March 26, and the entral Committee resigned and handed over power to it two davs later.
The politics of the members of the Commune were by and large of two camps, the Blanquists and the Proudhonist Winlg and the Second of two articles International Working Men's Association, the First International set up by Marx and Engels.
The Blanquists, followers of Louis HietSte Blanqui (1805-1881), believed that mankind would be freed from wage slavery not by means of the class struggle but through a conspiracy by a small minority of intellectuals. They lost sight of the real conditions necessary for a successful uprising and ignored contacts with the working class and peasantry.
The Proudhonists were socialists of the small peasants and self employed aster cenen. In keeping with this, they believed in a form of coperation in which each worker owned his own means of production, his tools. They abhorred mass organisation of the working class against the employcIs, secing il as unnarural otner than in the "exceptional" case of large workplaces.
Even in Paris, long a centre of «NOSTC by 1871 large enterprises were becoming the rule rather than the exception. Circumstances, and the involvement of the mass of proletarian Paris, turned notn these programmes on their heads.
The Commune Was majority Blanquist and most of its delegates were of petty bourgeois origin.
Twenty-five working class delegates, including 12 members of the International elected WClC March 26. Subsequent elections on April 16 brought in more socialist delegates including Marx's son-in-law Lorguet.
The members of the International were responsible for most of the CCOOIC nersures of The Commune. The ministry of Trade and was headed by German revolutionary, Frankel, the posts and telegraph, the Mint and direct taxation, and (towards the end of the Commune) finance were all directed by socialists.
In keeping with its role at the head of an entirely new form of state, the Commune was an entirely new type of body. All delegates were subject to recall by the constituents dav tme Executive body The Commune Was no mere Parliamentary talking shop, it was also the executive body, its members had to carry out their own policies, breaking down an important barrier between people and SLale In addition, the Commune declared that all judges, magistrates, administrators and teachers would be elected and subject to recall by their constituents.
As Marx put it:
"Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to represent and repress the people in parlament, universal suffrage was to serve the people constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for workers, foremen and accountants for his business." (Quoted in Lenin, State and Revolution).
And Lenin himself comments:
"The Commune substitutes for the venal and rotten parliamentarism of bourgeois society institutions in which freedom of opinion and discussion does not degenerate into deception, for the Parlamentarians temselves have to work, have to execute their own laws, have temse'ves to test the results achieved in reality, and to account directly to their constituents."
This workers' democracy, developed and tested through the experience of the Commune and the Russian Revolution, is a key element in every genuine revolutionary socialist programme.
The basis for the establishment of this new workers' state was the destruction of the old fundamentally capitalist one. The last act of the Central ( Committee of the National Guard was the abolition of the ПOTOT1011S Paris "Morality Police'. the first act of the Commune on March 30 was to abolish conscription and the standing army, plus the old state administration.
The army was replaced by the National Guard in which all citizens capable of bearing arms were to be enrolled. he state as the repressive machine of the minority Our history bourgeoisie was replaced by the armed people, i.e. the majority, armed to repress the counter-revolutionary minority.
"It is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush their resistance. This was particularly necessary for the Commune, and one of the reasons for its defeat was that it did not do this with sufficient determination. The organ of suppression, however, is here the majority of the population, and not a minority, as was always the case under slavery, serfdom and wage slavery. And since the majority of the people itself suppress its oppressors, a 'special force' for suppression is no longer necessary! In this sense, the state begins to wither away."
(Lenin, State and Revolution).
Lenin saw the Commune as a first step towards a classless Communist society in which no repressive state apparatus need exist.
Workers' wage
Two additional measures completed the new state. The first was the decision on April 1 that all state employees including the members of the Commune temselves should be paid at most 6,000 francs (i.e. working men's wages) thus preventing any form of careerism at the expense of the state.
The second was the abolition of all state payments for religious purposes on April 1 and on April 8 the removal of the church from the schools, clearing the way for education free from mysticism.
