karl marx, the civil war in france

(620): from Engels introduction--on the bourgeoisie, and terror: "And then followed a blood-bath among the defenceless prisoners, the like of which has not been seen since the days of the civil wars which ushered in the downfall of the Roman republic. It was the first time that the bourgeoisie showed to what insane cruelties of revenge it will be goaded the moment the proletariat dares to take its stand against the bourgeoisie as a separate class, with its own interests and demands. And yet 1848 was only child's play compared with the frenzy of the bourgeoisie in 1871."

(621): again, they've never really minded dictatorship--from Napoleon III to Pinochet

(623): the guillotine was publicly burnt on the 6th of April

(626): composition: most Blanquists, but also some members of Proudhon's wing in the First International. Alas--they didn't sack the Bank of France--stood outside with "holy awe" [because they weren't scientific socialists, implies Engels]

(626): is this passable as an empirical statement, then?--that Paris, the city of artisans, had become a home of "large-scale industry." some concede that the workers were semi-proletarianized--what to say? [ONE GREAT UNION was announced, of course...]

(626-627): Proudhon's disciples learned the importance of "association"; Blanquists learned the pitfalls of "dictatorial centralization."

(627): could not put up with the "old state machinery," they learned--for one, representatives must be subject to immediate recall (i.e., the collapse of the elitist heritage of the logic of representation). [the 1800s, he's arguing, taught revolutionaries the increasing power of the modern State--and 1848-1851 saw this increasingly inflated repressive apparatus transform into the Second Empire]

(628): KEY--the current understanding of the State, Engels is arguing, recalls the nonsense of the Hegelian rationalization of Prussian autocracy--"In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than the monarchy..."

(629): and, by contrast, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (it looks like the Paris Commune, says Engels).

--- here begins Marx (section III and IV)

(629): the State, with its bureaucracy and whatnot, is not an empty signifier--inherited from the days of "absolute monarchy."

(630): important--"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 labour, of a pbulci force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism. After every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive character of the State power stands out in bolder and bolder relief."

(631): "Bonapartism"--"...it professed to unite all classes by reviving for all the chimera of national glory... It was acclaimed throughout the world as the saviour of society."

(631): and here, an underdeveloped theory of imperialism as an extension--or the logical conclusion--of this increasingly powerful State (not talking about imperialism of the modern sort, but presumably expansionism within Europe)

(632): no 'separation of the powers' here--both "executive and legislative"; an 'electable' judiciary

(633): not anti-national, but nationalism of a higher sort: "The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by the Communal Constitution and 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."

(634): two key abolitions--the end of the "standing army" and the end of "State functionarism" [throughout these pages there is an interesting reflection on the nature of the reforms pursued by the communards--well worth flagging] -- a "thoroughly expansive political form... It was essentially a working-class government... the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour."

(635): "With labour emancipated, every man becomes a working man..."

(635-636): "The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias... They know that in ordre to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending... they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historical processes." [this is a process that cannot but proceed inside of history and struggle--this is the primary and most important objection to the utopian dreamers of many stripes. planning is fine, but practice is fundamental.]

(637-638): The commune and the peasantry--here he is suggesting that economic conditions and political advance is such that the peasant is no longer likely to be fooled; the State is trying to shift the war indemnities onto their backs, but the Commune promised to deliver them from this "blood tax." [noting, also, the steady proletarianization of the peasantry]

(639): interesting--Lenin adds a footnote, describing Haussman in the Russian translation...

(639): set in light of subsequent history, this is inspiring even if naive--the Commune was to "keep up all the decencies and appearances of liberalism as in a time of profound peace."

(645): Thiers struck a deal with Bismarck on the 10th of May--peace, indemnities in exchange for the release of the Army, and help, to crush the Communards.

(646): crushing of the Commune--"So it was. The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their masters. Then this civilization and justice stand forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge... Even the atrocities of the bourgeois in June, 1848, vanish before the ineffable infamy of 1871... A glorious civilization, indeed, the great problem of which is how to get rid of the heaps of corpses it made after the battle was over!"

(649): "...the vandalism of Haussmann, razing historic Paris to make place for the Paris of the sightseer!"

(651): "That after the most tremendous war of modern times, the conquering and the conquered hosts should fraternise for the common massacre of the proletariat--this unparalleled event does indicate, not, as Bismarck thinks, the final repression of a new society upheaving, but the crumbling into dust of bourgeois society... Class rule is no longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform; the national Governments are one as against the proletariat!"

(651): the bourgeois, democratic revolution is dead (i wonder, did Kautsky and Bernstein never read this?)--"there can be neither peace nor truce possible between the working men of France and the appropriators of their produce."