Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/27

xx confusion; it threatens to weaken instead of fortifying it, and to hinder instead of promoting the conquest of the public powers."

It is in that second part, and especially in the second paragraph of it, that lies the "Act of Cowardice."

There was before the International Congress an issue of fundamental importance, involving as it did the attitude of the militant proletariat towards the bourgeoisie throughout the world. It was a burning issue. Upon its immediate and definite settlement depended the harmonious working, nationally and internationally, of the socialist forces. The concrete form which it had already assumed in France was at that very moment "threatening disorganization and confusion" in the great movement of that country, while in other parts certain tendencies, ominous of similar evils, were boldly emerging from a long dormant state. Yet, precisely because of its obvious magnitude, of its far-reaching import, of its extreme urgency, and of the concrete forcefulness with which it presented itself in France, the Congress took fright, and, instead of facing it squarely, ran away from it, circuitously, by the Kautsky diplomatic back-door.

Can a militant socialist accept office from a bourgeois government? Such was the plain question. A plain Yes or No was the direct answer, the only answer, which it called for.

But the reply of the Congress was neither of those two briefest yet plainest of words. By an artifice of language which a Metternich would not have disavowed, this simplest of questions was turned into a complex problem, a tangle, in fact an impossibility. Observe the process.

First of all, its general importance is dwarfed by localizing it. To be sure, we are told that "the entrance of an isolated socialist in a bourgeois government"