The Socialism of the Commune

In spite of his volcanic temperament, Marx did not find anything in these precautionary measures to which he could not agree. He said in his Civil War in France, p.53:

The great social measure adapted by the Commune was one for the existence of the working element. This special measure could only point the way in which a government of the people, through the people, could function.

After Marx had so described the dictatorship of the proletariat as the government of the people through the people, in other words, as democracy, he continues, and praises the financial measures adopted by the Commune as “excellent both in their wisdom and moderation” (p.54).

Shortly before, Marx shows in the same work the principles on which a period of transition from capitalism to Socialism must proceed:–

The working classes did not demand any miracle from the Commune. It had no ready-made Utopias to introduce, as a result of popular decision. It knew that, in order to obtain its own freedom, and to fashion along with that some better standard of living, which the present state of society had made impossible through the economic complications then existing, the working class would have to go through a long process of preparation, and sustain many fights before men, as well as circumstances, could be completely transformed. It had no ideals to realise. It had merely to give the elements of the new society freedom to expand, the elements which were already latent in the crumbling bourgeois society. (p.50).

From the sentence, “the working class had no ideals to realise,” it has been concluded that Marx contributed to the Social movement no set aim and no definite programme. Burt this is disproved by the fact that he himself drew up the Socialistic programmes from The Communist Manifesto, of 1847 onwards to, the time of the programme of the French Labour Party, which he finished in 1880 with the collaboration of Guesde and Lafargue. In the above-cited paragraph he already gives the aims of the Social movement, namely, emancipation of the working class by means of victory and progressive class war, and the creation of a better standard of living, which would follow from the coming into power of the working class, and which would be based on the results of modern science.

It might be urged against Marx that these aims were nothing else but ideals, and therefore that the working class had still ideals to realise, but among the ideals which were not realisable Marx clearly understands all transcendental ideas, such as lie beyond the spheres of time and place, such, for instance, as the ideas of eternal justice and freedom. The aims of the workers’ movement were provided by the economic development that was then in progress. The special forms of their realisation are in a continuous state of development, and are indeed dependent on time and space. Socialism is for him no ready-made Utopia, but a process which promises a lengthy development of economic relations and also of the working class itself, a development which should not come to an end after a political victory, but which could only continue by setting at liberty “the elements of the new society.”

Already two decades before Marx had prescribed a lengthy preparation on the part of the working class, and the knowledge of the actual state of affairs as conditions necessary for the social revolution. After the breaking up of the Revolution of 1848, he recognised, as a result of his study of the economic conditions, that the Revolution for the time being had come to an end. This brought him into conflict with many of his comrades, who saw in this mere treachery towards the Revolution. The masses had need of a revolution, and they had the will for it; and therefore it was inevitable, so they said. But Marx replied in September, 1850, in the following words:–

In place of a critical examination the minority (the League of the Communists) sets up the dogmatic; instead of the materialistic conception of things, the idealistic. Instead of the actual condition of things being the driving force of the Revolution, they seek for that driving force in mere will; whereas we say to the workmen, “you have to go through twenty or fifty years of civil wars and struggles, not only to change conditions but also to change yourselves, and to make yourselves capable of political government.” You say to the workmen, on the contrary, “we must at once seize power or we might as well lie down and sleep.” Whereas we point out, specially to the German workers, the undeveloped state of the German proletariat, you flatter in the crudest manner possible their national feelings and the class prejudice of the German artisan, which is naturally much more popular.

Just as the democrats have converted the word ‘people’ into something almost sacred you have done the same with the word ‘proletariat.’ Like the democrats you substitute the word ‘revolution’ for ‘revolutionary development.’ Marx: (Cologne Communist Trial, new issue, 1885).

When Marx protested against the idea that mere will should be made the driving force of the Revolution, he did not mean to say, of course, that the will had nothing to do with the matter. Without will-power no conscious action is possible. Without the will, no revolution is possible, indeed no history. The first condition of every social movement lies in the strong will, which social endeavour engenders, and which arises from a deeply felt need. But with the will alone nothing can be achieved If the movement is to have any success, there must be something more than the mere will and mere need. I may have the will to live for ever, and this will may be unusually strong in me, nevertheless it cannot preserve me from death. If then the movement is to have success, the will must confine itself to what is possible, and the need must find the means to secure its own satisfaction. Moreover, those who will to do anything must possess the power to overcome any opposition that may arise. It is the purpose of discussion to distinguish, as a result of the examination of actual conditions, the possible from the impossible, and to show the mutual relation of strength. In this way the latent powers in humanity can be concentrated on what is practicable at the time. In this way all waste of energy may be avoided, and the existing power may be turned to better use, and operate more intensively.

