Engels’ Postscript¶
Core Argument¶
Engels’ Postscript (1891)¶
Engels’ postscript to the 1891 edition of Marx’s The Civil War in France serves both as a retrospective vindication of Marx’s predictions and as a theoretical clarification of the Commune’s historical significance. Engels opens by stressing that Marx’s two earlier Addresses on the Franco-Prussian War, also included in this edition, demonstrated his singular capacity to grasp the logic of events still unfolding. The prophecy that a German defensive war degenerating into conquest would revive the misfortunes of the post-1813 period had been fulfilled to the letter: twenty further years of Bismarck’s rule, the Exceptional Law against socialists, and the same arbitrary police measures. More critically, the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine had indeed forced France into Russia’s arms, as Marx foretold, leaving Germany either as Russia’s tool or perpetually arming for a “race war against the combined Slavonic and Roman races.” Engels points to the Damocles’ sword of a European war of 15–20 million armed men, whose only certainty is its absolute uncertainty.
Turning to the Commune itself, Engels offers corrections and additions. The Commune was divided between Blanquist majority and Proudhonist minority (members of the International). The Blanquists were socialists only by revolutionary instinct, save Vaillant; the Proudhonists were doctrinaire opponents of association, which Proudhon had denounced as harmful to workers’ freedom. Yet the irony of history compelled both to act against their doctrines. The Proudhonists, who hated association, produced the Commune’s most important decree: organising large-scale industry through workers’ associations combined into a great union—an organisation that, as Marx noted, necessarily led toward communism, the antithesis of Proudhonism. The Commune thus became the grave of the Proudhon school. The Blanquists, schooled in conspiratorial centralism, instead appealed for a free federation of all French communes, dismantling the centralised state machine that Napoleon had created in 1798 and every subsequent government had used against its opponents.
Engels develops this into a general theoretical point: the working class cannot simply take over the old state machine. The Commune’s two infallible expedients were universal suffrage with immediate recall of all delegates, and payment of all officials at workers’ wages (maximum 6,000 francs). This blocked the transformation of state organs from servants into masters of society—a process Engels illustrates with the American republic, where two great gangs of political speculators alternately exploit the nation, despite the absence of monarchy, nobility, or standing army. The superstitious reverence for the state, carried from German philosophy into bourgeois and even worker consciousness, must be overcome. The state is nothing but a machine for class oppression, in democratic republic no less than monarchy; at best an evil inherited by the proletariat, whose worst sides must be lopped off until a new generation can throw the entire lumber on the scrap-heap.
Engels concludes with a direct polemic against Social-Democratic philistines terrified of “dictatorship of the proletariat”: look at the Paris Commune—that was the dictatorship of the proletariat.