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Title: Revolutionary Commune Author: Karl Korsch Date: 1929 Language: en Topics: Council Communism, Paris Commune, German Revolution, Germany, commune Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1929/commune.htm Notes: First Published: in Die Aktion #19, 1929 Translated by Andrew Giles-Peters and Karl-Heinz Otto Source: Class Against Class; Transcribed: by Zdravko Saveski, for marxists.org 2009;
What should every class-conscious worker know about the revolutionary
commune in the present historical epoch which has on its agenda the
revolutionary self-liberation of the working class from the capitalist
yoke? And what is known about it today by even the politically
enlightened and therefore self-conscious segment of the proletariat?
There are a few historical facts, together with a few appropriate
remarks by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, which now after half a century of
Social Democratic propaganda prior to the Great War and after the
powerful new experiences of the last fifteen years, have already become
part and parcel of proletarian consciousness. However, this piece of
world history is today mostly dealt with as little in the schools of the
“democratic” (Weimar) republic as it was earlier in the schools of the
Kaiser’s imperial monarchy. I am referring to the history and
significance of the glorious Paris Commune, which hoisted the red flag
of proletarian revolution on March 18, 1871, and kept it flying for
seventy-two days in fierce battles against an onslaught of a well-armed
hostile world. This is the revolutionary commune of the Paris workers in
1871 of which Karl Marx said in his address to the General Council of
the International Workers Association on May 30, 1871, on the civil war
in France, that its “true secret” lay in the fact that it was
essentially a government of the working classes, “the result of the
struggle by the producing class against the propertied class, the
finally discovered political form under which the economic liberation of
labor could develop.” And it was in this sense that twenty years later,
when on the occasion of the founding of the Second International and the
creation of proletarian May Day celebrations as the first form of direct
international mass action, the propertied classes once again were
overcome with holy terror whenever the alarming words “dictatorship of
the proletariat” were sounded. Friedrich Engels flung the proud
sentences into the faces of the startled philistines: “Well then,
gentlemen, would you like to know what this dictatorship looks like?
Look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the
proletariat.” And then again, more than two decades later, the greatest
revolutionary politician of our time, Lenin, analyzed in exact detail
the experiences of the Paris Commune and the struggle against the
opportunist decline and confusion in regard to the theories of Marx and
Engels in the main part of his most important political work State and
Revolution. And when a few weeks later the Russian Revolution of 1917,
which had begun in February as a national and bourgeois revolution,
broke through its national and bourgeois barriers and expanded and
deepened into the first proletarian world revolution, the masses of West
European workers (and the progressive sections of the working class of
the whole world), together with Lenin and Trotsky, welcomed this new
form of government of the revolutionary “council system” as the direct
continuation of the “revolutionary commune” created half a century
earlier by the Paris workers.
So far, so good. As unclear as the ideas may have been that bound
together the revolutionary workers under the formula “all power to the
councils,” following that revolutionary period of storm and stress which
spread far and wide over Europe after the economic and political
upheavals of the four war years; however deep already then the rift may
have been between these ideas and that reality which in the new Russia
had come to the fore under the name of “Socialist Councils Republic”
nonetheless, in that period the call for councils war a positive form of
development of a revolutionary proletarian class will surging toward
realization. Only morose philistines could bewail the vagueness of the
councils concept at that time, like every incompletely realized idea,
and only lifeless pedants could attempt to alleviate this defect by
artificially contrived “systems” like the infamous “little boxes-system”
of Daumig and Richard Muller. Wherever in those days the proletariat
established its revolutionary class-dictatorship, as happened in Hungary
and Bavaria temporarily in 1919, it named and formed its “government of
the working class”-which was a result of the struggle by the producing
class against the propertied class and whose determined purpose was to
accomplish the “economic liberation of labor” — as a revolutionary
council government. And if in those days the proletariat had been
victorious in anyone of the bigger industrial countries, perhaps in
Germany during the big commercial strikes of spring, 1919, or in the
counteraction of the Kapp putsch in 1920, or in the course of the
so-called Cunow strike during the Ruhr-occupation and the inflation year
of 1923, or in Italy at the time of the occupation of factories in
October, 1920-then it would have established its power in the form of a
Council Republic and it would have united together with the already
existing “Federation of Russian Socialist Soviet Republics” within a
world-federation of revolutionary council republics.
