Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/25

xviii point where the proletariat will remain deaf to the frantic appeals and deceitful promises of the small labor exploiters who now compose the moribund middle-class; a point, in short, where its accumulated experience will have crystallized into a logical, inexorable rule of conduct.

In the meantime the class-conscious fraction of the proletariat, ever growing in numbers and knowledge, will, indeed, "conquer municipalities." It will also increase its representation in those legislative assemblies that are directly elected by the people, without as yet "conquering" them, however, since the "conquest" of such bodies implies that a majority of the people are ready for the Social Revolution, imperatively demand it, and would therefore proclaim it themselves if their representatives proved so recreant to their plain duty as to delay action.

But in what spirit and for what purpose will those municipalities be conquered and those legislative seats be carried? In a "Christian-Socialist" spirit? To slowly, "painfully," one step at a time, accomplish the "physical and moral regeneration of the working class"? And with this far-away end in view—thoroughly utopian, after all, as we have previously seen—to lengthen the agony of the proletariat by compromises with the small middle class, calculated to retard the progress of capitalist concentration? May we here ask also, by the way, where is that "modern democratic State" in which the municipalities are not subject to the higher legislative and executive powers that are now and will remain till Revolution Day controlled by the capitalist class; or in which the legislative branch directly elected by the people cannot be checked at every step by a senate or suchlike contrivance for the perpetuation of class rule?