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 crushed down by oppression and exploitation, rose up independently, impressed on the entire course of the revolution the stamp of their demands, their attempts to build up a new order on their own lines in place of the old shattered order.

On the continent of Europe, in 1871, the proletariat did not in a single country constitute the majority of the people. A "people's" revolution, actually sweeping the majority into its current, could be such only if embracing both the proletariat and the peasantry. Both classes are united by the circumstance that the "military and bureaucratic machinery of the State" oppresses, crushes, exploits them. To shatter this machinery, to break it up—this is the true interest of the "people," of its majority—the workers, and most of the peasants—this is the "preliminary condition" of a union of the poorest peasantry with the proletarians: while, without such a union, democracy is unstable and Socialist reconstruction is impossible. Towards such a union, as is well known, the Paris Commune was making its way; though it did not reach its goal, by reason of a number of circumstances, internal and external.

Consequently, when speaking of "a real people's revolution," Marx did not in the least forget the peculiar characteristics of the lower middle classes (he spoke of them much and often), and was very carefully taking into account the actual relationship of classes inmost of the continental European States in 1871. From another standpoint, also, he laid it down that the "shattering" of the machinery of the State is demanded by the interests both of the workers and of the peasants, unites them, places before them a common task of destroying the "parasite" and replacing it by something new.

But by what exactly?

In 1847, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx was, as yet, only able to answer this question entirely in an abstract manner, stating the problem rather than its solution. To replace this machinery by "the proletariat organized as the ruling class," "by the conquest of Democracy"—such was the answer of the Communist Manifesto.

Refusing to plunge into Utopia, Marx waited for the experience of a mass movement to produce the answer to the problem as to the exact forms which this organization of the proletariat as the dominant class will assume, and exactly in what manner this