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The Civil War in France
Marx, Karl
http://www.connexions.org/CxArchive/MIA/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/index.htmhttp://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/index.htm Year Published: 1871 Resource Type: Book Cx Number: CX6210 Written by Karl Marx as an address to the General Council of the International, with the aim of distributing to workers of all countries a clear understanding of the character and world-wide significance of the heroic struggle of the Paris Communards of 1871 and their historical experience to learn from. Abstract: - Excerpt: The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favor, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all the previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret was this: It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour. Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a delusion. The political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundation upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labour emancipated, every man becomes a working man, and productive labour ceases to be a class attribute. It is a strange fact. In spite of all the tall talk and all the immense literature, for the last 60 years, about emancipation of labor, no sooner do the working men anywhere take the subject into their own hands with a will, than uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces of present society with its two poles of capital and wages-slavery (the landlord now is but the sleeping partner of the capitalist), as if the capitalist society was still in its purest state of virgin innocence, with its antagonisms still undeveloped, with its delusions still unexploded, with its prostitute realities not yet laid bare. The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor. But this is communism, "impossible" communism! Why, those member of the ruling classes who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present system - and they are many - have become the obtrusive and full-mouthed apostles of co-operative production. If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production - what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, "possible" communism? Contents Introduction [The Begining of the Franco-Prussian War] [Prussian Occupation of France] [France Capitulates & the Government of Thiers] [Paris Workers’ Revolution & Thiers’ Reactionary Massacres] [The Paris Commune] [The Fall of Paris] Appendix Engels 1891 Postscript News stories describing some of the last massacres Marx’s Letters to Dr. Kugelmann (April, 1871) Franco-Prussian War Timeline of the Civil War History of Paris Commune by Lissagaray, 1876 Picture Gallery; [First and Second Drafts] Subject Headings |