From this striving, otherwise than in the case of the intellectuals, there results also another statement of the problem, and new perspectives are opened. In this way conceptions are formed regarding the regulation of the mutual relations of human beings in social production, conceptions which to the intellectual elements appear incomprehensible and which they declare to be utopian and unrealizable. But these conceptions have already unfolded a powerful force in the revolutionary uprisings of the wage-workers, of the modern proletarians. This force was shown first on a major scale in the Paris Commune, which sought to overcome the centralized authority of the State through the self-administration of the communes. It was the cause also of Marx’s giving up his idea (expressed in the Communist Manifesto) that state economy would lead to the disappearance of class society. In the workers’ and soldiers’ councils of the Russian and German revolutions of 1917-23, it arose once more to a mighty and at times all-mastering power. And in future no proletarian-revolutionary movement is conceivable in which it will not play a more and more prominent and finally all-mastering role. It is the self-activity of the broad working masses which manifests itself in the workers’ councils. Here is nothing utopian any longer; it is actual reality. In the workers’ councils the proletariat has shaped the organizational form in which it conducts its struggle for liberation.

Nonetheless, there remains still an unbalanced contradiction between on one hand Marx's characterization of the Paris Commune as the finally discovered "political form" for accomplishing the economic and social self-liberation of the working class and, on the other hand, his emphasis at the same time that the suitability of the commune for this purpose rests mainly on its formlessness; that is, on its indeterminateness and openness to multiple interpretations. It appears there is only one point at which Marx's position is perfectly clear and to which he professed at this time under the influence of certain political theories he had in the meantime come up against and which were incorporated in this original political concept-and not least under the practical impression of the enormous experience of the Paris Commune itself. While in the Communist Manifesto of 1847-48 and likewise in the Inaugural Address to the International Workers' Association in 1864, he still had only spoken of the necessity “for the proletariat to conquer political power” now the experiences of the Paris Commune provided him with the proof that "the working class can not simply appropriate the ready-made state machinery and put it into motion for its own purposes, but it must smash the existing bourgeois state machinery in a revolutionary way." This sentence has since been regarded as an essential main proposition and core of the whole political theory of Marxism, especially since in 1917 Lenin at once theoretically restored the unadulterated Marxian theory of the state in his work "State and Revolution" and practically realized it through carrying through the October Revolution as its executor. But obviously nothing positive is at all yet said about the formal character of the new revolutionary supreme state power of the proletariat with the merely negative determination that the state power cannot simply "appropriate the state machinery" of the previous bourgeois state "for the working class and set it in motion for their own purposes." So we must ask: for which reasons does the "Commune" in its particular, determinate form represent the finally discovered political form of government for the working class, as Marx puts it in his Civil War, and as Engels characterizes it once more at great length in his introduction to the third edition of the Civil War twenty years later? Whatever gave Marx and Engels, those fiery admirers of the centralized system of revolutionary bourgeois dictatorship realized by the great French Revolution, the idea to regard precisely the "Commune" as the "political form" of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, when it appeared to be the complete opposite to that system?