Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/30

Rh his office in the cabinet when the party organization recognizes that the latter gives evident proofs of partiality between labor and capital."

This addition was obviously intended by its author as a summons served by International Socialism upon Millerand to withdraw from the bourgeois cabinet ofFrance, in view of its infamous conduct towards the proletariat, as illustrated by the then recent massacres of unarmed strikers at Martinique and Chalon. But (probably because it was written in great haste) it wasmanifestly deficient, in that it left absolutely intact the spirit as well as the letter of the original motion, and unfortunately defective in that its last words, "partiality between capital and labor," are highly objectionable from the scientific standpoint of socialism. There can be no more partiality or impartiality between capital and labor—that is, to be absolutely correct, between the capitalist class and the laboring class—than between the robber and the robbed.

In conclusion of this criticism of the Kautsky resolution, which has been here forced upon us by Longuet's preface to Marx's international manifesto on the Paris Commune, we may now briefly consider that resolution in its relation to another act of the Paris Congress.

We have already noted the inconsistency of that body in declaring itself incompetent to decide upon a fundamental question of so-called tactics and in the same breath providing rules for the prosecution of such tactics. But this was by no means its only or most flagrant act of self-contradiction. On its first working day, its very first act was to decree the formation of an International Bureau, by unanimously and enthusiastically adopting a resolution from which we quote the following preamble and article 4: