THE PARIS COMMUNE
AND MARX’S
CONCEPTION OF THE DICTATORSHIP OF
THE PROLETARIAT
- Monty Johnstone
[Published in 'CLASS STRUGGLE' Organ of CPI(ML) Central Committee]
The Paris Commune
occupies a central position in Karl Marx’s political thought.
Already in his first draft of his Address
on the Civil war in France, started in the middle of April 1871, he
described it as “the initiation of the social revolution of the
nineteenth century” which, whatever its fate in Paris, would “make
le tour de monde.” It represented for him the first experience of
the working class holding political power, albeit extremely briefly
and under exceptional circumstances in one city.
Since he had refused
always on principle to follow his Utopian predecessors in “playing
with fantastic pictures
of the future structure of society,” the Commune provided Marx with
the only opportunity in his own lifetime to discuss in any detail the
characteristics of the transition period that he believed lay between
capitalism and a classless society. Above all, a study of Marx’s
writings on the Commune is essential for an understanding of that
period of his thought that has for a century aroused more bitter
controversy than any other; his conception of the dictatorship of the
proletariat and its relationship to democracy. This article limits
itself to considering this one aspect of Marx’s connection with the
Commune.
CONCEPT OF WORKING
CLASS HEGEMONY
From the autumn of
1870 Marx and Engels had opposed on tactical grounds any attempt at a rising in the French
capital. However, as soon as they saw sparked by Thiers’ attempt to
seize the artillery of the
National Guard, they declared their support wig Kugelmann in Hanover
on 12 April 1871, Marx expressed
his admiration for the “elasticity, historical initiative and
capacity for sacrifice” or the Paris revolutionaries. The Commune,
he wrote, was “the most glorious deed of our party since the June
insurrection in Paris” in 1848. The term ‘Party’ is used here
in the “great historical sense,” in which he had spoken in his
letter to Freiligrath of 29 February 1860, to denote the movement of
the workers as an independent class, as an expression of which he was
now forcefully identifying the Commune. In another letter to
Kugelmann, on 17 April 1871, Marx was even more enthusiastic. “The
struggle of the working class against the capitalist class and its
state has entered upon a new phase with the struggle in Paris,” he
wrote “Whatever the immediate results may be”—and already on 6
April in a letter Liebknecht he had expressed himself very
pessimistically on these —”a new point of departure of world
historic importance has been gained.”
It does not fall
within the scope of this article to consider whether or not Marx was
right in his view: of the proletarian
character of the Commune. What it is my intention to establish—for
his this also in dispute—is that this was indeed his view not only
as expressed in his famous Address on the Civil War in France, issued
in its final form just after the crushing of the Commune, but also on
all other occasions. Dr Shlomo Avineri S assertion that “the
various drafts of the Civil War in France offer clear evidence that
Marx considered the Commune not a working class affair, out a
petty-bourgeois, democratic-radical emeute,” does not stand
examination. Marx’s drafts in fact emphasize again and again his
only view that “the red flag, hoisted by the Paris Commune, crowns
in reality only the government of workmen for Paris!” and that
“the workmen’s revolution” he delivered, “the true elements
of the middle classes... from their sham representatives.”
In this last quoted
statement is expressed the essence of Marx’s concept of proletarian
hegemony, which occupies an
important place in his theory of socialist revolution. “For the
first time in history,” he wrote, “the party and moyenne middle
class has openly rallied round the workman’s revolution, and
proclaimed it as the only means of their own salvation and that of
France! It forms with them the bulk of the National Guard, it sits
with them in the Commune, it mediates for them in the Union
Republicaine.” Only the working class could rescue them from
financial ruin, as well as converting “science from an instrument
of class rule into a popular force” and “the men of science”
(i.e. the intellectuals) “into free agents of thought”. Indeed,
the “principle measures” that the Commune had taken after its
establishment were “for the salvation of the middle class—the
debtor class of Paris against the Creditor class!”. A five page
section of Marx’s first draft is devoted specifically to the
peasantry. The main lines of its argument are incorporated in the
final Address, which represents the Commune’s victory as the
peasants’ only hope of freedom from debt. A Communal Constitution
for all France would bring “the rural producers under the
intellectuals lead of the central towns of their districts, and there
secure to them, in the working men, the natural trustees of their
interests.”
