59 Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 1871
After every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive
character of the state power stands out in bolder and bolder relief. The Revolution of 1830,
resulting in the transfer of government from the landlords to the capitalists, transferred it from the
more remote to the more direct antagonists of the working men. The bourgeois republicans, who,
in the name of the February Revolution, took the state power, used it for the June \[1848\]


massacres, in order to convince the working class that “social” republic means the republic
entrusting their social subjection, and in order to convince the royalist bulk of the bourgeois and
landlord class that they might safely leave the cares and emoluments of government to the


bourgeois “republicans.”
However, after their one heroic exploit of June, the bourgeois republicans had, from the front, to
fall back to the rear of the “Party of Order” – a combination formed by all the rival fractions and
factions of the appropriating classes. The proper form of their joint-stock government was the


parliamentary republic, with Louis Bonaparte for its president. Theirs was a regime of avowed


class terrorism and deliberate insult towards the “vile multitude.”
If the parliamentary republic, as M. Thiers said, “divided them \[the different fractions of the
ruling class\] least,” it opened an abyss between that class and the whole body of society outside


their spare ranks. The restraints by which their own divisions had under former regimes still


checked the state power, were removed by their union; and in view of the threatening upheaval of
the proletariat, they now used that state power mercilessly and ostentatiously as the national war
engine of capital against labor.
In their uninterrupted crusade against the producing masses, they were, however, bound not only
to invest the executive with continually increased powers of repression, but at the same time to


divest their own parliamentary stronghold – the National Assembly – one by one, of all its own


means of defence against the Executive. The Executive, in the person of Louis Bonaparte, turned
them out. The natural offspring of the “Party of Order” republic was the Second Empire.
The empire, with the coup d’état for its birth certificate, universal suffrage for its sanction, and


the sword for its sceptre, professed to rest upon the peasantry, the large mass of producers not


directly involved in the struggle of capital and labor. It professed to save the working class by


breaking down parliamentarism, and, with it, the undisguised subserviency of government to the
propertied classes. It professed to save the propertied classes by upholding their economic
supremacy over the working class; and, finally, it professed to unite all classes by reviving for all
the chimera of national glory.
In reality, it was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already
lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation. It was acclaimed
throughout the world as the savior of society. Under its sway, bourgeois society, freed from


political cares, attained a development unexpected even by itself. Its industry and commerce
expanded to colossal dimensions; financial swindling celebrated cosmopolitan orgies; the misery
of the masses was set off by a shameless display of gorgeous, meretricious and debased luxury.
The state power, apparently soaring high above society and the very hotbed of all its corruptions.
Its own rottenness, and the rottenness of the society it had saved, were laid bare by the bayonet of
Prussia, herself eagerly bent upon transferring the supreme seat of that regime from Paris to
Berlin. Imperialism is, at the same time, the most prostitute and the ultimate form of the state
power which nascent bourgeois society had commenced to elaborate as a means of its own
emancipation from feudalism, and which full-grown bourgeois society had finally transformed
into a means for the enslavement of labor by capital.
The direct antithesis to the empire was the Commune. The cry of “social republic,” with which
the February \[1848\] Revolution was ushered in by the Paris proletariat, did but express a vague
aspiration after a republic that was not only to supercede the monarchical form of class rule, but
class rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that republic.

60 Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 1871
Paris, the central seat of the old governmental power, and, at the same time, the social stronghold
of the French working class, had risen in arms against the attempt of Thiers and the Rurals to
restore and perpetuate that old governmental power bequeathed to them by the empire. Paris
could resist only because, in consequence of the siege, it had got rid of the army, and replaced it
by a National Guard, the bulk of which consisted of working men. This fact was now to be
transformed into an institution. The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression
of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people.
The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the
various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members
were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The


Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same
time.
Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped


of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the
Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of
the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman’s wage. The vested
interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with


the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of


the Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto
exercised by the state was laid into the hands of the Commune.
Having once got rid of the standing army and the police – the physical force elements of the old
government – the Commune was anxious to break the spiritual force of repression, the “parson-


power,” by the disestablishment and disendowment of all churches as proprietary bodies. The
priests were sent back to the recesses of private life, there to feed upon the alms of the faithful in
imitation of their predecessors, the apostles.
The whole of the educational institutions were opened to the people gratuitously, and at the same
time cleared of all interference of church and state. Thus, not only was education made accessible
to all, but science itself freed from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had
imposed upon it.
The judicial functionaries were to be divested of that sham independence which had but served to
mask their abject subserviency to all succeeding governments to which, in turn, they had taken,
and broken, the oaths of allegiance. Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were
to be elective, responsible, and revocable.
The Paris Commune was, of course, to serve as a model to all the great industrial centres of
France. The communal regime once established in Paris and the secondary centres, the old
centralized government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of
the producers.
In a rough sketch of national organisation, which the Commune had no time to develop, it states


clearly that the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and
that in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an
extremely short term of service. The rural communities of every district were to administer their
common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies


were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time
revocable and bound by the mandat imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents. The few
but important functions which would still remain for a central government were not to be


suppressed, as has been intentionally misstated, but were to be discharged by Communal and


thereafter responsible agents.
The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by Communal
Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be

