Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/34

 will embody the most complete, most consistent "conquest of Democracy." Marx subjected the experiment of the Commune, although it was so meagre, to a most minute analysis in his Civil War in France. Let us bring before the reader the most important passages of this work.

In the 19th century took place the development of the "centralized State power, originating from the Middle Ages, with its ubiquitous organs: a standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy and judges." With the development of class antagonism between capital and labor, "the State assumed more and more the character of a public organization for the oppression of labor, that is, of a machine for class domination. After every revolution marking a certain advance in the class struggle, the purely oppressive character of the power of the State became more and more apparent." The State, after the revolution of 1848–49, becomes "the national weapon of capital in its war against labor." The Second Empire consolidates this.

"The Commune was the direct antithesis of the Empire. It was a definite form … of a Republic which was to abolish not only the monarchical form of class rule, but also class rule itself."

What was this "definite" form of the proletarian Socialist Republic? What was the State it was beginning to create?

"The first decree of the Commune was the abolition of the standing army and its replacement by the nation in arms." This demand now figures in the program of every party calling itself Socialist. But the value of these programs is best shown by the behaviour of our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, who refused to put their theories into practice even after the Revolution of March 12, 1917!

"The Council of the Commune consisted of municipal representatives elected by universal suffrage in the various districts of Paris. They were responsible and could be recalled at any time. The majority were, naturally, working men or acknowledged representatives of the working class."

" … The police, until then merely an instrument of the Government, was immediately stripped of all its political functions, and turned into the responsible and at any time replaceable organ of the Commune …"

" … The same was applied to the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Council of the Commune down to the humblest worker, everybody in the public service was paid at the same rates as ordinary