By Bernard E. Harcourt
Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators, history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.”
— Karl Marx, Civil War in France (1871)[1]
We turn next, at Marx 12/13, to the penultimate historical period of Marx’s life: the creation of the International Workingmen’s Association (1864–1876), the rise and fall of the Paris Commune (March-May 1871), Marx’s addresses to the IWA on the Franco-Prussian War, and his famous text The Civil War in France read to the General Council of the IWA just a few days after the collapse of the Paris Commune.
We are delighted to welcome to the seminar Columbia University Professor Bruno Bosteels, one of the world’s leading experts on Marx, to discuss The Civil War in France. Bruno Bosteels will put Marx’s writings on the Commune in conversation with two texts, Voltairine de Cleyre’s “The Commune is Risen” and Plotino Rhodakanaty’s “The American Commune,” as well as in relation to the second part of his book La comuna mexicana (The Mexican Commune).
It is a privilege to have Bruno Bosteels join us. Professor Bosteels will contextualize how the Paris Commune and Marx’s text, The Civil War in France, can be read together with the Late Marx and Marx’s later interest in the non-Western commune form. This involves rereading and rethinking Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks and the importance of Lewis H. Morgan for the late Marx. It also requires delving into the archives of non-Western social formations beyond what Marx himself was reading and annotating—which is crucial to overcome the Eurocentrism even in the many attempts to move toward a multilinear history.
Few scholars are as well positioned to propose this reading for us than Bruno Bosteels, who is not only an expert on Marx but also on the American reception of Marx’s writings. Bruno Bosteels is the Jesse and George Siegel Professor in the Humanities as well as Dean of Humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He is the author, translator, or editor of more than a dozen books and is currently finishing two new books, including one called The State and Insurrections: New Interventions in Latin American Marxist Theory (Pittsburgh, forthcoming).
In this full-length introduction to Marx 12/13 I will provide background on the readings.
The Writing of The Civil War in France (1871)
Let me pick up where we left off at Marx 9/13 with Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra and Marx 10/13 with Cornel West—i.e. with the writing of the economic manuscripts in 1857-1861 that would be published under the title Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy in East Berlin in 1953, followed by the writing of extensive economic manuscripts in the period 1861-1863 which he would use as the basis of Capital, Volume I (published in 1867) and which Engels would draw on for the two final volumes of Capital and Theories of Surplus-Value.
During this time, Karl Marx is still living in England where he went in exile with his family in the fall of 1849 at the end of the 1848 revolution in the German states. He is working on the classic texts of political economy, preparing his own treatise. And at this time, he resumes political organizing and becomes a leading force of the First International.
The First International, an organization of workers with representatives in multiple countries, is organized in September 1864 under the title “The International Working Men’s Association” (“IWA”). Although Marx was not a founder of the First International, nor did he participate in its founding, he quickly became a leader of the association because he was assigned the task by the General Council to draft the Inaugural Address of the IWA and the Provisional Rules. Like with the Communist Party in 1848, Marx became the theoretician of the IWA because of his writing and his assignment as the author of their principal texts. There too, Marx negotiated the power relations between the French Proudhonists, the German Lassalleans, the British trade unionists, republican democrats, and members of the Communist League, ultimately steering the IWA in his direction. Marx became the corresponding secretary for Germany and joined the General Council.
The IWA held its first Congress in 1866 in Geneva. For that meeting, Marx wrote instructions for the delegates that were largely reformist, advocating for labor legislation (like eight-hour working days) and trade unions.[2] Power struggles among German Social-Democrats, French Proudhonists, and English trade-unionists continued during the Congress of 1867 in Lausanne and 1868 in Brussels, eventually favoring the public ownership of mines, forests, railways, roads, and canals.[3]
It was in the context of the IWA that Marx would write and deliver an address to the General Council regarding the Paris Commune that would come to be known as The Civil War in France.
Marx had already written two addresses for the General Council of the IWA on the political situation leading up to the Commune. The first was an address on the Franco-Prussian War, commissioned on the very day of the outbreak of the war on July 19, 1870, and published in the Pall Mall Gazette on July 28, 1870, two days after it was adopted by the General Council.[4] The second was also on the topic of the Franco-Prussian War and was commissioned two days after the fall of the Second Empire and the establishment of the Third Republic on September 4, 1870. It ends with the proclamation: “Vive la république.” It was adopted on September 9 and published shortly thereafter as a pamphlet of the IWA.[5]
The Civil War in France was commissioned by the General Council on April 18, 1871, and Marx read the text to the council on May 30, 1871, two days after the Commune was finally crushed. It was adopted by the council and published as a pamphlet on June 13, 1871.[6]
A Second Primer on French History (1870-1871)
In order to read Marx’s Civil War in France, one has to have certain dates in mind—the key dates of the events that led up to the Paris Commune and of its existence. So let me quickly list the important dates with brief explanations of what happened.[7]
Following the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon in December 1851 and his accession to the throne as emperor of the French in December 1852, Napoleon III reigned as emperor for almost two decades—the 1850s and the duration of the 1860s, a time during which the United States was at civil war. The French Empire expanded by brutally colonizing Algeria, Indochina, and West Africa. It also acquired the regions of Savoie and Nice in the treaty of Turin in 1860. Domestically, it engaged, among other things, in public works, leading to the massive construction projects in Paris under Georges-Eugène Haussmann, which were themselves aimed at crushing potential insurrections.
By the end of the 1860s, Napoleon III’s popularity was falling as French power in the region was weaning. The Prussians (under King William I and the Prussian chancellor, Otto von Bismarck) had beaten the Austrians in the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866 and were the dominant force among the Germanic states. Bismarck was trying to form an alliance with Spain, which threatened the power of France and he provoked Napoleon III to declare war against Prussia.
On July 19, 1870, Napoleon III declares war against Prussia, expecting a swift victory. The Prussian military quickly outmaneuvered the French, however, and on September 2, 1870, after defeat at the Battle of Sedan in the Ardennes, Napoleon III personally surrendered and became a prisoner of war. With his surrender, the Second Empire fell.
On September 4, 1870, a new French government of national defense was formed in Paris and declared the establishment of the Third Republic. Léon Gambetta, Adolphe Thiers, and Jules Favre were among the leaders of the provisional government.
On September 19, 1870, Bismarck’s army began to lay siege to Paris, while fighting continued in other parts of France under Gambetta.
On January 28, 1871, the provisional government surrendered by means of an armistice that included the election of a French national assembly to ratify the terms of any peace settlement. Adolphe Thiers, who became the executive of the provisional government, negotiated the peace settlement, which was signed on February 26, 1871, and ratified by the national assembly on March 1, 1871. The national assembly was dominated by royalists, and the Parisian republican workers, who had fought to avoid capitulation, feared that the national assembly at Versailles would restore monarchy. Thiers decided to disarm the Parisian militia, known as the National Guard, and it is at that point that Parisians revolted against the provisional government in Versailles.
On March 18, 1871, Parisian republicans and workers rose up against an effort to withdraw cannons defending the city and the Commune was informally declared. Communes also arose in Lyon, Marseilles, Toulouse, and elsewhere, but were rapidly crushed, leaving the Paris Commune as the only city in revolt against the Versailles government. There were municipal elections in Paris on March 26, 1871, and the revolutionary Communards won, resulting in the formation of a government consisting of a coalition of Jacobins, Proudhonists, and Blanquists.
The Commune faced a number of critical decisions during its existence from March 18 to May 28, 1871: first, how aggressively to fight against the Versailles government and whether to seek to attack Versailles; second, whether to seize the Bank of France, which was located in Paris; third, what social and political measures to enact for the Commune. These would be questions that Marx addressed head on in his pronouncements on the Commune.
Meanwhile, on May 10, 1871, the Versailles government signed the Treaty of Frankfurt with Bismarck, which provided for the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine by the Germans and severe imposition of financial penalties.
On May 21, 1871, the Versailles government troops entered Paris and, during what is known as the “semaine sanglante” (the bloody week) from May 21 to May 28, 1871, the government troops crushed the Communards. It is believed that about 20,000 Parisian revolutionaries were killed during the fighting. On May 28, 1871, the Commune officially ended. This was followed by draconian, widespread repression, including mass executions, arrests, and deportations.
The Franco-Prussian War ultimately led to the establishment of the German Empire under William I of Prussia. William was actually crowned as the German Emperor during the war, on January 18, 1871, in the palace of Versailles.[8] It produced a decades-long confrontation between the French Third Republic and the German Empire that ultimately sparked the First World War.