61 Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 1871
the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was
but a parasitic excrescence.
While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its
legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society
itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society. Instead of deciding once in three or six
years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal
suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every
other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well-known
that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business generally know how to put the right
man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly. On the other
hand, nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supercede universal
suffrage by hierarchical investiture.12
It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterparts
of older, and even defunct, forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness. Thus,
this new Commune, which breaks with the modern state power, has been mistaken for a
reproduction of the medieval Communes, which first preceded, and afterward became the


substratum of, that very state power. The Communal Constitution has been mistaken for an
attempt to break up into the federation of small states, as dreamt of by Montesquieu and the
Girondins13, that unity of great nations which, if originally brought about by political force, has
now become a powerful coefficient of social production. The antagonism of the Commune
against the state power has been mistaken for an exaggerated form of the ancient struggle against


over-centralization. Peculiar historical circumstances may have prevented the classical
development, as in France, of the bourgeois form of government, and may have allowed, as in


England, to complete the great central state organs by corrupt vestries, jobbing councillors, and


ferocious poor-law guardians in the towns, and virtually hereditary magistrates in the counties.
The Communal Constitution would have restored to the social body all the forces hitherto
absorbed by the state parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of, society. By this
one act, it would have initiated the regeneration of France.
The provincial French bourgeois saw in the Commune an attempt to restore the sway their order
had held over the country under Louis Philippe, and which, under Louis Napoleon, was
supplanted by the pretended rule of the country over the towns. In reality, the Communal
Constitution brought the rural producers under the intellectual lead of the central towns of their
districts, and there secured to them, in the working men, the natural trustees of their interests. The
very existence of the Commune involved, as a matter of course, local municipal liberty, but no


longer as a check upon the now superseded state power. It could only enter into the head of a
Bismarck – who, when not engaged on his intrigues of blood and iron, always likes to resume his
old trade, so befitting his mental calibre, of contributor to Kladderadatsch (the Berlin Punch14) –
it could only enter into such a head to ascribe to the Paris Commune aspirations after the
caricature of the old French municipal organization of 1791, the Prussian municipal constitution
which degrades the town governments to mere secondary wheels in the police machinery of the
Prussian state. The Commune made that catchword of bourgeois revolutions – cheap government
– a reality by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure: the standing army and state


functionarism. Its very existence presupposed the non-existence of monarchy, which, in Europe at
least, is the normal encumbrance and indispensable cloak of class rule. It supplied the republic
with the basis of really democratic institutions. But neither cheap government nor the “true


republic” was its ultimate aim; they were its mere concomitants.
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

62 Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 1871
producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to
work out the economical emancipation of labor.
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 labor emancipated,
every man becomes a working man, and productive labor 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 wage-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?
The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias
to introduce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation,
and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own
economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic
processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the


elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. In the
full consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act up to it, the working
class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen’s gentlemen with pen and


inkhorn, and at the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth their
ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility.
When the Paris Commune took the management of the revolution in its own hands; when plain
working men for the first time dared to infringe upon the governmental privilege of their “natural


superiors,” and, under circumstances of unexampled difficulty, performed it at salaries the highest
of which barely amounted to one-fifth what, according to high scientific authority\*, is the
minimum required for a secretary to a certain metropolitan school-board – the old world writhed
in convulsions of rage at the sight of the Red Flag, the symbol of the Republic of Labor, floating


over the Hôtel de Ville.
And yet, this was the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as the
only class capable of social initiative, even by the great bulk of the Paris bourgeois –
shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants – the wealthy capitalist alone excepted. The Commune had
\* Professor Huxley. \[Note to the German addition of 1871.\]

