The Promise of Socialism On March 18 1871 the workers of Paris seized power and ruled for two months. Theirs was the first proletarian democracy in history. Nick Robin reassesses the Commune. KARL MARX and the first International had counselled the workers of Paris against rising in such hostile circumstances but they threw their full support behind them when they did.
Members of the International participated in the movement with the enthusiastic backing of their Executive Committee. Marx, in London, wrote of 'this glorious harbinger of a new society (whose) martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class'.
In 1870 the imperial adventures of Emperor Louis Napoleon, Bonaparte's nephew and the absolute ruler of France since the revolution of 1848, resulted in the defeat of the French armies by Bismarck of Prussia and the capture of the Emperor himself.
On September 4 1870, with the Prussian armies at the gates of Paris, a Republic was once again declared in France. The French army was crushed and demoralised and Paris was defended by the armed people, known as the National Guard.
The French bourgeoisie was frantic to make peace with the Prussians in order to turn on its own insurrectionary subordinate classes. It organised itself in a 'Party of Order' of monarchists, Bonapartists and, as Marx put it 'all that was dead in France' and set up a 'National Assembly' at Versailles outside Paris.
The remnants of the army were withdrawn from Paris and regrouped in Versailles. The leader of this decadent assemblage was Auguste Thiers who, according to Marx 'was consistent only in his greed for wealth and his hatred of the men that produce it'. His was truly a 'regime of avowed class terrorism and deliberate insult to the "vile multitude.
Armed Paris, the only obstacle to the counter-revolution, was besieged and starving. Thiers' assembly could not deceive the National Guard into giving up their arms and endA major publication racy (Ireland).£5.50. Send cheque payable to Socialist Outlook Fund to PO Box 1109, London N4 2UU.
soldiers. population: nies, by seizing the governmental power'. their wield it for their own purpose. fight for the defence of the Republic and for ary Paris. the destruction of the bourgeois state.
So on March 18, with the Prussian armies still tion of the old state machine. stationed at the gates of the city and collecting massive reparations from The National lar demand. Guard, the 'Versaillese' sent a battalion under their suppression? General Lecomte to seize 400 guns - which they claimed as 'state property' - from Montmartre in the very heart of revolutionary Paris.
The local population fraternised with the troops. The only shots fired that day were those that killed General Lecomte, fired by his own The Central Committee, a body of delegates from the National Guard battalions in each of Paris's twenty neighbourhoods (arrondissements), issued a manifesto in the name of the 'The Proletarians of Paris amidst the failure of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation deeds.' by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs ... they have understood that it is their imperious duty and their absolute right to render themselves masters of their own destiTo which Marx adds, in The Civil War in France: 'but the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and This was the prime lesson of the Commune the Commune. and one well understood by the Communards themselves; their experience prompted Marx and Engels to make their only correction to the Communist Manifesto to include the necessity of The Central Committee immediately prepared elections and on March 28 the newly-elected representatives of the people of Paris declared the Commune and with it the destrucThe standing army was abolished, the separation of church and state was decreed and enforced, the police and army were replaced by citizens' militias whose officers were instantly recallable, as were the judges. In the Commune's short life, two chiefs of the militia, Cluseret and Rossel, were both sacked by popuThe brutal and authoritarian Code Napoleon, La 'parasitical excrescence upon civil society' was abolished at a stroke. In place of the old state with its 'ubiquitous and complicated military, bureauoratic, clerical and judiciary organs (enmeshing) the living civil society like a boa constrictor, a completely new form of state was brought into existence. The Commune was a working body in which legislative and executive functions were combined and delegates and other state officials were paid no more than the wages of a skilled worker. Nine commissions were set up from among representatives to oversee the police, labour, education and so on. Factories abandoned by their owners were put to work under the control of the workers. The Mint, for example, was managed by Camélinat, a member of the International. Night baking was abolished, war widows and orphans were provided for, pawnshops were closed as contradicting the right of workers to their tools and to credit. This was the very antithesis of the Imperial state: 'the reabsorption of the state power by society, as its own living forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular masses themselves, forming their own force instead of the organised force of All this was prosecuted with the maximum order and efficiency, while outside the city the execrable Thiers plotted his invasion and fulminated against the 'unknown' band of criminals which had Paris in its grip.
