18 March 2021 marks the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune. We reprint an edited article from FRFI 18 (April 1982) written for an earlier anniversary. What makes the Paris Commune so important? First, it was the first successful working class insurrection in history. Second, it was the working class which defined the key characteristics of the state it established; there had been no blueprint or plan to follow. Third – crucially – it had Marx to document its colossal achievements despite the brevity of its existence. In The Civil War in France, Marx ensured that the lessons of the Commune were recorded so that a later generation could build on its achievements. It fell to Lenin in The State and Revolution to retrieve those lessons for the Russian Revolution. Today, the Commune continues to live through the forms of democracy assumed by Cuban socialism.
On 18 March 1871 the Paris Commune was proclaimed. For two months the Parisian working class ruled themselves in the first organised attempt at workers’ power. Ever since then the Commune has been a model of revolutionary heroism rich in lessons for future generations.
The chauvinism and expansionism of the French regime had caused a war with Prussia. Prussia was winning and advancing into France, and the Paris ‘deputies’ (MPs) formed a ‘Government of National Defence’. The working class stood firmly behind them, in full force since the great majority of the men were in the National Guard and armed to defend their city.
Four months later, starving, Paris surrendered, or rather the bourgeois politicians did. But the National Guard did not hand over its guns, and continued to assert its authority over most of Paris. The politicians, safely re-assembled in Versailles, tried to disarm the National Guard and steal the guns that the Parisian workers had paid for themselves. As long as the working class was armed, the bourgeoisie could not feel safe. The whole working class mobilised and civil war was declared between Paris and the French government. That is how the Commune came to be elected: to run the affairs of Parisians themselves.
The workers took several decisions of crucial importance for self-government. Firstly they abolished the army as it existed, and made the National Guard the only armed force: ie an army of all citizens capable of carrying arms. Then they decided no-one would earn more than a set wage. The most important officials in the Commune would receive a salary no higher than any other worker.
Every official in the administration, including judges and magistrates, would become the servants of society instead of the masters. The State would be the property of the working class, not the tool to enslave it. No longer could someone claiming to serve the people rise up on their backs and enjoy the power and wealth of a State functionary. All officials would be truly responsible to the people who had elected them. As Karl Marx put it:
‘Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people… ’
The Commune also acted to eradicate Church repression, by removing its influence over schools. Religion was to be a matter of private conscience, no longer forced down the throats of children. Priests were no longer paid from taxes either – their parishioners would support them.
The Commune also used its political power to try to reorganise industry – planning to open all factories which had closed, to be run by the workers themselves in cooperative societies. In one decree after another the Commune acted directly in the interests of the working class: abolishing night work for bakers, closing down pawnshops, shutting corrupt employment offices, banning employers’ fining workers out of their wages. It made some deeply political gestures, like burning the guillotine, and demolishing the Victory Column that Napoleon had made from captured guns. To the Communards this was a symbol of chauvinism: for them ‘the flag of the Commune is the flag of the World Republic’.
When the bourgeois army finally crushed the Commune it massacred thousands of these heroic men, women and children, branding them as Red extremists, murderers, and traitors. But if the Commune had a fault it was in being too ‘reasonable’. While the bourgeois army shot dead captured Communards, the workers did not even imprison their hostages. While in full command of Paris they did not touch the Bank. Many of their plans they could not accomplish in their besieged city, fighting to the death against the bourgeois army. But they showed the possibilities for the working class movement of the future. They had to work out their needs as they went along but some of their lessons never have to be learned again. The revolutionary movement knows from the Communards’ experience that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes’. (Marx)
The left of the Labour Party with its commitment to parliamentary politics claim the State can be reformed in the interests of the working class. They try to brand us as ‘extremists’ and ‘ultra-leftists’ but forget that Engels himself drew this lesson from the Paris Commune:
‘The state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the victorious proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at once as much as possible until such time as a generation reared in new, free social conditions is able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap heap.’
No ‘socialist’ government will act in the interests of the working class as long as the capitalist state has not been overthrown.
Let us remember our heritage this month and salute the martyrs of the Commune. As Engels wrote on the 20th anniversary of the Commune: ‘That was the dictatorship of the proletariat.’
Sheila Marston
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 280 February/March 2021
Further reading Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, V I Lenin, The State and Revolution, Lissagary, History of the Paris Commune