Under today’s conditions, however, the council concept has quite another
significance, as does the existence of a so-called socialist and
“revolutionary” council government. Now after the overcoming of the
world economic crisis of 1921 and the related defeat of the German,
Polish, and Italian workers-and the following chain of further
proletarian defeats including the British general strike and miners’
strike of 1926 — European capitalism has commenced a new cycle of its
dictatorship on the backs of the defeated working class. Under these
changed objective conditions we, the revolutionary proletarian
class-fighters of the whole world, cannot any more hold subjectively
onto our old belief, quite unchanged and unexamined, in the
revolutionary significance of the council concept and the revolutionary
character of council government as a direct development of that
political form of the proletarian dictatorship “discovered” half a
century ago by the Paris communardes.
It would be superficial and false, when looking at the flagrant
contradictions existing today between the name and the real condition of
the Russian “Union of Socialist Soviet Republics,” to satisfy ourselves
with the statement that the men in power in present-day Russia
“betrayed” that original “revolutionary” council principle, just as in
Germany Scheidemann, Muller, and Leipart have “betrayed” their
“revolutionary” socialist principles of the dap before the war. Both
claims are true without doubt. The Scheidemanns, Mullers, and Leiparts
were traitors to their socialist principles. And in Russia the
“dictatorship” exercised today from the highest pinnacle of an extremely
exclusive government-party apparatus by means of a million-headed
bureaucracy over the proletariat and the whole of Soviet Russia-that
only in name is still reminiscent of the “Communist” and “Bolshevik”
party-has as little in common with the revolutionary council concept of
1917 and 1918 as the Fascist party dictatorship of the former
revolutionary Social Democrat Mussolini in Italy. However, so little is
explained in both cases in regard to “betrayal” that rather the fact of
betrayal itself requires explanation.
The real task that the contradictory development from the once
revolutionary slogan “All Power to the Councils” to the now
capitalist-fascist regime in the so-called socialist soviet-state has
put on the agenda for us class-conscious revolutionary proletarians is
rather a task of revolutionary self-critique. We must recognize that not
only does that revolutionary dialectic apply to the ideas and
institutions of the feudal and bourgeois past, but likewise to all
thoughts and organizational forms which the working class itself has
already brought forward during the hitherto prevailing stages of its
historical struggle for liberation. It is this dialectic which causes
the good deed of yesterday to become the misery of today as Goethe said
in his Faust — as it is more clearly and definitely expressed by Karl
Marx: every historical form turns at a certain point of its development
from a developing form of revolutionary forces of production,
revolutionary action, and developing consciousness into the shackles of
that developing form. And as this dialectical antithesis of
revolutionary development applies to all other historical ideas and
formations, it equally applies also to those philosophical and
organizational results of a certain historical phase of revolutionary
class struggle, which is exemplified by the Paris communards of almost
60 years ago in the “finally discovered” political form of government of
the working class in the shape of a revolutionary commune. The same is
applicable to the following new historical phase of struggle in the
revolutionary movement of the Russian workers and peasants, and the
international working class, which brought forth the new form of the
“revolutionary councils power.”
Instead of bewailing the “betrayal” of the council concept and the
“degeneration” of the council power we must gather by illusion-free,
sober, and historically objective observation the beginning, middle, and
end of this whole development within a total historical panorama and we
must pose this critical question: What is — after this total historical
experience -the real historical and class-oriented significance of this
new political form of government, which brought about in the first place
the revolutionary Commune of 1871, although its development was
forcefully interrupted after 72 days duration, and then the Russian
Revolution of 1917 in concrete, more final, shape?