63 Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 1871
saved them by a sagacious settlement of that ever recurring cause of dispute among the bourgeois
themselves – the debtor and creditor accounts.15 The same portion of the bourgeois, after they had
assisted in putting down the working men’s insurrection of June 1848, had been at once
unceremoniously sacrificed to their creditors16 by the then Constituent Assembly. But this was
not their only motive for now rallying around the working class. They felt there was but one


alternative – the Commune, or the empire – under whatever name it might reappear. The empire
had ruined them economically by the havoc it made of public wealth, by the wholesale financial
swindling it fostered, by the props it lent to the artificially accelerated centralization of capital,
and the concomitant expropriation of their own ranks. It had suppressed them politically, it had
shocked them morally by its orgies, it had insulted their Voltairianism by handing over the
education of their children to the fréres Ignorantins,17 it had revolted their national feeling as
Frenchmen by precipitating them headlong into a war which left only one equivalent for the ruins


it made – the disappearance of the empire. In fact, after the exodus from Paris of the high


Bonapartist and capitalist boheme, the true bourgeois Party of Order came out in the shape of the
“Union Republicaine,”18 enrolling themselves under the colors of the Commune and defending it
against the wilful misconstructions of Thiers. Whether the gratitude of this great body of the
bourgeois will stand the present severe trial, time must show.
The Commune was perfectly right in telling the peasants that “its victory was their only hope.” Of
all the lies hatched at Versailles and re-echoed by the glorious European penny-a-liner, one of the
most tremendous was that the Rurals represented the French peasantry. Think only of the love of


the French peasant for the men to whom, after 1815, he had to pay the milliard indemnity.19 In the
eyes of the French peasant, the very existence of a great landed proprietor is in itself an
encroachment on his conquests of 1789. The bourgeois, in 1848, had burdened his plot of land


with the additional tax of 45 cents, in the franc; but then he did so in the name of the revolution;
while now he had fomented a civil war against revolution, to shift on to the peasant’s shoulders
the chief load of the 5 milliards of indemnity to be paid to the Prussian. The Commune, on the
other hand, in one of its first proclamations, declared that the true originators of the war would be
made to pay its cost. The Commune would have delivered the peasant of the blood tax – would
have given him a cheap government – transformed his present blood-suckers, the notary,


advocate, executor, and other judicial vampires, into salaried communal agents, elected by, and
responsible to, himself. It would have freed him of the tyranny of the garde champetre, the
gendarme, and the prefect; would have put enlightenment by the schoolmaster in the place of
stultification by the priest. And the French peasant is, above all, a man of reckoning. He would


find it extremely reasonable that the pay of the priest, instead of being extorted by the tax-
gatherer, should only depend upon the spontaneous action of the parishioners’ religious instinct.


Such were the great immediate boons which the rule of the Commune – and that rule alone – held
out to the French peasantry. It is, therefore, quite superfluous here to expatiate upon the more
complicated but vital problems which the Commune alone was able, and at the same time
compelled, to solve in favor of the peasant – viz., the hypothecary debt, lying like an incubus
upon his parcel of soil, the prolétariat foncier (the rural proletariat), daily growing upon it, and
his expropriation from it enforced, at a more and more rapid rate, by the very development of
modern agriculture and the competition of capitalist farming.
The French peasant had elected Louis Bonaparte president of the republic; but the Party of Order
created the empire. What the French peasant really wants he commenced to show in 1849 and
1850, by opposing his maire to the government’s prefect, his school-master to the government’s
priest, and himself to the government’s gendarme. All the laws made by the Party of Order in
January and February 1850 were avowed measures of repression against the peasant. The peasant
was a Bonapartist, because the Great Revolution, with all its benefits to him, was, in his eyes,


personified in Napoleon. This delusion, rapidly breaking down under the Second Empire (and in

64 Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 1871
its very nature hostile to the Rurals), this prejudice of the past, how could it have withstood the
appeal of the Commune to the living interests and urgent wants of the peasantry?
The Rurals – this was, in fact, their chief apprehension – knew that three months’ free
communication of Communal Paris with the provinces would bring about a general rising of the
peasants, and hence their anxiety to establish a police blockade around Paris, so as to stop the
spread of the rinderpest \[cattle pest – contagious disease\].
If the Commune was thus the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society,
and therefore the truly national government, it was, at the same time, as a working men’s
government, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labor, emphatically international.
Within sight of that Prussian army, that had annexed to Germany two French provinces, the
Commune annexed to France the working people all over the world.
The Second Empire had been the jubilee of cosmopolitan blackleggism, the rakes of all countries
rushing in at its call for a share in its orgies and in the plunder of the French people. Even at this
moment, the right hand of Thiers is Ganessco, the foul Wallachian, and his left hand is
Markovsky, the Russian spy. The Commune admitted all foreigners to the honor of dying for an
immortal cause. Between the foreign war lost by their treason, and the civil war fomented by their


conspiracy with the foreign invader, the bourgeoisie had found the time to display their patriotism


by organizing police hunts upon the Germans in France. The Commune made a German working


man \[Leo Frankel\] its Minister of Labor. Thiers, the bourgeoisie, the Second Empire, had
continually deluded Poland by loud professions of sympathy, while in reality betraying her to,


and doing the dirty work of, Russia. The Commune honoured the heroic sons of Poland \[J.


