The lessons of a glorious page in the labor movement
Lenin and Trotsky had no doubts and repeated at all times: the victory of October 1917 was possible also thanks to the detailed study the Bolsheviks did on the Paris Commune of 1871[1]. On the other hand, French socialism and its history of revolutions (from 1789 to 1793, from the 1830s to June 1848) was one of the three sources of Marx and Engels’ own elaboration (along with the English economy and German philosophy, that is, David Ricardo, Hegel and Feuerbach).
So, during this spring of 2011, in face of the magnificent spectacle of the Arab revolts, in face of the greatest revolutionary movement of the last two centuries, (never in history we had been offered a dozen of revolutions developed in the same week), to study the Commune over again, its achievements and its mistakes is not a rhetorical exercise on the celebrations calendar, it is not an academic study, but a work which seeks to build up the victory of contemporary revolutions.
The night of the cannons
The night between 17 and 18 of March 1871, after being driven back to Belleville [district of Paris], the soldiers of the republican government of Thiers tried to retake the 271 cannons and 146 machine guns that the National Guard had installed on the Montmartre hill, which dominates Paris.
But the proletariat, led by the Women’s Union (including teacher Louise Michel’s committee), blocked the street and invited the troops to disobey the orders and to revolt against their chief, General Lecomte. It is the beginning of the insurrection that, under the direction of the Central Committee of the National Guard, takes up all hotspots of the city and takes hold of the Hôtel de Ville, the seat of government. The bourgeois government flees from the capital and takes refuge in nearby Versailles.
The first structure of “Soviet” type in history
The National Guard was an old institution of the 1789-1794 revolution. But, if during the first French Revolution it was essentially an instrument of the bourgeoisie, or if in the revolution of 1848 it had been an instrument of the bourgeois counter-revolution against the first workers’ uprising (June), in 1871 it happened to be something else.
After the defeat of Napoleon III in the war against the Prussians[2] in 1870, which opened the door to a new Republic led by a bourgeois government in 1871, the National Guard was reconstructed on new foundations as a workers’ militia. Three hundred thousand armed workers in Paris were, as Marx wrote in those days, the main obstacle that stood before the bourgeoisie itself; an obstacle to the government’s attempt to force workers to pay for the economic crisis and war debts. Therefore, Thiers had first tried to tear it apart, by reducing and afterwards abolishing the guardsmen “pay” and then he tried to disarm it.
This new National Guard, composed of industrial workers and craftsmen, was endowed with its own structure, and with its appropriate bodies[3]. The workers were then a relatively developed class with a high degree of concentration in Paris: the shipyards employed 70,000 workers; there were other large concentrations in Govin, a locomotive manufacturer, in the Louvre weapons factory, etc… And the National Guard had an organization that anticipated somehow the workers and soldiers councils (the Soviets) who were born in Russia in the first revolution of 1905 and again in February 1917.
A Two-month government of the workers
The insurrection and the seizure of the government palace and of Paris, the Army division and its dissolution as the structure of the capitalist rule, that is, the revolutionary rupture of the bourgeois state, are the facts that resulted in the birth of the first workers’ government in history, a government that will last only two months.
Two months that transformed the society basis. There were a hundred of daily newspapers of the communards. There were endless daily meetings to organize the new power: as the theaters were not enough, the priests and their crosses were cast out of the churches and every location turned to be an instrument for the workers’ power administration.
After few days of taking power and after the bourgeois representatives flee Paris for Versailles (representatives elected by the new Republic), the Central Committee of the National Guard calls new elections in order to elect, no longer a parliament, but just a Commune (about ninety members) , that would assume the executive, legislative and judiciary functions.
The workers’ government will immediately take a series of measures: request and reorganization of factories under workers’ control, requisition of empty houses and their relocation for workers, free medical care (and abortion rights for women), comprehensive school reform (not another tool of the bourgeoisie), expropriation of the Catholic Church’s properties…
These measures were only partly accomplished. It lacked time; it lacked a coherent and unambiguous government direction. Above all, it was immediately necessary to defend the new power from French and Prussian bourgeoisies’ assault who were enemies in the war that had recently ended but now had rediscovered a full unity of intent in order to crush the workers’ revolution, surrounding Paris with weapons and invading it to accomplish an unprecedented massacre (more than one hundred thousand victims of summary executions, and processes persecutions implemented). On May 28, 1871, the Thiers government troops (reconstructed with Bismarck’s help) overthrew the last barricade and resumed Paris.
Mistakes, limitations and contradictions of the Commune
Although Marx and Engels immediately defined the Commune as the biggest event of the labor movement, working tirelessly to support the struggle development against the bourgeoisie, they did not cease to indicate its mistakes and limitations, in an attempt (during those two months) to suggest decisive corrections to it, and in order to (after the fall of the Commune) to propagate the teachings of that defeat, even the negative ones, to pursue them and advance to achieve new and longer lasting victories.
