State
and Revolution, Part 6a
Louis
Bonaparte as a bat, balancing Thiers and the Republic
The Civil War in France
In “The State and Revolution”
Lenin goes through (some of) the Marxist classics. He devoted a full chapter to
the Paris Commune, basing it on Marx’s classic book “The Civil War in France”.
A downloadable file of Chapter 5 of Marx’s book is attached,
and linked below.
Early on in this “Paris Commune”
chapter, Lenin refers to the Communist Manifesto, pointing out that it was
modified by Marx and Engels after 1871. This is what Lenin says, while quoting
them:
‘The last
preface to the new German edition of the Communist Manifesto signed by both its
authors is dated June 24, 1872. In this preface the authors, Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, say that the programme of the Communist Manifesto "has
in some details become out-of-date", and they go on to say:
‘"... One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that
'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and
wield it for its own purposes'...."[1]
‘The
authors took the words that are in single quotation marks in this passage from
Marx's book, The Civil War in France.’
Lenin goes on:
‘Marx's idea is that the working class must break up, smash
the "ready-made state machinery", and not confine itself merely to
laying hold of it.
‘On April 12, 1871, i.e., just at the time of the Commune,
Marx wrote to Kugelmann:
‘"If you look up the last chapter of my
Eighteenth Brumaire, you will find that I declare that the next attempt of the
French Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military
machine from one hand to another, but to smash it [Marx's italics--the original is zerbrechen], and this is the precondition for every real people's revolution on
the Continent. And this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris are
attempting."’
Lenin proceeds:
‘Today, [in 1917] in Britain and
America, too, "the precondition for every real people's revolution"
is the smashing, the destruction of the "ready-made state machinery”…
‘Secondly, particular attention
should be paid to Marx's extremely profound remark that the destruction of the
bureaucratic-military state machine is "the precondition for every real
people's revolution". This idea of a "people's revolution” seems
strange coming from Marx, so that the Russian Plekhanovites and Mensheviks,
those followers of Struve who wish to be regarded as Marxists, might possibly
declare such an expression to be a "slip of the pen" on Marx's part.
They have reduced Marxism to such a state of wretchedly liberal distortion that
nothing exists for them beyond the antithesis between bourgeois revolution and
proletarian revolution, and even this antithesis they interpret in an utterly
lifeless way.
‘If we take the revolutions of the
20th century as examples we shall, of course, have to admit that the Portuguese
and the Turkish revolutions are both bourgeois revolutions. Neither of them,
however, is a "people's" revolution, since in neither does the mass
of the people, their vast majority, come out actively, independently, with
their own economic and political demands to any noticeable degree. By contrast,
although the Russian bourgeois revolution of 1905-07 displayed no such
"brilliant" successes as at the time fell to the Portuguese and
Turkish revolutions, it was undoubtedly a "real people's" revolution,
since the mass of the people, their majority, the very lowest social groups,
crushed by oppression and exploitation, rose independently and stamped on the
entire course of the revolution the imprint of their own demands, their attempt
to build in their own way a new society in place of the old society that was
being destroyed.
‘In Europe, in 1871, the proletariat
did not constitute the majority of the people in any country on the Continent.
A "people's" revolution, one actually sweeping the majority into its
stream, could be such only if it embraced both the proletariat and the
peasants. These two classes then constituted the "people". These two
classes are united by the fact that the "bureaucratic-military state
machine" oppresses, crushes, exploits them. To smash this machine, to
break it up, is truly in the interest of the "people", of their
majority, of the workers and most of the peasants, is "the
precondition" for a free alliance of the poor peasant and the
proletarians, whereas without such an alliance democracy is unstable and
socialist transformation is impossible.’
The lessons
of the Paris Commune are many. Here are some of Marx’s own words from our
chosen chapter:
“…no sooner do the working men anywhere take
the subject [emancipation of labour] into their own hands with a will, than
uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces of present
society with its two poles of capital and wages-slavery (the landlord now is
but the sleeping partner of the capitalist), as if the capitalist society was
still in its purest state of virgin innocence, with its antagonisms still
undeveloped, with its delusions still unexploded, with its prostitute realities
not yet laid bare. The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the
basis of all civilization!
“Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to
abolish that class property which makes the labour of the many the wealth of
the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make
individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and
capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labour, into mere
instruments of free and associated labour. But this is communism,
"impossible" communism! Why, those member of the ruling classes who
are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present
system — and they are many — have become the obtrusive and full-mouthed
apostles of co-operative production. If co-operative production is not to
remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if
united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon common
plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the
constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of
capitalist production — what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism,
"possible" communism?”
Factual note:
What had happened in France was that Louis Bonaparte, the nobody, the returned
exile, who juggled the classes and deceived them all, had made himself an
“Emperor”. But he ran out of options after two decades in power. He decided to
make a foolish war on the Germans (Prussians), who beat the French and advanced
to Versailles, outside Paris. The French government then abandoned Paris like
cowards; hence the formation of the self-governing Paris Commune. In
Versailles, a suburb of royal palaces, the Germans for the first time agreed to
form a single German nation, while at the same time licensing and assisting the
treacherous French bourgeoisie to destroy their own compatriots in Paris.
- The above is to introduce the
original reading-text: The
Civil War in France, Chapter 5, The Paris Commune, 1871, Karl Marx.
