III. Decomposition or Conquest of the State?

The supporters of a “pure soviet system” (an expression common in Germany) do not realize, as a rule, that the political constructs of contemporary Bolshevism are essentially about the organization of a minority dictatorship. On the contrary, the supporters of a “pure soviet system” begin by sincerely looking around for political forms that might best express the genuine will of the majority. They come to “sovietism” only after rejecting the democracy of universal suffrage—precisely because it does not express this. While the psychology of the extreme leftists in their passion for “sovietism” is characterized by the desire to jump over the historical inertia of the masses, of the majority of the people, dominating their logic is the idea of a new political form, “at last discovered,” that best expresses the class rule of the proletariat, just as the democratic republic best expresses the class domination of the bourgeoisie.

The idea that the realization of workers’ power requires the use of social forms that are absolutely and fundamentally different from those in which the power of the bourgeoisie is manifested has existed since the dawn of the revolutionary labour movement. We find it, for example, in the vigorous propaganda of the immediate predecessors of the Chartist movement: the construction worker James Morrison and his friend, the writer James Smith.¹ While the advanced workers of the period were only beginning to feel the need to win political power and for this purpose to achieve universal suffrage, Smith wrote in his journal The Crisis on 12 April 1834:

The only House of Commons is a House of Trades [unions]. . . . We shall have a new set of boroughs when the unions are organized: every trade [union] shall be a borough, and every trade [union] shall have a council of representatives to conduct its affairs. Our present commoners know nothing of the interests of the people, and care not for them. . . . The character of the Reformed Parliament is now blasted [discredited], and . . . is not easily recovered. It will be replaced with a House of Trades.²

In the same period, Morrison wrote in his publication The Pioneer, 31 May 1834:

The growing power and growing intelligence of trades unions . . . will become, by its own self-acquired importance, a most influential, we might almost say dictatorial, part of the body politic. When this happens we have gained all that we want: we have gained universal suffrage, for if every member of the Union be a constituent, and the Union itself becoming a vital member of the State, it instantly erects itself into a House of Trades which must supply the place of the present House of Commons, and direct the industrial affairs of the country, according to the will of the trades. . . . With us, universal suffrage will begin in our lodges, extend to the general union, embrace the management of trade, and finally swallow up the political power.³

Substitute “soviet” for “union,” “ispolkom” [executive committee] for “council of representatives,” “Soviet Congress” for “House of Trades,” and you have an outline of the “soviet system” established on the basis of productive units.

Polemicizing with these representatives of the syndicalist conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Bronterre O’Brien, who later headed the Chartists, wrote in his newspaper Poor Man’s Guardian: “Universal suffrage does not signify meddling with politics, but the rule of the people in the state and municipality, a Government therefore in favour of the working man.”⁴

Drawing heavily on the experience of the revolutionary workers’ movement in England, the 1848 communism (scientific socialism) of Marx and Engels, identified the problem of winning state power by the proletariat with the problem of organizing a consistent democracy.

The Communist Manifesto declared: “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.”⁵

According to Lenin, the Manifesto poses the question of the state “in an extremely abstract manner, in the most general terms and expressions.”⁶ The problem of the conquest of state power begins to be presented more concretely in the Eighteenth Brumaire. Its refinement is completed in The Civil War in France, written on the basis of the experience of the Paris Commune. Lenin believes that, in the course of this refinement, Marx’s understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which today forms the basis of Bolshevism, was fully defined.

In 1852, in the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx wrote: “All [previous] revolutions perfected this [state] machine instead of breaking it.”⁷

On 12 April 1871, in a letter to Kugelmann, he formulated his viewpoint on the problem of revolution as follows:

If you look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire, you will find that I say 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 break it, and that is essential for every real people’s revolution on the Continent. And this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris are attempting.⁸

In this sense, Marx declared (in The Civil War in France) that the Commune was “a Republic that was not only to supersede the monarchical form of class-rule, but class-rule itself.”⁹

What, then, was the Commune? It was an attempt to bring about a truly and consistently democratic state by destroying the old military-bureaucratic state apparatus. It was an attempt to establish a state based entirely on the sovereignty of the people [narodovlastie]. Marx speaks of the eradication of the bureaucracy, the police, and the standing army, he speaks of the election and recall of all officials, of the broadest local self-government, of the concentration of all power in the hands of the people’s representatives (thus doing away with the gap between the legislative and executive branches of the government, and replacing the “talking” parliament with a “working institution”).¹⁰ To this point, then, in his defence of the Commune, Marx remains faithful to the conception of social revolution presented in The Communist Manifesto, in which the dictatorship of the proletariat is identified with winning “the battle of democracy.”¹¹ He therefore remains quite consistent when, in his letter to Kugelmann, quoted above, he stresses that “for every true people’s revolution on the Continent” (our emphasis, Martov), it is essential to break “the bureaucratic military machine.”¹²

It is interesting to compare the conclusions on this question drawn by Marx and Engels from their experiences in the events of 1848 with the conclusions drawn by Herzen. In his Letters from France and Italy, Herzen wrote:

Universal suffrage, when combined with the monarchical organization of the state, the absurd division of powers, of which the adherents of constitutional forms so boasted, the religious concept of representation, and the police centralization of the entire state in the hands of the ministry, is as much an optical illusion as the equality that Christianity preached. The issue is by no means whether you gather once a year to elect a deputy and again return to the passive role of the governed. The entire social hierarchy had to be based on elections, the commune had to be allowed to elect its own government, and the department its own; all the proconsuls who receive their holy office from ministerial anointment had to be abolished; only then would it be possible for the people to really make use of their rights and, moreover, to elect their central deputies efficiently.

