Karl Marx

“ To deprive them of the power of offense, you must deprive them of the means of defense. You must not only garrote, but murder. If ever conqueror took "material guarantees" for breaking the sinews of a nation, the First Napoleon did so by the Tilsit treaty, and the way he executed it against Prussia and the rest of Germany. Yet, a few years later, his gigantic power split like a rotten reed upon the German people. What are the "material guarantees" Prussia, in her wildest dreams, can, or dare impose upon France, compared to the "material guarantees" the first Napoleon had wrenched from herself? ”

“ After Whit-Sunday, 1871, there can be neither peace nor truce possible between the workingmen of France and the appropriators of their produce. The iron hand of a mercenary soldiery may keep for a time both classes tied down in common oppression. But the battle must break out again and again in ever-growing dimensions, and there can be no doubt as to who will be the victor in the end—the appropriating few, or the immense working majority. And the French working class is only the vanguard of the modern proletariat. ”

“ Why, that for months the Commune carefully hid, under a mask of moderation and humanity, the bloodthirstiness of its fiendish instincts, to be let loose in the hour of its agony!
The workingmen's Paris, in the act of its heroic self-holocaust, involved in its flames buildings and monuments. While tearing to pieces the living body of the proletariat, its rulers must no longer expect to return triumphantly into the intact architecture of their abodes. The Government of Versailles cries, "Incendiarism!" ”

“ On the German side, the war is a war of defense; but who put Germany to the necessity of defending herself? Who enabled Louis Bonaparte to wage war upon her? Prussia! It was Bismarck who conspired with that very same Louis Bonaparte for the purpose of crushing popular opposition at home, and annexing Germany to the Hohenzollern dynasty. If the battle of Sadowa had been lost instead of being won, French battalions would have overrun Germany as the allies of Prussia. After her victory did Prussia dream one moment of opposing a free Germany to an enslaved France? ”

“ The soil out of which it grows is modern society itself. It cannot be stamped out by any amount of carnage. To stamp it out, the Government would have to stamp out the despotism of capital over labor—the condition of their own parasitical existence.
Workingmen's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. ”

“ 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, was at the same time itself the greatest scandal of that society and the very hotbed of all its corruptions. ”

“ It still faces the Congress, reproachfully:—"What are you here for, with all your past declarations of international solidarity? You have settled nothing. You have, in fact, done terribly worse than nothing; you have actually laid the foundation of universal strife between the clear-minded, class-conscious, bona fide socialists, and the honest but unwary fraction of the proletariat, which ambitious arrivistes may now, to their heart's content, delude with false promises of improvement at the hands of bourgeois governments." ”

“ Fond of brandishing, with his dwarfish arms, in the face of Europe the sword of the First Napoleon, whose historical shoeblack he had become, his foreign policy always culminated in the utter humiliation of France, from the London convention of 1841 to the Paris capitulation of 1871, and the present civil war, when he hounds on the prisoners of Sedan and Metz against Paris by special permission of Bismarck. Despite his versatility of talent and shiftiness of purpose, this man has his whole lifetime been wedded to the most fossil routine. ”

“ The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par décret 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 economic 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. ”

“ 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, a workingmen's Government, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labor, emphatically international. Within sight of the Prussian army, that had annexed to Germany two French provinces, the Commune annexed to France the working people all over the world. ”

“ At last when treachery had opened the gates of Paris to General Douai, on the 21st of May, Thiers, on the 22d, revealed to the Rurals the "goal" of his conciliation comedy, which they had so obstinately persisted in not understanding. "I told you a few days ago that we were approaching our goal; to-day I come to tell you the goal is reached. The victory of order, justice, and civilization is at last won!"
So it was. The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their masters. ”

“ The French workmen must perform their duties as citizens; but, at the same time, they must not allow themselves to be swayed by the national souvenirs of 1792, as the French peasants allowed themselves to be deluded by the national souvenirs of the First Empire. They have not to recapitulate the past, but to build up the future. Let them calmly and resolutely improve the opportunities of Republican liberty, for the work of their own class organization. It will gift them with fresh Herculean powers for the regeneration of France, and our common task—the emancipation of labor. ”

