Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/38

Rh Circumstances even, will not " transform” him, if they are such only that, by deceitfully professing a change of views and sentiments, he can best subserve his selfish interest. No sooner had socialism given ample evidence of its enormous power of expansion, than it became a most attractive field of exploitation to intellectual schemers and profit-seekers. In the wake of those undesirable accessions came others still more dangerous and in greater number; men belonging, body and soul, to the doomed middle class, ignorantly seeking relief from the pressure of capitalist concentration in "reforms" of a so-called "socialist kind," and "therefore" calling themselves "socialists." From that moment the apparent growth of the socialist movement was abnormal, and its real spirit was correspondingly impaired. "It lost in depth what it gained in surface." Or, to tell the full truth, a detached body of the bourgeoisie, finding the proletarian citadel closed to compromission, had treacherously stolen into it in socialist garb and under the socialist banner.

It may well be conceived that many of the veterans viewed with intense disgust this turn of affairs. But, even in Germany, where Bernstein's recent somersault from Marxism into Middle-classism had raised their indignation to a very high pitch, courage was obviously wanting to take vigorous action against the unsound fraction of the party. Marx was dead; Engels was dead; Liebknecht was dying. The vague formulas, "Socialist Unity," "Freedom of Opinion," etc., which the logomachists of the "new method" used with apparent magical effect upon the unwary rank and file, seemed to paralyze the surviving leaders of the Marxian epoch. Most of these could not contemplate with equanimity the possible decrease of the "socialist vote" that might result from