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out-of-date", and they go on to say: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, and 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.