This discernment in social matters is, however, by no means easy to obtain; for the economic foundations of society are in a state of continuous development and change, and, in addition, social needs change also, as well as the means by which these needs shall be satisfied, and the forces which shall accomplish what is practically possible. Moreover, society becomes more complicated, wider in its embrace, and ever more difficult to penetrate. Certainly human intelligence, it is true, increases, and the methods of knowledge improve, but the human mind is not always fashioned to recognise actual relations as they are. It always tries to satisfy the needs of the time. But wherever the actual condition of things renders the satisfaction of these needs impossible, the human mind is only too inclined, from sheer imagination, to read into these conditions a very friendly aspect in accordance with what it desires. Man does not wish to die, but knowledge of actual conditions tells him that he must die. Yet human penetration has managed to discover in these very conditions same sign that we continue in existence after death. The proletariat of the Roman Empire lived in wretched poverty. Nevertheless they felt most strongly the need for a joyous life of pleasure without work; but actual conditions excluded such a life from the bounds of possibility. Despite all, their human instincts promised them such a life in the direction in which they thought they were going.

The idea of the deity was the means to make the weak strong, and the impossible possible. It was to raise the small, ill-treated Jewish people to be lords of the earth. It would give the indignant band of defenceless peasants, at the time of the Reformation, the victory over the well-equipped and well-disciplined armies of the potentates of that time. In the nineteenth century the proletariat discontinued to believe in a deity that would thus come to the rescue; but the picture of the great French Revolution, in which at certain times the proletariat of Paris was able to challenge the whole of Europe, caused a new belief in miracles to arise, which made them believe in the wondrous powers of the Revolution and the revolutionary proletariat. They needed merely to will in order to achieve what they willed. If nothing came of it, that was due merely to the fact that they had not willed. As against this idealistic conception, Marx championed the materialistic view, which insisted that the actual conditions of things should always be taken into account: Certainly these conditions made the emancipation of the working classes and a higher standard of living state of society, one of its aims which “the present as the result of its development, absolutely possesses.” These aims were not, however, to be immediately achieved, like some “ready made Utopia.” They did not form a complete scheme applicable to all times, but engendered merely a new form of social movement and development.

The working class, therefore, is not always, and in all circumstances, mature enough to take over control. It must everywhere go through a period of development, in order to become capable. Furthermore, it cannot choose the moment when it shall come into power. If the working class does take over control, then it must not simply destroy the means of production which it finds in existence. It must rather seek to carry on what is already existent, to develop it further in accordance with the needs of the proletariat, and to “liberate the elements of the new society,” all of which in different circumstances requires very different treatment. It will thus at any given moment more easily find what is attainable the more clearly it understands the actual conditions and takes them into account.

When, after the downfall of Napoleon, the possibilities of a proletarian Revolution arose, Marx gave it a good deal of serious thought. Certainly the Parisian workers were the most intelligent workers in the world at that time. They were not living in vain in the very heart of the world, in the very home of enlightenment and revolution. Nevertheless, the Empire had denied them a good school-system, freedom of the Press, as well as political, and for a long time also industrial, organisation. Therefore, to make use of the Republic for the better education and organisation of the working classes, to uphold and defend the Republic with every means in power, seemed to Marx to be the most imperative need of the time. There was one circumstance which rendered acquisition of political power by the workers at the time impossible, namely, the fact that the greater part of the country was still agrarian, and the population of Paris itself still largely small bourgeois. Moreover, the world’s history does not depend upon our mere will power. It can just as little postpone the coming of revolution as it can hasten it. The rising of the Paris workers and their victory on March 18th were inevitable. From henceforth it was for the people to become clear as to what the actual state of affairs permitted the victorious proletariat to carry out, and to concentrate all their strength upon this design.

Marx did not regard it as the chief duty of the Paris Commune at that time to do away with all capitalistic means of production. He wrote to Kugelmann about this on April 12th, 1871:

If you will turn up the last chapter of my 18th Brumaire you will find that I proposed, as the next attempt for the French Revolution, to undertake that they should not endeavour to wrest the bureaucratic military machine out of the hands of one man and give it to another, but smash it up completely. This is the necessary condition of every real popular revolution on the Continent. This is also what our heroic comrades in Paris are attempting. (The New Times, No.20, 1, p.709.)

