Manifesto of the Communist Party

59 

Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 1871 

After every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive 

character of the state power stands out in bolder and bolder relief. The Revolution of 1830, 

resulting in the transfer of government from the landlords to the capitalists, transferred it from the 

more remote to the more direct antagonists of the working men. The bourgeois republicans, who, 

in the name of the February Revolution, took the state power, used it for the June [1848] 

massacres, in order to convince the working class that “social” republic means the republic 

entrusting their social subjection, and in order to convince the royalist bulk of the bourgeois and 

landlord class that they might safely leave the cares and emoluments of government to the 

bourgeois “republicans.”  

However, after their one heroic exploit of June, the bourgeois republicans had, from the front, to 

fall back to the rear of the “Party of Order” – a combination formed by all the rival fractions and 

factions of the appropriating classes. The proper form of their joint-stock government was the 

parliamentary republic, with Louis Bonaparte for its president. Theirs was a regime of avowed 

class terrorism and deliberate insult towards the “vile multitude.”  

If the parliamentary republic, as M. Thiers said, “divided them [the different fractions of the 

ruling class] least,” it opened an abyss between that class and the whole body of society outside 

their spare ranks. The restraints by which their own divisions had under former regimes still 

checked the state power, were removed by their union; and in view of the threatening upheaval of 

the proletariat, they now used that state power mercilessly and ostentatiously as the national war 

engine of capital against labor.  

In their uninterrupted crusade against the producing masses, they were, however, bound not only 

to invest the executive with continually increased powers of repression, but at the same time to 

divest their own parliamentary stronghold – the National Assembly – one by one, of all its own 

means of defence against the Executive. The Executive, in the person of Louis Bonaparte, turned 

them out. The natural offspring of the “Party of Order” republic was the Second Empire.  

The empire, with the coup d’état for its birth certificate, universal suffrage for its sanction, and 

the sword for its sceptre, professed to rest upon the peasantry, the large mass of producers not 

directly involved in the struggle of capital and labor. It professed to save the working class by 

breaking down parliamentarism, and, with it, the undisguised subserviency of government to the 

propertied classes. It professed to save the propertied classes by upholding their economic 

supremacy over the working class; and, finally, it professed to unite all classes by reviving for all 

the chimera of national glory.  

In reality, it was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already 

lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation. It was acclaimed 

throughout the world as the savior of society. Under its sway, bourgeois society, freed from 

political cares, attained a development unexpected even by itself. Its industry and commerce 

expanded to colossal dimensions; financial swindling celebrated cosmopolitan orgies; the misery 

of the masses was set off by a shameless display of gorgeous, meretricious and debased luxury. 

The state power, apparently soaring high above society and the very hotbed of all its corruptions. 

Its own rottenness, and the rottenness of the society it had saved, were laid bare by the bayonet of 

Prussia, herself eagerly bent upon transferring the supreme seat of that regime from Paris to 

Berlin. Imperialism is, at the same time, the most prostitute and the ultimate form of the state 

power which nascent bourgeois society had commenced to elaborate as a means of its own 

emancipation from feudalism, and which full-grown bourgeois society had finally transformed 

into a means for the enslavement of labor by capital.  

The direct antithesis to the empire was the Commune. The cry of “social republic,” with which 

the February [1848] Revolution was ushered in by the Paris proletariat, did but express a vague 

aspiration after a republic that was not only to supercede the monarchical form of class rule, but 

class rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that republic.  

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60 

Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 1871 

Paris, the central seat of the old governmental power, and, at the same time, the social stronghold 

of the French working class, had risen in arms against the attempt of Thiers and the Rurals to 

restore and perpetuate that old governmental power bequeathed to them by the empire. Paris 

could resist only because, in consequence of the siege, it had got rid of the army, and replaced it 

by a National Guard, the bulk of which consisted of working men. This fact was now to be 

transformed into an institution. The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression 

of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people.  

The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the 

various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members 

were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The 

Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same 

time.  

Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped 

of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the 

Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of 

the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman’s wage. The vested 

interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with 

the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of 

the Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto 

exercised by the state was laid into the hands of the Commune.  

Having once got rid of the standing army and the police – the physical force elements of the old 

government – the Commune was anxious to break the spiritual force of repression, the “parson-

power,” by the disestablishment and disendowment of all churches as proprietary bodies. The 

priests were sent back to the recesses of private life, there to feed upon the alms of the faithful in 

imitation of their predecessors, the apostles.  

The whole of the educational institutions were opened to the people gratuitously, and at the same 

time cleared of all interference of church and state. Thus, not only was education made accessible 

to all, but science itself freed from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had 

imposed upon it.  

The judicial functionaries were to be divested of that sham independence which had but served to 

mask their abject subserviency to all succeeding governments to which, in turn, they had taken, 

and broken, the oaths of allegiance. Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were 

to be elective, responsible, and revocable.  

The Paris Commune was, of course, to serve as a model to all the great industrial centres of 

France. The communal regime once established in Paris and the secondary centres, the old 

centralized government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of 

the producers.  

In a rough sketch of national organisation, which the Commune had no time to develop, it states 

clearly that the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and 

that in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an 

extremely short term of service. The rural communities of every district were to administer their 

common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies 

were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time 

revocable and bound by the mandat imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents. The few 

but important functions which would still remain for a central government were not to be 

suppressed, as has been intentionally misstated, but were to be discharged by Communal and 

thereafter responsible agents.  

The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by Communal 

Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be 

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