Discussion points on The Civil War in France

• What marks off the "working existence" of a workers' state from the most democratic of bourgeois-democratic states?

• What were the main economic measures that the Commune was able to take, or at least sketch, in its nine weeks?

• In January 1918 Lenin opened his main report to the Third Congress of Soviets in Russia by exclaiming that the October 1917 Revolution had now lasted five days longer than the Commune! What does that tell us about Lenin's perspectives in the October Revolution?

• Marx concludes the Civil War in France with these words: "Workingmen’s Paris, with its Commune, will be for ever 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 priest will not avail to redeem them". Was he right? Why?

• In April 1871, after a few weeks of the Commune, replied to a comrade who he thought underestimated the Commune that the Versailes government had "presented the Parisians with the alternative of taking up the fight or succumbing without a struggle". Why did he think "taking up the fight" in those circumstances was better even if the chances of victory were tiny?