 Hello, welcome to Leftward Books and NewsClick. I've had the pleasure of speaking to Professor Ejaz Ahmed about different books by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. This episode is about Marx's terrific book Civil War in France, 1871. A text Marx wrote right after the Paris Commune was defeated after 72 days on the 28th of May, 1871. Ejaz, welcome. Nice to have you again. Thank you very much. Glad to be back. Ejaz, why don't you start by putting the text in its context, Civil War in France, 1871, the Paris Commune has just been crushed. Carnage in Paris, Marx writes this text intended for the first international and so on. Could you put the text and the Commune in context? Yes, it's a rather large undertaking but I'll try. This particular text, the Civil War in France, as we know, was a third address to the first international. He had already given two addresses to the international as the Commune, as the war, the Franco-Prussian War, and then the events that led to the Commune have been covered by his earlier texts. So in that sense, it's a much more condensed text and a much more theoretical reflection on the Commune rather than a narrative. Engels, of course, later on published all three lectures together under that title, which was a good thing to do because then you get. I think first thing to do is to actually reflect the relationship of this with the text we talked about the last time, which is the 18th program. I actually think that this is a, this is a very interesting sequential relation between the manifesto, the 18th premier and the Civil War in France. As you know, the manifesto is written in expectation of the Revolution of 1848, which breaks out just about the time the manifesto is published. France writes a number of addresses and essays on the Revolution, which also Engels put together as a collection, and then the 18th premier, which is written immediately after the counter-revolution is completed with the coup d'etat of Louis Napoleon. So there is an expectation of revolution, there is a defeat of the connection between the manifesto and, and now what you have is an evolution of a very different order which actually lasts for 72 years, in which the proletariat makes a revolution entirely of its own. Unlike the, the Revolution of 1848, this one is made by the proletariat, very self-consciously as a proletarian revolution. As much against the so-called republic led by Theos as a defense of Paris against the foreign power of the smart troops and so on and so forth. And this is an evolution that actually lasts for 72 years. I might just say that, you know, after the Bolshevik, after the Bolshevik Revolution had lasted for 73 days, Lenin was found dancing outside the Winter Palace because the Revolution had now lasted a day beyond the, and in some ways thought of the Bolshevik Revolution as the completion of redemption or whatever you want to call it, of the Revolution of 1870. So now, because it is a revolution of the proletariat with a certain kind of vision to which I'll come about, Marx is now much more interested in what was accomplished in, during that, and this connection that I'm talking about, textual connection. You know, in, in, in section three of the Paris commune, as he turns to the actual beginning of the, of the, of the commune, he, there's just one sentence saying, on such a such morning, Paris woke up to the cries of Viva the commune. And then he writes a whole long passage, which is simply lifted from the, from the last section, section seven of the of the 18th movement. It's a revised version of that. There is an absolute connection in his own mind. And rightly so I'll come to why that is. So now what I think the gist of it is this particular text is Marx's reflections, the gist of those reflections is that the withering of the state is identical to the dictatorship of the proletariat. It's one in the same. And how does the state wither away in a movement which is the creation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletariat take hold, not, not, not take only actually starts by saying you cannot take hold. You have to destroy the, the, the state, which he had already said in at the end of the 18th movement. And here he sees the materialization of that. And that I think is the, the crux of it. For him. Now, again, very interestingly, you know, what you all, you know, the very phrase withering away of the state is something that Marx shared with classical anarchism. And what you saw in during the, the, the, the, the, during the commune as angles was to actually say that much later in the late 1880s, that there was a complete sort of the, the followers of Blankey, the anarchist, but actually the largest, numerically the largest. The presence of the international in the, in the commune was not minor estimates range between 50,000 to 200,000 members of the international. The international was, of course, not, you know, tightly controlled, you know, tight cadre party. It actually was, you know, you just have to fill up the phone, you become a member of the international. But in order to, there's no incentive in, in doing that unless you actually believed in the program of the international. So what you're talking about is a great move, which had its own organization structure and so on. So, so followers of Marx are actually very active in in it. And I'll also come back to that. So for Marx, actually, that is what the interest is. And he talks about the actual, what, what the commune actually did in terms of, for example, the sort of restructuring of what would be, and in his, in a state of the bush as he would be the civil service the bureaucracy and so on and so forth, in which they institute equality of wages, all across whatever your, your job maybe your position maybe the equality of wages the highest was like 6,000 francs, which at that time is not a great amount of money. It's revocable everything by election, everything revocable. The, the judiciary, the bourgeoisie is always talking about the independence of the judiciary, the judiciary itself became an electoral office, open to record, etc. So there are those kinds of activities of the, you know, the creation of a, of a commune that was the opposite of the state. And which was, which in fact was destroying the Republic, that the various versions of the