It is all the more necessary to once again basically orient ourselves
concerning the historical and class-oriented character of the
revolutionary commune and its further development, the revolutionary
councils system, for even the barest of historical critique shows how
completely unfounded the widely spread conception is today among
revolutionaries who theoretically reject and want to “destroy” in
practice the parliament, conceived as a bourgeois institution with
regard to its origin and purpose, and yet at the same. time see the
so-called council system, and also its predecessor the revolutionary
commune;” as the essential form of proletarian government which stands
with its whole essence in irreconcilable opposition to the essence of
the bourgeois state, in reality it is the “commune,” in its almost
thousand years of historical development, which represents an older,
bourgeois form of government than parliament. The commune forms from the
beginnings in the eleventh century up to that highest culmination which
the revolutionary movement of the bourgeoisie found in the French
Revolution of 1789/93 the almost pure class-oriented manifestation of
that struggle which in this whole historical epoch the then
revolutionary bourgeois class has waged in various forms for the
revolutionary change of the whole hitherto existing feudal order of
society and the founding of the new bourgeois social order.
When Marx — as we saw in the previously quoted sentence of his “Civil
War in France” — celebrated the revolutionary Commune of the Paris
workers of 1871 as the “finally discovered political form under which
the economic liberation of labor could be consummated,” he was aware at
the same time that the “commune” could only take on this new character —
its traditional form having been passed on over hundreds of years of
bourgeois struggle for freedom — if it radically changed its entire
previous nature. He expressly concerns himself with the
misinterpretations of those who at that time wanted to regard this “new
commune which shatters the modern state power” as a “revival of the
medieval communes which preceded that state power and thence formed
their foundation.” And he was far removed from expecting any wondrous
effects for the proletarian class struggle from the political form of
the communal constitution per se- detached from the definite proletarian
class-oriented content, with which the Paris workers, according to his
concept, had for one historical moment filled this political form,
achieved through struggle and put into the service of their economic
self-liberation. To him the decisive reason enabling the Paris workers
to make the traditional form of the “commune” the instrument of a
purpose which was so completely opposed to their original historically
determined goal lies, rather, on the contrary, in its being relatively
undeveloped and indeterminate. In the fully formed bourgeois state, as
it developed in its classical shape especially in France (i.e., in the
centralized modern representative-state), the supreme power of the state
is, according to the well known words of the “Communist Manifesto,”
nothing more than “an executive committee which administers the common
affairs of the bourgeois class as a whole”; thus its bourgeois class
character is readily apparent. However, in those underdeveloped early
historical forms of bourgeois state constitutions, that also include the
medieval “free commune,” this bourgeois class character, which
essentially adheres to every state, comes to light in a quite different
form. As opposed to the later ever more clearly appearing and ever more
purely developed character of the bourgeois state power as a “supreme
public power for the suppression of the working class, a machine of
class rule” (Marx), we see that in this earlier phase of development the
originally determined goal of the bourgeois class organization still
prevails as an organ of the revolutionary struggle of liberation of the
suppressed bourgeois class against the medieval feudal rule. However
little this struggle of the medieval bourgeoisie has in common with the
proletarian struggle for emancipation of the present historical epoch it
yet remains as a historical class struggle. And those instruments
created then by the bourgeoisie for the requirements of their
revolutionary struggle contain to a certain extent-but only to a certain
extent--certain formal connecting links with the formation of today’s
revolutionary struggle of emancipation which is being continued by the
proletarian class on another basis, under other conditions, and for
other purposes.