On the contrary, the bourgeois republicans “wished to leave the cities and communes in the most complete dependence on the executive power and applied the democratic idea of universal suffrage to a single civic act.”¹³

Like Marx, Herzen denounced the supposedly-democratic bourgeois republic in the name of a republic that was genuinely and consistently democratic. And like Herzen, Marx attacked universal suffrage as a deceptive decoration attached to the “monarchic organization of the state,” bequeathed by the past. [Instead, he favoured] a state system built from top to bottom on universal suffrage and the sovereignty of the people.

Commenting on Marx’s idea, Lenin rightfully observes:

This was understandable in 1871, when England was still the model of a purely capitalist country, but without militarism and, to a considerable degree, without bureaucracy. Marx therefore excluded England, where a revolution, even a people’s revolution, then seemed possible, and indeed was possible, without [the prior condition] of first destroying the “ready-made state machinery.”¹⁴

Unfortunately, Lenin hurried on without giving much thought to all the questions that arise from this limitation posited by Marx.

That limitation, according to Lenin, allowed for a situation where the people’s revolution would not need to destroy the ready-made state machinery; [the people’s revolution] could make use of the ready-made state machinery if the latter did not have the military-bureaucratic character typical of the Continent. It was a question of an exception to the overall process of development, within the framework of and in spite of capitalism—the development in a country of a democratic apparatus of self-governance, which the military-bureaucratic machine had not succeeded in suppressing. In that case, according to Marx, the people’s revolution had only to take possession of this apparatus and develop it in order to create a state form suitable for the realization of its creative tasks.

There was a reason that both Marx and Engels theorized the possibility that a socialist overturn in England could be brought about by peaceful means. This theoretical possibility rested precisely on the democratic character, capable of further development, of the English state system of their day.

Much water has flowed under the bridge since then. In both England and the United States, imperialism has created that “military-bureaucratic state machine” whose absence had constituted the main feature differentiating the political evolution of the Anglo-Saxon countries from the general type of capitalist states. At the present time, it is doubtful whether this distinctive feature [the absence of a military-bureaucratic state machine] will be preserved even in the younger Anglo-Saxon republics: Australia and New Zealand. “Today,” Lenin correctly remarks, “in England and America, ‘the precondition for any real people’s revolution’ is the demolition, the destruction of the ‘ready-made state machinery.’”¹⁵

The theoretical possibility was not in the end realized. But the very fact that he admitted such a possibility shows us clearly Marx’s true views, leaving no room for any arbitrary interpretation. What Marx called the “demolition of the ready-made state machine” in the Eighteenth Brumaire and in his letter to Kugelmann was the destruction of the military-bureaucratic machine that the bourgeois democratic system had inherited from the monarchy and developed in the process of establishing the domination of the bourgeois class. There is nothing in Marx’s reasoning that even suggests the destruction of the state organization as such and the replacement of the state during the revolutionary period—that is, during the dictatorship of the proletariat—with some other social bond formed on a principle opposed to that of the state. Marx and Engels foresaw such a replacement only at the end of a prolonged process involving the “withering away” of the state,¹⁶ the withering away of all the functions of social coercion, the result of the prolonged existence of a socialist society.

No wonder that Engels wrote in 1891, in his introduction to The Civil War in France:

The state is . . . an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides (our emphasis, Martov) the victorious proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at once . . . until such time as a generation reared in new, free social conditions, is able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap.¹⁷

This seems quite clear. The proletariat lops off “the worst sides” of the democratic state (for example, the police, the standing army, the self-perpetuating bureaucracy, excessive centralization, etc., etc.). But it does not eliminate the democratic state itself. On the contrary, it shapes and develops it [the democratic state] in order to have it replace the “ready-made military-bureaucratic machine,” which must be smashed.

If one thing is certain, it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown.¹⁸

So wrote Engels in his critique of the draft of the Erfurt program in 1891.¹⁹ He does not speak of a “soviet” republic (this social form was as yet unknown), nor of a communist republic opposed to the state. Neither does he speak of a “trade-union republic” as conceived by Smith and Morrison or the French syndicalists. Explicitly and definitively, Engels speaks of a democratic republic—that is, of a state (“an evil inherited by the proletariat”) democratized from top to bottom.