There is no word of Socialism in this letter. Marx proclaims that the chief duty of the Commune is to destroy the power then in the hands of the bureaucrats, the militarists. Obviously the proletariat can never come to the head of affairs without striving, along with the changes in the organisation of the State, to realise also the changes in the organization of the means of production, which should ameliorate its position. If we characterise all such attempts at political power with this end in view as Socialism, then certainly there was Socialism in the Commune, but State Socialism was far removed from what we to-day understand as Socialism. Naturally that was due in part to want of time. The whole rising lasted only a few weeks. For the most part this was due to the fact that this rising was confined to the small industrial elements in Paris. As the result of the existing economic basis, little more could be achieved than the transformation of single workshops into associations of productive workers.

The organisation of a complete branch of industry into a unified system of production and control of its exports, as well as of its raw materials, was hardly possible at that time. If the Commune had been successful, it might have acquired for itself the whole of the State and Government machinery. It might also have introduced nationalisation of railways, perhaps also of mines and ironworks. But all this would not have done away with capitalism, for it was already in operation to a large extent, or at least in preparation, in neighbouring Germany. But under a proletarian and democratic regime it would nevertheless have greatly raised the social position of the working-class. In addition to lack of time and to the economic backwardness of the country, there came a further serious hindrance to “socialisation,” namely, the ignorance of the men who were in the Commune. The Jacobins and Blanquists cared not one farthing for economic matters. The Internationalists, as we have seen, attributed to them the greatest importance; yet just at the time of the Commune they were theoretically untenable. These Internationalists had the intention of abandoning the Proudhonist basis, but they were not prepared to go so far and deliberately put themselves on the side of the Marxists. In the meanwhile, in spite of their fears, Marx agreed with the method of the Commune, namely, first of all to examine the economic question before making any changes, and not to introduce hasty decrees, which would fail of their object, cause confusion, and finally discouragement. Even if this caution arose more from theoretic uncertainty than from theoretic discernment, it agreed with all that Marx, in consequence of his materialistic conception of things, regarded as necessary, namely, that in the Revolution we must be guided not by mere will alone, but by a knowledge of the actual state of affairs. Debreuilh has characterised this feature of the Paris rising extraordinarily well in his Commune, p.419.

The policy of methodic expropriation, quite apart from the opposition of the other classes, was impossible, for the very good reason that the day labourers in the mass had no idea of the constitution of society other than the traditional one, and because they had not developed any institutions or trade guilds, which are absolutely necessary to ensure the normal working of production and exchange after all capitalistic organisation. has been removed. It is impossible to improvise a new regime, especially a Socialist regime, by means of decrees. Decrees and laws should rather make secure the relations already existing. If in this matter the Commune had attempted to act prematurely, probably the sole result would have been to cause a section of its own best powers to turn against it, without causing among the daily workers any appreciable disposition in their favour. They could not do otherwise than prepare the way for a general social provision, under the pretence of democratising the political machinery then in existence; and that is what they did. (Debreuilh.)

In this way the Marxian idea of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was realised on the social plane. This Marxian method of socialisation, which was so very much like that of the Commune, must be our method to-day. That does not mean to say that this same method and this same reserve must be employed in present day Germany, as was the case in the Commune of 1871 in Paris. Since then, half a century of the most powerful capitalist development has elapsed. The enormous progress that was made is shown by the fact that, at that time, it was Paris alone which rose in an insurrection that was not purely proletarian, without any support from the country; and that it had to succumb to the superiority of agrarianism, which was intimately bound up with bureaucracy and higher finance. In the year 1918 the German Revolution broke out throughout the entire Empire, and it was everywhere led by the proletariat. German agriculture constitutes hardly more than a quarter of the population (1907 – 29 per cent.), and industry has made enormous progress and has advanced to the formation of Trade Unions comprising whole branches of industry.

The Parisian proletariat in 1871 had only just emerged from the Bonaparte regime, which had hitherto prevented it from acquiring any means of education or of organisation. The German proletariat entered on this Revolution with the political and corporate experience of half a century, with political and economic organisation, which embraced millions of people. And finally, the Socialists of Paris in 1871 were on the point of giving up an economic theory that had proved to be unsatisfactory. But they had not gone so far as to evolve another and superior theory. German Socialism has at its command the historical and economic insight and the clear methods of a theory, which has been recognised by the Socialists of all countries as the highest and best, and which even the bourgeois classes accept, thanks to its enormous superiority over any other conception of economics now prevailing. In these circumstances Socialism can proceed much more rapidly, more energetically and with quicker results than was ever possible in 1871.