Preemptive correction (2025)

From the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Verso have announced the publication in April of a book by Jasper Bernes entitled The Future of Revolution: Communist prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising. A passage in the advance publicity for the book reads:

When Marx wrote that the Paris Commune of 1871 showed that “the working-class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes,” he identified a principle that will remain true as long as capitalism and its class antagonism persists.

What Marx wrote may or may not remain true as long as capitalism lasts but the subtitle of the book suggests that Bernes is not interpreting the passage in the way Marx meant; that he thinks that Marx wrote ‘simply cannot’ rather than ‘cannot simply’ and was advocating some sort of uprising or insurrection against the capitalist state as the way to communism as a society of common ownership and production directly to meet people’s needs (or socialism, as we call it and as Bernes too seems to define it).

The passage is taken from a manifesto Marx wrote in behalf of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) immediately after the fall of the Commune of Paris at the end of May 1871, and later published as part of a pamphlet The Civil France in France. The Commune had been an uprising in Paris against the French government following its defeat in January 1871 in the Franco-Prussian War. It was not an attempt to establish socialism as the common ownership of the means of production but it did introduce a wide political democracy in which, for the first time in history, workers played a part in running things.

Marx’s point was that this — introducing full political democracy — was what the working class should first do on winning control of political power, before using it to introduce pro-worker measures. In other words, the working class should take control of ‘the ready-made state machinery’ but ‘amputate’ (his word) ‘the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power’ before using it.

That this is what Marx meant is clear from a speech he gave the following year, in September 1872, on the margin of the IWMA Congress in The Hague in which he was reported as saying:

You know that the institutions, mores, and traditions of various countries must be taken into consideration, and we do not deny that there are countries — such as America, England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland — where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means.

How could the working class do this without ‘laying hold’ of ‘the ready-made state machinery’ through organising politically and winning an election? Only once they had done this would they be in a position to lop off its undemocratic features before using it to end capitalism and introduce socialism or to deal with any ‘pro-slavery’ rebellion by some capitalist elements.

Those who disagree with this are entitled to their point of view but they are not entitled to claim that it was Marx’s.

Adam Buick