150TH ANNIVERSARY COMMEMORATION
Paris Commune was first workers government in history
https://themilitant.com/2021/04/10/paris-commune-was-first-workers-government-in-history/
April 19, 2021
Meeting of elected representatives of Paris Commune, which lasted for 72
days in 1871. Karl Marx called the Commune “the glorious harbinger of a
new society,” where “the proletariat for the first time held political
power.” It showed the future, not just for France, but for working
people worldwide.
Meeting of elected representatives of Paris Commune, which lasted for 72
days in 1871. Karl Marx called the Commune “the glorious harbinger of a
new society,” where “the proletariat for the first time held political
power.” It showed the future, not just for France, but for working
people worldwide.
This week’s special feature commemorates the 150th anniversary of the
Paris Commune, the world’s first working-class government. It lasted
from March 18 to May 28, 1871, before its overthrow in a bloody
counterrevolution. The excerpts below are from an article, “Communism
and the Fight for a Popular Revolutionary Government: 1848 to Today,” by
Mary-Alice Waters, in New International no. 3. Waters is a leader of the
Socialist Workers Party and an editor of New International, a journal of
Marxist politics and theory. Copyright © 1984 by New International.
Reprinted by permission.
BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
The revolutionary upsurge of 1871 that led to the Paris Commune was
precipitated by the defeat of the French armies in the Franco-Prussian
War. “Storming heaven,” as [Karl] Marx put it, the working people of
Paris seized power, drove the government of the French bourgeoisie out
of the city, and held the advancing Prussian army at bay.
“The political rule of the producers” was established, said Marx. “The
proletariat for the first time held political power.” The Paris Commune,
“the glorious harbinger of a new society,” showed the way forward for
all humanity. …
What was Marx’s conclusion? The secret of the Commune, as he put it in
The Civil War in France, was that “it was essentially a working-class
government.”
By this Marx did not mean that the Commune was a minority government of
Paris, a city that still had only a small industrial work force. Marx
said that the Commune was a “government of the people by the people,” a
government of the producers. It was a government that led the nation.
The economic and social trajectory of this revolutionary dictatorship
was clear. The Commune, Marx said, was “the political form at last
discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.”
It was a tool for organizing and leading the transition from the society
it inherited to a new order. The Commune, he emphasized, was “a lever
for uprooting the economical foundations upon which rests the existence
of classes, and therefore of class-rule.” That was not a task to be
accomplished overnight. The Commune, however, showed the political form
that would enable the exploited producers to organize to wrest from the
exploiters, by degrees, the productive property rightfully theirs.
Marx carefully studied the actions of this first government of the
producers, including those that pointed to its chief weaknesses.
“The first decree of the Commune,” Marx noted, “was the suppression of
the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people.”
With that act — the precondition for a real people’s revolution — a new
government began to function, a revolutionary dictatorship whose
legitimacy was based on the armed might of the popular majority. …
The armed people inside Paris, organized and led by the Central
Committee of the National Guard, began to assume all public functions.
Through the institutions of the newly elected municipal government, the
Paris Commune, the masses of working people were drawn into the tasks of
deciding all questions affecting their daily lives — food distribution,
education, health, public order and defense — and then implementing
these decisions.
The Paris Commune was “no longer a state in the proper sense of the
word,” [Frederick] Engels wrote in 1875. It was no longer an instrument
for suppressing the majority, which had been the function of the state
throughout all prior history. In place of a special coercive force, the
armed population itself was organized through the Commune government and
became the guarantor of popular majority rule. …
The Paris Commune showed for the first time how a qualitatively new kind
of political power begins to emerge as soon as the minority — the old
ruling classes — no longer exercise a dictatorship suppressing the
majority — the exploited classes.
It was still necessary, however, to suppress the armed resistance of the
minority — the French bourgeoisie and landed property owners. Most of
these exploiters fled Paris for nearby Versailles when the Commune took
power. They continued to collaborate with the Prussian army, which was
at the gates of Paris. As always, the old ruling classes, though shocked
and stunned by the revolutionary victory of the people, were determined
to restore their rule at any price.
It was in part what Marx called the “too great decency” of the Paris
working people, their reluctance to use decisive military force against
their class enemies, that led to the Commune’s early defeat after
seventy-two days of tumultuous existence. The counterrevolutionary
forces showed no such decency. They carried out one of the bloodiest
slaughters ever inflicted on a city. The victorious forces of reaction
ruthlessly murdered some 20,000 men, women, and children. …
While Marx and Engels considered the heroic uprising of the Parisian
workers to have been the greatest revolutionary action by any section of
the international proletariat up until that time, they were by no means
uncritical of the Commune’s leadership or its policies. The Commune
reinforced every lesson previously drawn concerning the need for an
organized vanguard party of the proletariat, based on a scientific — not
a utopian, petty-bourgeois — program. …
It is worth noting that among the many descriptions used by Marx to
capture various aspects of the Paris Commune’s significance, he nowhere
described it as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Engels did describe
it in these terms on one occasion twenty years later — in the final
sentences of his introduction to the 1891 edition of The Civil War in
France. He derisively pointed to the hypocrisy and spinelessness of
those on the right wing of the German Social Democratic Party who
feigned reverence for the Commune, but were “filled with wholesome
terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good,
gentlemen,” Engels rebuked them, “do you want to know what this
dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune.”
As history has demonstrated, however, the revolutionary dictatorship
established by the Commune was, more accurately, a transitional,
revolutionary government of the producers — the first anticipation of
what we today call a workers and farmers government. As such, it
illuminated, briefly but brilliantly, the future not just for France and
Europe, but for the world.
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Carl Sagan “It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance
between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all
hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great
openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some
tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes,
whichever one it is, you’re in deep trouble. If you are only skeptical,
then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new.
You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the
world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now
and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on
the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being
skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and
either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and
progress. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility
and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot
distinguish the useful as from the worthless ones.” ― Carl Sagan
