It is upon the opening paragraph of this first part that the French Ministerialists, through their mouthpiece Longuet, rest their claim of "corroboration." It is, indeed, as we shall see, the only passage in the whole resolution that may be said to bear a certain relation to Marx's words quoted by Longuet. But, to use a favorite expression of Marx, it is the relation of a "parody" to the original play.

Supposing it was Kautsky's intention to thus "corroborate" his great master in economics, the latter might have turned from Longuet to him and asked: "Where did you see in any of my writings that I made the conquest of the political power by the proletariat—in other words, the Social Revolution—dependent upon the physical and moral regeneration' of the workers? Is not the proletariat to-day strong enough, physically, to drive from power the degenerates who exploit it? Is it not, indeed, by its own strong arms that all the battles of those degenerates are fought, even against its own flesh and blood? What proportion of the total amount of human muscle and endurance, wasted in war or spent in industry, comes from the other classes? Again, is not the proletariat moral enough for all the immediate purposes of the Social Revolution, through which alone it can enter an era of higher morality and physical improvement? As a body is it not, in fact, the most moral of the classes into which the exploitation of the industrious by the idle-fundamental immorality, source of nearly all forms of private and public degradation—has divided the human race? Look at the proletarians of '71, or at those of '48, or at any of those who, in various countries and at different times before and since, suffered martyrdom in the cause of social justice; did they fail because they were physical wrecks and moral deformities?"