The Civil War in France

An important work by Marx summarizing the historical experience of the proletarian revolution in Paris and elaborating on the doctrines of the class struggle, the state, the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Written in April–May 1871, published in London in form of a single edition in mid-June 1871, and in European countries and the United States in 1871–1872. In 1891, when a German memorial edition was published to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Paris Commune, Engels proofread the translation and wrote an introduction.

During the Paris Commune Revolution, Marx and Engels always paid close attention to the development of the Paris Commune and gave theoretical guidance to the revolutionary movement. At the meeting of the General Council of the First International on April 18, 1870, Marx proposed to issue a declaration to all members of the International, which was unanimously agreed upon, and Marx was commissioned to draft this declaration. In mid-April 1871, he began to draft the first draft of the declaration, and completed the second draft in mid-May. On May 30, three days after the defeat of the Paris Commune, Marx read the many times revised version of The Civil War in France to the General Council of the International, which was unanimously approved and published in London on June 13. 1871–72, The Civil War in France was translated into German, French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and other languages, and widely circulated in European countries and the United States. In 1891, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Paris Commune, the Berlin publisher Vorwärts published the third (commemorative) German edition of The Civil War in France, for which Engels recalibrated the translation and wrote an introduction. At the same time, Engels included in this edition the two declarations to the General Council of the International Workers’ Association on the Franco-Prussian War, written by Marx. Since then, these two declarations have been included in the single-volume edition of The Civil War in France in various languages. The first Chinese translation of The Civil War in France, translated by Wu Liping and Liu Yun (Zhang Wentian), was published by the Yan’an Liberation Publishing House in 1938. In 1939, the Shanghai Haichao Publishing House published a Chinese translation by Guo He based on the Japanese translation, entitled The Paris Commune. In May 1961, in commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the Paris Commune, the Renmin Publishing House published Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin on the Paris Commune, compiled by the Compilation and Translation Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, which for the first time included the full text of the two drafts of “The First Draft” and “The First Draft” of The Civil War of France. In November 1963, the Renmin Publishing House published Volume 17 of the first Chinese version of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels, compiled by the Compilation and Translation Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. In 1964, the Renmin Publishing House republished a single edition of The Civil War in France in accordance with Volume 17 of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels, and reprinted it many times in 1964 and 1970.

The theoretical contribution of The Civil War in France mainly includes four points:

First, the objective historical conditions and the necessity of the proletarian revolution to smash the former state machinery and replace it with the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx pointed out: “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 labor, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism.” Therefore, once the working class has won the battle for power, it has to build its own state and cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes. The book emphasized that the former bourgeois state machinery must be smashed and the former military-bureaucratic organs of violence used by the bourgeois state to suppress the people must be eradicated. The organs of the old governmental power that practiced class oppression had to be eliminated and the legitimate functions belonging to the State wrested from the authorities and restored to the responsible administrators of the society to which they originally belonged. The commune became a brand-new institution of state administration, which represented a republic that was not only to supersede the monarchical form of class rule, but class rule itself. The first decree after the establishment of the Commune was that the Commune’s power organs and people’s representatives were elective, responsible, and at all times revocable. The Commune was to be a working body, executive and legislative at the same time. The Commune abolished the standing army and the armed forces were organized according to democratic principles; the Commune abolished the bureaucracy and replaced it with democratically elected public officials accountable to the electorate and subject to the supervision of the masses; officials of the judiciary were replaced by elected judges who were accountable to the electorate and can be recalled; the police was stripped of its political attributes and made general staff; and all public officials received salaries equivalent to those of skilled workers; it separated the Church from the State and swept away its old privileges; opened the whole of the educational institutions to the people gratuitously, freed science freed from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had imposed upon it, etc. Marx believed that the Communal Constitution was a true democracy, that the Paris Commune was the self-government of the producers, and that with the elimination of the standing army and state functionarism, the Commune became a clean government in the true sense of the word.

Second, concerning the historical position of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx dealt with the socio-economic tasks of the proletarian revolution, pointing out the relationship between the Commune and the revolutionary transformation of the society and economy. Marx held: “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.” “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 labor.” Later, Engels wrote in the Introduction: “Do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” This makes it more precise and concrete to discuss the historical position of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Third, this book clarifies the necessity of the worker-peasant alliance. In The Civil War in France, Marx emphasized that the alliance between the working class and the peasants was an important condition for the proletariat to win the victory in the revolution and build a new social system. Taking the Paris Commune revolution as an example, he explained that that the policies implemented by the proletarian state must be fully in line with the interests of the peasants. “The Commune was perfectly right in telling the peasants that ‘its victory was their only hope’”. The working class can only lead the revolution as the natural trustee of the interests of the peasants if it can liberate them from capitalist slavery and give them a new social position in the new future society. In “The First Draft”, Marx also elaborated on the objective basis for the realization of the worker-peasant alliance, pointing out that only a state in which the proletariat holds power can fundamentally ensure that the peasants can change the current economic condition of cruel exploitation; it is only in the state of the new regime that the peasants can be guaranteed freedom from the exploitation of the landlords and from the oppression, servitude and poverty of the old system, that the property in the land can be transformed into a right that they truly enjoy, and that they can enjoy the fruits of their labor and at the same time truly acquire their status as independent producers. Marx also emphasized that the working class in the new social life would have to rely on its power to ideologically transform the peasants from their traditional backward consciousness.

Fourth, concerning the importance of international co-operation and solidarity among the working class. The Paris Commune was eventually suppressed by the French ruling class with the support of foreign invaders. In summarizing the defeat, Marx pointed out that European governments testified, before Paris, to the international character of class rule. The international cooperation of the working class, therefore, was the first condition for its eventual emancipation. In describing the importance of international cooperation of the working-class for the victory of the working-class revolution, Marx pointed out that chauvinism is a means, by permanent armies, to perpetuate international struggles, to subjugate in each country the producers by pitching them against their brothers in each other country, a means to prevent the international co-operation of the working classes, the first condition of their emancipation.

The Civil War in France has a very high place and value in the history of Marxism. It is a classic example Marx’s application of the materialist conception of history to analyze the proletarian revolutionary movement from the standpoint of the proletariat, and has greatly developed Marxist doctrines of proletarian revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat. Engels once clearly pointed out that this work was good at “grasping clearly the character, the import, and the necessary consequences of great historical events, at a time when these events are still in process before our eyes, or have only just taken place”, showing Marx’s “remarkable gift” for analyzing the major historical events of the society, and that its theoretical contribution was beyond “all the mass of literature which has been written on this subject.”