notes to Marx, The Civil War in France - part II
Christopher Cutrone
(Continued from below:)
What was the positive programmatic content of the Paris Commune for Marx? There was none.
Marx and Engels were not prescriptive in their politics, but sought to generalize from the historical experience of political movements and phenomena. They embraced the Commune as a significant historical phenomenon that they wished to push further to explore its anti-capitalist possibilities. As Marx put it,
"The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favor, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all the previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret was this:
"It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.
"Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a delusion. The political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery." (634-635)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm
For Marx, he Commune was the "political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor." It was a beginning, not an end.
The problem with the way most "Marxists" (and others, such as anarchists/anarcho-syndicalists) have interpreted the Commune is as a finished form of radical, participatory, working-class democracy. But, for Marx, the "expansive" aspect of its "political form" was the key to grasping its historical significance, it opened and advanced certain possibilities and necessities of proletarian socialism: For, "the political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery."
During the regular academic year primary reading group, we have read Rosa Luxemburg's 1906 pamphlet on the 1905 Russian Revolution, The Mass Strike, the Trade Unions and the Political Party, in which strike committees, unions and political organizations/parties all mediate different levels of the social process of political revolution.
The problem with most on the "Left" is that they take one or the other historical phenomenon and isolate it from the others, hypostatizing it and freezing and dogmatizing it. So, either the factory committees, as "point of production"/producers' democracy (as with anarcho-syndicalists), or the soviets/workers' councils (as with the council communists), or the political party (as with the vanguardists/pseudo-"Leninists") is raised as the sole or primary principle of social-emancipatory political action, whereas Marx was concerned with the actual (and hence changing/potentially developing) historical content of political forms, none of which stand as permanent or ready-made.
This was not Marx and Engels's approach to the Commune -- or to any social-political phenomena of their time. Neither should it be ours (towards this history).
Our interest in the history of the Paris Commune, or the 1848 Revolutions, or the Russian, Bolshevik and German Revolutions, etc. in 1905 and 1917-19, is not to provide ready-made models for action, but to address the questions and problems that were raised in these moments of radical historical crisis and potential transformation. It is a "critical" approach we adopt that seeks to grasp and push historical phenomena further, following Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky's approaches to the phenomena of their time.
Our problem is uniquely different from theirs, to the extent that, unlike them, we cannot regard our own present historical moment as building upon, working immanently within or potentially transforming an ideological or organizational continuity of our immediate historical forebears.
Whereas Marx could consider himself to be doing so with regard to Proudhon, Blanqui (and, as we will see later, Bakunin, Lassalle, et al.), between 1848-71 and in the experience of the 1st International Workingmen's Association and the founding of the German Social Democratic Party, Engels could consider himself doing so regarding the further development of the German SPD and the founding of the 2nd Socialist International, and LLT could considering themselves to be doing so regarding the potentially revolutionary crisis of the "imperialist" epoch and of the 2nd Intl., through WWI and the revolutions that followed and the founding of the 3rd Communist International, we have no movement available to us of which we can consider ourselves to be pushing further and growing out of.
This makes our critique/critical approach in Platypus inevitably and necessarily more nebulous and uncertain. It means that, unlike Trotsky or Lenin and Luxemburg before him, it is not about rejuvenating Marxism; it also means that unlike Marx and Engels, it is not about making socialism more self-aware of its historical mission. It means asking fundamental questions about social emancipation -- the Left. We situate the Marxist tradition within the greater socialist tradition, and socialism within the greater Left. We do this because we cannot take any of these for granted, but must consciously reestablish each overarching historical framework within which we may try to specify our present circumstances. It is only within these expansive frameworks that we can begin to get a handle on the potential possibilities of the present.
The problem with historical phenomena like the Commune (or the Bolshevik Revolution) is that in their defeated character they can serve to arrest thought -- as with the fixed model character they assume for the dogmatists of various stripes -- rather than provoke thought and action further.
We are thrown back onto a pre-Marxian kind of moment, in which inchoate strivings must be gleaned for their historical content. But unlike the earlier moment, we suffer the effects of regression. Unfortunately, the historical imagination of phenomena like the Commune bears the hallmarks of such regression.
