READ AND DISCUSS:

Marxism understands that theory relies on practice, that the workers’ movement has to learn and adapt its ideas from experience. The 1871 Paris Commune was of particular significance because it had been the first time that the working-class had successfully held power. It had done so for two months, before being defeated.

As Engels wrote in the 1888 Preface ⁶, as discussed in the previous lesson, “the struggle against capital, the defeats even more than the victories, could not help ... preparing the way for a more complete insight into the true conditions for working-class emancipation.” And the key lesson to learn from the defeat of the Paris Commune was that in order to overthrow capitalism, a revolutionary working-class can’t just use the existing state machine - the courts, the police, the army etc. - for its own purposes. Instead, it would need to create its own new organisations to organise the new society.

Rather than developing this important point in detail as part of a Preface to the existing Manifesto, Marx and Engels referred readers to a speech made by Marx, to the General Council of the ‘First International’ in 1871, for further explanation. That speech is worth reading in full, alongside the Communist Manifesto, but the quoted passages above contain the key points explaining how the workers of Paris created a new kind of state machinery.

It showed how, unlike under capitalism, workers’ democracy would mean that all representatives would be elected and subject to immediate recall by their electors. All officials would also be paid the same as other workers – without extra privileges of office.

Lenin, in preparing for the October 1917 Russian Revolution, took time to go back and read what Marx and Engels had written about the lessons of the Paris Commune, and summarised the key points in his pamphlet ‘State & Revolution ¹¹’. In it, Lenin quoted what Engels had written on its 20^th anniversary:

“The Commune had to recognise that the working class, once in power, in order not to lose again its only just-gained supremacy, must, on the one hand, do away with all the old machinery of oppression previously used against itself, and on the other … safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials. It filled all posts by election … subject to recall at any time by the electors. It paid all officials … only the wages received by other workers”.

The Paris Commune showed how a victorious working-class must organise new forms of state machinery, both to make sure that their gains are not taken back by capitalism, but also to provide safeguards against the danger of bureaucracy and corruption. In the 1917 Russian Revolution, the ‘soviets’ - or elected workers’ councils - emerged as the form of organisation that could both bring the working class together to organise revolutionary change and then also become the machinery of a new workers’ state.

The Manifesto issued by the first ever World Congress of the Communist International in 1919 explained the importance of soviets as follows: “the proletariat is compelled to create its own apparatus designed first and foremost to cement the inner ties of the working class and to assure the possibility of its revolutionary intervention into the future development of mankind. This apparatus is represented by the Workers’ Soviets … a broad organisation which embraces the working masses independently of trade or level of political development already attained; a flexible apparatus which permits of continual renovation and extension; and is capable of attracting into its orbit ever newer layers, opening wide its doors to the toiling layers in the city and the country who are close to the proletariat. This irreplaceable organisation of working-class self-rule, this organisation of its struggle for and later of its conquest of state power, has been tested in the experience of various countries and constitutes the mightiest conquest and weapon of the proletariat in our epoch ¹² ”.

Tragically, despite the best efforts of the leaders of the 1917 Russian Revolution, above all of Lenin and Trotsky, a privileged bureaucracy did indeed emerge as a consequence of the isolation and economic weakness of the fledgling Soviet workers’ state.

1. What conclusions would you draw for workers trying to change the world today from Marx’s conclusion that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes’ ?

2. In the Russian revolution, what new form of organisation was created in struggle that could also then form the machinery of a new workers’ state?

3. Looking at what is quoted above from both Marx and Engels, what differences were there between the state that was set up by the Paris Commune, and argued for by Lenin, and the top-down bureaucratic regime that emerged under Stalin?