Marx, The Civil War in France
Marx wrote and delivered the essay to the IWA in English. What we have is not a translation, but the original, in English.
The address begins with a takedown of Adolphe Thiers, who is described as “that monstrous gnome.”[9] Much of the address is a venomous attack on Thiers and the perceived traitorous acts of the Versailles government, who are portrayed as more evil than Bismarck himself.
Marx refers to the Versailles government as “the counter-revolutionary conspiracy.”[10] This reference to the counterrevolution evokes, of course, all of Marx and Engels’ writings about the repression of the 1848-1849 Revolutions on the Continent.
From my perspective, the main contribution of the essay is that Marx expands on what he characterizes as a new form of government, a new society, what he refers to as a completely new historical creation.
Marx uses the model of the Paris Commune to imagine a new political form, what we might call with him “a self-government of the producers.”[11] Referring to an outline of a possible roadmap that the Communards had drafted, Marx suggests that the Communards intended that the Paris Commune would serve as a political blueprint to be replicated throughout France, even in the smallest communities.[12] In urban as well as rural areas, the standing army would be replaced by a national militia. Rural communities would administer their common affairs “by an assembly of delegates in the central town.”[13] These district assemblies would then “send deputies to the national delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandat impératif (formal instructions) of his constituents.”[14]
Under this model, the role of a central government would be dramatically reduced. “The few but important functions which still would remain for a central government were not to be suppressed, as has been intentionally misstated, but were to be discharged by Communal and therefore strictly responsible agents,” Marx wrote.[15] The idea is that the functions of the state would be continued to be exercised, but they would be exercised by the communal agents. The goal was to break the hold of a state that was independent of or superior to the people themselves.
Marx had an abolitionist ambition of getting rid of the punitive and repressive organs of the state. He writes, “the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated.”[16] This would be achieved by arming the people and eliminating the standing army.
The police were effectively to be abolished. The punitive and repressive functions were to be eliminated. Those who formerly policed would now serve the Commune. The coercive forces of religious institutions and the church were also to be suppressed—the spiritual force of repression, the parson power was to be disestablished and disendowed.
Universities and educational institutions were to be transformed. They would be open to the public for free and themselves freed from the interference of the state and of the church. “Thus,” Marx writes, “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.”[17]
Another central pillar was universal suffrage, by which Marx meant universal male suffrage, and the election of municipal counselors for short terms.[18] Because of the composition of the Parisian population, made up mostly of the working class, Marx believed there would be a majority of working men elected, or representatives of the working class. Moreover, the Commune was to be “a working not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.”[19]All of those who served the Commune were to be paid at workman’s wages.
Judges and magistrates were to have their functions transformed as well. They would no longer be considered independent—which Marx viewed as an illusion anyway—but instead would be elected and responsible to the people and could have their appointments revoked if they did not serve the Commune properly.[20] Paradoxically perhaps, Marx draws a comparison between individual decision making and corporate decision making, seeming to suggest that companies are actually good at figuring out who the right person is to promote their interests. In the same way, he argued, individuals in the Commune should be able to determine who is the best person to promote the interests of the Commune and to replace them promptly if they do not carry forth their responsibilities. Marx writes, “Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well known that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business generally know how to put the right man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly.”[21]
Marx refers to the Commune as a “completely new historical creation.”[22] Marx argues that the form of the Commune was misinterpreted by most observers, appropriated by many, attacked by others, but mostly on the basis of false comparisons and analogies. It was misinterpreted as the reproduction of medieval communes, or a federation of small states, or a struggle against over centralization.
What he shows instead is that it was a unique and novel form of government based on working-class self-government. “Its true secret was this,” he writes: “It was essentially a working-class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour.”[23]
This economic emancipation of labor entailed the elimination of the working class and the elimination of classes. “With labour emancipated,” he writes, “every man becomes a working man, and productive labor ceases to be a class attribute.”[24]
So in the Commune, Marx saw the realization of the overcoming of class, which is what he had militated for and proclaimed in the Communist Manifesto twenty-three years earlier.
