On 29 January 1849, only a few months after the June 1848 repression of the proletarian uprising in Paris (over 3000 rebels massacred, 1500 deported without trial, 15 thousand arrested and then deported), Odilon Barrot, the French Prime Minister, asked the National Assembly to approve a series of exceptional measures, “an authentic multi-purpose law against right- and left-wing extremists”, pronouncing the famous sentence, then quoted by Engels in a text of 6 March 1895, “la légalité nous tue,” (legality kills us). In his appeal to the Assembly, Barrot declared that in that chamber no internal political faction would ever again be able to put forward a state of truce, pacification, legality towards the proletariat, because the very principle by which the State exists is summed up in control, security and repression. He therefore proposed that the Assembly should stand down: the Assembly bowed its head, the government disbanded the clubs (political parties) and the Garde Mobile they had made use of in June and replaced 50 prefects in various Departments. Nothing new for the generations of proletarians that followed, right down to our own times.
We shall not deal here with the daily, routine action of the forces of law and order (police and army) and the magistrates and the way it affects the whole of society, in factories, streets, homes, prisons, battlefields, but with the work of control and fierce repression at peak moments of the class war. Nevertheless, the fact remains that in bourgeois society, “even in the most democratic of republics,” this action is exercised without interruption. The transition from the age when the “dictatorial function” appears hazy (times of so-called “social peace”) and the eyes of the proletariat are clouded by the smoke of legalitarian, democratic, assistentialist and collaborationist ideologies, to an age where the dictatorship imposes itself transparently, in the light of day, depends on the sudden outbreak of rebellion by the oppressed class, forced into unbearable conditions. At that point, part of the bourgeoisie, alarmed by the prospect of an uncertain future, urges its State to take up the class war, yelling to one another, “the long age of legality has been suicide, we have to get back to facts.” Faced with the bourgeoisie’s declaration of open class war, as its battle is unchained – the inevitable result of the contradictions in the capitalist mode of production – the proletariat once more discovers new forms of organization, tactics and strategies for avoiding being wiped out (the great experiences of the Commune and Red October confirm this, as well as thousands of episodes of class struggle over a period of two centuries of bourgeois rule) – methods and forms that, in the presence of a revolutionary party rooted in the class, represent true declarations of war against the bourgeoisie and in which the objective of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is put in first place. The various ages of legality and illegality, dead calm and fierce repression, collaboration and open counter-revolution, alternate along with the various phases and contradictions of capitalist economy.
In the 1891 preface to Marx’s The Class Wars in France, on the subject of the “fascination of the barricades”, from which we quoted significant passages in a recent article, Engels describes the various modern, technical and tactical conditions in the class struggle between workers in the large towns and the police or army, projecting the revolutionary process either into the revolutionary war or into the modern slaughter. Some years previously (15 December 1887), anticipating the events of the first world war by a quarter of a century, Engels himself had already written, in an article entitled On Arch-Patriots (which Lenin made use of, in an article for “Pravda”, July 2, 1918): “No war is any longer possible for Prussia-Germany except a world war and a world war indeed of an extent and violence hitherto undreamt of. Eight to ten millions of soldiers will massacre one another and in doing so devour the whole of Eurepe until they have stripped it barer than any swarm of locusts has ever done. The devastations of the Thirty Years’ War compressed into three or four years, and spread over the whole Continent; famine, pestilence, general demoralisation both of the armies and of the mass of the people produced by acute distress; hopeless confusion of our artificial machinery in trade, industry and credit, ending in general bankruptcy; collapse of the old states and their traditional state wisdom to such an extent that crowns will roll by dozens on the pavement and there will be no body to pick them up; absolute impossibility of foreseeing how it will all end and who will come out of the struggle as victor; only one result is absolutely certain: general exhaustion and the establishment of the conditions for the ultimate victory of the working class. This is the prospect when the system of mutual outbidding in armaments, taken to the final extreme, at last bears its inevitable fruits. This, my lords, princes and statesmen, is where in your wisdom you have brought old Europe. And when nothing more remains to you but to open the last great war dance—that will suit us all right. The war may perhaps push us temporarily into the background, may wrench from us many a position already conquered. But when you have unfettered forces which you will then no longer be able again to control, things may go as they will: at the end of the tragedy you will be ruined and the victory of the proletariat will either be already achieved or at any rate inevitable.”