Dabrowski and W. Wróblewski\] by placing them at the head of the defenders of Paris. And, to


broadly mark the new era of history it was conscious of initiating, under the eyes of the


conquering Prussians on one side, and the Bonapartist army, led by Bonapartist generals, on the
other, the Commune pulled down that colossal symbol of martial glory, the Vendôme Column.20
The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence. Its special measures
could but betoken the tendency of a government of the people by the people. Such were the


abolition of the nightwork of journeymen bakers; the prohibition, under penalty, of the


employers’ practice to reduce wages by levying upon their workpeople fines under manifold


pretexts – a process in which the employer combines in his own person the parts of legislator,
judge, and executor, and filches the money to boot. Another measure of this class was the


surrender to associations of workmen, under reserve of compensation, of all closed workshops
and factories, no matter whether the respective capitalists had absconded or preferred to strike
work.
The financial measures of the Commune, remarkable for their sagacity and moderation, could
only be such as were compatible with the state of a besieged town. Considering the colossal
robberies committed upon the city of Paris by the great financial companies and contractors,
under the protection of Haussman,21 the Commune would have had an incomparably better title to
confiscate their property than Louis Napoleon had against the Orleans family. The Hohenzollern


and the English oligarchs, who both have derived a good deal of their estates from church


plunders, were, of course, greatly shocked at the Commune clearing but 8,000f out of
secularization.
While the Versailles government, as soon as it had recovered some spirit and strength, used the


most violent means against the Commune; while it put down the free expression of opinion all
over France, even to the forbidding of meetings of delegates from the large towns; while it
subjected Versailles and the rest of France to an espionage far surpassing that of the Second
Empire; while it burned by its gendarme inquisitors all papers printed at Paris, and sifted all
correspondence from and to Paris; while in the National Assembly the most timid attempts to put
in a word for Paris were howled down in a manner unknown even to the Chambre introuvable of

65 Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 1871
1816; with the savage warfare of Versailles outside, and its attempts at corruption and conspiracy
inside Paris – would the Commune not have shamefully betrayed its trust by affecting to keep all
the decencies and appearances of liberalism as in a time of profound peace? Had the government
of the Commune been akin to that of M. Thiers, there would have been no more occasion to
suppress Party of Order papers at Paris that there was to suppress Communal papers at Versailles.
It was irritating indeed to the Rurals that at the very same time they declared the return to the
church to be the only means of salvation for France, the infidel Commune unearthed the peculiar
mysteries of the Picpus nunnery22, and of the Church of St. Laurent. It was a satire upon M.
Thiers that, while he showered grand crosses upon the Bonapartist generals in acknowledgment
of their mastery in losing battles, singing capitulations, and turning cigarettes at Wilhelmshöhe,23
the Commune dismissed and arrested its generals whenever they were suspected of neglecting
their duties. The expulsion from, and arrest by, the Commune of one of its members \[Blanchet\]
who had slipped in under a false name, and had undergone at Lyons six days’ imprisonment for
simple bankruptcy, was it not a deliberate insult hurled at the forger, Jules Favre, then still the
foreign minister of France, still selling France to Bismarck, and still dictating his orders to that


paragon government of Belgium? But indeed the Commune did not pretend to infallibility, the


invariable attribute of all governments of the old stamp. It published its doings and sayings, it


initiated the public into all its shortcomings.
In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of different stamp; some of
them survivors of and devotees to past revolutions, without insight into the present movement,
but preserving popular influence by their known honesty and courage, or by the sheer force of
tradition; others mere brawlers who, by dint of repeating year after year the same set of
stereotyped declarations against the government of the day, have sneaked into the reputation of
revolutionists of the first water. After March 18, some such men did also turn up, and in some
cases contrived to play pre-eminent parts. As far as their power went, they hampered the real
action of the working class, exactly as men of that sort have hampered the full development of
every previous revolution. They are an unavoidable evil: with time they are shaken off; but time
was not allowed to the Commune.
Wonderful, indeed, was the change the Commune had wrought in Paris! No longer any trace of
the tawdry Paris of the Second Empire! No longer was Paris the rendezvous of British landlords,
Irish absentees, 24 American ex-slaveholders and shoddy men, Russian ex-serfowners, and
Wallachian boyards. No more corpses at the morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely any
robberies; in fact, for the first time since the days of February 1848, the streets of Paris were safe,