ABSTRACT
Many commentators have detected a niggling ambiguity in Karl Marx’s attitude towards the Paris Commune. Marx specifically referred to the lower phase of communism in four of his works — the Manifesto, The Class Struggles in France, The Civil War in France and the Critique of the Gotha Programme. The theory of permanent revolution was specifically designed to deal with imperfect revolutionary situations — situations in which Marx had to explain the transition to communism in a society which had yet to complete its bourgeois phase of development. In the Manifesto Marx and Engels tell that ‘the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution’. The similarities between the Manifesto’ programme and the Critique’s proposals are nonetheless quite clear, especially when it comes to the relationship between the spheres of production and circulation.