The concept of
working class political power did not therefore presupposes the
necessity of the proletariat as the
majority of the population. Writing three years after the Commune
Marx explained:
“Where the peasant
exists on a mass scale as a private property owner, where he
constitutes a more or less substantial majority, as in all the states
of the western European continent... the following occurs: either he
prevents, wrecks every worker’s revolution, as he has done up till
now in France; or the proletariat (for the peasant proprietor does
not belong to the proletariat and even where, according to his
position, he does) must as a government take measures through which
the peasant finds his position directly improved and which thus win
him for the revolution.”
Such a working class
government would be based on an alliance with other classes which
accepted proletarian leadership and gave it majority support in the
country. Despite efforts to do so, which were made neither
consistently nor early enough, the Paris workers did not succeed in
persuading the peasant majority in the French provinces that it was
the champion of their true interests. In the capital itself, however,
Marx saw “the working class... openly acknowledged as the only
class capable of social initiative, even by the great bulk of the
Paris middle class—shopkeepers, tradesmen,merchants— the wealthy
capitalists alone excepted”. With such a conception of hegemony in
mind, he went on to declare: “If the Commune was the true
representative of all the healthy elements of French society, and
therefore the truly national government, it was at the same time, as
a working men’s government, as the bold champion of the
emancipation of labour, emphatically international. There was for him
no contradiction whatsoever in speaking of a “workmen’s
revolution” as a “people’s revolution” and the working men’s
government” that it established as “a government of the people by
the people”.)
THE DICTATORSHIP OF
THE PROLETARIAT
Marx did not
actually use the words “dictatorship of the proletariat” to
describe the Paris Commune. It was a term that
he used synonymously with such expressions as “the rule of the
proletariat” or “political power
held by the working class”, which occur much more frequently in his
works. One would hardly expect him to use such a phrase in his one
work on the commune, the Address on the Civil War in France, since
this was not written in his own name but on behalf of the General
Council of the First International with its British trade union
members, to whom it would have been unfamiliar and potentially
alarming. If, however, we compare the way in which he characterizes
the Commune with his description elsewhere of the function of the
dictatorship of the proletariat, the identity becomes apparent.
Engels noted in
1872-73 that “the views of German scientific socialism on the
necessity of political action by the
proletariat and its dictatorship as the transition to the abolition
of classes and with them of the state... had already been expressed
in The Communist Manifesto and since then on innumerable occasions”.
In 1848, in the Manifesto, the conception of the dictatorship of the
proletariat (though not yet the term, which is first found in Marx in
1850 is put forward as follows: “The first step in the revolution
by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of
ruling class, to win the battle of democracy. The Proletariat will
use its supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the
bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands
of the State, i.e. of the proletariat organized as the ruling class”.
In 1852, writing to J. Weydemeyer, he emphasized as something new in
his theory, his belief that “the class struggle necessarily leads
to the dictatorship of the proletariat” and that “this
dictatorship constitutes the transaction to the abolition of all
classes and to a classless society”. There is no record of Marx
using the term again till 1871, four months after the end of the
Commune. Then, at a dinner attended largely by Communard refugees,
after referring to the Commune, he noted that, before it would be
possible to eliminate the basis of class rule, “a proletarian
dictatorship would become necessary”. His best known formulation of
this idea in this period was made in 1875 in this Critique of the
Gotha Programme, where he wrote: “Between capitalist and communist
society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the
one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political
transition period in which the state can be nothing but the
revolutionary dictatorship of
the proletariat”.
All these quotations
make it clear that for Marx the dictatorship of the proletariat did
not denote a classless society
with a fully socialist economy. It was to be a prolonged transitional
phase, in which political power had
passed to the workers, who would use it to destroy the economic basis
for the existence of
classes.
