The Civil War in FranceKarl Marx
About The Civil War in France
Marx wrote in 1871 as an address to the General Council of the International Working Men's Association, weeks after the fall of the Paris Commune. It is both a history of the Commune and a theoretical interpretation of its significance.
The Commune, Marx argues, was not an accident but the political form "at last discovered" under which the economic emancipation of labor could proceed. The Communards replaced the standing army with the armed people, made all officials elected and revocable at short notice, paid them workmen's wages, and abolished the separation between legislative and executive power. The Commune was a working body, not a parliamentary talking shop.
Marx uses the Commune to settle a question that had remained abstract in his earlier writings: what replaces the bourgeois state after revolution? Not a new state apparatus but the destruction of the old one. The Commune demonstrated that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes. It must smash it.
The text is polemical, compressed, and written in the heat of defeat. It became the most cited document in later Marxist debates about the state, and Lenin's State and Revolution is essentially a commentary on it.