our whole national economy like the postal system, but in such a way that the technical experts, inspectors, clerks, and indeed, all persons employed, should receive no higher wage than the workingman, and the whole under the management of the armed proletariat—this is our immediate aim. This is the kind of State and economic basis we need. This is what will produce the destruction of Parliamentarism while retaining representative institutions. This is what will free the laboring classes from the prostitution of these institutions by the capitalist class.
4. The Organization of the Unity of the Nation.
"In the short sketch of national organization which the Commune had had no time to develop, it was stated quite clearly that the Commune was to become … the political form of even the smallest village. … From these Communes would be elected the 'National' Delegation at Paris. …
"The few but very important functions which would still remain for a Central Government, were not to be abolished—such a statement was a deliberate falsehood—but were to be discharged by Communal, that is, strictly responsible agents. …"
"The problem consisted in this: Whilst amputating the purely repressive organs of the old Government power, to wrest its legitimate functions from an authority which claims to be above Society, and to hand them over to the responsible servants of Society."
To what extent the Opportunists of contemporary Social-Democracy have failed to understand—or perhaps it would be more true to say, did not want to understand—these words of Marx, is best shown by the book, as famous or infamous as the work of Herostratus, of the renegade Bernstein—The Fundamentals of Socialism and the Problems of Social Democracy. It is just in connection with the above passage from Marx that Bernstein wrote saying that this program "in its political content displays, in all its essential features, the greatest similarity to the Federalism of Proudhon. … In spite of all the other points of difference between Marx and the 'petty shopkeeper' Proudhon (Bernstein places the words "petty shopkeeper" in inverted commas in order to make them sound ironical), on these points their currents of thought resemble one another as closely as could be." Of course, Bernstein continues, the importance of the municipalities is growing, but "it seems to me doubtful whether the first task of the democracy would be such a dissolution (Auflösung) of
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