In dozens of letters written in those days and in each subsequent text, the two main leaders of the communist revolutionary movement indicated, in particular, some points that contributed to the failure of that grand experiment. Here, for reasons of space, we will briefly indicate the Commune negative lessons which Marx pointed out, summarized in two points.
First: the economic measures effectively implemented by the Commune (and in this case, thanks in part to Proudhon’s ideas, that is, anarchist and reformist ones) were insufficient. In particular, though theorizing and partly practicing the expropriation of bourgeois ownership of the means of production, the Commune prostrated fully before the National Bank, asking Baron Rothschild, the bank’s owner, to open up a credit account for them instead of seizing it.
Second: the political-military measures were insufficient, late and confusing. Rather than attacking the government that fled to Versailles, before it had time to reorganize and surround Paris, the Commune waited and then delayed the organization of the armed defense of the capital, entrusting it in many cases to unable officers and exceeded in generosity against opponents who were arming themselves (the “red terror” against the revolution enemies was, as Engels points out, more announced than practiced, or practiced with “excessive friendliness”).
Instead of prioritizing the extension of the revolution to other major French cities, the only effective way to break through the political isolation, the Commune closed in on itself and the Central Committee of the National Guard “lost time” (Marx’s phrase , taken by Trotsky) willing to assign the power they had conquered to an elected structure. Thus they called on an election for the Commune (formally through “universal suffrage”, but attended by, in fact, only workers, since the bourgeoisie were largely fleeing or were constrained to be silent.)
A “starting point of historical importance”
Even with contradictions, limitations and errors in their subjective intentions and in their general meanings, recalls Marx, the Commune was the first workers’ government in history, the first one to rule in favor of workers. Marx wrote about it shortly before the defeat, in a letter to Kugelmann: “Whatever the immediate outcome may be, a new point of departure of worldwide importance has been gained.” [4]
What did Marx mean? In particular, the fact that the Commune had taught forever, in practice (and it is worth more than a thousand programs and texts), that workers simply cannot “conquer” the bourgeois State and “convert it” to their interests. That the State, its institutions, its parliament (still the most democratic) and their armed bodies must be “smashed”. An impossible work of peaceful reform is not enough, the revolutionary rupture is required, i.e., the insurgency and civil war, whose duration and degree of intensity and violence depend not on a choice of the revolutionaries, but on the degree of resistance that the ruling classes are able to counteract in order to defend their ownership of the means of production and exchange.
It is, then, necessary to substitute for the bourgeois State, overthrown by the revolution, with a different State, based on the workers’ organs of struggle, a workers’ State. The bourgeois dictatorship (of a tiny minority over the majority) needs to be replaced by the proletariat dictatorship (which is the society’s vast majority). In other words, a different centrally planned economy based on the requirements of the majority, which cannot be based on the false and formal bourgeois democracy and its institutions: we need another State, another democracy.
The workers of the Commune, with their heroic (and unfortunately failed) attempt indicated, Marx concluded, in practice, for the first time in history, “the way, finally found” of the proletarian domination.
They had built, for the first time, a workers’ government, because for the first time they had completely destroyed the bourgeois government, rejecting the policy of class collaboration that so far had led the workers’ representatives to occupy posts in the bourgeoisie government (for example, in France in February 1848 when Louis Blanc became a member of the provisional government) and thus subordinating the workers’ interests to bourgeois interests, sacrificing the class struggle to the alleged (and nonexistent) “common interests” between classes.
It was really a “theoretical” achievement (forcefully put in practice) of fundamental importance. It is no coincidence that every time the labor movement (guided by the traitor leadership) abandoned this “conquest” and renounced the class independence in the conflicts with the bourgeoisie and its governments, ended up in a stalemate. It is no coincidence that the main point of any reformist policy – that is, a counter-revolutionary policy – always consisted of leading the workers to believe in the collaboration with the enemy.
All the betrayal policies wrought by social democracy in the early 20th century led later to the support of governments involved in the First World War’s massacre; the whole policy of the so-called “popular fronts” run by Stalinism in the thirties, which supported the direct participation in bourgeois governments; the entire policy of social democracy in the following decades, up to the caricatured version represented by the contemporary reformist governance; all the defeats that reformism has imposed on the labor movement lay on the denial of “the way, finally found” by the workers of Paris.
That’s why not only the bourgeoisie but also the reformers of all ages (and the anarchists play the same role) do their best in order to deny or at least to fake that page of history. That is why that page of history belongs only to the revolutionaries.