This is so explicit, so definitive, that when Lenin quotes these words, he finds it necessary to immediately obscure their meaning. “Engels,” he says,

reiterates here in a particularly striking form the fundamental idea that runs through all of Marx’s works—namely, that it is the democratic republic that comes closest to the dictatorship of the proletariat (our emphasis, Martov). For such a republic—without in the least eliminating the rule of capital, and, consequently, the oppression of the masses and the class struggle—inevitably leads to such an extension, development, expansion, and escalation of this struggle that, as soon as it becomes possible to satisfy the basic interests of the oppressed masses, this possibility is realized inevitably and solely through the dictatorship of the proletariat, through the leadership of those masses by the proletariat.²⁰

Engels is not speaking about a political form that “comes closest to the dictatorship,” as Lenin suggests in his comments, but rather about a “specific” political form in which to implement the dictatorship. According to Engels, the dictatorship is realized in a democratic republic.²¹ Lenin sees the democratic republic merely as an arena in which to sharpen the class struggle to the extreme, thus confronting the proletariat with the task of dictatorship. For Lenin, then, since the democratic republic finds its conclusion in the dictatorship of the proletariat, the former, having given birth to the latter, so to speak, naturally dies in the very act of its birth. Engels, on the contrary, believes that by gaining supremacy in the democratic republic and thus realizing its dictatorship within it, the proletariat is thereby, for the first time, investing the democratic republic with a character that is genuinely, fundamentally, and completely democratic. That is why, in 1848, Engels and Marx equated the notion of raising “the proletariat to the position of ruling class” with that of winning “the battle of democracy.” That is why in The Civil War, Marx emphasized, in the experience of the Commune, the absolute triumph of the principles of sovereignty of the people [narodovlastie]: universal franchise, election, and recall of all officials. That is why in 1891, in his preface to The Civil War, Engels once again wrote:

Against this transformation of the state and the organs of the state from servants of society into masters of society—an inevitable transformation in all previous states—the Commune made use of two infallible means. In the first place, it filled all posts—administrative, judicial and educational—by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time by the same electors. And, in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers.²²

Universal suffrage is therefore an “infallible means” by which to prevent the transformation of the state [and the organs of the state] “from servants of society into masters of society.” Thus, the state conquered by the proletariat in the form of a consistently democratic republic can be a real “servant of society.”

Is it not obvious that when Engels speaks this way and identifies, at the same time, a democratic republic of this kind with the dictatorship of the proletariat, he is not employing the latter term to indicate a form of government but to denote the social character of state power? This was exactly what Kautsky emphasized in his Dictatorship of the Proletariat when he says that for Marx such a dictatorship was not a question “of a form of government but of a condition which must everywhere arise when the proletariat has conquered political power.”²³ Any other interpretation leads inexorably to a glaring contradiction between Marx’s statement that the Paris Commune was the embodiment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and his reference to the consistent democracy implemented by the Paris Commune.

The above quotation from Lenin demonstrates that—in his rare moments of spiritual communion with the first teachers of scientific socialism—even he was able to rise above a simplistic conception of class dictatorship, its reduction to dictatorial forms of organization of power, and understand it precisely as a distinct “political condition.” In the above quotation from The State and Revolution, Lenin equates the “dictatorship of the proletariat” with the “leadership of those (popular) masses by the proletariat.” This equation is entirely in the spirit of Marx and Engels. It is the way that Marx depicted the dictatorship of the proletariat during the Paris Commune when he wrote “this was the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as the only class [still] capable of social initiative, [acknowledged] even by the great bulk of the Paris middle class—shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants—the wealthy capitalists alone excepted.”²⁴

It is the voluntary acceptance by the masses of the population of the leadership of the working class in the struggle against capitalism, that is the essential condition for the “political status” that is called the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Similarly, it is the voluntary acceptance by the broad popular masses of the leadership of the bourgeoisie that makes it possible to call the political conditions existing in France, England, and the United States the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.” This dictatorship in no way disappears when the bourgeoisie considers it feasible, by granting them universal suffrage, to offer formal sovereignty to the peasants and the petite bourgeoisie under its leadership. Similarly, the dictatorship of the proletariat about which Marx and Engels spoke is also realizable on the basis of the same sovereignty of the people and the wide application of universal suffrage.²⁵

Therefore, if we keep in mind the assessments by Marx and Engels, cited previously, concerning dictatorship, the democratic republic, and the state as “an evil [inherited by the proletariat],” we cannot but arrive at the conclusion that, for Marx and Engels, the problem of the conquest of political power by the proletariat was reduced to the destruction of the bureaucratic-military machine, which commands the bourgeois state in spite of its democratic parliamentarism, and to the development of a new state machine based on the consistent implementation of democracy, universal suffrage, and the broadest self-governance, under the condition that the proletariat actually leads the majority of the people.

In that regard, Marx and Engels continue and extend the political tradition of the Montagnards of 1793 and the Chartists of the O’Brien school.²⁶

There is no doubt that it is possible to discover in the works of Marx and Engels traces of a different set of ideas. These appear to offer grounds for the thesis that the forms and institutions in which the political power of the proletariat manifests itself take on a fundamentally new character, fundamentally opposed to the forms and institutions that embody the political power of the bourgeoisie, fundamentally opposed to the state as such. Consideration of these traces of an entirely different set of ideas merits a separate chapter.

When Marx was writing about the Commune, not only did he have to present his views on the dictatorship of the proletariat, simultaneously and above all else he had to defend the Commune against its numerous embittered enemies. This circumstance could not fail to influence the very assessment of the slogans and forms of the movement.

The revolutionary explosion that led to the seizure of Paris by the armed proletariat on 18 March 1871—on the basis of an acute struggle between labour and capital—was affected by the clash between the democratic-republican population of the French capital and the conservative masses of the provinces, especially the rural masses.