Who were these men and women of the Commune? As Marx had written after the elections: 'Never were elections so sifted, never delegates fuller representing the masses from which they had sprung. To the objection of the outsiders that they were unknown - in point of fact that they were known only to the working classes - they proudly answered "so were the twelve apostles" and they answered by their They were by no means all members of the International; the majority were Blanquists, Proudhonist utopians and Jacobins, representatives of previous periods in the class struggles in France in which the independent voice of the proletariat was drowned out by the masses of petit bourgeois, artisans and intellectuals, all with grievances of their own against the bourgeois dictatorship. These forces were united in There were people like the 24 year old Paul Rigault, head of the Commune police, who started in office by arresting the Archbishop of Paris and whose Jacobin hatred of the clergy is expressed in his questioning of some Jesuit priests. 'What is your profession?', he asked. 'Servant of God'. Where does your master live?'. 'Everywhere'. 'Take this down', says Rigault to his secretaries. 'So and so alleging himself to be servant of one God, vagrant'.
There was Louise Michel, organiser of the women's battalions of the National Guard, who said from the dock after the defeat of the Commune: I belong entirely to the social revolution, and I declare I accept the responsibility of all my acts. I accept it entirely and without reserve. You accuse me of having participated in the execution of generals. To this I answer, yes.' Gustave Courber, the well-known painter,
was put in charge of the Commission of Education. He was as famous for his revolutionary system of absinthe drinking as for his passionate espousal of utopian socialism.
The aged revolutionist, Auguste Blanqui, was elected delegate to the Commune from two different arrondissements despite his incarceration in the south of France. It was Blanqui who observed of Rigault that 'he was nothing but a guttersnipe, but a policeman of genius.
There were many veterans of the barricades of 1848 and subsequently of many prison cells, among them Delescuse and Feliz Pyat.
On April 12, six days after the public burning of the guillotine, the whole of working class Paris assembled to observe the destruction of the chief symbol of the Empire. The enormous column in the Place Vendôme, on top of which stood a statue of Napoleon as the Emperor Caesar, was reduced to rubble by skilful engineering.
The column, the epitome of a savage and warlike dictatorship, had been inscribed 'a monument of barbarism, symbol of brute force and false glory, an affirmation of militarism, a negation of international right' (Marx) and draped with the red flag.
To the strains of the Marseillaise Place Internationale: a fitting tribute to the internationalism of the Communards who accepted as citizens the worker." oppressed workers of the entire world, who appointed as two of its principal military defenders the Poles Dombrowski and Wroblewski, and designated the Prussian internationalist, Frankel, its 'minister' of labour.
The destruction of the Vendôme column was a symbolic act but a powerful one. Lissagaray in his participant account History of the Paris Commune (translated into English by Marx's daughter Eleanor) puts it like this: It showed that a war of classes was to supersede the war of nations'. It was not surprising, therefore, that 'one of the first acts of the victorious bourgeoisie was to again raise this enormous block, this symbol of their sovereignty. To lift up Caesar on his pedestal they needed a scaffolding of 30,000 corpses.?
To look for a detailed governmental programme in the Commune is a waste of time. Its short existence was absorbed in a life and death struggle against the armies of the bourgeoisie. Yet the International recognised in the Commune the germs of a new society.
Sometimes, it is true, it was, in Lissagaray's words, like 'a concert without a conductor, each instrumentalist playing what he liked, confusing his score with his neighbour's.' Yet the Communards taught a crucial lesson to the international workers' movement: "That the political instrument of their enslavement cannot serve as the political instrument of their emancipation' (Marx).
The experience of the workers in power was worth a thousand books or articles. The news from Paris spread fast and demonstrations of support broke out all over Europe; throughout the major cities of France, the Commune was declared.
In Paris itself the debt-ridden middle classes aligned themselves with the working class against the predatory bourgeois creditors; the workers championed their demands to be rid of clerical oppression.
The middle classes, Marx wrote: 'Feel that only the working class can emancipate them from priest rule, convert science from an instrument of class rule into a popular force... "The Commune was a working body in which legislative and executive functions were the Place Vendôme was renamed the combined and delegates and other state officials were paid no more than the wages of a skilled Science can only fully play its genuine part in the Republic of Labour'.