This corresponds to
his description of the Commune as precisely such a transitional
regime already in the first draft
of this Civil War. It was “the political form of the social
emancipation, of the liberation of labour from the usurpations (slave
holding) of the monopolists of the menas of labour”. In the final
Address this becomes the well known statement that the Commune “was
essentially a working class government... the political form at last
discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of
labour... The Commune was.. to serve as a lever for uprooting the
economic foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and
therefore of class rule”.
It is, in my
opinion, anachronistic to argue that Marx made a distinction between
a worker’s government and the
dictatorship of the proletariat, in the way that has at times been
done by some twentieth century
Marxists. Nor do I find it plausible that Engels, whose agreement
with Marx on all fundamental political questions is recorded in their
correspondence over four decades, should have interpreted either the
Commune or the concept of proletarian dictatorship differently from
his great co- thinker. And Engels was to write quite unequivocally in
his 1891 preface to Marx’s Civil War: “Dictatorship of the
proletariat... Do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like?
Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat”.
WAS THE COMMUNE
SOCIALIST?
In 1881, in an
atmosphere very different from that in which, ten years earlier, he
had produced his memorable
vindication of Paris’ March revolution, Marx wrote in a letter to
the Dutch socialist F. Domela- Nieuwenhuis that the Commune “was
merely the rising of a city under exceptional conditions, the
majority of the Commune was in no wise socialist, nor could it be”.
I do not think that this statement invalidates the contention that
Marx saw the commune as a dictatorship of the proletariat, at least
in embryonic form, although it may at first sight appear to do so.
Already during its existence he had recognized how limited were the
opportunities for it to realize its potential. Thus, in the first
draft of The Civil War, he wrote: “The actual ‘social’
character of their Republic consists only in this, that the workmen
govern the Paris Commune! As to their measures, they must by the
nature of things, be primarily confined to the military defence of
Paris and its approvisionment”. There was “nothing socialist”
in any of the Commune decisions “except their tendency,” he said,
and he proceeded to welcome the fact that the “real conditions of
the movement no longer clouded in Utopian fables”. Similar points
were made in the Address, which declared that “the great social
measures of the Commune was its own working existence”.
The Address itself
did however go further than this by projecting into the future the
tendencies that Marx believed
to be expressed in the Commune’s decision of 16 April in favour of
the surrender to association of workmen of all closed workshops with
some compensation for their owners. Thus Marx concluded that “the
Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the
labour of the many the wealth of the few,” aiming at “the
expropriation of the expropriators” and leading to communism. This
placing of “the unconscious tendencies of the Commune... to its
credit as more or less conscious plans” was in Engel’s view
“justified and even necessary under the circumstances”. In doing
so, Marx was anticipating the socialist measures that his class
analysis of society (as well as his knowledge of socialist trends and
demands in the Paris labour movement) led him to expect sooner or
later from a workers’ government. “The political rule of the
producer cannot coexist with the perpetuation of his social slavery,”
he wrote in the Address. Such a concept was nothing new to Marx: it
belonged to the heart of his dialectic of social development. Already
in 1844, in The Holy Family, he and Engels had written: “The
question is not what this or that proletarian, or even the whole of
the3 proletariat at the moment considers as its aim. The question is
what the proletariat is, and what, consequent on that being, it will
be compelled to do”. In the first draft of The Civil War he wrote:
“The Commune does not (do) away with the class struggles, through
which the working class strive for the abolition of all classes...but
it affords the rational medium in which the class struggle can run
through its different phases in the most rational and humane way”.
The Paris Commune
represented for Marx a rudimentary form of working class rule, of the dictatorship of the
proletariat. If he could welcome in it a high level of Selbst Tatigkeit (initiative, self activity) on the part of the Paris
workers, he had no illusions about their comparatively low level of
Selbstbewusstsein (consciousness), related to the inadequate level of
development of industry and of an industrial proletariat. He saw this
reflected in the ideologies of Proudhonism and Blanquism, which he
had criticized over the years and which predominated in one form or
another among the largely semi-artisan Paris workers of that period.