During the preceding two decades, the “backward peasantry” of France had suppressed revolutionary and republican Paris by supporting [the Second Empire’s] extreme bureaucratic centralism. As a result, the uprising of the Parisian democracy against the representatives of those backward peasants gathered at Versailles took on the character of a struggle for municipal autonomy.²⁷

At first, this character of the movement gained the Commune the sympathy of many representatives of a purely bourgeois radicalism—supporters of administrative decentralization and broad local self-government. But this aspect of the Paris Commune of 1871 also obscured—even from the leaders of the Commune—the true nature and historic meaning of the movement they were leading.

In his memoir about the [First] International, the famous anarchist James Guillaume tells how immediately after the outbreak of the revolt, the Jura Federation, which he headed, sent its delegate Jacquault to Paris in order to learn the best way to help the movement—a movement the Jurassians saw as the beginning of a worldwide social revolution. They were very surprised when their delegate returned with a report that E. Varlin, the most prominent leader of the left-wing French Internationalists, responded to this question with an expression of astonishment. According to Varlin, the revolution of 18 March had only one, purely local aim—the conquest of municipal freedoms for Paris. According to Varlin, the conquest of these freedoms was not expected to have any social and revolutionary consequences for the rest of Europe.²⁸

This, of course, could have been said only during the first days of the Commune. Soon, the historic meaning of their revolution began to reveal itself to the Paris proletariat. Nevertheless, when it came to conceiving of the Commune’s aims, the influence of narrow bourgeois ideas of municipal autonomy continued to be felt until the very end. It was not without reason that Marx in his Civil War had to refute British liberals and even Bismarck himself, who tried to depict the whole Commune movement as aimed at achieving municipal autonomy.

And was it not this lack of clarity in the Communards’ ideology that Marx had in mind later, in one of his letters to Kugelmann, reporting on the rebellion against him by the exiled leaders of the Commune in London? Marx reminded the activists of the Commune that it was he who had “defended the honour” of the 1871 revolution.²⁹ Marx defended the Commune precisely by revealing the historic meaning of its heroic deeds, a meaning that had escaped the consciousness of even the Communard combatants.

But besides bourgeois radicalism, other ideological influences were also strong—anarchist Proudhonism and Hébertian Blanquism.³⁰ These two tendencies are organically intertwined with the general French working-class movement. For the representatives of both these ideological currents, the slogan “the commune” carried a meaning diametrically opposed to that assigned to it by bourgeois-democratic decentralist radicalism. These opposing views were united only in a purely formal sense, the fact that each took a stand against the bureaucratic and centralizing leanings of the state apparatus bequeathed by the Second Empire.

In the second half of the 1860s, French Blanquism, having drawn closer to the working class masses, partially overcame the narrow conspiratorial and bourgeois-Jacobin character of the political tradition under whose influence they (and along with them, the Babeuf school) had grown up. While Blanqui continued to draw his political inspiration from the heritage of the eighteenth-century revolution, he and the most active of his followers became more critical of the Jacobin forms of popular sovereignty [narodovlastie] and revolutionary dictatorship. They tried to find ideological support for the proletarian movement of their time in the revolutionary tradition of the so-called Hébertists—the extreme left-wing of the sans-culottes of the French Revolution.

In 1793–94, Hébert and his supporters relied on the true “common poor”³¹ of the Parisian faubourgs, whose vague social and revolutionary hopes they expressed. By means of this support, the Hébertists turned the Paris Commune into an instrument by which they might exert pressure on the central government. Relying directly on the armed masses, they sought to transform the Paris Commune of 1794 into the centre of all revolutionary power. Until Robespierre reduced it to the level of a subordinate administrative mechanism (which he accomplished by crushing the Hébertists and sending their leaders to the guillotine), the Commune of 1794, being in fact an elected body of the active revolutionary elements among the Parisian urban poor, embodied the instinctive desire of these urban poor to impose their dictatorship on politically backward rural and provincial France.³²

The Commune as the centre of the revolutionary will and the direct revolutionary creativity of the proletarian masses—contrasted with the democratic state—that became the fighting political slogan of the young Blanquists toward the end of the Second Empire.³³

Alongside this “Hébertist” current and intertwined with it—in the course of the revolution of 18 March—another political current manifested itself: anarcho-Proudhonism.

For this latter current, just as for the Hébertist-Blanquist one, the “commune” was a lever for a revolutionary overturn. But it was not the commune as a political organization with a specifically revolutionary character, opposed to another political organization—a more or less democratic state—that was to obtain the effective submission of the latter by means of the dictatorship of Paris over France. The “commune” they had in mind was a “natural” social organization of producers. They opposed every state as an “artificial” (that is, political) union of citizens established on the basis of hierarchical subordination through the “fraudulent” apparatus of popular representation. Understood this way, the commune was not to rise above the state or subordinate it to its dictatorship. It was to separate itself from the state and invite all the 36,000 communes (cities and villages) of France to do the same, with the purpose of decomposing the state and replacing it with a free federation of communes.

“What does Paris want?” asked La Commune on 19 April, answering its own question as follows:

The absolute autonomy of the Commune extended to all localities in France, assuring to each one its full rights, to every Frenchman the full exercise of his faculties and abilities as a man, citizen, and worker.

