Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

the place of a heart; his private life as infamous as his public life is odious - even now when playing the part of a French Sulla, he cannot help setting off the abomination of his deeds by the ridicule of his ostentation."4

The second section dealt with the events immediately preceding the establishment of the Commune. T h e only obstacle to Thiers' counter- 1 evolutionary conspiracy was armed Paris. To overcome this, Thiers had invented the lie that the cannon of the National Guard were the property of 1 he state. It was Thiers who had begun the Civil War by sending soldiers to remove the cannon. T h e only violence practised by the Com - mune was the shooting of the two generals Lecomte and Thomas by their troops and the dispersal of an armed demonstration in the Place Vendome, which was as nothing compared to the atrocities of the Versailles Government with their wholesale shooting of prisoners.

T h e most interesting part of the Address is its third section, where Marx described the political organisation of the Commune - both actual

.mil potential. His organisational model was noticeably less centralised 1 linn that in the parallel passage at the end of the Communist Manifesto. I Ins change of emphasis was marked right at the beginning of the section: I he working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinII y, and wield it for its own purposes'.115 Marx then defined the organs

• •I state power as being the 'standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, <IIK1 judicature' and gave a history of its developments in France up to die Second Empire which

professed to save the working class by breaking down Parliamentarism, and, with it, the undisguised subservience of Government to the propertied classes. It professed to save the propertied classes by upholding then economic supremacy over the working class; and, finally, it prolessed to unite all classes by reviving for all the chimera of national glory. In reality, the Empire was the only form of government possible

it a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation.116

I lie Commune was the 'direct antithesis' to the Empire and was the positive form' of the Republic of 1848. Marx then described the election ol the Commune (he exaggerated the working-class nature of its

• imposition) and the transformation of the standing army, police, admininiiaiion and judicature into elected, responsible and revocable agents of tin < ommune:

I lie Paris Commune was, of course, to serve as a model to all the great industrial centres of France. The communal regime once established in

3 6 2 K A RL M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

Paris and the secondary centres, the old centralised Government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers. . . . T h e Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an extremely short term of service. T h e rural communes of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and 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 mandat imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents. T h e few but important functions which still 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 stricdy

to become a reality by the destruction of the State power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence.. . . Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Com - munes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well known that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business, generally know how to put the right man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it prompdy. On the other hand, nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supersede universal suffrage by hierarchic investiture."7

T h i s passage reveals much more about Marx's view of the shape of the future communist society after the revolution than it does about the plans of the Communards, a majority of whom would probably not have agreed with Marx's projects."8

Marx then mentioned some misconceptions about the C o m m u n e: it was not a throw-back to the Middle Ages; it was not aimed at the breaking up of the nation; and it was not the sort of self-sufficient economic unit advocated by the Proudhonists.

Marx wrote of 'the multiplicity of interpretations, to which the C o m - mune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favour', but claimed that the C o m m u ne was nevertheless 'the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour'.1 1 '' He elaborated on the character of this 'economic emancipation' by accepting the charge that the C o m m u n e intended to abolish class property and expropriate the expropriators by setting up

'united co-operative societies' which would 'regulate national production upon a common plan'. At the same time he declared:

The working class have no ready-made Utopias to introduce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. T h ey have no ideals to realise, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. In the full consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act up to it, the working class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen's gentlemen with the pen and the ink-horn, and at the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois doctrinaires, pouring forth their ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility.120

Marx further proclaimed that the measures of the C o m m u n e also bene-

No longer was Paris the rendezvous of British landlords, Irish absentees, American ex-slaveholders and shoddy men, Russian ex-serf-owners, and VVallachian boyars. No more corpses at the morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely any robberies; in fact, for the first time since the days of February 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, and that without Police of any kind.121

I Ins was very different from:

die Paris of the francs-fileurs, the Paris of the Boulevards, male and Irinale - the rich, the capitalist, the gilded, the idle Paris, now thronging with its lackeys, its blacklegs, its literary boheme, and its cocottes at Versailles, Saint-Denis, Rueil, and Saint-Germain; considering the Civil War but an agreeable diversion, eyeing the battle going on through irleseopes, counting the rounds of cannon, and swearing by their own honour and that of their prostitutes, that the performance was far better

In 1 he fourth and final section, Marx described Thiers's feeble attempts in 1 use an army against Paris and his reliance on prisoners released by

Bismarck once the peace was signed. When eventually the final battle for Paris began, the atrocities of the Versailles Government were monstrous:

To find a parallel for the conduct of Thiers and his bloodhounds we must go back to the times of Sulla and the two Triumvirates of Rome. The same wholesale slaughter in cold blood, the same disregard, in massacre, of age and sex; the same system of torturing prisoners; the same proscriptions, but this time of a whole class; the same savage hunt after concealed leaders, lest one might escape; the same denunciations of political and private enemies; the same indifference for the butchery of entire strangers to the feud. There is but this difference, that the Romans had no mitrailleuses for the despatch, in the lump, of the prescribed, and that they had not 'the law in their hands' nor on their lips the cry of civilisation.125

To the charge of incendiarism Marx replied that in war fire was an arm as legitimate as any. A few hostages had also been killed, but their lives had also been forfeit many times by the shooting of prisoners by the Versailles Government. T h e result of the Commune was that class antagonisms had been sharpened:

But the battle must break out again and again and in ever-growing dimensions, and there can be no doubt as to who will be the victor in the end, - the appropriating few, or the immense working majority. And the French working class is only the advance guard of the modern proletariat.... Wherever, in whatever shape, and under whatever conditions the class struggle obtains any consistency, it is but natural that members of our association should stand in the foreground. The soil out of which it grows is modern society itself. It cannot be stamped out by any amount of carnage. To stamp it out the Governments would

Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be for ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. The martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.124

T h e Civil War in France (the title given to the Address) was the most brilliant of Marx's polemics, and had an immediate success unknown to any of the previous pronouncements of the General Council. It ran through three editions in two months, sold 8000 copies in the second edition and was translated into most European languages. In an overall

thought it is important in providing Lenin with a basis for the Bolshevik

State and Revolution, Lenin put great emphasis on Marx's remark that the proletariat 'cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and use it for its own purposes'125 - though in fact Lenin's view of the Party

.is the vanguard of the proletariat is more akin to Blanqui's conceptions; and Lenin strained the facts of the Commune even further than Marx.) ihe Civil War in France is only one interpretation of the Commune: there were Proudhonist, Blanquist and anarchist interpretations that were as instified as Marx's in that their views were similarly represented to the (Commune. It must also be remembered that the Civil War was an obituary126 and scarcely the place to offer a critical assessment: Marx's letters show him much more reticent about the achievements of the Commune, and later he even went as far as to say (in a letter to the Dutch socialist I )omela Nieuwenhuis) that the Commune 'was not socialist, nor could it have been'.127

Nevertheless, amid the reaction that swept over Europe following the defeat of the Commune, the very success of the Civil War, with its

greatest threat to society and civilisation. T h e most incredible rumours were published as fact in the Press: the International had conspired with Napoleon; it had conspired with Bismarck; Marx had even been Bismarck's

the International. Favre, Foreign Minister in the Thiers Government, not content with stifling the remnants of the Commune in France, issued a circular to all European governments declaring the International a menace

only country that agreed to the extradition of the French refugees. In spite of the almost universal condemnation of the Commune in the British Press (complete with the wildest inaccuracies which Marx spent a lot of

((iranville) said the British Government had no right to expel refugees who had not contravened any British law or committed any of the crimes specified in the treaty of extradition.

It soon became known that Marx was the author of the infamous Address; from being virtually unknown in England, except to a very small