“ Again, is not the proletariat moral enough for all the immediate purposes of the Social Revolution, through which alone it can enter an era of higher morality and physical improvement? As a body is it not, in fact, the most moral of the classes into which the exploitation of the industrious by the idle-fundamental immorality, source of nearly all forms of private and public degradation—has divided the human race? ”

“ After five days of heroic struggle, the workmen succumbed, and now followed a massacre of the defenseless prisoners, the like of which had not been seen since the days of the Civil Wars which ushered in the downfall of the Roman Republic. It was the first time that the bourgeoisie showed to what a mad ferocity of vengeance it can be stirred up, so soon as the proletariat dares to stand up against it as a separate class with its own interests and demands. ”

“ Society had created for itself definite organs, originally by simple division of labor, for the provision of its common interests. But these organs, at the head of which is the power of the State, had in the course of time, and in the service of their own separate interests, transformed themselves from the servants of society into its masters. And this is true not only of the hereditary monarchy, but also of the democratic republic. Nowhere do the "politicians" form a more distinct and more powerful subdivision of the nation than in the United States. ”

“ Their panic was their only punishment. Even the sergents-de-ville, instead of being disarmed and locked up, as ought to have been done, had the gates of Paris flung wide open for their safe retreat to Versailles. The men of order were left not only unharmed, but allowed to rally and quietly to seize more than one stronghold in the very center of Paris. This indulgence of the Central Committee—this magnanimity of the armed workingmen—so strangely at variance with the habits of the "party of order," the latter misinterpreted as mere symptoms of conscious weakness. ”

“ And precisely because the natural tendency of capitalism is to stunt and demoralize a constantly growing number of wage-workers; precisely because, with its development, a condition must ultimately prevail that will be the very reverse of that improvement which in the Kautsky savante consultation is absurdly considered as a not only possible but essential preliminary to the Social Revolution; it becomes more and more imperative to hasten the day when the proletariat can victoriously and securely proclaim itself forever the absolute master of its own destinies. ”

“ They dare not pretend that the people of Alsace and Lorraine pant for the German embrace; quite the contrary. To punish their French patriotism, Strasburg, a town with an independent citadel commanding it, has for six days been wantonly and fiendishly bombarded by "German" explosive shells, setting it on fire, and killing great numbers of its defenseless inhabitants! Yet, the soil of those provinces once upon a time belonged to the whilom German Empire. Hence, it seems, the soil and the human beings grown on it must be confiscated as imprescriptible German property. ”

“ And while the proletariat attacks the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie attacks the Bonaparte, who vainly does his best to defend it. The Second Empire becomes a pandemonium; war to Germany is declared; ignominiously falls the imperial mountebank.
Then does the class battle reach its climax. The bourgeoisie rushes on to seize the power. The armed proletariat bars the way. ”

“ 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 members 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 coöperative production. If coöperative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system ”

“ 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 middle class—shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants—the wealthy capitalist alone excepted. The Commune had saved them by a sagacious settlement of that ever recurring cause of dispute among the middle class themselves the debtor and creditor accounts. ”

“ Opposed to this new world at Paris, behold the old world at Versailles—that assembly of the ghouls of all defunct régimes, Legitimists and Orleanists, eager to feed upon the carcass of the nation—with a tail of antediluvian Republicans, sanctioning, by their presence in the Assembly, the slaveholders' rebellion, relying for the maintenance of their Parliamentary Republic upon the vanity of the senile mountebank at its head, and caricaturing 1789 by holding their ghastly meetings in the Jeu de Paume. ”

“ As Louis Bonaparte flattered himself that the war of 1866, resulting in the common exhaustion of Austria and Prussia, would make him the supreme arbiter of Germany, so Alexander flattered himself that the war of 1870, resulting in the common exhaustion of Germany and France, would make him the supreme arbiter of the Western Continent. As the Second Empire thought the North German Confederation incompatible with its existence, so autocratic Russia must think herself endangered by a German empire under Prussian leadership. ”

“ It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic 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 coexist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economic foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. ”