The Commune was able to manage with roughly a quarter of the number of functionaries employed by the old Second Empire, and moreover it paid them at most a salary barely amounting to one fifth of what Professor Huxley put forward as a minimum for a secretary to a metropolitan school board:
"The Commune made that catchword of bourgeois revolutions 'cheap government', a reality by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure the standing army and state functionarism."
(Marx, The Civil War in France)
This had its effect. Shortly after the National Guard seized power in Paris there were risings in Marseilles, Lyons, Dijon and elsewhere, attempting to set up Communes along the lines of Paris.
Federation
The Paris Commune's own programme was for a national federation of urban and rural Communes along the same lines as in Paris with a Federal body made up of representatives from all the communes to be convened in Paris as the central authority.
The risings in the cities were suppressed, but the real fear of Thiers and his Rurals was that the programme of the Commune might reach the French peasantry. The peasants had been ground down by taxation (it was they, the majority, who paid for the excesses of the Second Empire) and the weight of the state bureaucracy. The Commune promised the peasants freedom from the tax burden, from the petty state officials and gendarmes who 11 n(e7 Communal rule would be elected by and responsible to the population, and from the superstitions of the priest in - the schools. "The Rurals - this was in fact their chief apprehension - knew that three months' free communication of Communal Paris with the provinces would bring about a general rising of the peasants, and hence their anxiety to establish a police blockade around Paris, so as to stop the spread of the rinderPest."
(Marx, ibid., p. 61).
Before going on to discuss the economic reforms of the Commune it is necessary to say a word about its internationalism. Despite being surrounded Eastern and Northern fronts by hostile German army, the Commune elected a German socialist Frankel as Minister of Labour.
In addition, several Polish revolutionaries including Dabrowski, Who was a general, served in the National Guard. On March 30 all toreigners elected to the Commune were confirmed in office with the words "the flag of the Commune is the Flag of the World Republic" (quoted in Lenin, Paris Commune and the tasks of the Democratic Dictatorship).
The Commune lifted the financial burden imposed by the big bourgeoisie and the Second Empire on the working class and the petty bourgeoisie. It declared on March 30 that no rent would be paid on dwelling houses from October 1870 to April 1871 and all payments already made would be booked as rent in advance for the future.
At the same time it also deferred the debts of the small shopkeepers and the like and proclaimed an end to foreclosures on their mortgages. The sale of all articles pledged in the municipal loan office (the state pawnshop) was stopped.
For the workers, the Commune oluawed The fines imposed by employers to claw back a part of the incagie wages tney pala. Night work for bakers was abolished on April 20, and the employment offices, previously run by agents of the police, were handed over to the mayoralties of the twenty arrondissements (districts) of Paris.
April 30 saw the closure of the pawnshops as private exploitation of the workers and a contradiction of the right of the workers to their instruments of Labour and to credit.
Workers control
A start was made on workers' control of industry when on April 16 the Commune ordered a list to be made of all factories closed down by the employers - and called for the previous employees to form cooperative societies and work out plans to run them.
The demolition of the symbols of the previous power was started by the 137th Battalion of the National Guard, who dragged out the guillotine and publicly burnt it amid great rejoicing.
The great victory column on the Place Vendome, cast from guns captured by Napoleon was ordered to be demolished because it served as a symbol of chauvinism and an incitement to national hatred; this was done on May 12. The Chapel of Atonement built in memory of the execution of Louis XVI by the French Revolutionaries suffered the same fate. But in their есолоіс me reç &< in he m. Commune stopped short. tary and political ones the They remained standing outside the Bank of France, centerpiece of the bourgeois financial order. If they had seized it, they could have reworked the financial system, offering cheap credit to workers and the petty bourgeoisie including the peasantry, and at the same time bought the French bourgeoisie to its knees by refusing to allow them the services of the Bank. Militarily and politically the Commune lacked the resoluteness of purpose to win an insurrection. After seizing power in Paris on