Treating the Commune (or the Bolshevik Revolution) as a positive programmatic model is the very manifestation and meaning of regression, for this serves not to challenge but to abdicate from thinking, as if we know the answers when we clearly do not, but can only ask the questions.
-- Chris
* * *
I am writing with notes to this week's reading, Marx's Civil War in France, his pamphlet on the Paris Commune 1870-71.
The selection in the Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader (pp. 618-652) includes: Engels's 1891 Introduction and Postscript (in Tucker, pp. 618-629); and the latter part of Marx's pamphlet ("The Paris Commune," in Tucker, III., pp. 629-642; and "The Fall of Paris," in Tucker, IV. pp. 642-652).
With this reading, we are going somewhat out of chronological order of the syllabus (next week we will read Marx's 1864 Inaugural Address to the First International, and Karl Korsch's 1924 essay on "The Marxism of the First International"). We are doing so to round out the trajectory of our readings on Bonapartism and French political events of the mid-19th century informing Marx's perspective; 1870-71 was, for Marx, the long aftermath of 1848-51. -- Our final readings, over the course of the next few weeks, will be concerned with Marx's explicit programmatic expressions of his positive politics (with a coda by Max Horkheimer in our final week, on the extended legacy and unfulfilled tasks of Marx's politics).
Engels's 1891 Introduction looks back over the 20 years intervening since Marx's writing, and looks ahead in certain respects to WWI. In this, Engels departs from the more commonplace characterization of 1871-1914 as the "Belle Epoque" of "peaceful development" of capitalism in Europe, after the Franco-Prussian War, which saw the rise of Germany as a major industrial country.
Engels points out that "for 50 years" Paris found a position of potential proletarian character to any political crisis or revolution. This was most clearly expressed in 1848. Engels glosses Marx's earlier arguments in The Class Struggles in France and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte with the statement that, "If the proletariat was not yet able to rule France, the bourgeoisie could no longer do so" (620).
This was intrinsically related to developments in neighboring Germany, where Bismark's rule also expressed the inability of the bourgeoisie to rule Germany, and the proletariat was challenged with fulfilling the tasks of the bourgeois democracy there. The authoritarianism of Bismark and Napoleon III/Louis Bonaparte reflected a common condition of bourgeois society in crisis.
(As we will discuss about next week's readings, another world-historic event, in the U.S. Civil War, was necessary to allow for the completion of bourgeois rule there. Cinco de Mayo celebrates the Mexican republicans' defeat of Napoleon III's 1862 attempt, in cahoots with the British, to intervene to aid the slavocracy Confederacy in the American Civil War.)
Engels points out (pp. 626-627) about the socialists participating in the Commune, Proudhonists and Blanquists, that the developments of the Commune marked a definitive end of Proudhonism among French workers, but continued only among "bourgeois radicals." This was because the historical experience of the working class had moved beyond a self-conception as artisan to recognition of large-scale industry and the need for labor unions, which were anathema to Proudhon. Similarly with the Blanquists, the historical experience of the Commune had demonstrated the possibility and necessity of smashing the "old state machine" rather than trying to take it over to serve socialist ends.
Engels makes short but important mention of how the Bonapartist state had gone from being the "servants to the masters of society" (627). Engels points to the U.S. where he says that "'politicians' [have] form[ed] a more separate and powerful section of the nation" as nowhere else. This is because rather than politics serving business, politicians "make a business of politics," a fusion of capitalism with the state no less authoritarian in the U.S. than in Bonapartist France. Engels wrote that this expressed the necessity of "shattering" and overcoming the capitalist state, towards which the Paris Commune pointed (628). Engels ends his Introduction by stating unequivocally that this is the content of the Marxist conception of the "dictatorship of the proletariat:"
"[The state is] at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap." (629)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm
This is the content of Marx's pamphlet on the Paris Commune.
As Marx begins section III of his pamphlet, in France,
"The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature -- organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labor -- originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle class society as a mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism. Still, its development remained clogged by all manner of medieval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies, and provincial constitutions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the 18th century [1789-99] swept away all these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last hinderances to the superstructure of the modern state edifice raised under the First Empire [1799/1804-1814/15], itself the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France.