In a famous passage, Marx exclaims that the Commune intended to abolish property and expropriate the expropriators. He writes, “The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labour of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor into mere instruments of free and associated labor.”[25] By contrast to those who called this “communism, ‘impossible’ communism,” Marx called it “communism, ‘possible’ communism.”[26]
Note that Marx rehearses here the expression “the expropriation of the expropriators.”[27] Marx had used that expression to conclude Book I of Capital just a few years earlier in 1867. Étienne Balibar has written at length about how the expression captures the Hegelian dialectic of the negation of the negation, as well as, in his words, “the messianic reference drawn from the biblical formula: ‘they will oppress their oppressors’ (Isaiah 14:1–4 and 27: 7–9).”[28] We began Marx 1/13 with a discussion of this expression with Balibar—and have now come full circle.
Marx viewed the Commune as a unique instantiation of a communist possibility. It was, he wrote, “the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as the only class capable of social initiative.”[29]
It is also interesting to point out that Marx describes Paris under the Commune as devoid of street crime, safe for the first time. He writes that there were “no more corpses at the morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely any robberies. In fact, for the first time since the days of February 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, and that without any police of any kind.”[30]
In a vivid and stirring final part, extremely moving, Marx describes the barbarity of the repression of the Commune, comparing it to wholesale slaughters of ancient Rome in the times of Sulla, referring to the working men’s Paris and the “act of its heroic self-holocaust.”[31] It is a tragic tale that leaves the reader saying, ‘say it isn’t so.’
Marx emphasizes at the end of his address that everyone, including Adolphe Thiers, identified the International Working Men’s Association as the source of inspiration of the Commune and as responsible for all the problems associated with the rise of the working class. He uses that to position the IWA as the vanguard of the working class. “Our association is, in fact, nothing but the international bond between the most advanced working men in the various countries of the civilized world,” he writes.[32]
Marx ends a tragic story on a positive note. Although the Commune was crushed, it represents a struggle that will prevail, that will break out again, and that ultimately will be victorious. After the Commune, he writes, “there can be neither peace nor truce possible between the working men of France and the appropriators of their produce. […] The battle must break out again and again in ever growing dimensions, and there could be no doubt as to who will be the victor in the end—the appropriating few, or the immense working majority. And the French working class is only the advanced guard of the modern proletariat.”[33]
This is a story of good and evil—and of the temporary triumph of evil. It is a stirring message of hope. And it foreshadows a victory to come. It is a call to arms and a proclamation of faith, despite or because of the magnitude of the defeat.
Marx’s text and, more generally and importantly, the Commune itself, has played a towering role in the revolutionary imagination since. This is evident in the two texts that Bruno Bosteels brings to our attention and will contextualize at the seminar. Let me say a word about those texts.
Voltairine de Cleyre, The Commune is Risen (1912)
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912) was an American anarchist poet, writer, and leader, whom Emma Goldman referred to as “the poet-rebel, the liberty-loving artist, the greatest woman anarchist of America.”[34]
Born and raised in poverty in an abolitionist family in Leslie, Michigan, de Cleyre embraced poetry and anarchist philosophy at a young age, and became a staunch critic of sexism, inequality, and capitalism. The Haymarket uprising and severe repression in 1886 converted de Cleyre to anarchism. In 1892, at the age of 26, de Cleyre settled in Philadelphia and “founded a social group called the Ladies’ Liberal League. The group’s purpose was not ‘to smile men into ticket-buying and shame them into candy purchase,’ she said, but to host discussions on sex, prohibition, socialism, anarchism and revolution.”[35] Following an assassination attempt on her by a former student with mental illness in 1902, de Cleyre became a penal abolitionist—which is remarkable given how early it was in 1902.
Her poem/tract “The Commune is Risen” was published in Mother Earth in March 1912, a month before her death from a cranial infection on April 17, 1912, at the young age of 45.
The poem/tract is an ode to the Paris Commune, but at the same time a searing critique of the Communards for not having properly waged battle against the Versailles government. De Cleyre is deeply critical of the Communards’ failure to seize the Bank of France: “Every day, throughout the life of the Commune,” she writes, “the Bank of France had been allowed to transmit the sinews of war to Versailles, the social blood been drained to supply the social foe.”[36] That failure reflected, to de Cleyre, the Communards’ Achilles’ heel, the fact that they ultimately respected property.