The autonomy of the Commune will be limited only by the right to equal autonomy of all the other municipalities adhering to the pact. Such an association of communes will assure French unity.³⁴

From this evolved a consistently federalist program in the Proudhonist-Bakuninist sense, which recognized a voluntary pact as the only tie between individual communities and which ruled out any complex apparatus of general state administration. The “Federalists” were particularly eager to be called “Communards.

“On the 18th of March,” wrote the Bakuninist Arthur Arnould, a member of the Commune, “the people declared that it was necessary to escape the vicious circle, to cut off the evil at its root—not merely to change masters, but to cease having masters altogether. With an admirable insight into the truth, to achieve this goal they [the people] proclaimed the means that could lead to it—the autonomy of the Commune and a federation of communes.

It was a matter of elucidating, for the first time, the actual rules, the just and normal laws, which can assure the real independence of the individual and the group, whether communal or corporative, and then to link similar groups together, so that they would enjoy at the same time, the union that creates strength . . . and the autonomy that is essential to . . . the unlimited expansion of all original capacities, all productive and progressive characteristics.³⁵

This communal federalism was presented by the anarcho-Proudhonists as the [model for an] organization in which the economic relations of the producers could be directly expressed.

“It is up to each autonomous grouping,” says the same Arnould, “whether communal or corporative, depending on circumstances within its own circle, to solve the social question, that is, those questions related to the property question, the relation between labour and capital . . . etc.”³⁶

Note the caveat: “communal or corporative, depending on circumstances . . .” The viewpoint of the Federalist-Communard approaches quite closely the outlook that led successively to: in 1833 the Morrison and Smith formula of a “house of trade-unions”; at the beginning of the twentieth century, the doctrine of Georges Sorel, Édouard Berth and [Daniel] De Leon, on the replacement of the “artificial” subdivisions of the modern state by a federation of “natural” corporative (occupational) cells; and in 1917–19, the conception of the “soviet system.”³⁷ The “communal grouping,” comments Arnould in a footnote, “corresponds to ancient political organization” while “the corporative grouping would have corresponded to the social organization.”³⁸ Thus the communal organization was to serve as a transition from the state to a “corporative” federation.

This opposition of a “political” organization to a “social” organization suggests that the “breaking up of the state machinery” by the proletariat will immediately restore “natural” relationships among the producers, relations that can only manifest themselves outside of political norms and institutions. This opposition is the basis of the social revolutionary tendencies among the Communards.

All that the socialists call for, everything they would not be able to obtain without horrible convulsions, without bitter, painful, and ruinous struggles from a strong and centralizing power, no matter how democratic it is presumed to be, they will achieve in an orderly manner, with certainty and without violence, through the simple activation of the communal principle of free groupings and federation.

The solution can belong only to the corporative and productive groups, linked together federally, and freed therefore from governmental and administrative—that is to say, political (our emphasis, Martov)—shackles, which till now have maintained, by oppression, the antagonism between capital and labour, subjecting the latter to the former.³⁹

Such was the understanding of the essence and meaning of the Commune by its most advanced militants, most directly linked with the social revolutionary class movement of the French proletariat.

Charles Seignobos is certainly wrong when he writes (in his essay on the Commune, found in the Histoire générale edited by Lavisse and Rambaud) that the revolutionaries moved away from their initial aim—the seizure of power in France—and instead moved to the cause of a self-sustaining commune in Paris because they found themselves on the defensive, isolated from the rest of France.⁴⁰ This circumstance merely facilitated the triumph of the anarcho-federalist ideas in the Commune movement. If, in the program statements of the Communards, the Hébertist conception of the Commune as dictator exercising power over France, was superseded by the Proudhonist idea of an apolitical federation, it was because the class character of the movement was sharply outlined in the struggle between Paris and Versailles. At that time, the class consciousness of the proletariat in the small industries of Paris revolved entirely around the ideological opposition of a “natural” union of producers within society to the “artificial” union of producers within the state. We have already seen how Varlin gave the Commune, in its early days, a purely democratic-radical interpretation. In its proclamation of 23 March 1871, the Paris section of the International wrote: “The independence of the Commune is the guarantee of a contract whose clauses, freely debated, will bring an end to class antagonism and will assure social equality.” That is, with the fall of the power of coercion exercised by the state, it becomes possible to create a simple “natural” social bond among the members of society—a bond based on their economic interdependence. And it is precisely the Commune that is destined to become the framework within which this relationship can be organized.

“We have demanded the emancipation of the workers,” continues the proclamation, “and the communal government guarantees it, for it shall furnish each citizen with the means of defending his rights and effectively controlling the acts of its representatives charged with managing its interests and determining the progressive application of social reforms.”⁴¹

It is clear at a glance that, for the anarchist idea of a workers’ commune—that is, a union of producers, as contrasted to a union of citizens within the state—the proclamation has discreetly substituted the idea of a political commune, the prototype of the modern state, a state microcosm within which the representation of interests and the satisfaction of social needs become specialized functions, just as (though in a simpler form) in the complex mechanism of the modern state. P. Lavrov understood this quite well. He notes in his book on the Commune:

In the nineteenth century, the community of communal interests completely disappeared in the face of the rise of the internal struggle between classes. As a unified moral whole, the community did not exist at all [Lavrov’s emphasis]. In each community, the irreconcilable camps of the proletariat and the big bourgeoisie confronted each other, with the struggle becoming more complicated due to the presence of the most diverse groups of the petite bourgeoisie. For a moment, Paris was united by a common affect: anger with the Bordeaux and Versailles Assemblies. But a transient affect cannot be the foundation of a political order.