As he wrote these words the social-pacifists, chauvinists, masters of socialdemocratic opportunism of the times were saying that the barricades of 1848 should be replaced, as a lesson learned forever, by “the democratic, legalitarian and non-violent conquest of power.”
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There are three classical works on French history by Marx, tracing the phases in the development of the class war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The first, Class Wars in France, regards the period 1848-1850 and, for Engels, is the first attempt to explain a period of history, with its corresponding economic conditions, according to his materialistic concept. The second, which follows straight afterwards, is The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and analyses the period extending up to 2 December 1851, the famous date of the coup d’état by means of which the young Napoleon became emperor. The third is the Address of the Communist International on the Commune of 1871, written immediately after its bloody repression.
Two results sum up the completed analyses and can be referred to for the sake of clarity as home politics and foreign politics. The former says that, however complex the arrangement of the sides taken by classes and parties in a society, when the proletariat makes its ultimate claim, all the other classes and parties hurl themselves against it. The latter says that, when, in a modern nation or capital city, the workers raise the fiery flag of the victorious class dictatorship, all national armies, even if they are mutual enemies, will form a confederation against it.
In an article of 1952, entitled “La legalité nous tue” 1, from which we have taken the quotations that follow, we wrote: “At the end of his study on the formation of a single, clear, brazen, total class power, Marx writes his famous passage on the revolutionary mole that has dug so skilfully. He justifies the workers of Paris for having remained indifferent to Napoleon III’s coup d’état of 2 December and records the crushing of the democratic lie beneath the gun barrels as a useful result. […] The main lesson is this: the working class will have political strength when it learns to prepare itself for the inevitable time to come when the liberal, democratic, constitutional, republican bourgeoisie will scream that legality is ruining it and move in a united, totalitarian front against the revolution. At this stage, if – instead of accepting the fight and shouting ‘dictatorship of the proletariat against dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’ – the proletariat shouts: ‘constitutional democracy’ and ‘freedom, not totalitarianism’, all will be lost, as in June 1848 or March 1871.”
On this counter-revolutionary path, democracy’s main claim (universal suffrage) had completed its mission: “The majority of the people had received primary education, which is all universal suffrage is useful for in times of revolution. It had to be eliminated, either by a proletarian revolution or by the forces of reaction. […] Engels’ preface in no way differs from the line established by Marx. His reconstruction, referring to Germany’s power relations in 1895, does not even contemplate excluding the final, armed clash, and deals only with the politics of bourgeois ‘provocation’ that Odilon Barrot uses so successfully. He states: ‘we shan’t be such fools as to attack when it’s convenient for you, the German empire, minister Bismarck, the German bourgeoisie’. The spirit of the fight is that, when the moment comes, and it does not come ‘at will’ but can be recognized historically, we must lead the provocations.”
Together with these considerations, Engels leaves us a precious heritage in the letters he writes to Kautsky, director of Vorwärts, on 1 April 1895: “To my great surprise I find an extract from my Introduction today in Vorwärts, published without my knowledge and so twisted that I seem like a pacific supporter of legality at all costs”; and to Lafargue on 3 April 1895: “Bernstein has played a dirty trick on me. From my Introduction to Marx’s articles on France between 1848-’50 he has extrapolated all he could use in defence of tactics at all costs, peaceful and contrary to violence, which is convenient for him to preach, especially now that they’re preparing special laws in Berlin”.
In our 1952 article, we therefore commented as follows: “What Engels taught us about the generous revolutionary impatience of 1848 was that it was not sufficient for France to be centrally controlled by Paris and Paris by its workers. It was even less possible to kid oneself that this was sufficient in Germany at the time. But when the election statistics confirmed what the figures tell us about industrial development after 1848, and even more so after the Prussians had drained France’s rich finances in 1871, the moment approached when the revolutionary minority will no longer represent itself alone, but an effective working-class majority. In saying this, Engels does not see the class movement as depending on ‘class consciousness’ or even less so on ‘democratic consultation’ of the majority but merely on the physical existence of a numerous proletarian class and highly developed industrialism. Moreover, he places international factors in the limelight and recalls Marx’s conclusion following the overthrow of 1848; from the present moment onwards any revolutionary struggle by the French proletariat will coincide with a world war. He is already using the words ‘world war’ and thus foreseeing the Commune of twenty years later, sparked off by the European war of 1871. In 1895 Engels realizes that this is the period in between the European war and what he had prophesied to Bismarck on several occasions: the great war against the united Slav and Latin races.”