Karl Marx had already at an earlier date pointed out the special
significance which these earlier experiences and achievements of the
bourgeois class struggle-which found their most important expression in
the various phases of development of the revolutionary bourgeois commune
of the middle ages — had in regard to the forming of modern proletarian
class consciousness and class struggle; in fact, he pointed this out
very much earlier than the great historical event of the Paris Commune
insurrection of 1871 permitted him to praise this new revolutionary
commune of the Parisian workers as the finally discovered political form
of economic liberation of labor. He had demonstrated the historical
analogy existing between the political development of the bourgeoisie as
the suppressed class struggling for liberation within the medieval
feudal state and the development of the proletariat in modern capitalist
society. It is from this perspective that he was able to win his main
theoretical support for his special dialectical revolutionary theory of
the significance of trade unions and the trade union struggle — a theory
which until this day is still not completely and correctly understood by
many Marxists from both the left and right wing. And he arrived at it by
comparing the modern coalitions of workers with the communes of the
medieval bourgeoisie, stressing the historical fact that the bourgeois
class likewise began their struggle against the feudal social order by
forming coalitions. Already in the polemical treatise against Proudhon
we find in regard to this point the following illustration, classical to
this day:
In the bourgeoisie we have two phases to distinguish: that in which it
constituted itself as a class under the regime of feudalism and absolute
monarchy, and that in which, already constituted as a class, it
overthrew feudalism and monarchy to make society into a bourgeois
society. The first of these phases was the longer and necessitated the
greater efforts. This too began by partial combinations against the
feudal lords.
Much research has been carried out to trace the different historical
phases that the bourgeoisie has passed through, from the commune up to
its constitution as a class.
But when it is a question of making a precise study of strikes,
combinations and other forms in which the proletarians carry out before
our eyes their organization as a class, some are seized with real fear
and others display a transcendental disdain. (Marx, The Poverty of
Philosophy, chapter 2, # 5)
What is theoretically articulated here, by the young Marx in the 1840’s,
who only recently crossed over to proletarian socialism, and what he
repeats in a similar form a few years later in the Communist Manifesto
by illustrating the diverse phases of development of the bourgeoisie and
the proletariat, he also articulates once again 20 years later in the
well known resolution of the Geneva Congress of the International
Association of Workers with regard to trade unions, He argues that the
trade unions have already during their hitherto prevailing development
become “the focal points of organization of the working class ... Just
as the medieval municipalities and villages had become focal points of
the bourgeoisie.” This is so although the trade unions are not aware of
their focal significance beyond the immediate daily tasks of defending
the wages and working hours of the workers against the continuous
excessive demands of capital. Hence in the future the trade unions must
act consciously as such focal points of the organization of the whole
working class.
If one wants to understand Marx’s later position regarding the
revolutionary commune of the Parisian workers in its real significance,
one must take his original concept on the historical relationship
between the organizational forms of the modern proletarian and the
earlier bourgeois class struggle as a starting point. The commune arose
from the struggle of the producing class against the exploiting class
and broke up in a revolutionary act the prevailing bourgeois state
machinery. When Marx celebrates this new commune as the finally
discovered form for the liberation of labor, it was not at all his
desire — as some of his followers later claimed and still do so to this
day — to designate or brand a definite form of political organization,
whether it is called a revolutionary commune or a revolutionary council
system, as a singularly appropriate and potential form of the
revolutionary proletarian class dictatorship. In the immediately
preceding sentence, he expressly points to “the multifariousness of
interpretations which supported the commune and the multiplicity of
interests expressed in the commune,” and he explained the already
established character of this new form of government as a “political
form thoroughly capable of development.” It is just this unlimited
capability of development of new forms of political power, created by
the Paris communardes in the fire of battle, which distinguished it from
the “classic development of bourgeois government,” the centralized state
power of the modern parliamentary republic. Marx’s essential
presupposition is that in the energetic pursuit of the real interests of
the working class this form can in the end even be used as that lever
which will overthrow the economic bases forming the existence of
classes, class rule, and the state. The revolutionary communal
constitution thus becomes under certain historical conditions the
political form of a process of development, or to put it more clearly,
of a revolutionary action where the basic essential goal is no longer to
preserve any one form of state rule, or even to create a newer “higher
state-type,” but rather to create at last the material conditions for
the “withering away of every state altogether.” Without this last
condition, the communal constitution was all impossibility and all
illusion,” Marx says in this context with all desired distinctness.