The “real autonomous principle of the system,” Lavrov writes in the same book, “to which the social revolution must lead is not a political commune that permits inequality, a mixture of parasitic and working classes, etc., but a solidaristic grouping of workers of various kinds, rallied to the program of the social revolution” (our emphasis, Martov).⁴²

P. Lavrov speaks definitively of a “confusion of two notions.”

On the one hand, the autonomous political commune, the ideal of the Middle Ages, in the struggle for which the bourgeoisie solidified itself and grew strong during the first phases of its development. On the other hand, the autonomous proletarian commune, which is to emerge after the economic victory of the proletariat over its enemies, after the establishment, within the community, of a social solidarity that is inconceivable as long as the economic exploitation of labour by capital continues, and therefore as long as class hatred within each community is inevitable. When we analyze the demands of communal autonomy as they were generally formulated in the course of the struggle in question, it may seem strange how the indisputably socialist militants of the Commune saw the connection between the fundamental question of socialism, about the struggle of labour against capital, and the slogan of the “free commune” that they inscribed on their banner.⁴³

The strangeness of which Lavrov speaks lies in the fact that a social form into which, we believe, the more or less complete structure of a socialist economy will be moulded, is [simultaneously] assumed to be necessary for the very process of transforming the capitalist system into a socialist one. This is the same strangeness, the same contradiction, that can be observed among anarchists. It is an indisputable fact that once the foundations of the private economic order are destroyed and the entire national economy is transformed into a communal, socialist economy, the need for the state as an organization that rises above the producer disappears. The anarchists conclude from this that the precondition for this social transformation is “the demolition of the state,” its “decomposition” into its simplest cells, into “communes.” There existed in the ideology of the Communards a conflation of Proudhonist, Hébertist, and bourgeois-autonomist notions. As a result, in their discourse on the essence of the revolution, they switched quite easily from the political “commune”—a territorial unit created by the preceding bourgeois development and that, in essence, is the main part of the state mechanism—to the labour or “corporative” commune, a commune of freely associating workers that we can easily imagine as the probable form of the social grouping in a fully finished socialist system in which the collective work of perhaps one or two generations will have rendered possible the “gradual dying out of the state” as predicted by Engels.⁴⁴

Dunoyer, one of the witnesses who appeared before the commission of inquiry appointed by the Versailles National Assembly after the fall of the Commune (quoted by Lavrov in his Paris Commune), gave interesting insights into the fact that the communalist ideas, as they were perceived by the workers, were nothing more than an attempt to transpose the forms of their own militant organization into the organization of society.

“The grouping of workers within the International by sections and federations of sections was one of the elements in the development of the communal idea in France in 1871.” The International “possessed a ready-made organization, where the word ‘commune’ stood for the word ‘section’ and the federation of communes was nothing but a federation of sections.”⁴⁵

Compare this quotation with those of the English syndicalists of the 1830s, cited in the preceding chapter, who wanted to replace the bourgeois-parliamentary state with a federation of trade-unions. Let us recall the analogous theses of the French syndicalists in the twentieth century. And let us not forget that in our time, working people everywhere come to the idea of the “soviet state” after experiencing the soviets as their own combat organizations, created in the process of a class struggle that has taken revolutionary forms.

In all the communalist theses, it is common to deny that the “state” can be an instrument for the revolutionary transformation of society in the direction of socialism. However, Marxism, as it developed from 1848 onwards, is characterized above all by the fact that—following the tradition of Babeuf and Blanqui—it recognized the state (naturally after its conquest by the proletariat) as the principal lever of such a transformation. That is why, as early as the 1860s, the anarchists and Proudhonists considered Marx and Engels to be “statists.” How, then, did they [Marx and Engels] react to the experience of the Paris Commune, when the proletariat attempted for the first time to exercise its dictatorship and embark on a socialist transformation?

The Proudhonists and the anarchists, who were not well acquainted with the laws of economic development, imagined the process of transferring the means of production to the working class in a very naive and simplistic way. They did not see that capitalism had created such a grandiose mechanism of concentrated production and exchange that the working class cannot master it without having at its disposal an equally grandiose administrative machinery, extending over the entire economic sphere embraced by capital. Only by ignoring the whole complexity and magnitude of the social and revolutionary transformation could they imagine the self-sufficient “commune”—itself based on self-sufficient “autonomous” productive units—as the lever of such a transformation.

Of course, Marx was better informed than anyone about the decisive role played by anarcho-Proudhonism in the communist movement. As early as 1866, in a letter to Engels (20 June 1866), he refers ironically to “Proudhonized Stirnerianism,” which is inclined to see “everything broken down into small ‘groups’ or ‘communes,’ which in turn form an ‘association,’ but not a state.”⁴⁶

But in 1871, Marx’s task was to defend the cause of the Commune from its arch-enemies. He faced the task of justifying the first attempt of the proletariat to gain power, an attempt that, had it not been crushed by external forces, would have led the workers beyond their original objectives and broken the ideological bonds that limited and distorted the scope of their revolution.