"During the subsequent regimes, the government, placed under parliamentary control -- that is, under the direct control of the propertied classes – became not only a hotbed of huge national debts and crushing taxes; with its irresistible allurements of place, pelf, and patronage, it became not only the bone of contention between the rival factions and adventurers of the ruling classes; but its political character changed simultaneously with the economic changes of society. At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and labor, the state power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labor, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism." (629-630)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm
Notice that for Marx the "political character" of the state "changed simultaneously with the economic changes of society. At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and labor." This antagonism, which expressed the contradiction and crisis of capital, for Marx, conditions the political character of the state.
Marx anticipated the arguments made later by Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky about turn-of-the-20th century society and politics, when he wrote that,
"Imperialism is, at the same time, the most prostitute and the ultimate form of the state power which nascent middle class society had commenced to elaborate as a means of its own emancipation from feudalism, and which full-grown bourgeois society had finally transformed into a means for the enslavement of labor by capital." (631)
This was because, according to Marx, Bonapartism was
"In reality . . . the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling. . . . It was acclaimed throughout the world as the savior of society. Under its sway, bourgeois society, freed from political cares, attained a development unexpected even by itself. Its industry and commerce expanded to colossal dimensions; financial swindling celebrated cosmopolitan orgies; the misery of the masses was set off by a shameless display of gorgeous, meretricious and debased luxury. The state power, apparently soaring high above society and the very hotbed of all its corruptions." (631)
At the same time,
"The direct antithesis to the empire was the Commune. The cry of "social republic," with which the February [1848] Revolution was ushered in by the Paris proletariat, did but express a vague aspiration after a republic that was not only to supersede the monarchical form of class rule, but class rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that republic."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm
A famous slogan of the Marxist Left (for instance by the Spartacist League) is "Those who labor must rule!" The character of the "must" has to be explained. In other words, why "those who labor *must* rule," as opposed to "those who labor *should* or *will* rule," in the sense of the desirability or possible historical eventuality of socialism, the *necessity* of socialism must be explained.
Marx characterized this in terms of the common ruin to which capital had come to subject both the workers and the "middle class:"
"And yet, this was the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as the only class capable of social initiative, even by the great bulk of the Paris middle class -- shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants -- the wealthy capitalist alone excepted. The Commune had saved them by a sagacious settlement of that ever recurring cause of dispute among the middle class themselves -- the debtor and creditor accounts. The same portion of the middle class, after they had assisted in putting down the working men's insurrection of June 1848, had been at once unceremoniously sacrificed to their creditors by the then Constituent Assembly. But this was not their only motive for now rallying around the working class. They felt there was but one alternative -- the Commune, or the empire -- under whatever name it might reappear. The empire had ruined them economically by the havoc it made of public wealth, by the wholesale financial swindling it
fostered, by the props it lent to the artificially accelerated centralization of capital, and the concomitant expropriation of their own ranks. It had suppressed them politically, it had shocked them morally by its orgies, it had insulted their Voltairianism by handing over the education of their children to the fréres Ignorantins, it had revolted their national feeling as Frenchmen by precipitating them headlong into a war which left only one equivalent for the ruins it made – the disappearance of the empire. In fact, after the exodus from Paris of the high Bonapartist and capitalist bohème, the true middle class Party of Order came out in the shape of the "Union Republicaine," enrolling themselves under the colors of the Commune and defending it against the wilful misconstructions of Thiers. Whether the gratitude of this great body of the middle class will stand the present severe trial, time must show." (636-637)
Marx construed the pathological dynamics of capitalism, demonstrated through the two decades of the 2nd Empire in the 1850s and 60s, as simply intolerable by society in a popular sense, requiring the authoritarian solution of Bonapartism to maintain itself. This was perhaps an overstatement, but a hopeful one.