“ To take strategic positions in view of the final battle, and from there ceaselessly bombard the citadel of oppression; to thus and otherwise, by constant agitation from every point of vantage that may be gained, educate the proletarian masses, enlighten their blind discontent and transform it into a clear-minded resolve; to so organize them that every conflict in which they may be engaged, every victory they may win, and every reverse they may suffer, shall alike serve as object lessons to intensify their class- consciousness and class-solidarity ”

“ It is not Germans that befouled their hands by the subjugation of Italy, the oppression of Hungary, and the dismemberment of Poland. Their present military system, which divides the whole able-bodied male population into two parts—one standing army on service, and another standing army on furlough, both equally bound in passive obedience to rulers by divine right—such a military system is, of course, "a material guarantee" for keeping the peace, and the ultimate goal of civilizing tendencies! ”

“ In their stead, the real women of Paris showed again at the surface—heroic, noble, and devoted, like the women of antiquity. Working, thinking, fighting, bleeding Paris—almost forgetful, in its incubation of a new society, of the cannibals at its gates—radiant in the enthusiasm of its historic initiative! ”

“ In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of a 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 bawlers, who by dint of repeating year after year the same set of stereotyped declamation against the Government of the day, have sneaked into the reputation of revolutionists of the first water. ”

“ Away with your Kautsky resolution! Even that—bad as it is and contemptible economically and politically—can be no cloak at all for your treachery to the proletariat. For, while it displays extraordinary cowardice in not reprobating unconditionally and forbidding instantly, in the name of international solidarity, your ministerial "tactics" and so-called "new method," it at least disapproves of them in language sufficiently suggestive, despite its incongruities, to cause their immediate abandonment by any one of you that may still honestly claim to be a socialist ”

“ When Thiers, during six weeks, bombarded Paris, under the pretext that he wanted to set fire to those houses only in which there were people, was that incendiarism? In war, fire is an arm as legitimate as any. Buildings held by the enemy are shelled to set them on fire. If their defenders have to retire, they themselves light the flames to prevent the attack from making use of the buildings. To be burnt down has always been the inevitable fate of all buildings situated in the front of battle of all the regular armies of the world. ”

“ What we want is not glory, but safety. The Germans are an essentially peaceful people. In their sober guardianship, conquest itself changes from a condition of future war into a pledge of perpetual peace. Of course, it is not Germans that invaded France in 1792, for the sublime purpose of bayoneting the revolution of the eighteenth century. ”

“ Paris, however, was not to be defended without arming its working class, organizing them into an effective force, and training their ranks by the war itself. But Paris armed was the Revolution armed. A victory of Paris over the Prussian aggressor would have been a victory of the French workman over the French capitalist and his State parasites. In this conflict between national duty and class interest, the Government of National Defense did not hesitate one moment to turn into a Government of National Defection. ”

“ The partial awakening, here and there, of some local bodies among the many that composed her working class could not yet be of such general import and widespread influence as must have attached to an equal display of vigor by the more compact proletariat of France; and so long as this recognized leader in the social-revolutionary process lay seemingly unconscious and helpless under the yoke of a vulgar despot, the German socialists, hampered at every step in their agitation by the repressive measures of their own petty tyrants, could only prepare their own ground and await developments. ”

“ 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 workingmen. ”

“ Here, then, was a Congress asserting itself as the world's labor parliament, whose powers were such, in its own declared opinion, that it could not only institute an executive to carry out its decisions and those of its predecessors, but order the socialist representatives elected to the parliaments of various countries to come together under the supervision of that executive and in coöperation with it determine the policy—the tactics—which all must adopt concerning matters that may in any way affect the laboring class. ”

“ And people imagine they have taken a very bold step, when they have once freed themselves from the belief in monarchy and swear now by the democratic republic. But in reality the State is nothing else than a machine for the oppression of one class by another class, and that no less so in the democratic republic than under the monarchy. ”

“ Petersburg Cabinet, an outlaw amongst nations, only incites them to consider whether the few victims who escape the double cordon around Paris are not to be given up to the hangman at Versailles!
That after the most tremendous war of modern times, the conquering and the conquered hosts should fraternize for the common massacre of the proletariat—this unparalleled event does indicate, not as Bismarck thinks, the final repression of a new society upheaving, but the crumbling into dust of bourgeois society. The highest heroic effort of which old society is still capable is national war ”