It is understandable, therefore, why in his defence of the Commune Marx did not even raise the question of whether the realization of socialism is conceivable within the framework of autonomous city and rural communes. In light of the existing division of labour, economic centralization, and the degree of development of the forces of production already attained at that time, merely to pose the question would have meant a categorical rejection of the notion that the autonomous commune could “solve the social question.” It is understandable why Marx avoided the question of whether a federalist link between the communes could ensure, to some extent, planned social production on the broad basis prepared by capitalism. It is understandable why Marx touches only in passing on one of the most important issues of the social revolution—the relationship between the city and the countryside—and merely asserts, without any supporting evidence, that “the communal constitution brought the rural producers under the intellectual lead of the central towns of their districts, and there secured to them, in the working men, the natural trustees of their interests,”⁴⁷ whereas, on the contrary, the whole question is whether a socialist economy—involving economic leadership of the village by the city—can be placed within the framework of a federation of autonomous communes.

Marx could “push aside” all these questions in the expectation that, in the process of the social revolution, they would find their own solution, leaving behind the anarcho-communalist illusions with which the workers began the revolution.

But Marx did not merely remain silent on the Paris Commune’s contradictions. He attempted to resolve these contradictions by recognizing the Commune as “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour,”⁴⁸ and in so doing came into conflict with his own principle, that the lever of the social revolution can only be the conquest of state power.

“The Communal Constitution,” declared Marx, “would have restored to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the State parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of society.”⁴⁹

“The very existence of the Commune,” he says later, “involved , as a matter of course, local municipal liberty, but no longer as a check upon the, now-superseded, State power” (our emphasis, Martov).⁵⁰

Thus, the destruction of the “bureaucratic-military machine” of the state, about which Marx writes in a letter to Kugelmann, morphed imperceptibly into the abolition of all state power, of any apparatus of coercion in the service of the social administration. Breaking up the “the modern state edifice”⁵¹ of the Continental type became the decomposition of the state as such.

Are we dealing here with a certain deliberate vagueness of wording that allowed Marx to avoid touching on the weak points of the Paris Commune at a moment when the Commune was being trampled by triumphant reaction? Or did the powerful impulse of the revolutionary proletariat of Paris, marching under the banner of the Commune, make acceptable to Marx certain ideas of Proudhonist origin? Whatever the case, Bakunin and his friends saw Marx’s The Civil War in France as an acknowledgement of the correctness of the very path of social revolution which they advocated. In his memoirs, James Guillaume observes with satisfaction that, in its assessment of the Commune, the General Council of the International (under whose auspices The Civil War was published) adopted the viewpoint of the federalists.⁵² Bakunin declared triumphantly: “The effect of the communalist uprising was so great that even the Marxists were compelled to bow and scrape before it—because it had overthrown all their ideas—and contrary to any logic and their actual sentiments, appropriated its aims and program.”⁵³ There is more than a little polemical exaggeration in these words, of course, but they do contain a grain of truth.

In the summer of 1917, it was precisely these not very definite opinions of Marx’s on the destruction of the state by a proletarian uprising and the creation of the Commune, that formed the basis for the new revelation Lenin presented to the world concerning the tasks of the social revolution. It is precisely on the basis of these opinions of Marx, that Lenin constructed his anarcho-syndicalist scheme for the destruction of the state happening in the very moment of the proletariat’s conquest of the dictatorship, replacing the state with the political “form ‘at last discovered’” which in 1871 was imagined as the Commune and was now [imagined as] “the soviets,” which after “the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, in different circumstances and under different conditions, continue the work of the Commune and confirm Marx’s brilliant historical analysis.”⁵⁴

As early as 1899, in his well-known The Preconditions of Socialism, Eduard Bernstein observed that in The Civil War Marx took a step toward Proudhon. “Whatever other differences there may be between Marx and ‘petit-bourgeois’ Proudhon, on this point their way of thinking is as nearly as possible the same.”⁵⁵ Bernstein’s words threw Lenin into a rage. “Monstrous! Ridiculous! Renegade!” Lenin shouted at Bernstein, and he took the opportunity to revile Plekhanov and Kautsky for not correcting “this distortion of Marx by Bernstein”⁵⁶ in their polemics against Bernstein’s book.⁵⁷

But following his attack on Kautsky and Plekhanov, Lenin could have also come down on the “Spartacist” Franz Mehring, unquestionably the best expert and commentator on Marx. In his Karl Marx: The History of His Life, published not long before his death, Mehring writes categorically, leaving no room for doubt.

