Dictatorship vs. Democracy

nd … K

ians in the seventh decade of their life. As a contrast to the green Marx of 1848-49 (the author of the Communist Manifesto!) Kautsky quotes the mature Marx of the epoch of the Paris Commune-and the latter, under the pen of Kautsky, loses his great lion's mane, and appears before us as an extremely respectable reasoner, bowin

if we were talking about Buddha or Leo Tolstoy…. It is more than natural that, against the international campaign which represented the Communards as souteneurs and the women of the Commune as prostitutes, against the vile slanders which attributed to the conquered fighters ferocious features drawn from the degenerate imagination of the victorious bourgeoisie, Marx should emphasize and underline those features of tenderness and nobility which not infrequently

r such a reproach. This conscientious non-understanding is one of the symptoms of Kautsky's mental decline in connection with questions of the revolution generally. The first place, according to Marx, ought to have be

wanted a revolutionary victory. Nowhere, by one word, does he put forward the principle of democracy as something standing above the class struggle. On the contrary, with the concentrated contempt of the revolutionary and the Communist, Marx-not the young editor of the Rhine Paper, but the mature author of Capital: our genuine Marx with the mighty l

edants, Karl Kautsky. In the empire of Napoleon III, Marx sees "the only possible form of government in the epoch in which the bourgeoisie has already lost the possibility of governing the people, while the working class has not yet acquired it." In this way, not democracy, but Bonapartism, appears in Marx's eyes as the final form of bourgeois power. Learned men may say that Marx was mistaken, as the Bonapartist empire gave way for

e Commune, but its class essence. The Commune, as is known, abolished the regular army and the police, and decreed the confiscation of Church property. It did this in the right of the revolutionary dictatorship of Paris, without the permission of the general democracy of the State, which at that moment formally had fou

elded to the self-government of the producers." Marx, consequently, sees the problem of revolutionary Paris, not in appealing from its victory to the frail will of the Constituent Assembly

e proposed structure of labor France in the following words:-"The management of the general affairs of the village communes of every district was to devolve on the Assembly o

k of bourgeois democracy, indirectness of election confuses the demarcation line of parties and classes; but in the "self-government of the producers"-i.e., in the class proletarian State, indirectnes

rural producers under the intellectual leadership of the central towns of their districts, and there to secure to them, in the workmen of the towns, the natural guardians of their interests." The question was not one of making the peasant equal to the worker on paper

Marx sees directly the contrary. "The Commune was an extremely elastic form of the State, while all former forms of government had suffered from narrowness. Its secret consists in this, that in its very essence it was the government of the working class, the result of the struggle between the class of producers and the class of appropriat

e following words:-"Not satisfied with their open waging of a most bloodthirsty war against Paris, the Versaillese strove secretly to gain an entry by corruption and conspiracy. Could the Commune at such a time without shamefully betraying its trust, have observed the customary forms of liberalism, just as if profound peace reigned around it? Had the g

the old in its collapse." Destruction and cruelty are inevitable in any war. Only sycophants can consider them a crime "in the war of the slaves against their oppressors, the only just war in history." (Marx.) Yet our dread accuser K

ed Communards, the Commune, to protect the lives of those prisoners, had nothing left for it but to resort to the Prussian custom of taking hostages. The lives of the hostages had been forfeited over and over again by the continued shooting of the prisoners on the part of the Versaillese. How could their lives be spared any longer after the blood-bath with which MacMahon's Pretorians celebrated their entry into Paris?" How otherwise we sha

We shall not here enter into details. But, to give though it be but a partial criterion for valuing the conditions of the struggle, let us remind the reader that, at the moment when the White Guards,

a smile of calm contempt to the vile abuse of the lackeys of the Press and to the learned patronage of well-intentioned bourgeois doctrinaires,

ise of retired theoreticians of the Second International, this in no way