'La sola 'guerra giusta' nella storia: la lotta degli schiavi contro i loro oppressori'

“The Philistines of democracy are indignant at the inequality in representation of the workers and peasant which, in the Soviet Constitution, reflects the difference in the revolutionary roles of the town and the country. Marx writes: “The Commune desired to bring the rural producers under the intellectual leadership of the central towns of their districts, and there to secure to them, in the workmen of the towns, the natural guardians of their interests”. The question was not one of making the peasant equal to the worker on paper, but of spiritually raising the peasant to the level of the worker. All questions of the proletarian state Marx decides according to the revolutionary dynamics of living forces, and not according to the play of shadows upon the marketplace screen of parliamentarism. In order to reach the last confines of mental collapse. Kautsky denies the universal authority of the Workers’ Councils on the ground that there is no legal boundary between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. In the indeterminate nature of the social divisions Kautsky sees the source of the arbitrary authority of the Soviet dictatorship. Marx sees directly the contrary: “The Commune was an extremely elastic form of the state, while all former forms of government had suffered from narrowness. Its secret consists in this, that in its very essence it was the government of the working class, the result of the struggle between the class of producers and the class of appropriators, the political form, long sought, under which there could be accomplished the economic emancipation of labor”. The secret of the Commune consisted in the fact that by its very essence it was a government of the working class. This secret, explained by Marx, has remained, for Kautsky, even to this day, a mystery sealed with seven seals. The Pharisees of democracy speak with indignation of the repressive measures of the Soviet government, of the closing of newspapers, of arrests and shooting. Marx replies to “the vile abuse of the lackeys of the Press” and to the reproaches of the “well-intentioned bourgeois doctrinaires”, in connection with the repressive measures of the Commune in the following words: “Not satisfied with their open waging of a most bloodthirsty war against Paris, the Versaillese strove secretly to gain an entry by corruption and conspiracy. Could the Commune at such a time ‘without shamefully betraying its trust’, have observed the customary forms of liberalism, just as if profound peace reigned around it? Had the government of the Commune been akin in spirit to that of Thiers, there would have been no more occasion to suppress newspapers of the party of order in Paris than there was to suppress newspapers of the Commune at Versailles”. In this way, what Kautsky demands in the name of the sacred foundations of democracy Marx brands as a shameful betrayal of trust. Concerning the destruction of which the Commune is accused, and of which now the Soviet government is accused, Marx speaks as of “an inevitable comparatively insignificant episode in the titanic struggle of the newborn order with the old in its collapse”. Destruction and cruelty are inevitable in any war. Only sycophants can consider them a crime “in the war of the slaves against their oppressors, ‘the only just war in history'” (Marx)” [Leon Trotsky, ‘On the Paris Commune. Thirty-five years after: 1871-1906 – The Paris Commune – The Paris Commune and Soviet Russia – Marx and …Kautsky – Lessons of the Paris Commune’, New York, 1970]