Following passage is an extract from an e by Andre Marty published in a special of Regards May 1933 on the Paris HATE. ial democrats fallaciously want to reconheir 'socialism' with a defence of the geois State that is trying to crush comsts. They put forward the 'taking of r' by 'democratic means', without nce, without a proletarian revolution, out the dictatorship of the proletariat. is why they have to falsify the whole ry of the heroic revolution of 1871. They e its profoundly proletarian character and that it set up an ordinary "democratic" e, which was only a cover for capitalist torship in reality.
This is the theoretical basis on which the list leaders justify their integration in the geois State apparatus whose interests me sacred once they have been assimilated the bourgeois milieu. If he were rejected le State the social democrat official would bbed in the dust. So he will never hesitate rally to change his label and when fascism, se bed he has been making, comes to power, ill change sides, taking arms and baggage trying to take the mass of the proletariat ugh the party, with him.
What are the consequences today of this al of the most precious lessons of the Come and with it the basic Marxist doctrine? ad of crushing the bourgeois State in ember 1918 and installing the German mune on its ruins, social democracy proned that socialism could and must be eved 'peacefully' in the framework and by neans of the 'democratic', that is, bourgeois, ablic. In the name of this democracy, the ces and Scheidemanns have massacred the of the German working class in the revoluary struggles in 1918-1919. The "big piece' cial democracy, the Weimar Republic, was : on the corpses of Karl Liebknecht and i Luxembourg. And this so-called 'popular' e gave the workers not peace but murderous nalisation, progressive liquidation of the working class legislation that existed. ocations, fascist assassin bands. And each social democracy persisted in integrating f in this republic, that became more and e fascist and in defending the preparations i bourgeois terroristic-fascist dictatorship. ne name of the lesser evil, social democracy ce strikes, dissolved the organisation of prolen defence that had 300,000 members-the Front-and massacred workers on May Day, ain agent being the chief of Berlin's police. m one betrayal to another it finally prosed itself in front of the fascist hangman of that it had succeeded in weakening and dividing more and more and breaking up the Second International at the same time.
"Mr. Blum may very well, today, reproach the the German social democracy for not having installed the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1919! Didn't he himself and his party violently attack the Spartakists at the time? Didn't he himself recently declare, in the name of his party, 'the undeniable right of France to indemnity', thus feeding fascism through his defence of the Treaty of Versailles? Didn't he with his party, continuously defend the policy of the 'lesser evil'? The famous campaign of Mr. Blum and Populaire against the Communist Party -guilty of wanting to oppose the workers" united front to Marshal Hindenburg-is not so different! Right now in France itself, aren't Mr. Blum and his party practising the policy of the lesser evil"? It is nearly a year now since the Chambre has been elected. By supporting a government that has not achieved even one of its electoral promises and is disillusioning the workers, isn't the socialist party making the bed for fascism?
*There is only one way to escape this threat, the French workers only have one answer-the answer of the Paris Commune, of the Soviet countries, of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is why, united for action, grouped in larger and larger numbers-socialists and communists-under red flags, reaffirming their alliance with the peasants, workers and enslaved people of the colonies, led by the Communist Party, the only heir of the traditions and methods of the Commune, they will march in larger and larger partial struggles, against capitalist exploitation and its regime towards the final struggle for the setting up of the new French Commune and the solid long lasting dictatorship of the proletariat and of socialist society, without classes.
Andre Marty 14th March 1933 Two days after the defeat of the Commune Marx presented to the General Council of the International his address on The Civil War in France. In this document Marx took up, first through the General Council then in his own name, unconditional defence of the Commune and everything it had done and stood for. He accompanied this uncompromising stance with an analysis which he was not to surpass in incisiveness and brilliance, cutting straight through to the underlying process behind the confused happenings (distorted to an incredible degree by the bourgeois press in Britain as elsewhere).
Today when even the bourgeois press join in the celebration of its centenary, thereby attempting to appropriate a movement whose major aim was to destroy them, Marx's position is unchallengeable. This was not so at the time. Indeed, he himself expressed misgivings before its proclamation of the efficacy of the Commune. The leadership of the Commune was by no means in the hands of the International and of those thirty or so from the International, only perhaps two could be said to be under the hegemony of Marx's thought, the rest of them were Proudhonists of one sort or another. But by far an overwhelming majority of the Commune were Blanquists and Jacobins.
This lack of a unified, not to say Marxist, leadership was of course reflected in its policies and decisions. It was quite true, Engels said in the republican bourgeoisie had failed to pass solely out of cowardice... the Commune promulgated decrees that were in the direct interest of the working class and, in part, cut deeply into the old order of society. But even after two months the Banque de France had not been touched and the only factories that were put in the hands of the hands of the workers were those closed down by the capitalists and even those were not nationalised, but transformed into collectives. Again, the Commune was inept in dealing with its enemies, especially in relation to the bourgeois government at Versailles under Thiers, and its provisions for the defence of Paris were inadequate to say the least. For these and many other reasons, the Commune was less than a perfect model for the unequivocal support of Marx. The fact that he nonetheless took up the Commune, weaknesses and all, was not a reflection of Marx's ignorance. On the contrary, all the factors Marx mentioned and criticised in private letters to friends and participants in the Commune. His position on this question was determined by his Internationalist principles which demanded unconditional support of all those in the vanguard of the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism. In the short term, this principled position cost Marx and the International dear. In the tradition of British chauvinism and philistine corporativism, the British trade union members of the Council took this opportunity to split with the International. At the same time the sections in various European sections were subject to severe repression from the bourgeois state for their association with the "Red Doctor", defender of the Commune.
DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT Whilst the Commune was deficient in many respects there is one fundamental theme which revolutionaries today must defend not only against the bourgeoisie but also against its "friends" in the C.P.s and elsewhere. It is beyond question that the brief weeks and days of the existence of the Commune witnessed a democratic structure which has been unsurpassed. But to see in this a mere "extension" and "advance" for democracy is to miss that aspect of it which was to change the thinking of Marx and Engels on the question of the state and fundamentally influence their future thinking. For, as Marx was to explain in his Address, the Commune's "real secret was that it was essentially a government of the working class, the result of the struggle between the producing and expropriating classes, the finally discovered political form under which the economic emancipation of labour could take place." Or, as Engels more briefly expressed it, it was the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" For what the Commune had revealed was that the state was no mere machine which the working class had simply to lay their hands on, but was a structure which was part and parcel of capitalist society and as such had to be destroyed root and branch and replaced by institutions which would be the content of a workers' state. Of course, Lenin understood this, relying on this conception for his analysis in State and Revolution. It is precisely this conception of the Commune which the bourgeoisie cannot celebrate and it is only with this understanding that we can agree with Marx's concluding proclamation in The Civil War in France that "The Paris of the workers with its Commune will be commemorated for ever as the glorious herald of a new society. Its victories are Its destroyers have already been pilloried by history and not all the prayers of their priests and parsons will be able to set them free."
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Marx and the Commune