There was hardly a Marxist in the Commune. The Paris members of
Marx’s own organization, the International, came from the
Proudhonist school of socialism. Contrary to the stories of the
anti-Communard press of the period, Marx was neither able not wished
to dictate policy to them. Above all, there was in Paris no working
class party, such as Marx had long believed necessary for success and
to the creation of which, in one country after another, he and Engels
devoted themselves particularly actively after the defeat of the
Commune, influenced by its weakness in this respect.
Despite all these
limiting factors, Marx expressed confidence in the Socialist
tendencies that he believed inherent in
the French working class to “work out their own emancipation” in
the course of “long struggles...
transforming circumstances and men”. These would doubtless include
the formation of their own political party as a vital factor in
raising the level of consiciousness and cohesion. Marx’s whole
conception rejected any sort of paternalist tutelage. As Engels
expressed it in his 1890 Preface to the Communist Manifesto: “For
the ultimate triumph of the ideas set forth in the Manifesto, Marx
relied solely and exclusively upon the intellectual development of
the working class, as it necessarily had to ensue from united action
and discussion”.
WHAT THE COMMUNE
ADDED TO MARX’S THEORY
There has been much
controversy as to whether Marx understood the dictatorship of the
proletariat as “a social
description, a statement of the class character of the political
power” or as a description, in addition, of the
political power itself. My own reading is that the concept was
expressed by Marx first as the former: the rule of the working class,
with its interest in the socialist transformation of society,
directly counter posed to “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”
by which he designated capitalist rule. Later however, after the
experience of the Paris Commune, he added a general indication of the
type of state and the forms of government that he considered in
keeping with its function of creating the basis for a classless and
stateless society. These are suggested broadly in his description of
the Commune as “the reabsorption of the state power by society as
its own living forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular
masses themselves, forming their own force instead of organized force
of their suppression—the political form of their social
emancipation, instead of artificial force... of society wielded for
their oppression by their enemies”.
To achieve this,
presupposed smashing the “bureaucratic-military machine” of the
capitalist state rather than
transferring it into other hands. This, wrote Marx, was “the
preliminary condition for every people’s revolution on the
continent”. Such a conception was not to be found in the Communist
Manifesto, which, Marx and Engels now appreciated, had “in some
details become antiquated”. They therefore incorporated into their
Preface to the German edition of 1872 the statement from their
Address on the Civil War that “the working class cannot simply lay
hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own
purposes”. This point, they believed, had been “proved by the
Commune”.
The old bureaucratic
state structure was to be replaced by “really democratic
institutions”, reflecting “the people acting
for itself by itself”. This meant that universal suffrage, instead
of deciding once in every three or six years who was to misrepresent
the people” in a parliamentary talking shop, would be extended to
give the people real control over administration at all levels. “The
Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and
legislative at the same time, “wrote Marx. “Instead of continuing
to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once
stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible
and at all times revocable agent of the Commune... From the members
of the Commune downward, the public service had to be done at
workmen’s wages”. The first decree of the Commune was the
replacement of the standing army by the armed people, comprising the
National Guard, the bulk of whose members were working men”.
Marx emphasized
every anti-bureaucratic measure envisaged by the Commune. “Like the
rest of the public servants,
magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsible and
revocable,” he wrote. It was a question, as Engels was to point out
in his 1891 Preface, of the need for the working class to “safeguard
itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all,
without exception, subject to recall at any moment”. All public
functions, whether administrative, political or military, were to be
made into “real worker’s functions, instead of the hidden attributes of a trained caste”. The Commune pointed the way for
getting rid of “the whole sham of state-mysteries and state
pretentions” (sic). It did not “pretend to infallibility” but
published its doings and sayings and “initiated the public into all
its shortcomings”.
REPRESSIVE MEASURES
These predominantly
“liberation” prescriptions are not contradicted by Marx’s
criticisms of the Commune for “an
excess of moderation” shown towards its enemies. This was, in his
view, the result of the Parisians’ failure to recognize from the
outset that theirs had started a civil war against them, in which
through “a too ‘honorable’ scrupulosity” they held back from
taking the necessary initiatives. In particular, he argued, they
should have marched at once on Versailles after theirs’forces and
retreated there following the miscarriage of their attempt to seize
the cannon at Montmartre on 18 March. Instead of devoting themselves
to mounting such an offensive, “they lost precious moments... by
the election of the Commune. It was not a question of opposing the
election of a Commune, for which (as we have seen) he was full of
praise as a model of democratic government, but of the inappropriate
timing of these elections, which diverted attention from the urgent
military task of the moment. As a corollary to this, the Central
committee “surrendered its power too soon” to the newly elected
Commune, at a moment when its undivided authority was needed to deal
with the hostile troops preparing to attack Paris from without and
their reactionary supporters organizing armed demonstrations within.