For the moment, therefore, says Engels, although our comrades do not give up the right to revolution, which is, indeed, the only historical right on which all modern States rest, we German socialists are not experiencing the dawn of an armed struggle: “If we do not commit the great folly of allowing ourselves to be dragged into fighting on the streets for the pleasure of the parties of law and order, then […] their last resort will be to break this legality, which is fatal to them, with their own hands.” Apart from Germany’s peculiar situation in 1895, Engels knew that one day bourgeois legality would blow up; he confirmed that universal suffrage leads to its end under one of two dictatorships: that of the proletariat or the even more fatal one of the bourgeoisie.
Today (1952, when our article was written – or 2015?), “the bourgeois States reinforce themselves with powerful police forces, trained and equipped, financed by the dollar when necessary, or readily topped up by the troops at ports and airports. On their national holidays, when the workers are stupidly led to celebrate a recent liberation, formations whose efficiency causes any memory of the SS, not to speak of the idiotic black shirts, to pale can be seen parading in clear view. […] Meanwhile, the representatives of the proletariat officially positioned in trade unions or parties, merely devote all their time to encouraging the right of these States to exist, defend themselves and protect their constitution. This constitution is democratic and from this we can immediately deduce that the State has the right to suppress ‘any attempt at dictatorship’. This is how the proletariat is taught that it finds protection in a system that will continue indefinitely within the legal limits of the institutions, and that it is thus as well for the workers’ delegates to support laws and measures for repressing any movement that threatens to attack legal power by using force.” They tell us that “democracy offers possibilities that should be exploited ‘to the end’. We must therefore avoid the bourgeois State suppressing it, reducing the guarantees, the possibilities of having unions, newspapers, press, meetings etc. (and of course above all elections!). So we have to avoid power being taken over by those groups who would do away with these guarantees (the right wings, fascists etc.) and instead let the State repress these groups legally, by disbanding their parties, immediately banning their newspapers, meetings, election candidatures or similar manifestations. The State, the government, the majority party currently in power all reply: wonderful! And so let us pass a law stating that freedom of opinion, association or agitation is limited by this norm: it is not permissible to state that power can be gained any other way than legally. […] But of course the law will ‘be the same for everyone’, i.e. whoever theorizes an act of force, from the right or from the left wing, loses any right to take part in political work and is punished by repressive measures.”
At this point the mass of legalitarians, pacifists, nationalists, democrats of all types emerges, proclaiming: “Nothing wrong with this! The special repressive law does not regard us. We shall remove the armed seizing of power and the dictatorship of the proletariat from our programmes, certain that for at least 30-40 years the proletariat has no further demands to make, other than those that are fully compatible with the present Constitutions.”
What throws the working class off track is when it is made to believe that democracy serves to keep the bourgeois State in a condition of weakness until the day when the class will suddenly take to the streets, the day on which the “state of war against the bourgeoisie” will be declared. In fact, when right-wing forces, fascists, start to be successful in a democratic context, the battle cry will be that of the “defence of democracy”, not of overthrowing the bourgeoisie. Again, taken from our article: “fascism returns, we have to defend ourselves, we must rebuild the action groups, relaunch the united partisan forces and the anti-fascist front!” On the current political panorama, the right-wing and “left”-wing parties, extra-parliamentary and parliamentary, have become the spiritual guides and involuntary heads of police of democracy, the defenders and monitors of law and order. They are the Capitoline geese that start squawking every couple of days or so to announce danger on the horizon.
“But the most serious aspect of this lurid comedy,” we insisted in our conclusion, “is the admission by the immense majority of workers (some progress in class consciousness!) of the existence of two or more groups in the ruling class’s parties which by nature, out of principle or embracing some philosophy or other, confess either that they always use persuasion or that they use force. Thus all the teaching remaining from Marx’s reading of history is destroyed, i.e. that when the moment of suffrage is put aside, and class force is taken up, all bourgeois and middle-class groups (which were the first to join the ranks of fascism even in 1922) take the side of repression both in practice and in principle.”
1 “La legalité nous tue”, Battaglia comunista, n.12/1952.