The way in which the Address dealt with these details [about the Commune—Martov] was brilliant, but there was a certain contradiction between them and the opinions previously held by Marx and Engels for a quarter of a century and set down in The Communist Manifesto.⁵⁸ They held that one of the final results of the future proletarian revolution would certainly be the dissolution of that political institution known as the state, but this dissolution was to have been gradual. The main aim of such an institution was always to protect by force of arms the economic oppression of the working majority of the population by a minority in exclusive possession of the wealth of society. With the disappearance of this minority of wealthy persons, the necessity for an armed repressive institution such as the state would also disappear. At the same time, however, they pointed out that, in order to achieve this and other still more important aims of the future social revolution, the working class must first seize the organized political power of the state and use it to crush the resistance of the capitalists and reorganize society. These opinions of The Communist Manifesto could not be reconciled with the praise lavished by the Address of the General Council on the Paris Commune for the vigorous fashion in which it had begun to exterminate the parasitic state. (Our emphasis throughout, Martov)⁵⁹

And Mehring adds, “It is not difficult to realize that the supporters of Bakunin interpreted the Address of the General Council in their own way.”⁶⁰

Mehring believes that it was “perfectly clear” to Marx and Engels that there was a contradiction between the theses presented in The Civil War and their previous position on the conquest of state power. He writes, “After the death of Marx, Engels was compelled to engage in a struggle against the anarchist tendencies in the working-class movement, and he let this proviso drop and once again took his stand on the basis of The Manifesto.”⁶¹

“On the basis of The Manifesto,” the working class would seize the state apparatus that the bourgeoisie had created, democratize it from top to bottom (see the immediate measures that, according to The Manifesto, the proletariat would implement upon winning power), and thereby transform it from a machine used by the minority for the suppression of the majority into a machine for the suppression of a minority by the majority, for the emancipation of this majority from social inequality. That means, as Marx wrote in 1852, not merely to adopt and use the ready-made state machine of the bureaucratic, police, and military type, but to smash it in order to construct a new state machine based on the self-government of the people under the leadership of the proletariat.

The ambiguous formulations found in The Civil War in France were reasonable enough given the practical necessity for the General Council of the International to defend the cause of the Commune (a Commune led by Hébertists and Proudhonists) against its enemies. But these formulations almost completely erased the line between the Marxist thesis of the “conquest of political power” and the anarchist idea of the “destruction of the state.” On the eve of the overturn of October 1917, in his struggle against the republican democratism practised by the socialist parties that he opposed, Lenin used these formulations to good effect, accumulating in his The State and Revolution as many contradictions as were found in the heads of all the members of the Commune put together: Jacobins, Blanquists, Hébertists, Proudhonists, and anarchists. Objectively (and most likely without Lenin’s even realizing it), this was necessary so that an attempt to create a state machine very similar in its structure to the former military and bureaucratic type and in the hands of a small party,⁶² might be presented to the masses—then in a seething, revolutionary state—as the destruction of the old state machinery, the birth of a stateless society based on a minimum of coercion and discipline.

At a time when the most revolutionary masses were expressing their emancipation from the centuries-old yoke of the old state by forming autonomous “Kronstadt republics” and carrying out experiments in “workers’ control,” which were understood in a completely anarchist sense, etc.—at that moment, the “dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasantry” (in the form of the actual dictatorship of the “true” spokespeople for the needs of these classes: the chosen ones of Bolshevik communism) could only be consolidated by dressing itself in this anarchist anti-state ideology. The formula of “All power to the soviets!” was the most suitable to give mystical expression to the contradictory desires of the revolutionary elements of the people: to create a machine that would suppress the exploiting classes to the benefit of the exploited; and, simultaneously to be free from any state machine, which for them would mean the necessity of subordinating their wills as individuals or groups to the will of the social whole.

The “soviet mysticism” current at this stage of the revolution in the countries of western Europe, is no different in origin and significance, while in Russia itself, the evolution of the soviet state has already led to the creation of a new and very complex state machine based on the very same antagonisms that characterize the state of the capitalist class—the opposition of the “administration of persons” to the “administration of things,” the opposition of “administration” to “self-government,” the opposition of the bureaucratic functionary to the citizen.

The economic retrogression that occurred during the world war simplified economic life in all countries and, in the consciousness of the masses, the question of the organization of production was eclipsed by the question of uniformity in distribution and consumption. This retrogression has revived in the working class the illusion that the national economy can be controlled by transferring the means of production directly—bypassing the state—to individual groups of workers (“workers’ control,” “immediate socialization,” etc.).

From the soil of these resurgent economic illusions,⁶³ we see again the growth of the illusion that the emancipation of the working class can be realized, not by conquering the state, but by destroying it. Through these and other illusions, the revolutionary working class is thrown back toward the confusion, obscurity, and ideological immaturity that characterized it during the Commune of 1871.

In part by exploiting, in part by themselves falling victim to these illusions and this ideological immaturity, certain extremist minorities of the socialist proletariat seek to circumvent the difficulty of realizing a genuine class dictatorship under conditions where this class, having lost its internal unity in the crisis of the war, is incapable of directly fighting for revolutionary goals. In the end, this anarchist illusion in the destruction of the state covers for the desire to concentrate all the coercive power of the state in the hands of a proletarian minority, one that trusts neither in the objective logic of the revolution nor in the class consciousness of the proletarian majority, let alone the people’s majority. Therefore, compelled by external conditions and the inner conditions of the proletariat, the idea of a fundamental rupture in principle with all the old bourgeois forms of revolution—[a rupture] in the form of a “system of soviets”—serves as a cover for methods of the struggle for power characteristic of the bourgeois revolutions. Those revolutions were always accomplished through the transfer of power—from one “conscious minority, relying on an unconscious majority”—to another.