Nonetheless, there remains still an unbalanced contradiction between on
one hand Marx’s characterization of the Paris Commune as the finally
discovered “political form” for accomplishing the economic and social
self-liberation of the working class and, on the other hand, his
emphasis at the same time that the suitability of the commune for this
purpose rests mainly on its formlessness; that is, on its
indeterminateness and openness to multiple interpretations. It appears
there is only one point at which Marx’s position is perfectly clear and
to which he professed at this time under the influence of certain
political theories he had in the meantime come up against and which were
incorporated in this original political concept-and not least under the
practical impression of the enormous experience of the Paris Commune
itself. While in the Communist Manifesto of 1847–48 and likewise in the
Inaugural Address to the International Workers’ Association in 1864, he
still had only spoken of the necessity “for the proletariat to conquer
political power” now the experiences of the Paris Commune provided him
with the proof that “the working class can not simply appropriate the
ready-made state machinery and put it into motion for its own purposes,
but it must smash the existing bourgeois state machinery in a
revolutionary way.” This sentence has since been regarded as an
essential main proposition and core of the whole political theory of
Marxism, especially since in 1917 Lenin at once theoretically restored
the unadulterated Marxian theory of the state in his work “State and
Revolution” and practically realized it through carrying through the
October Revolution as its executor.
But obviously nothing positive is at all yet said about the formal
character of the new revolutionary supreme state power of the
proletariat with the merely negative determination that the state power
cannot simply “appropriate the state machinery” of the previous
bourgeois state “for the working class and set it in motion for their
own purposes.” So we must ask: for which reasons does the “Commune” in
its particular, determinate form represent the finally discovered
political form of government for the working class, as Marx puts it in
his Civil War, and as Engels characterizes it once more at great length
in his introduction to the third edition of the Civil War twenty years
later? Whatever gave Marx and Engels, those fiery admirers of the
centralized system of revolutionary bourgeois dictatorship realized by
the great French Revolution, the idea to regard precisely the “Commune”
as the “political form” of the revolutionary dictatorship of the
proletariat, when it appeared to be the complete opposite to that
system?
In fact, if we analyze more exactly the political program and goals to
be attained as proposed by the two founders of scientific socialism,
Marx and Engels, not only in the time before the Paris Commune
insurrection, but also afterwards, the assertion cannot be maintained
that the form of proletarian dictatorship realized by the Paris Commune
of 1871 would in any particular sense be in unison with those political
theories. Indeed, Marx’s great opponent in the First International,
Michael Bakunin, had on this point the historical truth on his side when
he sarcastically commented on Marx’s having annexed the Paris Commune
retrospectively:
“The impact of the Communist insurrection was so powerful that even the
Marxists, who had all their ideas thrown to the wind by it, were forced
to doff their hats to it. They did more than that: in contradiction to
all logic and their innermost feelings, they adopted the program of the
Commune and its aim as their own. It was a comic, but enforced travesty.
They had to do it, otherwise they would have been rejected and abandoned
by all- so mighty was the passion which this revolution had brought
about in the whole world.” (Cf. [Fritz] Brupbacher: Marx and Bakunin,
pp. 114–115.)
The revolutionary ideas of the Paris communardes of 1871 are partly
derived from the federalistic program of Bakunin and Proudhon, partly
from the circle of ideas of the revolutionary Jacobins surviving in
Blanquism, and only to a very small degree in Marxism. Twenty years
later, Friedrich Engels claimed that the Blanquists who formed the
majority of the Paris Commune had been forced by the sheer weight of the
facts to proclaim instead of their own program of a “strict dictatorial
centralization of all power in the hands of the new revolutionary
government” the exact opposite, namely the free federation of all French
communes with the Paris Commune. On this issue the same contradiction
arises between Marx and Engels’ political theory upheld so far and their
now prevailing unconditional acknowledgment of the commune as the
“finally discovered political form” of the government of the working
class. It is erroneous when Lenin in his 1917 work “State and
Revolution” describes the evolution of the Marxian theory of state, as
if Marx had in the transition period up to 1852 already concertized the
abstract formulation of the political task of the revolutionary
proletariat (as proposed in his “Communist Manifesto” of 1847–48) to the
effect that the victorious proletariat must “destroy” and “smash”, the
existing bourgeois supreme state power. Against this thesis of Lenin
speaks Marx and Engels’ own testimony, who both declared repeatedly that
just the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871 provided for the first
time the effective proof that “the working class cannot simply
appropriate the ready made state machinery and set it in motion for its
own purposes.” It was Lenin himself who provided the logical gap
appearing in his presentation of the development of revolutionary
Marxist state theory at this point by simply jumping over a time span of
20 years in his otherwise so historically correct and philologically
exact reproduction of Marx and Engels’ remarks on the state, He proceeds
from the 18^(th) Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) straight on to the
Civil War in France (1871) and in so doing overlooks among other things
the fact that Marx summarized the whole “political program” of the
working class in this one lapidary sentence of his Inaugural Address of
the First International: “It is therefore the great task of the working
class now to seize political power.”