The alternative, Marx thought, was the resigned acceptance of barbarism. This barbarism was found in the duplicity and hypocrisy -- and rank deceitfulness -- of even "liberals" such as Thiers, who Marx pillories precisely for their willful obfuscation of this issue of progressive barbarization of bourgeois society in the context of capital's manifest and widening contradictions.
The issue of nationalism, as it has characterized strongly the period of the crisis of capital and has been the consistent form of anti-Marxism, is addressed by Marx as follows:
"If the Commune was thus the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society, and therefore the truly national government, it was, at the same time, as a working men's government, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labor, emphatically international. Within sight of that Prussian army, that had annexed to Germany two French provinces, the Commune annexed to France the working people all over the world." (638)
By contrast,
"The Second Empire had been the jubilee of cosmopolitan blackleggism, the rakes of all countries rushing in at its call for a share in its orgies and in the plunder of the French people. Even at this moment, the right hand of Thiers is Ganessco, the foul Wallachian, and his left hand is Markovsky, the Russian spy." (638)
The reactionary character of nationalism is clearly spelled out by Marx:
"The Commune admitted all foreigners to the honor of dying for an immortal cause. Between the foreign war lost by their treason, and the civil war fomented by their conspiracy with the foreign invader, the bourgeoisie had found the time to display their patriotism by organizing police hunts upon the Germans in France. The Commune made a German working man [Leo Frankel] its Minister of Labor. Thiers, the bourgeoisie, the Second Empire, had continually deluded Poland by loud professions of sympathy, while in reality betraying her to, and doing the dirty work of, Russia. The Commune honored the heroic sons of Poland [J. Dabrowski and W. Wróblewski] by placing them at the head of the defenders of Paris. And, to broadly mark the new era of history it was conscious of initiating, under the eyes of the conquering Prussians on one side, and the Bonapartist army, led by Bonapartist generals, on the other, the Commune pulled down that colossal symbol of martial
glory, the Vendôme Column." (638-639)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm
Marx considered the Paris Commune to be the augur of an inevitable final reckoning between the workers and capitalist society. Marx sought to draw political conclusions, both positive and negative, from the experience of the Commune, which was the "antithesis" of the Bonapartist 2nd Empire, but which nevertheless even "liberal" bourgeois society could not abide. The social crisis of capital was found in the impossibility of further democratization of bourgeois society without overcoming capitalism.
Furthermore,
"After [the Commune was put down on] Whit-Sunday, 1871, there can be neither peace nor truce possible between the working men of France and the appropriators of their produce. The iron hand of a mercenary soldiery may keep for a time both classes tied down in common oppression. But the battle must break out again and again 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 advanced guard of the modern proletariat.
"While the European governments thus testify, before Paris, to the international character of class rule, they cry down the International Working Men's Association -- the international counter-organization of labor against the cosmopolitan conspiracy of capital -- as the head fountain of all these disasters. Thiers denounced it as the despot of labor, pretending to be its liberator." (651)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch06.htm
Thus Marx articulated the necessity of his own politics: the "specter of communism" haunting bourgeois society in its decadence, which he had announced in the Manifesto of 1848.
This history seems quite distant from us today, but we must keep in mind just how much it was able to fire the imaginations of people as recently as in the 1960s (and afterwards, but in much more attenuated and confused, muddled ways, i.e., the neo-"anarchism" that looks to the Commune in the same way it looks to the anthropology of pre-capitalist cultures).
Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky considered themselves the direct inheritors of the unfulfilled tasks of the Paris Commune -- and rightfully so.
As we will be considering in coming weeks, however, the attempt to build a politics on the Commune's legacy was not unproblematic or without its own self-contradictions. This is because not only the history after the Commune, but that which led up to it, was characterized as much by regression as progress in the clarification of the tasks of emancipation beyond capital.
Marx was able to address the Commune -- as he had the events of 1848 -- as a clarification of the practical politics of socialism in ways that subsequent Marxists proved less able to do with the revolutions of 1917-19, burdening subsequent "Marxism" with a host of questions and problems of the relation of capitalism, socialism and democracy in the 20th century, only dimly and ever more obscurely perceived through subsequent historical experience, including and perhaps especially in the 1960s and after.
-- Chris