Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/28

Rh can never and nowhere "be considered as the beginning of the conquest of the political power," but we are told also that in countries where such an event occurs it may be considered as an expédient forcé, of a temporary and exceptional character, like the circumstances which may necessitate it.

The back-door is now wide open. Circumstances are not the same at all times and in all countries. Manifestly, then, "whether in a particular case the political situation necessitates this dangerous experiment, is a question of (particular, local) tactics, and not of (general, universal) principle." And thereupon the Congress declares itself incompetent, impotent. Non possumus. The question is dodged. The act of cowardice is consummated.

But the question will not down. It still faces the Congress, reproachfully:—"What are you here for, with all your past declarations of international solidarity? You have settled nothing. You have, in fact, done terribly worse than nothing; you have actually laid the foundation of universal strife between the clear-minded, class-conscious, bona fide socialists, and the honest but unwary fraction of the proletariat, which ambitious arrivistes may now, to their heart's content, delude with false promises of improvement at the hands of bourgeois governments." Whereupon the Congress—that same Congress which the previous instant declined to legislate on a fundamental question of so-called "tactics," even though it involved a still more fundamental question of principle—undertakes to redeem itself by providing tactical checks and other tactical rules to be observed in the hazardous operation of making a "socialist" into a bourgeois minister.

As it always happens in cases of flagrant inconsistency, the Congress succeeded only in adding to the pile of its