Republic that had been in France since Nepal. That whole state structure that the, the republican, the republican revolution against the monarchy. It was the most central, France was the most centralized state in Europe after Nepal. And to give a notion of an alternative to it. And not only just at the level of Paris, what was very interesting, you know, they actually marched what they call, call the flag of the Universal Republic. And, and what their conception was, was that all of France will become a sort of network of communes, which will themselves be the beginning of a world consisting of communes. They were actually thinking of a certain universality of form of this dictatorship of the proletariat. So they're thinking and was actually far beyond what they were able to do in the, in those 72 years. Now Marx doesn't actually go into all the details of what they did, it's one, one address. But at the center is that what the socialist non state would look like the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. So that I think is the central part. There are other things that I want to say about it. You know, Marx quite rightly begins with the war. And then the rise of the republic and so on, or rather reconstitution of this fake republic. And then goes into. Actually something much more complex one more thing I say and then I'll stop there and we can go into other aspects of it. What is very interesting to me is that the occasion for the revolution of 1871 was produced by a crisis. Crisis of war. Crisis of the defeat of France. And that vacuum, which was created by the withdrawal of the government from Versailles from Paris to Versailles, the collapse of the army. It was replaced by the National Guard, which had been paid for actually. We can come back to the structure. But what I wanted to emphasize is that it was that crisis which had made the possibility to open the person. But that crisis was not actually the starting point. Quite rightly, only talks about that crisis and then goes into, you know, the activity of the commune and only that aspect of the commune, which is related to that, you know, evolution of the state and the rise of the I wanted to emphasize that because that somewhat resembles the October, the conditions of the October. And I think on a global scale it resembles the crisis, which made possible the Chinese is the crisis of the Second World War. There's great revolutions, there's a chain of great revolutions that come out of that kind of crisis of bourgeois rule. But those things don't come out of some, you know, one problem if you only read Marxist text without, you know, putting that text in a context is as if it was some great spontaneous surprise. As if suddenly the working class rose. What, what made the organization of that spontaneity possible is actually another sort of question that is related to this. So, to take us now from that context, I think this very interesting, you know, the underlying crisis that produces revolutions and so on, despite the fact this only lasted 72 days. Today still is a considerable amount of time in other French cities, the communes only lasted for some hours so this is still an achievement of some magnitude. But to come back to the conceptual level at several points you've talked about the dictatorship of the proletariat, the withering away of the state these are key concepts in the text. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about the term dictatorship of the proletariat, the way you've talked about it as related somehow to the withering away of the state. Lots of people think of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the hardening of the state not its withering away. Could you talk a little bit about these concepts and their relationship to each other. One way of looking at it would be that, you know, Lenin's great text, I mean, the 18th Romain and the Paris commune and the Lenin's state and evolution are the central texts of Marxist theory, the state and evolution. By the way this title, the state and evolution, Lenin might have taken it from one of the communes who wrote a book called state and evolution. So that may also be a connection, even the title may be a connection to the commune. In the state and evolution again, which itself is by and large in a very large measure. Summary and a certain sense of synthesis of Marxist and Engels's writing and precisely the text that we have been talking about. Again, there again, what Lenin says there is that there is no reason why we cannot distribute the functions of the state among about 200 million people. That's the dictatorship of the proletariat. And the phrase dictatorship of the proletariat I think is fundamentally connected with the idea that what they call the liberal state, the democratic state is actually a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. And the liberal democratic state is a political form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. And that the when the proletariat smashes the state, the proletariat cannot take hold of the state, it has to smash the state. And it cannot then reconstitute a state in the form of the state of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The dictatorship of the proletariat is refers to the shift of power, class power from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat, and which is to say from a minority to a great majority. And the great majority when it takes hold of the state distributes the functions of the state among the class as a whole. It has no separate bureaucracy, it has no separate. It is not a state of the minority. Therefore, it cannot, it does not create a state other than itself. It becomes the executive, the legislature, the judiciary as a whole. And the question is what kind of forms you will have. After all, when the Soviets were formed in the Soviet Union, the Soviet is the Russian word for commune. The hope was that that is the form, the rule so called the political, the political expression of the revolution would take. I did not take that form finally. Is it is a different question, which we take as from the text that we are looking at. And that's why I began where I've been at the heart of Marxism is that is the distribution of this, that this concentration of power that takes place under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the