The Commune commanded the overwhelming support of all sections of the masses. On March 29 the Freemasons joined the Commune with a demonstration of 10,000 headed by a banner declaring 'Love one another' after Thiers had rejected their attempts at reconciliation.
The Commune legislated the abolition of conscription and the taxation of the bourgeoisie to pay for the war, the key demands of the peasantry. This was another lesson of the Commune, the lesson of Permanent Revolution, that the working class is the only class which can lead the social emancipation and liberation of all the other oppressed classes against their rulers.
The Commune also put paid to the ideologies of utopian socialism by proving that the real movement of the working class would be 43 ace Pree Loved the agent of social change.
But we jump too far ahead; there was, after all, a further lesson of the Commune - the bloodthirsty character of a ruling class confronted by an insurrectionary people. The collaboration of the Prussian army with Thiers and the disorganisation and technical inferiority of the Commune's forces ensured that when the army did enter Paris on May 21, it took only eight days to destroy the Commune; the provincial communes by then had already been crushed.
As the barricades crumbled, the ruling class and its army indulged in an orgy of massacres and blood-letting. The population of Paris was no more than half a million; yet between 20,000 and 30,000 were killed of whom perhaps only a quarter fell in battle.
In his diary, M Audéoud, a Paris bourgeois, wrote: 'What a joy to see them lying there, their flesh in rags... it is a pleasure to bathe and wash our hands in their blood!' (Jellinek). 40,000 were taken prisoner.
The Commune's final death agony came with the massacre at the cemetery of Père Lachaise where 147 National Guards were slaughtered on the site now known as the 'wall of the Federals'. Engels described the wall as 'a mute but eloquent testimony to the frenzy of which the ruling class is capable as soon as the working class dares to stand up for its rights' Thus was order restored in Paris.
The trials, executions, and deportations to the Pacific colony of New Caledonia, dragged on for five more vears. Mary commented: A glorious civilization, indeed, the great problem of which, how to get rid of the heaps of corpses it made after the battle was over'.
It is well known that Marx and the International had counselled against a rising of the Paris working class against the bourgeoisie while the Prussian army was still on the offensive. But Marx never placed himself outside the living movement of the working class whatever his detailed criticisms of this or that aspect of the struggle. When the Communards rose, Marx's solidarity and admiration was total.
In a letter to Kugelmann, he w. ote: 'What elasticity, what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice in these Parisians! After six months of hunger and ruin caused by in"In place of the old state with its 'ubiquitous and complicated military, bureaucratic, clerical and judiciary organs (enmeshing) the living civil society like a boa constrictor, a completely new form of state was brought into existence." ternal treachery more than by the external enemy, they rise, beneath Prussian bayonets, as if there had never been a war between France and Germany and the enemy were not still at the gates of Paris! History has no like example of their greatness!' Despite their bloody defeat, the workers of Paris, by 'storming heaven', vindicated in practice many of the central ideas which were Marx's life's work: 'A new point of departure of world-wide significance has been gained', Marx wrote to Kugelmann.
The Petersburg Soviet of 1905 was the first confirmation of this and the October revolution its victory.
When Lenin left for Finland in July 1917 he took with him two books: Clausewitz' The Art of War and Marx's Civil War in France. He arrived back secretly in Russia two months later having jettisoned Clausewitz and written State and Revolution.
Paraphrasing Marx, he wrote that the Commune was 'the political form "at last discovered", by which the smashed state can and must be replaced' - a revision, incidentally, of his previous position in Two Tactics for Social Democracy in which the Commune is criticised for 'confusing democratic and socialist tasks'.
The Commune heralded a new era. The dispossessed and exploited took power and governed without bosses or generals. The Communards not only showed the workers of the world the possibility of a new society free of exploitation, they created one.
One hundred years after Marx's death, sixty years since Stalinism contaminated the notion of proletarian dictatorship, Marxists should forcibly reassert the true, genuinely democratic, content that our tradition attaches to these words.
With Engels we point: 'Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.' [First published in International January-April 1983] Further reading • Karl Marx, The Civil War in France • Frank lellinek. The Paris Commune Lissagaray, History of the Commune of 1871 Marx and Engels, Selected Works • Lenin, Selected Works.
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