Marx’s criticisms were dictated by considerations of war-time
emergency. It was also from this standpoint alone that he approved
the Commune’s suspension of hostile papers two weeks after the
Versailles troops had started attacking the outskirts of Paris and
bombarding the city. “With the savage warfare of Versailles
outside, and its attempts at corruption and conspiracy inside Paris,”
he wrote, “would the Commune not have shamefully betrayed its trust
by affecting to keep up all the decencies and appearances of
liberalism as in a time of profound peace?”. And he stressed how
“free from... acts of violence” the Paris proletarian revolution
had remained from 18 th March till the entry of the Versailles troops
into Paris.
If, for Marx, a
proletarian dictatorship had to be prepared to have recourse to
measures of coercion and repression, it
should be solely against the minority of its active class enemies on
behalf of the majority of the
people, from whom it derived its mandate, and only under conditions
of civil war.
The difference
between such a mass democratic “dictatorship” and one by small
elite was brought out sharply by
Engels in 1874 in his article, “The Programme of the Blanquist
Communard Refugees”. In it he contrasted the Marxist conception of
“the dictatorship... of the whole revolutionary class, the
proletariat” with “Blanquita’s conception of every revolution as
the coup de main of a small revolutionary minority”. From the later
followed the necessity after its success of “the dictatorship... of
the small number of those who carried out the coup and who are
themselves already in advance organized under the dictatorship of one
or a few individuals”.
In Marx’s writings
on the Commune, there is nothing to suggest that he would have
favoured a one favoured a
one-party system or any sort of monolithic political structure, let
alone a “personality cult”. On the contrary, what emerges is a
pluralistic conception of the Commune as a “thoroughly expansive
political form, while all previous forms of government had been
emphatically repressive”. In his first draft Marx quoted an extract
from the London Daily News, which deplored the fact that the Commune
was “a concourse of equivalent atoms, each one jealous of another
and none endowed with supreme control over the others”. The last
phrase was underlined by Marx, who noted that “the bourgeois...
wants political idols and ‘great men’ immensely”.
AN ALIEN BODY IN
MARX’S THOUGHT?
It had been widely
argued that the ideas developed by Marx in The Civil War in France, emphasizing
destruction of the power of the centralized bureaucratic state
machine, constitute an alien body in his
thought. In my opinion, this view is not borne out by an examination
of his writings. On the contrary, from the early 1840s throughout his
life, there runs one strong and continuous theme of the struggle
against bureaucracy. Already in 1843 in his Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of the State, he was denouncing bureaucracy as “the
‘state formalism’ of civil society... a particular, closed
society in the state” which “constitutes itself as an actual
power and becomes its own material content”. Its universal spirit
was “the secret, the mystery sustained within bureaucracy itself by
hierarchy and maintained on the outside as a closed corporation”.
Opposing the monarchic rule favoured by Hegel, he argued for a
democracy where “the constitution itself appears only as one
determination, and indeed the self-determination of the people...
based on its actual foundation, on actual man and the actual people,
not only implicitly and in its essence, but in the existence and
actuality”. The “atomization” of bourgeois society “in its
political act” resulted directly from the fact that “the
community... in which the individual exists, is civil society
separated from the state, or the political state is an abstraction
from it”.
In 1852, in The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx denounced the executive
power of the French state
“with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization” as an
“appalling parasitic body which enmeshes the body of the French
society like a net and chokes all its pores”. All revolutions
hitherto had “perfected this machine instead of smashing it”.
