These were political relations which it might seem no one could call worthy of imitation.
“But the Central Committee,” Kautsky consoles himself, “never attempted to infringe the principle in virtue of which the supreme power must belong to the delegates elected by universal suffrage. In this respect the “Paris Commune was the direct antithesis of the Soviet Republic.” (Page 74) There was no unity of government, there was no revolutionary decision, there existed a division of power, and, as a result, there came swift and terrible destruction. But to counter-balance this – is it not comforting? – there was no infringement of the “principle” of democracy.
The Democratic Commune and the Revolutionary Dictatorship
Comrade Lenin has already pointed out to Kautsky that attempts to depict the Commune as the expression of formal democracy constitute a piece of absolute theoretical swindling. The Commune, in its tradition and in the conception of its leading political party – the Blanquists – was the expression of the dictatorship of the revolutionary city over the country. So it was in the great French Revolution; so it would have been in the revolution of 1871 if the Commune had not fallen in the first days. The fact that in Paris itself a Government was elected on the basis of universal suffrage does not exclude a much more significant fact – namely, that of the military operations carried on by the Commune, one city, against peasant France, that is the whole country. To satisfy the great democrat, Kautsky, the revolutionaries of the Commune ought, as a preliminary, to have consulted, by means of universal suffrage, the whole population of France as to whether it permitted them to carry on a war with Thiers bands.
Finally, in Paris itself the elections took place after the bourgeoisie, or at least its most active elements, had fled, and after Thiers’ troops had been