of the imperialists had opened the eyes of the broad masses of the workers.
To think that the revolution can take place without civil war is equivalent to thinking that there can be a “peaceful” revolution. Anyone who believes this (as the mensheviks who utter laments concerning the hurtfulness of civil war believe it) is turning away from Marx to those antediluvian socialists who imagine that the factory owners can be talked over. We might just as well hope by petting a tiger to persuade the animal to live upon grass and to leave cattle alone! Marx was an advocate of the civil war, that is to say of the fight of the armed proletariat against the bourgeoisie. Writing with reference to the Paris Commune (the rising of the Parisian workers in the year 1871), Marx declares that the communards had not been sufficiently resolute. He uses reproachful terms in the manifesto of the First International. [The Civil War in France.] We read: “Even the sergents-de-ville, instead of being disarmed and locked up, as ought to have been done, found the gates of Paris flung wide open, for their safe retreat to Versailles. The men of the ‘party of order’” [this was the name then given to the counter-revolutionaries] “were not only left unharmed; they were allowed to rally and quietly to seize more than one stronghold in the very heart of Paris. . . . In its reluctance to continue the civil war opened by Thiers” [the French counterpart of Denikin] “. . . the Central Committee made a grave mistake. It was urgently necessary to attack Versailles,. . . to put an end, once for all, to the plots of Thiers and the Rurals. Instead of this, the ‘party of order’ was again allowed to test its strength at the ballot-box, in the communal elections of March 26th.” Here Marx clearly advocates the armed suppression of the counter-revolution; he advocates civil war. Engels, too, wrote as follows: “Would the Commune of Paris have