Yet even in the time after 1871, when Marx, on account of the experience
of the Paris Commune, advocated in a far more certain and unequivocal
way that ever before the indispensable necessity of crushing the
bourgeois state machinery and building the proletarian class
dictatorship, he was far removed from propagating a form of government
modelled on the revolutionary Paris Commune as the political form of
proletarian dictatorship, Just for that one historical moment-in which
he unconditionally and without reservations came forward on behalf of
the heroic fighters and victims of the commune vis-Ă -vis the triumphant
reaction did he, or so it appears, uphold this standpoint-and I am
referring to the Address to the General Council of the International
Workers’ Association on the “Civil War in France,” written in blood and
fire on behalf of this first international organization of the
revolutionary proletariat. For the sake of the revolutionary essence of
the Paris Commune, he repressed the critique which from his standpoint
he should have exercised on the special form of its historical
manifestation. If beyond that he even went a step further and celebrated
the political form of the revolutionary communal-constitution directly
as the “finally discovered form” of the proletarian dictatorship, then
the explanation does not lie any more merely with his natural solidarity
with the revolutionary workers of Paris, but also in a special,
subsidiary purpose. Having written the Address to the General Council of
the I.W.A, directly after the glorious battle and defeat of the Paris
communardes, Marx not only wanted to annex the Marxism of the Commune
but also at the same time the Commune to Marxism. It is in this sense
that one must understand this remarkable document, if one wishes to
correctly grasp its meaning and range of significance not only as a
classic historical document looked at as a hero’s epic or as a death
lament. Rather beyond all that, it should be seen as a fractional
polemical treatise of Marx against his most intimate opponents in the
bitter struggles which had already broken out and would soon thereafter
lead to the collapse of the First International. This fractional
subsidiary purpose hindered Marx from appraising in a historically
correct and complete way that interconnecting revolutionary movement of
the French proletariat which began with the insurrections of the Commune
in Lyon and Marseilles in 1870 and had its climax in the Paris Commune
insurrection of 1871. It also forced him to explain the revolutionary
communal constitution, welcomed as the “finally discovered political
form” of proletarian class dictatorship, as a centralist government as
well — although this was in contrast to its actual essential being.
Already Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels themselves, and more so Lenin,
deny the charge that the Paris Commune had an essentially federalist
character. If Marx cannot help but explain in his short account of the
sketch of the All-French Communal Constitution produced by the Paris
Commune the unambiguous federalist aspects of this constitution, then in
so doing he still emphasizes purposively the fact (naturally not denied
by such federalists as Proudhon and Bakunin) that “the unity of the
nation was not to be broken but on the contrary was to be organized”
through this communal constitution. He underlines “the few but important
functions” which are still remaining to be dealt with by a “central
government” within this communal constitution. He remarks that according
to the plan of the Commune these functions “were not — as some
intentionally falsified-to be abolished, but were to be transferred to
communal (and strictly responsible) civil servants.” On this basis,
Lenin later declared that “not a trace of federalism is to be found” in
Marx’s writings on the example of the Commune. “Marx is a centralist and
in his explanations cited here there is no deviation from centralism”
(“State and Revolution”). Quite correctly so, but Lenin omits to mention
at this point that Marx’s exposition of the Paris Commune is also
everything else but a historically correct characterization of the
revolutionary commune constitution aspired to by the Paris communardes
and realized in the first beginnings.
