V. I.

Lenin

Concluding Paragraph to the Article “The Paris Commune and the Tasks of the Democratic Dictatorship” [1]

Thisarticle teaches us, first and foremost, that for representatives
of the socialist proletariat to take part in a revolutionary government together
with the petty bourgeoisie is fully permissible in principle, and, in certain
conditions, even obligatory. It shows us further that the real task the Commune
had to perform was primarily the achievement of the democratic and not the
socialist dictatorship, the implementation of our “minimum
programme”. Finally, the article reminds us that when we study the lessons
of the Paris Commune we should imitate not the mistakes it made (the failure to
seize the Bank of France and to launch an offensive against Versailles, the
lack of a clear programme, etc.), but its successful practical measures, which
indicate the correct road. It is not the word “Commune” that we must
adopt from the great fighters of 1871; we should not blindly repeat each of
their slogans; what we must do is to single out those programmatic and practical
slogans that bear upon the state of affairs in Russia and can be formulated in
the words “a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and
the peasantry”.

---
Notes:
[1]
The article “The Paris Commune and the Tasks of the
Democratic Dictatorship” was published in Proletary , No. 8 of
July 17 (4), 1905. Its author, who is not known, provided a historical note on
the activities of the Paris Commune and the composition of its government,
which, besides representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, included socialist
workingmen prominent in the labour movement. The article was directed against
the tactics of the Mensheviks, who denied the possibility of Social-Democrats
participating in a provisional revolutionary government. The article was edited
by Lenin, who changed the title, made a number of changes in the wording, and
wrote the conclusion.