Marx took up these
themes and developed them, often in very similar terms, in The Civil
War, presenting the
Commune as “the direct antithesis” of the Second Empire with
its” state power, apparently soaring
high above society”. What the Commune envisaged, he wrote, was to
“restore to the social body all
the forces hitherto absorbed by the state parasite feeding upon, and
clogging the
free movement of
society” (84). These last words were quoted and underlined by
Bakunin’s Comrade- in-arms, James Guillaume, as “a remarkable
passage...where Marx seems to have abandoned his own programme”.
Even Lenin, copying out Marx’s reference to the “destruction of
the state power” as a “parasitic excrescence” alongside the
copious other extracts from The Civil War in his famous “Blue
Notebook” was led to exclaim: “By calling the ‘state’ a
parasitical excrescence, Marx ‘almost’ speaks of the abolition of
the state”. He added, however, in my opinion correctly: “The
point, of course, is not the term, but the essence”. It is easy to
“discover” any amount of verbal contradictions if quotations from
Marx Engels are viewed in isolation. From the context in this case,
it is clear that the state power that Marx wished to destroy was
specifically “the State power which claimed to be the embodiment of
(a national) unity independent of, and superior to, the nation
itself”. This state, acting as “the master instead of the servant
of society”, served “full-grown bourgeois society” as “a
means for the enslavement of labour by capital”. The Commune stood
for the destruction of such a state and its replacement by one of a
new type, in which “the merely repressive organs of the old
governmental power were to be amputated,” whilst “its legitimate
functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping preeminence
over society itself, and resorted to the responsible agents of
society”.
CENTRALISM AND LOCAL
AUTONOMY
Did Marx’s Civil
War in France represent theoretically “a practical retreat of
Marxism in the face of Proudhonism”?.
Was now Marx championing the standpoint, which he had opposed in the international, of
the French Proudhonists who wanted “everything to be dissolved into
small ‘groups’ or ‘communes’, which in turn form an
‘association’, but no state”? A close examination of the text
does not support such a conclusion despite its superficial
plausibility.
In the first draft,
Marx showed that in France “organized into self-working and
self-governing communes” the
“state-functions” would not disappear but would be reduced to a
few functions for general national
purposes”. In the Address he emphasized : “The few but
important functions which would remain for a central government were
not to be suppressed, as has
been intentionally misstated, but were to be discharged by Communal
and therefore strictly responsible agents. The unity of the nation
was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by the
Communal Constitution”.
And in case there
should still be any doubt, he went on:
“The Communal
Constitution has been mistaken for an attempt to break up into a
federation of small states, as
dreamt of by Montesquieu and Girondins, that unity of great nations
which, if originally brought about by political force, has now become
a powerful coefficient of social production. The antagonism of the
Commune against the state power has been mistaken for an exaggerated
form of the ancient struggle against over-centralisation”. Moreover, Marx made
it clear that “united cooperative societies are to regulate
national production
upon a common plan,”
thereby securing the centralization of the economic system to which
the Communist Manifesto
had attached so much importance.
Marx had always been
and remained a centralist. However for him, as for subsequent
Marxists, the issue was not
one of centralization versus decentralization, but of finding the
right balance between the two. The equilibrium was inevitably a
shifting one, varying from one country to another and as between
different historical periods. In 1848-50, he saw the strongest
possible centralization as the sine qua non of the
bourgeois-democratic revolution in Germany directed against the
feudal absolutism entrenched in its betty principalities. In France,
in 1871, the problem was of the opposite character. Already in 1852,
in his Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx had pointed to “the most
extraordinary centralization” of the French bourgeois state which
found its counterpart “in the helpless dependence, in the loose
shapelessness of the actual body politic”. Even “a bridge, a
schoolhouse and the communal property of a village community” were
“shatched from the activity of society’s members themselves and
made the object of government activity”. One can hardly change Marx
with inconsistency for not putting forward the same demands in a
proletarian revolution directed against such bureaucratic-capitalist
over centralisation as he had in a bourgeois democratic revolution
against feudal particularism!
The democratic
transformation initiated by the commune demanded forms of local self
government that would make
possible the greatest measure of initiative and popular participation
at gross-roots level, while
preserving a united republic with a central authority. The programme
of the Commune— The Declaration of
the French People of 19 April – incorporated both these elements.
