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﻿<title﻿>﻿New Socialist Magazine, Lessons of the Paris Commune of 1871 - Article﻿</title>﻿

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﻿<b﻿>﻿Lessons of the Paris Commune of 1871

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by Tom Keefer﻿<br﻿>﻿

﻿<i﻿>﻿New Socialist Magazine, May - June 1996﻿</i>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿

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﻿<font﻿ ﻿size="1"﻿>﻿The Paris Commune of 1871 was a grassroots popular government created during a period of revolutionary upheaval. It has often been described as the first workers' government. Tom Keefer looks at the story of those memorable events and what they teach us about the nature of a genuine workers' state.﻿</font>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿


During the days between March 28 and May 28, 1871, the working class ruled Paris, France. Red flags flew from the offices of municipal government buildings and a new government and political administration elected through universal male suffrage -- known to history as the Paris Commune -- was proclaimed. The standing army and police were dissolved and workshops and factories came under the control of their workers. 

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The revolutionary majority of the Commune issued a proclamation demanding that "... the working class must obtain political power. There must be an end to governmental oligarchy and industrial feudalism. A republic must be so organized that in tendering to the workers ownership of the tools of production ... [it] will secure political freedom through social equality". 

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As in the vast majority of modern revolutions, the uprising which created the Paris Commune grew out of crises brought on by war. The expansionist policies of emperor Louis Bonaparte led to the disastrous Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and culminated in the decisive defeat of the French forces at the battle of Sedan. The resulting abdication of the emperor led to the formation of a provisional "government of national defense", established in Paris and the founding of the 'Third Republic'. Although the provisional government was only able to hold Paris for four months, it was forced to arm its populace to keep the Prussians from launching an all out attack on the city. As a result the majority of the Parisian working class was integrated into the National Guard which rapidly expanded to include 384,000 men in a total of 254 neighborhood battalions. Adding to the distress of the Third Republic, in the midst of the hardships caused by the siege, many of these battalions elected radical working class leaders as their officers. 

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The Commune came into being as a result of the attempt by the republican government of Adolphe Thiers to seize the artillery of the National Guards on Saturday March 18. To the dismay of Thiers, his soldiers refused to fire on the National Guard who refused to turn in their weapons, and in some cases his troops turned their guns upon their own commanders and shot their own officers. A spontaneous insurrection broke out triggered by these events, and Thiers and his government was forced to flee from Paris as the Central Committee of the National Guard marched on and occupied the Hotel de Ville, the traditional seat of the Parisian government. 

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Yet despite their seizure of power, the main concern of the Parisian insurgents was to "legalize" their insurrection and instead of following up on the routed government forces, they waited for elections on the 26 of March to elect a new municipal government which was constituted as the Paris Commune and officially proclaimed on March 28, 1871. 

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The radicals and revolutionary elements of the movement (most of whom were associated with the Paris Federation of Trade Unions and the local sections of the International Workingmen's Association) met with other radical leaders prior to the elections and created 'vigilance' committees in each arrondissement of Paris. The program of these committees was to "demand and seek to achieve by every means the abolition of the privileges of the bourgeoisie, its elimination as a ruling caste, and the advent of workers to political power." In the elections to the Commune, the leaders of these committees found themselves the majority of the new government and consequently passed decrees in the interests of the Parisian workers. 

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The Commune's nature differed from those of parliamentary bodies in that it was comprised executive and legislative body at the same time. The Commune began its rule by disbanding the standing army and substituting for itthe armed people. Churches had their property confiscated and all educational institutions were opened to the general public free of charge. Like all of the Commune's public servants, Judges and Magistrates received no more than the average workers wage and were responsible to the arrondissement from which they were elected. The new government was extremely inexpensive to run as it eliminated the modern state's two major expenditures, the standing army and government bureaucracy. 

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Further decrees were passed which abolished night work in bakeries; returned all articles in the National Pawnshops to their owners; continued the moratorium on payment of rent and bills; created cooperative workshops for unemployed women workers and transferred abandoned factories and workshops to cooperative operation by their work force. No part of the government, whether military, economical, political or legislative, was left independent of the will of the voting population. Various popular clubs, the Paris sections of the International, and Trade Unions functioned as means by which the populace exerted its will on the Commune. For the first time a government freely elected by its (male) population in a major European country composed in the main of workers, substituted itself for the entire mechanisms of the former state. Karl Marx described the depth of the changes wrought by the Commune in his work The Civil War in France : 

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﻿<blockquote﻿>﻿...No longer was Paris the rendezvous of British landlords, Irish absentees, American ex-slave holders and shoddy men, Russian ex-serf owners... No more corpses at the morgues, no nocturnal burglaries, and scarcely any robberies; in fact for the first time since the days of February 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, and that without police of any kind. 