In order to deflect from the federative and anti-centralist character of
the Paris Commune as much as possible, Marx and Engels; and likewise
Lenin, have emphasized above all else the negative aspect, that it
represents as such the destruction of the prevailing bourgeois state
power. On this point there is no quarrel among revolutionaries. Marx,
Engels, and Lenin have justly emphasized that the decisive foundation
for the proletarian revolutionary character of the form of political
supreme power as stated by the Commune is to be sought in its societal
being as a realization of proletarian class dictatorship. They pointed
out to their “federalist” adversaries with great severity that the
decentralized, federative sidle form as such is quite as bourgeois as
the centralist form of government of the modern bourgeois state. They
nevertheless committed the same error which they so strongly opposed in
their opponents, not by concentrating on the “federalist” character of
the communal constitution, but rather by emphasizing too much the other
formal differences which distinguished the Paris Commune from
parliamentarism and other surpassed forms of the bourgeois state
constitution (for example, on the replacement of the standing army
through the militia, on the unification of executive and legislative
power, and on the responsibility and right of dismissal of “communal”
functionaries). They thereby created a considerable confusion of
concepts out of which emerged not only harmful effects with regard to
the position of Marxism vis-Ă -vis the Paris commune, but also likewise
for the later positing of the revolutionary Marxist direction vis-Ă -vis
the new historical phenomenon of the revolutionary council system.
As incorrect as it may be to see with Proudhon and Bakunin an overcoming
of the bourgeois state in the “federative” form, it is just as incorrect
when today some Marxist followers of the revolutionary commune on the
revolutionary council system believe on the basis of such misunderstood
explanations by Marx, Engels, and Lenin that a parliamentary
representative with a short-term, binding mandate revocable at any time,
or a government functionary employed by private treaty for ordinary
“wages,” would be a less bourgeois arrangement than an elected
parliamentarian. It is completely erroneous when they believe that there
are any “communal” or “council-like” forms of constitution whose
introduction may cause the state governed by the revolutionary
proletarian party in the end to relinquish completely that character of
an instrument of class suppression which adheres to every state. The
whole theory of the final “withering away of the state in Communist
society,” taken over by Marx and Engels out of the tradition of utopian
socialism and further developed on the basis of practical experiences of
the proletarian class struggle in their time, loses its revolutionary
meaning when one declares with Lenin that there is a state where the
minority does not suppress anymore the majority, but rather “the
majority of the people themselves suppress their own suppressors”; and
such a state of proletarian dictatorship then in its capacity as
“fulfiller” of true or proletarian democracy “is already a withering
away of the state” (“State and Revolution”).
It is high time again to posit with full clarity the two basic theories
of the real revolutionary proletarian theory which by temporary adapting
to practical requirements of such certain phases of struggle as the
Paris Commune insurrection of 1871 and the Russian October Revolution of
1917 in the end ran into danger of being abrogated. The essential final
goal of proletarian class struggle is not anyone state, however
“democratic,” “communal,” or even “council-like,” but is rather the
classless and stateless Communist society whose comprehensive form is
not any longer some kind of political power but is “that association in
which the free development of every person is the condition for the free
development of all” (“Communist Manifesto”).
Irrespective of whether the proletarian class can “conquer” more or less
unchanged the surpassed state apparatus following the illusion of the
Marxist reformists, or whether it can only really appropriate it
according to revolutionary Marxist theory by radically “smashing” its
surpassed form and “replacing” it through a new voluntary created form —
until then, in either case this state will differ from the bourgeois
state in the period of revolutionary transformation of capitalist into
Communist society only through its class nature and its social function,
but not through its political form. “The true secret of the
revolutionary commune, the revolutionary council system, and every other
historical manifestation of government of the working class exists in
this social content and not in anyone artificially devised political
form or in such special institutions as may once have been realized
under some particular historical circumstances.