[lbo-talk] Cultural Change? ( Marxist democracy)

Ted Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com
Fri May 7 20:17:13 PDT 2004


Charles Brown wrote:


> Lenin quoted Marx not on what happened in the Commune, but wherein Marx
> draws lessons from the Commune as to what should be done differently
> than
> what was done in the Commune.

Earlier he quoted Lenin quoting Marx:


> "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] "

I think you've misread this. According to Marx (both in this letter and in the Civil War in France), the Commune corrected the mistake of 1848. Instead of trying to make use of "state power" in its Bonapartist form, it "smashed" that form. Marx is endorsing the "smashing," i.e. endorsing the radical restructuring of "state power" proposed by the Commune. This, along with much else, removed the capacity for "mass repression."

As the passage I quoted indicates, the Commune was "magnanimous" _to a fault_ because it failed to use violence where violence was perfectly justified i.e. to protect itself from anti-democratic violent saboteurs. Rational "magnanimity" doesn't exclude a configuring of "state power" to protect "democracy" (in the true form the Commune gives it) from those (necessarily a small minority if the Commune's idea of democracy is to be pracicable) who undertake to violently overthrow it. This is Marx's idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat."

The "magnanimity" means that these individuals are understood as mistaken rather than as evil. The problem they present will disappear as the removal of the last remaining obstacles to the full development of rational self-consciousness (i.e. of any "repression" other than the kind I've just mentioned) works to complete the development of this self-consciousness in everyone. At that point, the community "will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap."

The practicability of the arrangements the Commune attempted to put in place presupposes that the great majority of the population have already attained the degree of rational self-consciousness such practicability requires. This requirement wasn't met by the great majority of Russians in 1917, was it? (Or, in fact, by the great majority anywhere ever.)

Your interpretation appears to attribute to Marx the ideas Engels attributes to the Blanquists and rejects.

Ted



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