... As to your former inquiry concerning the passage in the preface of the Manifesto  taken from Der B rgerkrieg in Frankreich you will most likely agree with the reply given in the original (Der B rgerkrieg..., p 19 et seq)  I am sending you a copy in case you do not have one there. It is simply a question of showing that the victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administratively centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes; whereas all bourgeois republicans since 1848 inveighed against this machinery so long as they were in the opposition, but once they were in the government they took it over without altering it and used it partly against the reaction but still more against the proletariat. That in The Civil War the instinctive tendencies of the Commune were put down to its credit as more or less deliberate plans was justified and even necessary under the circumstances. The Russians have very properly appended this passage from The Civil War to their translation of the Manifesto. If at that time the publication did not have to be finished in such a hurry we could also have done this and various other things too...
Letters: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence 1884