Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/23

xvi To these questions the answer is obvious. Manifestly, it is neither physical strength nor moral sense that is now wanting in the proletariat. And precisely because the natural tendency of capitalism is to stunt and demoralize a constantly growing number of wage-workers; precisely because, with its development, a condition must ultimately prevail that will be the very reverse of that improvement which in the Kautsky savante consultation is absurdly considered as a not only possible but essential preliminary to the Social Revolution; it becomes more and more imperative to hasten the day when the proletariat can victoriously and securely proclaim itself forever the absolute master of its own destinies.

How to accomplish this is the very problem which Marx has solved. He solved it theoretically by his masterly analysis of the class struggle, and practically by the synthesis of it which he carried out as far as he could with the undeveloped elements then within his reach. In the Workingmen's International Association, which he founded; in its principles, which he formulated; in its work, which he superintended; and in its ultimate result, which is the class-conscious, uncompromising and only bona fide socialism of the present day, we have that synthesis so far as the revolutionary process has now gone, but with all the elements required for its completion, together with the plainest rules for the increase of their power and the elimination of retarding factors.

Those elements, already powerful, but as yet insufficiently so to bring about the Social Revolution, are: