the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
May 1, 2011
The following article is translated from the journal published by comrades of Lutte Ouvrière in France (in Lutte des Classe #136, May-June 2011).
“The petty-bourgeois Social Democrat has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words, Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” (Friedrich Engels)
“The direct antithesis to the Empire was the Commune”—so wrote Karl Marx in his 1871 pamphlet, The Civil War in France. In this text, Marx not only paid tribute to the Communards, who had “stormed heaven,” he also analyzed this first proletarian revolution, which held power for two months in Paris, drawing all its useful political lessons for the future struggles of the working class.
Since 1852, France had been dominated by the Second Empire of Napoleon III. This dictatorial state, corrupt to the core, composed of opportunists, nouveaux riches, and swindlers, had arisen because the bourgeoisie, terrified by the June 1848 workers’ uprising, had thrown itself into the arms of the first military adventurer who came along: Napoleon III. While the second Empire took direct political leadership of society away from the bourgeoisie, it continued zealously to serve its economic interests and to develop its industry, leading to the development of the proletariat and to the renewal of the workers’ movement.
In 1864, in London, working class activists from different European countries founded the First International—the first international organization in the history of the workers’ movement. In France, the 1860s saw a renewed organizational activity among the working class, together with a rising level of struggles and strikes.
In 1870, faced with growing opposition, Napoleon III went to war against Prussia (the part of Germany centered at that time around Berlin). The incompetence, waste and corruption plaguing the imperial power led to its defeat within a few weeks. When the laboring classes of Paris heard that Napoleon III had been defeated and captured by the Prussians, they took to the streets, proclaiming a Republic on September 4, 1870. The bourgeois republicans, whose opposition to the Empire had previously been rather tame, took over the leadership of this new Republic. In the name of the need for “national defense”—against the Prussians who were continuing the war—they formed a government led by Adolphe Thiers. But far from trying to repel the invasion, this bourgeois republic had only one real objective right from the start: to disarm the laboring classes, which it feared more than anything else. It had been barely 20 years since the workers’ uprising of June 1848—and that event was still fresh in everyone’s memory.
Tens of thousands of workers were concentrated in Paris—in the building trades, public works and other industries that were booming—not to mention the large number of artisans. Marx explained: “Paris, however, was not to be defended without arming its working class, organizing them into an effective force, and training the ranks by the war itself. But Paris armed was the Revolution armed. A victory by Paris over the Prussian aggressor would have been a victory of the French workers over the French capitalist and his State parasites. In this conflict between national duty and class interest, the Government of National Defense did not hesitate one moment to turn into a Government of National Defection.”
Despite the bourgeois government’s attitude, the Parisian laboring classes learned to act collectively, to organize themselves and measure their forces during the months of war and the siege of Paris that followed. Vigilance committees were formed as early as September. By October 1870, the resistance to the Prussian siege of the capital and the resulting famine was fanning the flames of revolt. The National Guard—which had been the armed militia of the petty bourgeoisie, enrolling only those who could afford to pay—was opened to the laboring population.
This armed force of the people—which managed to win respect from the Prussian army, despite difficulties resulting from famine and siege—became the heart of the revolt. Its elected central committee won the trust of much of the Paris laboring classes and thus became a sort of political leadership. The bourgeoisie could not accept that the laboring population would arm itself, nor that it would organize itself and choose its own commanders. A clash between the bourgeois republic and the working class was fast approaching. Appalled by the government’s cowardice and lies, the proletariat several times threatened the government.
On January 28, 1871, Thiers signed an armistice deal with Bismarck, increasing popular anger and accelerating the revolutionary process. Thiers had to try to disarm Paris. On March 18, when Thiers’ troops tried to snatch the cannons away from the people of Paris, the revolt burst out. (Those cannons had been in great part paid for by the people themselves despite the privations of famine.) The rank-and-file troops sided with the Parisian insurgents and shot their own generals who had ordered them to fire on the crowd, most of which were women.
The institutions of political power, together with the city’s wealthy, the bourgeoisie and their clique, all fled to Versailles. Paris was in the hands of the workers, and power fell to those the Parisian people considered as their representatives—the Central Committee of the National Guard. On March 26, 1871, elections were held for the Paris Commune, which became the center of political power in the city, under the active control of the proletariat.
With the Paris Commune, a new type of political power surged up from the class struggle itself. The proletariat was experiencing, as Marx wrote, that “the working class cannot take over the ready_made capitalist state machine and use it for its own ends.” It was the first and the most important lesson coming out of the Commune.
The fact that they had elected a city council was not, in and of itself, a revolutionary act. What counted was that the armed proletariat had imposed its influence, its class domination on society and, in so doing, had transformed political power. The Paris Commune was not a talkative but impotent parliamentary organism, like those the bourgeoisie had already produced so many times. The Commune was a working body, which exercised both legislative and executive powers, thus allowing active and direct control by the population over what was decided and done. Decisions were taken and applied directly by the exploited themselves. Neither the rich nor their lackeys imposed their choices. For once, the masses did.
The National Guard, uniting the armed population, was already the antithesis of the bourgeoisie’s permanent standing army. The Commune went one step further by decreeing the abolition of the standing army. As Auguste Blanqui, a revolutionary leader in the 1848 revolution, had already proclaimed two decades earlier, “he who has iron, has bread!” By abolishing the standing army and forging a new state whose power was not based on a repressive force separate from the population, but on the arming of the population as a whole, the Commune revived the revolutionary history of the proletariat.
All the officials of the Commune, from then on elected by the people, became accountable to the people and recallable by them at any time. They were paid workers’ wages. Thus the laboring classes were taking control of political life. Finally, the Commune attacked the spiritual weight of the Church and proclaimed the separation of Church and State, long before the radical laws of 1905 established France as a secular republic.
Throughout its 72 days of existence, the Commune took measures determined by the interests of the laboring population. “The people only get what they take for themselves,” said one of the Commune’s revolutionary leaders, Louise Michel. The government that the Parisian workers had chosen for themselves, controlled by the workers in arms, made choices and voted texts that expressed its class character.
The Commune defended tenants from their landlords and ordered a moratorium on rents, which were impossible to pay after months of war. Empty homes were commandeered for the homeless. The Commune prohibited workplace fines, which had put a strain on workers’ wages, and prohibited night work for bakers. Finally, on April 16, the Commune decided that shops and workshops abandoned by their owners should be taken over and run for the benefit of the whole community, set up as cooperatives directly run by their workers. During the Commune, the need of the laboring classes to survive gave birth to the first beginnings of collectivization in the means of production.
As Trotsky wrote about another period, “revolution is above all the violent eruption of the masses into the domain where they govern their own destinies.” During the Commune, as in all revolutionary periods, the workers’ consciousness evolved rapidly. And the most revolutionary ideas and initiatives came from the very depths of the population itself.
Socialist aspirations were expressed everywhere, as in this statement issued by a women’s meeting: “For us, the first class wound that needs to be closed is that of the bosses who exploit the worker and get rich from his sweat. No more bosses who consider the worker as a machine for production! Let the workers join forces, let their work be for the common good and they will be happy. Another vice of this society is that the rich do nothing but spend their time drinking and having fun, taking no care. They must be rooted out, as must be the priests and nuns. We cannot be happy until there are no more bosses, no more rich, no more clergy.”
Those same aspirations were expressed in the following statement, April 23, 1871, from the mechanics and metallurgists union:
“Considering that equality must not be a hollow expression within the Commune, which was, itself, the outcome of the revolution of March 18;
“and considering that our economic emancipation is the aim of the struggle, so valiantly carried out and that we wish to continue until the last royalist cleric is extinguished;
“and considering that this can be achieved only by the workers banding together, which alone will change our condition from hirelings to associates;
“We declare that we give our delegates the following general instructions: suppress the exploitation of man by man, the last remaining form of slavery; organize work through solidarity associations, with collective and inalienable capital.”
Borne by the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses, their initiatives and their aspirations, the Commune found itself at the very forefront of progressive ideas. Religious obscurantism was fought, religious convents closed and the atrocities committed within them publicly denounced. Discussions were organized to devise a new form of education for the masses that would be free, public and secular. The Commune committed itself to developing vocational training for girls and, moreover, women took an active part in the revolution. The Commune gave official recognition to civil unions, providing the first legal recognition to families formed outside marriage (unmarried partners, so-called “illegitimate” children). Finally, the Commune banned prostitution, considering it a form of “commercial exploitation of human beings by other human beings.” Ideas for setting up children’s nurseries and communal eating facilities emerged. The Commune reopened libraries, museums and theaters and gave the laboring classes the opportunity, for the first time, to attend concerts.
Foreigners were recognized by the Commune as members of the great international family of workers. What could be more significant in this respect than the fact that the Commune gave supreme command of its army to a Polish non_commissioned officer?
The Paris Commune perished in May 1871 under the fire of Thiers’ troops, allied with those of Bismarck. “The international of the ruling classes” had gone into action to crush this first attempt at workers’ emancipation. Between 20,000 and 40,000 died in the repression. The massacre of the Communards, whose dead bodies lined the streets, did not stop until the danger of a cholera epidemic threatened. The violence of the repression reflected the level of the bourgeoisie’s fear.
This Parisian working class revolution, even though it had been crushed, showed the way for future revolutions. Lenin wrote of the Commune: “Not only was Marx enthusiastic about the heroism of the Communards.... Although the mass revolutionary movement did not achieve its aim, he regarded it as a historic experience of enormous importance, as a definite advance of the world proletarian revolution, as a practical step that was more important than hundreds of programs and arguments. Marx endeavored to analyze this experiment, to draw tactical lessons from it and re_examine his theory in the light of it.”
From 1848 on, Marx and Engels asserted that, to emancipate itself, the proletariat had to become the ruling class and take over political power. But this remained a revolutionary prospect and not a concrete reality. Of course, Marx and Engels had been able to draw the political lessons of past revolutions, particularly that of 1848: “Any attempt at revolution in France will have to involve the breaking up of the machineries of the bureaucracy and that of the army.” But it was the Paris Commune that showed for the first time how the working class could break up the bourgeois state machinery and forge its own state to achieve its own emancipation.
Later on, many socialist activists who claimed to be Marxist abandoned these ideas on the state. Lenin, to the contrary, took up the banner of the Paris Commune in his book, State and Revolution, written at the height of the 1917 revolution. He pushed Marx’s analysis further and used the Commune as an example: “Thus, the Commune appeared to have replaced the broken State machine by instituting a democracy that was ‘simply’ more complete: suppression of the army, the possibility of electing and recalling all its officials, without exception. However, ‘simply’ implies a vast amount of work: the replacement of institutions by others that are completely different. This is a true case of ‘transforming quantity into quality’: carried out this way, as fully and as methodically as conceivable, democracy changes from being bourgeois to being proletarian: the State (‘a special power designed to subdue a specific class’) becomes something which is no longer truly a State.”
The Paris Commune fed the experience of the international workers’ movement for decades. Its history constitutes the core of the training of all the revolutionaries of the 20th century. Revolutionaries, particularly the Bolsheviks, carefully studied this first form of a workers’ state in history, and they drew all the political lessons from the experience of the Commune. For example, in a 1908 article entitled “Lessons of the Commune,” Lenin analyzed what he called its mistakes. He explained that, by not expropriating the Bank of France, the Commune stopped half way in the social and economic fight against the capitalists and that this reinforced the bourgeoisie. He also warned the proletariat against romantic illusions and drew all the conclusions from the violence of the Versailles repression: “The second mistake was excessive magnanimity on the part of the proletariat: instead of destroying its enemies it sought to exert moral influence on them; it underestimated the significance of direct military operations in civil war, and instead of launching a resolute offensive against Versailles that would have crowned its victory in Paris, it tarried and gave the Versailles government time to gather the dark forces and prepare for the blood_soaked week of May.” Lenin added, however: “But despite all its mistakes the Commune was the greatest example of the great proletarian movement of the 19th century.”
Lenin reasoned as a revolutionary and searched in the history and the experience of the proletariat for lessons that could help its victory in future battles. In 1917, these analyses helped the Bolsheviks to take power with all the resolution that the Communards had lacked. Knowledge of the events of the Commune, of the fighting between it and the Versailles troops helped to lead the civil war in Russia to victory.
For its 140th anniversary, the Commune is the object of polite commentaries, even from the Social Democratic mayor of Paris. The deceitful friends of the workers, past and present, can praise the Commune because it did not overcome, shedding hypocritical tears over its martyrs and its dead. These people celebrate the workers only when they are defeated. These same people hated the Russian workers of 1917 who, armed with the lessons of the Commune, defeated the bourgeoisie and did not let themselves be massacred.
The hopes and dreams of the Communards, as well as their mistakes and failures, are all part of the heritage of revolutionary communists—a heritage we must be proud of, that we should learn about, understand and pass on, in order to continue the fight against the capitalist order. Every young person who joins the side of the working class and the ranks of the revolutionary movement should keep in mind the courage of well-known figures of the Commune—like Louise Michel, Leo Frankel and Eugene Varlin—but above all that of the thousands of anonymous workers who fought on the barricades for the emancipation of their class. Just as today’s young person in the revolutionary movement should recognize and understand the hatred of the bourgeoisie towards the Commune. Without this knowledge, we will never be victorious.
The best tribute we can pay to the Communards, to the known as well as to the unknown fighters, is to learn about their struggles, to learn about their actions and their mistakes and to continue their fight.
Forty years have passed since the proclamation of the Paris Commune. In accordance with tradition, the French workers paid homage to the memory of the men and women of the revolution of March 18, 1871, by meetings and demonstrations. At the end of May they will again place wreaths on the graves of the Communards who were shot, the victims of the terrible “May Week,” and over their graves they will once more vow to fight untiringly until their ideas have triumphed and the cause they bequeathed has been fully achieved.
Why does the proletariat, not only in France but throughout the entire world, honor the men and women of the Paris Commune as their predecessors? And what is the heritage of the Commune?
The Commune sprang up spontaneously. No one consciously prepared it in an organized way. The unsuccessful war with Germany, the privations suffered during the siege, the unemployment among the proletariat and the ruin among the lower middle classes; the indignation of the masses against the upper classes and against authorities who had displayed utter incompetence, the vague unrest among the working class, which was discontented with its lot and was striving for a different social system; the reactionary composition of the National Assembly, which roused apprehensions as to the fate of the republic—all this and many other factors combined to drive the population of Paris to revolution on March 18, which unexpectedly placed power in the hands of the National Guard, in the hands of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie which had sided with it.
It was an event unprecedented in history. Up to that time power had, as a rule, been in the hands of landowners and capitalists, that is, in the hands of their trusted agents who made up the so_called government. After the revolution of March 18, when M. Thiers’ government had fled from Paris with its troops, its police and its officials, the people became masters of the situation, and power passed into the hands of the proletariat. But in modern society, the proletariat, economically enslaved by capital, cannot dominate politically unless it breaks the chains which fetter it to capital. That is why the movement of the Commune was bound to take on a socialist tinge, i.e., to strive to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie, the rule of capital, and to destroy the very foundations of the contemporary social order.
At first this movement was extremely indefinite and confused. It was joined by patriots who hoped that the Commune would renew the war with the Germans and bring it to a successful conclusion. It enjoyed the support of the small shopkeepers who were threatened with ruin unless there was a postponement of payments on debts and rent (the government refused to grant this postponement, but they obtained it from the Commune). Finally, it enjoyed, at first, the sympathy of bourgeois republicans who feared that the reactionary National Assembly (the “rustics,” the savage landlords) would restore the monarchy. But it was of course the workers (especially the artisans of Paris) who played the principal part in this movement. Active socialist propaganda had been carried on during the last years of the Second Empire among the workers, and many of them even belonged to the First International.
Only the workers remained loyal to the Commune to the end. The bourgeois republicans and the petty bourgeoisie soon broke away from it: the former were frightened off by the revolutionary_socialist, proletarian character of the movement; the latter broke away when they saw that it was doomed to inevitable defeat. Only the French proletarians supported their government fearlessly and untiringly, they alone fought and died for it—that is to say, for the cause of the emancipation of the working class, for a better future for all toilers.
Deserted by its former allies and left without support, the Commune was doomed to defeat. The entire bourgeoisie of France, all the landlords, stockbrokers, factory owners, all the robbers, great and small, all the exploiters joined forces against it. This bourgeois coalition, supported by Bismarck (who released a hundred thousand French prisoners of war to help crush revolutionary Paris), succeeded in rousing the ignorant peasants and the petty bourgeoisie of the provinces against the proletariat of Paris, and forming a ring of steel around half of Paris (the other half was besieged by the German army). In some of the larger cities in France (Marseilles, Lyons, Saint Étienne, Dijon, etc.) the workers also attempted to seize power, to proclaim the Commune and come to the help of Paris; but these attempts were short_lived. Paris, which had first raised the banner of proletarian revolt, was left to its own resources and doomed to certain destruction.
Two conditions, at least, are necessary for a victorious social revolution—highly developed productive forces and a proletariat adequately prepared for it. But in 1871 both of these conditions were lacking. French capitalism was still poorly developed, and France was at that time mainly a petty_bourgeois country (artisans, peasants, shopkeepers, etc). On the other hand, there was no workers’ party; the working class had not gone through a long school of struggle and was unprepared, and for the most part did not even clearly visualize its tasks and the methods of fulfilling them. There was no serious political organization of the proletariat, nor were there strong trade unions and co_operative societies....
But the chief thing which the Commune lacked was time—an opportunity to take stock of the situation and to embark upon the fulfilment of its program. It had scarcely had time to start work, when the government entrenched in Versailles and supported by the entire bourgeoisie began hostilities against Paris. The Commune had to concentrate primarily on self_defense. Right up to the very end, May 21_28, it had no time to think seriously of anything else.
However, in spite of these unfavorable conditions, in spite of its brief existence, the Commune managed to promulgate a few measures which sufficiently characterize its real significance and aims. The Commune did away with the standing army, that blind weapon in the hands of the ruling classes, and armed the whole people. It proclaimed the separation of church and state, abolished state payments to religious bodies (i.e., state salaries for priests), made education public and purely secular, and in this way struck a severe blow at the gendarmes in cassocks. In the purely social sphere the Commune accomplished very little, but this little nevertheless clearly reveals its character as a popular, workers’ government. Night_work in bakeries was forbidden; the system of fines, which represented legalized robbery of the workers, was abolished. Finally, there was the famous decree that all factories and workshops abandoned or shut down by their owners were to be turned over to associations of workers that were to resume production. And, as if to emphasize its character as a truly democratic, proletarian government, the Commune decreed that the salaries of all administrative and government officials, irrespective of rank, should not exceed the normal wages of a worker, and in no case amount to more than 6,000 francs a year (less than 200 rubles a month).
All these measures showed clearly enough that the Commune was a deadly menace to the old world founded on the enslavement and exploitation of the people. That was why bourgeois society could not feel at ease so long as the Red Flag of the proletariat waved over the Paris town hall. And when the organized forces of the government finally succeeded in gaining the upper hand over the poorly organized forces of the revolution, the Bonapartist generals, who had been beaten by the Germans and who showed courage only in fighting their defeated countrymen, organized such a slaughter as Paris had never known. About 30,000 Parisians were shot down by the bestial soldiery, and about 45,000 were arrested, many of whom were afterwards executed, while thousands were transported or exiled. In all, Paris lost about 100,000 of its best people, including some of the finest workers in all trades.
The bourgeoisie were satisfied. “Now we have finished with socialism for a long time,” said their leader, the bloodthirsty dwarf, Thiers, after he and his generals had drowned the proletariat of Paris in blood. But these bourgeois crows croaked in vain. Less than six years after the suppression of the Commune, when many of its champions were still pining in prison or in exile, a new working_class movement arose in France. A new socialist generation, enriched by the experience of their predecessors and no whit discouraged by their defeat, picked up the flag which had fallen from the hands of the fighters in the cause of the Commune and bore it boldly and confidently forward. Their battle_cry was: “Long live the social revolution! Long live the Commune!” And in another few years, the new workers’ party and the agitational work launched by it throughout the country compelled the ruling classes to release Communards who were still kept in prison by the government.
The memory of the fighters of the Commune is honored not only by the workers of France but by the proletariat of the whole world. For the Commune fought, not for some local or narrow national aim, but for the emancipation of all toiling humanity, of all the downtrodden and oppressed. As a foremost fighter for the social revolution, the Commune has won sympathy wherever there is a proletariat suffering and engaged in struggle. The epic of its life and death, the sight of a workers’ government which seized the capital of the world and held it for over two months, the spectacle of the heroic struggle of the proletariat and the torments it underwent after its defeat—all this raised the spirit of millions of workers, aroused their hopes and enlisted their sympathy for the cause of socialism. The thunder of the cannon in Paris awakened the most backward sections of the proletariat from their deep slumber, and everywhere gave impetus to the growth of revolutionary socialist propaganda. That is why the cause of the Commune is not dead. It lives to the present day in every one of us.
The cause of the Commune is the cause of the social revolution, the cause of the complete political and economic emancipation of the toilers. It is the cause of the proletariat of the whole world. And in this sense it is immortal.