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Despite the changes instituted by the Commune, it was characterized by a complete lack of political homogeneity and preparedness to deal with the historic situation in which it found itself. Although the Commune government elected on March 26 was based solidly along radical socialist lines, it was a government which had no plan or program to consolidate the demands of the French working class. Attempts to set up communes at Lyon and Marseilles were savagely put down by Thiers and his 'forces of order', while the Commune focused on establishing their legality in Paris. 

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The Commune also failed to seize the assets of and to nationalize the Bank of France and repeatedly released the secret agents and spies it captured. While Thiers executed all captured communards by the hundreds the Commune refused to shoot its handful of hostages until the final days of the siege. 

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The Commune was eventually put down by the armed forces of Thiers who struck a deal with the Prussian army in which they promised to "pacify" Paris in return for the return of captured French soldiers and the speedy payment of "war reparations" to the Prussians. Thiers's troops encircled Paris, tacitly supported by the Prus﻿sians, and tried to bombard Paris into submission through the use of incendiary shells. This assault culminated in a bloody week of street fighting from May 21-28 resulting in the national government's forces slaughtering over 20,000 communards. 

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Prisoners taken by the Versailles government were executed en masse by machine gun fire, covered in quick lime and then buried in mass graves. A further 40,000 communards were arrested and then either driven into exile, executed or imprisoned as Thiers re-established 'order'. In the wake of his triumph, reactionary legislation was implemented and, coupled with a continued physical elimination of oppositional forces, French democracy was "bled dry for a generation". 

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Karl Marx, the founder of revolutionary socialism, remains an important political thinker for his theorizing on the structure of a non-capitalist state. Marx believed that as the productive forces of capitalism developed they would also create their own "gravedigger" -- the proletariat, or working class. When the inherent contradictions within capitalism prompted a major economic crisis, the working class would seize power and establish socialism, as a transition into a communist society from which each would contribute to the best of their ability and would recieve according to their need. Marx had no illusions in the benevolence of the capitalist state, as he consistently pointed out that the bourgeois state functions as the 'executive of capital', thus requiring that the working class create its own form of state if it is to free itself. 

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The impact of the Commune led Marx to make the only addition that he thought necessary to the Communist Manifesto, a change based on the revolutionary experience of the Commune. This addition made in the last preface of the German edition is dated the 24th of June, 1872 and summarizes Marx's impressions of the Commune: "One thing especially was proved by the commune... 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.'" Marx viewed the importance of the Commune as lying in the manner in which it broke up the old state and created a new workers' state which discouraged careerism and corruption and was run by and for the interests of the working class. 

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Vladimir Lenin is perhaps the most well known revolutionary socialist after Marx. Lenin's views on the Commune and the revolutionary state bear special meaning to his life's work as he played a leading role in the founding the USSR the world's second socialist state (although also a short-lived one). In The State and Revolution , Lenin put forward a clarification of Marx's thought on the state and applied it to the Russian situation. Lenin recognized the "worker's councils" or Soviets as the modern form of the commune adapted to the Russian situation. 

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During the unfolding revolution in Russia in 1917, Lenin sought to learn from the success and failure of the Communards. He argued that in the establishment of a socialist state in Russia, "Every citizen... must act as a judge and participate in the government of the country, and what is most important to us is to enlist all the toilers to a man in the government of the state. That is a tremendously difficult task, but socialism cannot be introduced by a minority, by a party". Lenin explicitly argued against an elitist, bureaucratic approach to government and for a form of government virtually identical to that of the Commune. Lenin maintained that "the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 . . . continued the work of the Commune and confirmed the historic analysis . . . of Marx". 

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The result of the 1871 Commune of Paris and it's relevance to two of the world's greatest socialist thinkers lies in its attempt at constructing a new social order. The fact that a working class government ruled the capital of an advanced western country and did so effectively and efficiently energized the imaginations of those who later followed in the socialist tradition. The Commune existed as a popular, responsible government which resolved problems of government bureaucracy, debt and inflexibility -- problems which continue to plague our society today. The heroism, self sacrifice and far reaching changes implemented by this first workers government gave an undeniable justification to the field of socialist analysis and a verification of the possibilities of revolution. 

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