power in the hands of the state, the army, the police, judiciary, the state, and the other, which are completely independent of the population, even the parliamentary form that they have. This is what needs to be dispersed among the classes whole. And therefore the winning of the state and the dictatorship the bourgeoisie are identical. See the interesting thing about this text also, apart from all these other concepts is that, as you said, it shapes Lenin's writings, he begins to take notes when he's coming into the new post czarist, you know, the government of Kerensky's and power and Lenin is coming into this hot house environment, and he's taken all these notes and he's left them in, in Finland. He eventually gets his notes back starts to draft state and revolution while the Soviet sub been created and so on. It's quite an extraordinary text because it goes through the precy of many of the important texts on the state including angles, and the text on the origin of the family, and the state and so on. So, just to have a few words on Lenin's text I know we've talked about Lenin already but just a few words. There's something in both the Civil War in France lectures and then in Lenin's text about the capacity the belief in the capacity of the proletariat to govern. You could say a few things about this because this is an idea that has has almost disappeared this idea that you know as they used to say I'm not even sure this is an actual quotation, but they used to say every cook can govern, you know, that sort of phrase. Can we talk a little bit about this belief in the capacity of people to govern themselves and not have to be governed by a class that dominates them. But that I think should take us into what made the commune possible. You see, as I said, you know, Marx quite rightly begins with the beginning of the crisis that produced the commune. But that is not the starting point in actual historical fact. The very historical fact is that sometime in 1868, that is to say three years about the commune actually came into being. There arose despite the you had the empire Louis Napoleon's empire, which was a very strict dictatorship. And they were very strict forms of censorship. For the first time in 1868, there occurs what is called a reunion, which is a public meeting which is not authorized. It does not announce itself as a political meeting in which the survivors of 1848 and young workers of France and a number of emigre workers come together to discuss politics. But what can they discuss? They cannot discuss contemporary politics. They cannot discuss the emperor and his state this, that, so on. So they do two things. One is that there is an immediate objective, which is to raise the cell, the cell is the wages of women workers in a number of factories. But because they cannot discuss day to day politics. They cannot discuss high matters about the about and they take the name the commune in France because there was a commune in 1789. So actually this, you know, Mark, Mark says on that morning, Paris rose to this. And three years since 69, all such meetings were beginning with Viva la Commune and ending with Viva la Commune. So this conception of what the commune would look like was developed in those clubs, in those reunion centers, which were, which grew all over Paris. And therefore there was an, and then they became networks. And there were itinerant sort of members of this, these clubs who go, who would go from one club to the other to the other. And so a unity of discussion of that time, of that time, and they actually talked about everything that they finally did. This was a real process of working class, thinking at a very high level, making a political breakthrough on its own. Just what form it will take, you know, all the details, everything that was done, had already been worked out. The National Guard itself had been organized in these kinds of groupings, which brought the whole of the National Guard together. You know, so this, for example, this women's question, for example, was very big. And, you know, Elizabeth DiVizio showed up first in Geneva, then in Paris as an emissary of Marx. And organized this, when the commune rose, she actually organized the women's association. Which became the largest organization of the commune. This was something prepared well before the commune actually came into being. So it has been, it had been taught about before putting into action. So what I'm, what I'm saying is that it's the ability of the working class not only to organize itself, organize itself or to rule, but to produce theory at the highest home. What I'm also saying is that what Marx brings to us is a summation of what the working class had taught on its own. Not on its own, in that sense. Of course there had been that kind of thinking going on for in transfer in very long time. Of course, as I said, members of the international were very active. They were very active in the formation of those clubs and reunion centers and so on and so forth. They were extremely active in women's organization. They were very active in the, in the artists organizations. By the way, the artist organization which began with membership of 4000. It was not artists of high art. It was actually working people who worked on the artistic sites of production. So what I'm saying is that there is a link, a historical link, the working class when it becomes a ruling class doesn't, that's not the point zero. There has been a very long history of revolutionary attempts, building revolutionary societies and so on. In other case, I would argue that just as the module revolution was prepared by the Bolshevik party under the leadership of Lenin and his comrades, who had, who had conducted a very high level of theoretical discourse, as well as organized party that was able to then lead the revolution. Something like that had already happened in the case of the commune. And it was inspired by Marx, it was inspired by Blankey and so on and so forth. But the actual practical details were worked out among the workers themselves in their, you know, three years of preparation. That's amazing. I just, on behalf of news click and left put books thanks a lot for joining us giving us a master class on the Paris commune and on Marx's Civil War in France thanks a lot. Thank you.