State and Revolution, Part 6
The
Paris Commune, 1871
The main text (attached) is
the third part of Lenin’s “Generic Course” on The State and Revolution. It is
devoted to the Paris Commune [pictured in the photograph, above, and
memorialised in Soviet artwork, below] and to the lessons that Karl Marx in
particular drew from that experience.
Marx’s work “The Civil War in France”
was written during, and immediately after, the events of early 1871
in Paris. Lenin’s summary of Marx, as usual, is brief but misses very
little. Lenin’s summary itself has its highlights and these are what we will
note here.
The first is where Lenin
notes that Marx would have made a correction to the Communist Manifesto of
1848 on the basis of the experience of the Paris Commune. In 1871 Marx
wrote: “…the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made
state machinery and wield it for its own purposes” – by which he meant
that proletariat had to "to smash the bureaucratic-military
machine" and to replace it with a state that is "the
proletariat organized as the ruling class" and as an "armed
people" that had disbanded the bourgeoisie's "special bodies of armed men".
Lenin wrote:
“Marx did not indulge in utopias; he expected the
experience of the mass movement to provide the reply to the question as to the
specific forms this organisation of the proletariat as the ruling class would
assume and as to the exact manner in which this organisation would be combined
with the most complete, most consistent ‘winning of the battle of
democracy.’"
The Commune was “a
practical step that was more important than hundreds of programmes and
arguments.”
Lenin proceeds in the second and third sections of this chapter to
relate how the practical steps were executed.
In the fourth part, Lenin
addresses the question of centralism and clearly shows that centralism is not
imposed but must be won politically, as a matter of free-willing action. All
the time, Lenin is carrying on a secondary argument against the “opportunists”
and the “anarchists, whom he says are “twin brothers.” Lenin writes:
“The anarchists dismissed the question of political
forms altogether. The opportunists of present-day Social-Democracy accepted the
bourgeois political forms of the parliamentary democratic state as the limit
which should not be overstepped; they battered their foreheads praying before
this 'model', and denounced as anarchism every desire to break these forms.”
“…now one has to engage in excavations, as it were, in
order to bring undistorted Marxism to the knowledge of the mass of the people,” says Lenin.
As it was in 1917, so it
remains in 2015: One has to engage in excavations.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: State and
Revolution, Chapter 3, The Paris Commune, Lenin.
