8
proved by the Commune, viz., that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery and wield it for its own purposes."
What were these revolutionary measures, which had in some details become antiquated in 1888, when Engels endorsed the opinion expressed by Marx and himself in 1872? A few of them may be omitted, but we will enumerate seven out of the ten. The proletariat organised as the ruling class was to wrest capital from the bourgeoisie and to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the workers' State. "Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which in the course of the movement outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production. … In the most advanced countries the following measures will pretty generally be applicable:—
1. Abolition of property in land. …
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all refugees and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. …
8. Equal liability of all to labour. …
10. Free education for all children in public schools."
Now the most interesting point about this programme—the preamble no less than the numbered items—is that, with trifling changes in wording, the communist programme of 1848 would serve for a statement of the revolutionary measures whereby the communist government of Russia secured itself in power seventy years later. Yet in the interval Marx and Engels had seemed, from time to time at any rate, more interested in what we should now term "social democracy" than in what Russia is realising in the form of "revolutionary communism." In 1895, only a few months before his death, Engels wrote a preface to a reprint of Marx's Class Struggles in France from 1848 to 1850. Herein Engels expresses his jubilation at the steady growth of the socialist vote in the elections to the German Reichstag, and anticipates at no distant date the entirely peaceful conquest of political power by the Social Democratic Party. In a speech made only a few days before her murder, Rosa Luxemburg declared that this endorsement of bourgeois parliamentarism as against revolutionary communism was made against Engels' better judgment. Perhaps this is true, but the fact remains that the endorsement was made. What became of revolutionary communism between 1871 and 1914? That is the problem we have now to consider.