De Cleyre proclaims that the chief reason that the Commune failed was that the Communards respected property—or, as she puts is more eloquently, “in the hour of necessity, the Communards were not Communists. They attempted to break political chains without breaking economic ones; and it cannot be done.”[37]
They were not sufficiently anarchist. They respected the state. They did not attack the French state, and instead bolstered the state by both maintaining institutions like the Bank of France and by failing to enact a more radical anarchism: “Because she had not asked enough,” de Cleyre writes: “Because making war upon the State, she had not made war upon that which creates the State, that to preserve which the State exists.”[38] She is referring here to property but also to the condition of possibility of the state. The Communards had not sufficiently attacked the concept of the state.
De Cleyre is writing at a time of global uprisings, 1911-1912. She mentions explicitly China, without giving details, but that is a time in China of the Xinhai Revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty and imperial rule and led to the establishment of a republic on January 1, 1912. She mentions the mining worker strikes and unrest in France, Germany, and Austria. But her main object and source of inspiration are the land revolts throughout Mexico—“over all the land, from the border to Yucatan.”[39] The Mexican Revolution erupted in November 1910 and would last for ten years. 1911 was a turning point, with the armed uprising led by Emiliano Zapata in Morelos demanding land reform. It is on this note that de Cleyre ends her poem/tract, referring to the ghosts of Communards past deported and buried around the world:
In the roar of that fire we hear the Commune’s “earthquake tread,” and know that out of the graves at Pere-la-chaise, out of the trenches of Satory, out of the fever-plains of Guiana, out of the barren burial sands of Caledonia, the Great Ghost has risen, crying across the world, Vive la Commune![40]
More than 40 years earlier, from Mexico, another call to revolution invoked the ghost of the Commune.
Plotino Rhodakanaty and The American Commune (1877)
Plotino Constantino Rhodakanaty (1828-circa 1890) was an anarchist who spent most of his adult life in Mexico. The details are hazy, but Rhodakanaty was apparently born in Athens, and lived as a young man in Vienna and Paris, where he studied philosophy, imbibed anarchist thought, and met the thinker he admired most, the first self-proclaimed anarchist, Pierre Joseph Proudhon. After spending several years in Spain learning Spanish, Rhodakanaty set off for Mexico in about 1861 to experience and participate in agrarian socialist reforms. There, he began to write and advocate, and work out his anarchist views.[41]
Rhodakanaty published an important article titled La Cartilla Socialista (“A Socialist Primer”) in which he espoused the utopian socialist thinker Charles Fourier’s ideas for agrarian socialism. La Cartilla Socialista began by asking, and answering:
What is the most elevated and reasonable goal that human intelligence can be devoted to? The achievement of universal association, of individuals and peoples, in order to fulfill the earthly purposes of humanity.[42]
Rhodakanaty helped form the Socialist Student Group to “spread the message of the abolition of the state, cooperativism, universal brotherhood and equality,” founded a school called the School of Light and Socialism, and eventually got involved in the agrarian reform movement.[43]
The text of his that Bruno Bosteels has brought to our attention, and translated from the Spanish, was published on August 14, 1877, in the newspaper El Combate. It is a call to arms in Mexico to breathe life into a popular uprising inspired by the Commune. Rhodakanaty writes of the spirit of the Commune as a “migrating bird” that has taken off from Paris, already passed over the United States (he is referring to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877), and now hovering over Mexico.
Rhodakanaty gives voice to a common belief at the time that the Parisian Commune would inspire other worker uprisings across the globe. “The germ of the Commune,” Rhodakanaty writes, “sooner or later, must explode among us.”[44]
Bruno Bosteels’ Theses on Marx
Our readings for the seminar also include Bruno Bosteels’ contributions, including his eleven Theses on Marx and the first chapter of the forthcoming English translation of his book, La Comuna Mexica.
In his Theses on Marx, Bosteels takes a contrarian view of practically all hitherto existing forms of Marxism, arguing that in all or practically all cases they substitute for the revolutionary praxis that they are intended to animate. Bosteels critiques all invocations of Marx’s eleventh thesis, including his own. His theses on Marx, as opposed to Marx’s theses on Feuerbach, taunt the reader: “Until unalienated life becomes imaginable, every invocation of the eleventh thesis is false—including this one.”[45]
We will have to see, but I read this as a provocation to imagine unalienated life, perhaps a first step to changing the world. In that effort to imagine, I take it, the spirit or memory of the Commune will play a role.
