....Democratic was the constitution of the Communist League; democratic was its fashion of welcoming and discussing each new teaching; democratic was its intervention in the revolution of 1848 and its participation in the rebellious resistance against the invasion of reaction; democratic finally was the very way in which the League was dissolved. In this first type of our present parties, in this first cell so to speak, of our complex organism, elastic and highly developed, there was not only the consciousness of the mission to be accomplished as precursor, but there was already the form and the method of association which alone are suitable for the first initiators of the proletarian revolution. It was no longer a sect; that form was already, in fact, outgrown. The immediate and fantastic domination of the individual was eliminated, what predominated was a discipline which had its source in the experience of necessity and in the precise doctrine which must proceed from the reflex consciousness of this necessity. It was the same with the International, which appeared authoritarian only to those who could not make their own authority prevail in it. It must be the same, and it is so, in the working class parties and where this character is not or cannot yet be marked, the proletarian agitation still elementary and confused simply engenders illusions and is only a pretext for intrigues, and when it is not so, then we have a passover where men of understanding touch elbows with the madman and the spy; as for example the society of The International Brothers which attached itself like a parasite to the International and discredited it; or again the co-operative which degenerates into a business and sells itself to capitalists; the labor party which remains outside politics and which studies the variations of the market to introduce its tactic of strikes into the sinuosities of competition; or again a group of malcontents, for the most part social outcasts and little bourgeois, who give themselves up to speculations on socialism considered as one of the phases of political fashion. Social democracy has met all these impedimenta upon its way and it has been obliged to relieve itself of them as it will have to do again from one time to another. The art of persuasion does not always suffice. Oftener it was necessary and it is necessary to resign ourselves and wait until the hard school of disillusion serves to instruct, which it does better than reasonings can do.
Posted on: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 13:45:13 +0000
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