From: Ted Winslow
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."
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CB: In a word, sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. Marx had that much common sense in his theory of insurrection and defense of the revolution for a long time after the insurrection, in fighting counterrevolution. The Commune was a dress rehearsal of a successful insurrection. Lenin quotes Marx and Engels as not only that the Commune corrects the Revolution of 1848 but that the Commune teaches that smashing or breaking up the bureaucratic-military whatever is necessary, and it is obvious that there can be heavily violent counter attacks from the military sector, as in the Civil War in Russia after in 1919.
Also, Marx and Engels supported the violent repression of the slavocratic South of the U.S.
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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.
^^^^ CB: There could be a little subtle humor in that "magnanimous to a fault", not so much an implied absolute principle of no violent repression ever in insurrection or socialist state powers ( for Marx a state _is_ a violent repressive apparatus.)
I think you are reading too much into "magnanimous". Yea it was big of the Communards not to pull a Reign of Terror. They were bigger than the old Frond. Of course, the Communards did get their asses handed to them (!)
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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."
^^^^ CB: This can't occur until there are no capitalist states left. But yea, we aim to throw the state on the scrap heap of history. See _The Family, Private Property and the State_.
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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.)
^^^^^ CB: However , Marx supported the Commune even though he said it was doomed to failure from the beginning, and predicted that it would be a folly of despair. Similarly, Marx would have been worried about the lackings of the Russian population in 1917, but no doubt would have joined the rev !
Your interpretation appears to attribute to Marx the ideas Engels attributes to the Blanquists and rejects.
Ted
^^^^ CB: I'll have to look up what ideas Engels attributes to the Blanquists and rejects . :
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