Welcome to Marx 12/13!
Watch the seminar Marx 12/13 here!
Notes
[1] Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” in Karl Marx, The First International and After, ed. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2010), 187-236, at p. 233.
[2] David Fernbach, “Introduction,” in Karl Marx, The First International and After, ed. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2010), at p. 17.
[3] Fernbach, “Introduction,” at p. 18.
[4] See Karl Marx, “First Address of the General Council on the Franco-Prussian War,” in Karl Marx, The First International and After, ed. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2010), 172-176, at p. 172 and n.1.
[5] See Karl Marx, “Second Address of the General Council on the Franco-Prussian War,” in Karl Marx, The First International and After, ed. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2010), 179-186, at p. 179 and n.14.
[6] See Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” in Karl Marx, The First International and After, ed. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2010), 187-236, at p. 187 and n.1.
[7] All dates and facts can be verified at the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Franco-German War.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 18 March 2025, available at https://www.britannica.com/event/Franco-German-War (accessed 19 April 2025); and The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Commune of Paris.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 19 April 2025, available at https://www.britannica.com/event/Commune-of-Paris-1871 (accessed 19 April 2025).
[8] The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “William I.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 18 March 2025, available at https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-I-emperor-of-Germany (accessed 19 April 2025).
[9] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 191.
[10] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 198.
[11] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 210.
[12] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 210.
[13] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 210.
[14] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 210.
[15] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 210.
[16] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 210.
[17] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 209-210.
[18] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 209.
[19] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 209.
[20] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 210.
[21] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 210-211.
[22] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 211.
[23] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 212.
[24] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 212.
[25] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 213.
[26] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 213.
[27] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 213.
[28] Étienne Balibar, “Critique in the 21st century: Political economy still, and religion again,” Radical Philosophy 200 (Nov/Dec 2016), 11-22, at p. 20 n.24 (“I think I may have been one of the first, if not the very first, to note that the famous formulation that concludes – or, rather, leaves unfinished – the first volume of Capital (‘the expropriation of the expropriators’ [Die Expropriateurs werden expropriirt]), beyond its obviously ‘French’ revolutionary associations, contains as well a messianic reference drawn from the biblical formula: ‘they will oppress their oppressors’ (Isaiah 14:1–4 and 27: 7–9)”).
[29] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 214.
[30] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 219.
[31] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 226; and 228.
[32] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 232-233.
[33] Marx, “The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council,” at p. 232.
[34] Michael B. Dougherty, “Overlooked No More: Voltairine de Cleyre, America’s ‘Greatest Woman Anarchist,’” The New York Times, September 26, 2018, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/obituaries/voltairine-de-cleyre-overlooked.html.
[35] Dougherty, “Overlooked No More: Voltairine de Cleyre, America’s ‘Greatest Woman Anarchist.’”
[36] Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Commune is Risen,” Mother Earth 7, no. 1 (March 1912): 10–15, available at The Anarchist Library online at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/voltairine-de-cleyre-the-commune-is-risen.
[37] Cleyre, “The Commune is Risen,” at p. 2.
[38] Cleyre, “The Commune is Risen,” at p. 2.
[39] Cleyre, “The Commune is Risen,” at p. 3.
[40] Cleyre, “The Commune is Risen,” at p. 4.
[41] Jason M. Brown and Christopher J. Nielsen, “Plotino Constantino Rhodakanaty: Introduction to a Mormon Anarchist,” available at the Anarchist Library here https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jason-m-brown-and-christopher-j-nielsen-plotino-constantino-rhodakanaty-introduction-to-a-mormo.
[42] Brown and Nielsen, “Plotino Constantino Rhodakanaty: Introduction to a Mormon Anarchist.”
[43] Brown and Nielsen, “Plotino Constantino Rhodakanaty: Introduction to a Mormon Anarchist.”
[44] Plotino C. Rhodakanaty, “The American Commune,” El Combate, August 14, 1877, translated by Bruno Bosteels.
[45] Bruno Bosteels, “Theses on Marx,” Communis, February 4, 2025, available at https://communispress.com/theses-on-marx/.
