A CENTURY'S BALANCE SHEET
Now this is a point that the commentators have never failed
to emphasize; for most of them the Manifesto has in it all the
certitude of natural science. Its fundamental hypothesis-that the
proletariat can and must take the fate of society into its hands, snatch
it from the catastrophe into which the bourgeoisie is leading it, and
guide it toward communism--seems to them as solidly based, or
nearly so, as the laws of motion governing the heavenly bodies.
Without pausing to examine just what the modem physicist considers
as truth in this domain, it is enough to observe that Neptune still
follows the orbit marked out for it by Leverrier, whereas, unhappily,
the course of the proletariat has, for more than a third of a century,
been increasingly erratic. So much so that it is impossible today to
shrug off the necessity of a systematic scrutiny of Marx's fundamental
hypothesis.
The proletariat
is
no longer what it was in 1848 : a new star
just emerging into sight over the horizon. For a hundred years now,
its course has shown what
it
is capable of, but also, unfortunately,
what it has been unable to accomplish.
It has shown itself capable of outbursts of heroism, during which
it sacrifices itself without a thought, and develops a power so strong
as to shake society to its very foundations. It can rid itself in an
instant of the most inveterate prejudices, while there seems to be no
limit to its audacity. But by and by, whatever the consequences of
its action, whether victory or defeat, it is finally caught up in the
sluggish, quotidian flow of things.
·
The fetid backwaters of the past seep back; the proletariat
sinks into indolence and cynicism. And even in its triumphant mo–
ments, it exhibits a want of consciousness in the choice of its leaders.
The "instinctive sense of reality" attributed to it by Auguste Comte,
which it so readily reflects in many a circumstance, abandons it at
such moments. Its courage and self-sacrifice are not enough to give
it what, precisely, is needed in order to act out the role assigned to
it by Marx: political capacity. What the proletariat is incapable of
achieving is a leadership which will be faithful to its interests, will
understand and defend them boldly, imaginatively, and tenaciously.
Such
is
the task which, for these last one hundred years, it has proved
itself incapable of carrying out.
The crisis of our age is in a sense, then, that of the leadership
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