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 "It is generally the fate of new creations of History [wrote Marx] to be mistaken for any old and even defunct forms of social life to which the new institutions may bear a sort of likeness. Thus, this new Commune, which is breaking up (bricht) the modern State, was regarded as the resurrection of the mediaeval communes … as a federation of small States (Montesquieu, The Girondins) as an exaggerated form of the ancient struggle against over-centralization … The Communal constitution would have restored to the social body all those forces hitherto devoured by the parasitic excrescence called 'the State,' feeding upon Society and hindering it from moving forward freely. By this one act the regeneration of France would have been advanced. …

"The Communal constitution would have brought the rural producers under the intellectual leadership of the chief towns of each district, and would have secured for them there, in the persons of the town workers, the natural representatives of their interests. The very existence of the Commune would have involved, as a matter of course, local self-government, but no longer as a balance to the power of the State, which now becomes superfluous. … "

"The annihilation of the power of the State," which was a "parasitic excrescence," its "amputation," its "destruction"; "the power of the State now becomes superfluous"—these are the expressions used by Marx regarding the State when appraising and analyzing the experience of the Commune.

All this was written a little less than half a century ago; and now one has to excavate, as it were, in order to bring uncorrupted Marxism to the knowledge of the masses. The conclusions drawn from the observation of the last great revolution, through which Marx lived, have been forgotten just at the moment when the time has arrived for the next great proletarian revolutions.

"The variety of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which found their expression in it, proves that it was a thoroughly flexible political form, whereas all previous forms of Government have been, in their essence, repressive. Its true secret was this. It was essentially the government of the working class, the result of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class; it was the political form, at last discovered, under which labor could work out its economic emancipation …