(The fact that the Commune adopted it unanimously minus one vote
bears our Engels point, in his 1891 Preface to the Civil War, that in
the course of the revolution the Proudhonists evolved from their hard
anti-centralist and the Blanquists from their super centralist positions. Marx felt able to write approvingly of this “rough
sketch of national organization which the Commune had no time to
develop”, despite its ambiguity on the nature of the relationship
between “the absolute autonomy of the communes” and “the great
central administration”. This indefiniteness is reflected in Marx’s
account in The Civil War, which he did not think was the place to
subject these proposals to detailed critical examination. The more so
because he considered the broad outlines of the suggested Communal
Constitution as justified by its social essence: the superseding of
the governmental machinery “by real self-government, which in Paris
and great cities, the social strongholds of the working class, was
the government of the working class”. Except on this condition,
“the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a
delusion”.
Marx spoke
favourably of proposals for a national structure whereby the rural
communes, which were to be
established even in the smallest hamlets, would administer “their
common affairs by an assembly of
delegates in the central town” of each district. “These district
assemblies were again to send deputies to the
national delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time
revocable and bound by the mandate imperatif (formal instructions) of
his constituents”. Nowhere however, did he try to present this
particular method of indirect election as the only possible system
for a working class administration, and he was in fact never to refer
to it again. What was of lasting importance for him in this
connection was that future society would develop organs of local
self-government with a large measure of auto nomy and scope for
initiative from below. This in 1874, in his notes on Bakunin’s
Statism and Anarchy, he meets Bakunin’s challenge: “The Germans
number about forty million. “Will e.g. all forty million be members
of the government?” with the comment: “Certainly! Since the
matter begins with self-government of the Commune (Gemeinde)”.
Similarly, twenty years after the Commune, in his Critique of the
Social Democratic (Erfurt) Draft Programme, arguing for a unitary
rather than a federal republic in Germany, Engels demanded within it
“complete self-government in province, district and commune
(Gemeinde) through officials elected by universal suffrage”.
CONCLUSIONS
Marx on the Commune
reveals no dramatic turn in his political thought. Paris’ spring
revolution did however provide
the experience, of international relevance, that crystalised into
positive forms the attitudes inherent in his long-standing criticisms
of the political alienation in capitalist and feudal states. With
this, as I have argued, he added a new dimension to his concept the
dictatorship of the proletariat. This entailed a through going
participatory democracy, combining direct democracy at the base with
the election at regional and national levels of delegates operating
under continuous control and briefing from below. Such forms were
necessary for the adequate expression and safeguarding of the class
character of the new transitional regime, which would begin to
transcend the divorce between state and civil society that Marx had
developed as early as 1843, and to prepare the way for a classless
and stateless society.
The Commune, in the
seventy-two days of its existence, could but suggest the first steps
to be taken along this
road, and Marx felt himself obliged to extrapolate some of the others
from the tendencies that he perceived in it. His views were therefore
only a first outline, derived from this particular “model”, which
reflected a localized experience in France in 1871. It could not be
more than the initial stage of a proletarian dictatorship, neither
fully developed nor nationally based, whose days were probably
numbered from the start. Much of the Marx’s exposition was
consequently sketchy, tentative and in need of development in the
light of subsequent revolutions. These never came in his lifetime,
but there has been no lack of revolutionary experience for Marxists
to scrutinize and generalize from in the last forty years. It is a
weakness that they have not adequately done so, in order to carry
much further forward the analysis of post-capitalist societies in the
light of these subsequent events.
Yet, even after a
hundred years, Marx’s deeply democratic, anti-elitist,
anti-bureaucratic Civil War in France retains
its relevance as the standing point for such theoretical elaboration.
Its basic ideas, reflecting his
horror of giant state bureaucracies alienating man politically,
depriving him of effective control of his society and constricting
all his activities, have a highly topical ring. So do the ideas that
he counter posed, under the inspiration of the Commune, for “the
self-government of the producers”, with “the haughteous masters
of the people” replaced by “their always removable servants...continuously
under public supervision”.
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