> On April 12, 1871, i.e., just at the time of the Commune, Marx wrote to
> Kugelmann:
>
> "If you look up the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire, you will
> find
> that I declare that the next attempt of the French Revolution will be
> no
> longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from
> one
> hand to another, but to smash it [Marx's italics--the original is
> zerbrechen], and this is the precondition for every real people's
> revolution
> on the Continent. And this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris
> are
> attempting." (Neue Zeit, Vol.XX, 1, 1901-02, p. 709.)[2] "
>
>
> ^^^^^
>
> CB: "Smashing" the bureaucratic-military machine is a euphemism for
> employment of quite a lot of violence.
>
> Marx modified his view based on the very limited experience of the
> Commune
> to asserting the need for use of more "smashing", i.e. violence
> against the
> counterrevolution. What would have been his attitude to the much
> greater
> violence of the counterrevolution against the Russian revolution.
I just quoted a long passage from the Civil War in France in which Marx claims that repressive and murderous hostility and a desire for retribution played no role in the actions of the Commune and that its brief rule involved few acts of violence of any kind . While being "magnanimous" to a fault, the Commune was "smashing" the "state," i.e. attempting to radically alter the nature and structures of "state power." To understand the meaning of "smashing," don't you and Lenin have to make your interpretation consistent with the fact that Marx also claims the Commune was "magnanimous" to a fault?
In what specific ways does "state power" in the USSR after 1917 correspond to the "state power" the Commune was attempting to create? The specifics of the latter are spelled out in the Civil War in France.
The idea of human "authenticity" I'm attributing to Marx is the idea that we have the potential for rational self-consciousness. I'm also attributing to him the idea that creating socialism requires the prior realization of a great deal of this potential. Rational self-consciousness is "magnanimous"; it's free of repressive and murderous hostility and a desire for retribution.
Unenlightened self-consciousness, on the other hand, will be more or less dominated by these irrational "passions"; it will also be "prejudiced," "superstitious" and "mystical." It will be incapable of creating "state power" which is "socialist" in the sense spelled out in the Civil War in France. In the 18th Brumaire, Marx points to Napoleon III as illustrating the kind of "state power" which will issue from the dominance of a particular kind of prejudice and superstition, the kind characteristic of French peasants in the period.
What was the nature of the self-consciousness dominant in Russia in 1917 and after? Does it explain the nature of "state power" in the period?
Ted