Without a Communist Party no revolution can succeed and evolve
Our interpretation of the Commune and its teachings, even if necessarily schematic, would be incomplete if we did not talk anything about the main cause (in Marx, Lenin and Trotsky’s opinions) of its defeat. All the great revolutionary leaders who have studied the Commune agree that it failed due to a lack of direction, due to a lack of a consistently Marxist party. No revolution in history occurred “spontaneously” (“spontaneous generation” does not exist either in nature or in politics). There has always been a leadership: the qualities of these leaders determine the possibilities of a Revolutionary triumph.
In fact, all trends of the Left were present in the Commune (neo-Jacobins, Proudhonists, Bakuninists ,anarchists, Blanquists) and, although a majority of leaders were linked to the International Workers Association (the First International), only a few were close to the positions of the International, that is, the positions of Marx and Engels (the main texts of Marx, from the first volume of “The Capital”, published in 1867, were largely unknown in France, even the Communards’ leaders did not know them) .
In sum, there was no shortage of organizations linked to the several trends of the labor movement. There was even an embryonic party (the Central Committee of Twenty Districts, a vanguard organization, based on a program of class opposition to the bourgeoisie, born in September 1870), but the few Marxists present in different organizations and sometimes (rarely) part of the direction of the Commune, did not yet have a real party[5].
This explains the reasons of the oscillations, the hesitations, the delays and the huge errors in running the Commune. It also explains why Marx, a few weeks before the insurrection in Paris, thought it was needed time in the new conjuncture of the classes struggle (precipitated by the bourgeois attack to disarm the National Guard) to allow the revolutionary workers to build the communist party that was missing[6].
It was the failure of the Commune itself the main element that led to the crisis and, then, to the decision to dissolve the First International (based on a “naive conjunction of all factions” in the words of Engels) to give rise to an International and to “fully Marxist” parties.[7]
As Trotsky concluded, it was precisely the presence of a “fully Marxist” party in Russia (the Bolsheviks) that allowed the Petrograd Commune of 1917 not to be massacred like that of Paris and allowed a non-ephemeral (unfortunately also destroyed by the successive work of Stalinism) and effective dictatorship of the proletariat[8].
This is the main lesson left for us by the workers who, 140 years ago, gave their lives for the first workers’ government in history: the revolutions that are now shaking North Africa and Middle East, and the revolutions that tomorrow may ignite Europe and Western countries, will be able to impose themselves and evolve towards socialism only if, in the heat of struggle, they understand how to build those consistently Marxist parties (i.e., today, Trotskyist) and that consistently communist International (that is, today, the Fourth International), which are indispensable tools to overthrow capitalist domination and win.
[1] A large part of State and Revolution, the book Lenin wrote on the eve of the October Revolution, and all the main texts (e.g., the “April Theses”) with which the Bolshevik leader “rearmed” the party programmatically in order to guide it to victory, are full of references to the Commune of 1871.
[2] Prussian, or of Prussia region of Germany which, under the leadership of Bismarck, led the process of national unification of Germany.
[3] In late February 1871, an assembly of two thousand delegates of the National Guard battalions approves the constitution as a republican federation. The first point of the program is the suppression of the standing army and its replacement with the armed working class.
[4] Letter from Marx to Kugelmann, April 17, 1871 (K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, p. 264)
[5] There was a direct representative in Paris of the First International, sent by Marx: Serrailier. Besides him, Marx could count, in Paris, only on other officer: a worker of Hungarian origin, Leo Frankel. There were still some isolated Marxists, for example, the young Elisabeth Dmitrief, a militant from Russia, encouraged by Marx to go to Paris in March 1871, who became leader of the Women’s Union. We know that Marx also had correspondence with Eugene Varlin (the most interesting figure in the Commune) and that he wrote several letters to Varlin, Serrailier and Frankel (mostly lost).
[6] Marx, “Let them calmly and resolutely improve the opportunities of republican liberty, for the work of their own class organization. It will gift them with fresh herculean powers for the regeneration of France, and our common task – the emancipation of labor” in the second address to the General Council of the International (September 9, 1870); The Civil War in France, http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/index.htm
[7] Engels, “I believe that the next International – after Marx’s writings have produced their effect for some years- will be directly communist and will proclaim precisely our principles.” Letter to A. Sorge, September 12, 1874, K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, p. 289.
[8] In many texts of the decade of 1930, Trotsky updates the classic analysis of Marx and Lenin on the Commune and comments on how the Commune was not an effective dictatorship of the proletariat, but only one embryo: precisely because, even if there had been an embryo of a soviet (the Central Committee of the National Guard), it was missing a vanguard Marxist party which, confronting with the reformist trends (as the Bolsheviks did in 1917 against the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries) and destroying them politically, could gain the workers’ struggle bodies for a coherent program aimed at the communist dictatorship of the proletariat.
