Glory to the Paris Commune!

March 18 of this year is the 152nd anniversary of the Paris Commune’s foundation. This was the first proletarian dictatorship ever; it had democracy for the working people while it suppressed capitalists, making it the opposite of all the bourgeois dictatorships of its time and ours. It showed the working people of the world that another world was possible. The experiment proved the importance of violence and force in revolution, the need to destroy the bourgeois state, and the inevitability of the dictatorship of the proletariat in a proletarian revolution.

In Chapter Five of The Civil War in France, Marx writes:

The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature—organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labor—originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle class [bourgeois] society as a mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism. Still, its development remained clogged by all manner of medieval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies, and provincial constitutions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the 18th century swept away all these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last hindrances to the superstructure of the modern state edifice raised under the First Empire, itself the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France. …

The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.

Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman’s wage. The vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the state was laid into the hands of the Commune. …If the Commune was thus the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society, and therefore the truly national government, it was, at the same time, as a working men’s government, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labor, emphatically international. Within sight of that Prussian army that had annexed to Germany two French provinces, the Commune annexed to France the working people all over the world. [Source]

The Paris Commune’s proletarian dictatorship started to build itself up as the masses smashed the bourgeois state. The proletarian state paid people according to work and did away with exploitation and privileges that come from it. The working class had true democracy for the first time, and they worked on having unity with this democracy. Lenin explained the significance of the Paris Commune in Chapter Three of The State and Revolution:

It is well known that in the autumn of 1870, a few months before the Commune, Marx warned the Paris workers that any attempt to overthrow the government would be the folly of despair. But when, in March 1871, a decisive battle was forced upon the workers and they accepted it, when the uprising had become a fact, Marx greeted the proletarian revolution with the greatest enthusiasm, in spite of unfavorable auguries. Marx did not persist in the pedantic attitude of condemning an “untimely” movement as did the ill-famed Russian renegade from marxism, Plekhanov, who in November 1905 wrote encouragingly about the workers’ and peasants’ struggle, but after December 1905 cried, liberal fashion: “They should not have taken up arms.”

Marx, however, was not only enthusiastic about the heroism of the Communards, who, as he expressed it, “stormed heaven”. Although the mass revolutionary movement did not achieve its aim, he regarded it as a historic experience of enormous importance, as a certain advance of the world proletarian revolution, as a practical step that was more important than hundreds of programmes and arguments. Marx endeavored to analyze this experiment, to draw tactical lessons from it and re-examine his theory in the light of it. …

The Commune, therefore, appears to have replaced the smashed state machine “only” by fuller democracy: abolition of the standing army; all officials to be elected and subject to recall. But as a matter of fact this “only” signifies a gigantic replacement of certain institutions by other institutions of a fundamentally different type. This is exactly a case of “quantity being transformed into quality”: democracy, introduced as fully and consistently as is at all conceivable, is transformed from bourgeois into proletarian democracy; from the state (= a special force for the suppression of a particular class) into something which is no longer the state proper.

It is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush their resistance. This was particularly necessary for the Commune; and one of the reasons for its defeat was that it did not do this with sufficient determination. The organ of suppression, however, is here the majority of the population, and not a minority, as was always the case under slavery, serfdom, and wage slavery. And since the majority of people itself suppresses its oppressors, a ‘special force” for suppression is no longer necessary! In this sense, the state begins to wither away. Instead of the special institutions of a privileged minority (privileged officialdom, the chiefs of the standing army), the majority itself can directly fulfil all these functions, and the more the functions of state power are performed by the people as a whole, the less need there is for the existence of this power.

In this connection, the following measures of the Commune, emphasized by Marx, are particularly noteworthy: the abolition of all representation allowances, and of all monetary privileges to officials, the reduction of the remuneration of all servants of the state to the level of “workmen’s wages”. This shows more clearly than anything else the turn from bourgeois to proletarian democracy, from the democracy of the oppressors to that of the oppressed classes, from the state as a “special force” for the suppression of a particular class to the suppression of the oppressors by the general force of the majority of the people—the workers and the peasants. [Source]

Writers in Peking Review also reflected on the Paris Commune in 1966; in Issue 16 of their 9th Volume, Chieng Chih-Szu wrote his article, “The Great Lessons of the Paris Commune”, which states this:

The masses were the real masters in the Paris Commune. While the Commune was in being the masses were organized on a wide scale and they discussed important state matters within their respective organizations. Each day around 20,000 activists attended club meetings where they made proposals or advanced critical opinions on social and political matters great and small. They also made their wishes and demands known through articles and letters to the revolutionary newspapers and journals. This revolutionary enthusiasm and initiative of the masses was the source of the Commune’s strength. …

The masses also carefully checked up on the work of the Commune and its members. One resolution of the Communal club of the third, arrondissement said: The people are the masters . . . i{ men you have elected show signs. of vacillation or stalling, please give them a push forward to facilitate the realization of our aims – that is, the struggle for our rights, the consolidation of the Republic, so that the cause of righteousness shall triumph. The masses criticized the Commune for not taking resolute measures against the counter-revolutionaries, deserters and renegades, for not carrying out immediately the decrees it passed, and for disunity among it’,s members. …

The Paris Commune also resolutely did away with all the privileges of state functionaries, and in the matter of salaries it made an important reform of historic significance. [Source]

Thus, the Paris Commune is an important and glorious experience for the proletariat to remember. Sadly, it did fail in two months. It did not use authority to the extent needed to defend itself from external threats, allowing the French bourgeois army to regroup itself and bombard the Commune, killing it. The errors mainly had to do with a lack of centralism, for the Communards failed to create a functioning state machine; they attempted to organize an election during their state of being at war, and this cost the time that could have been used to create an organized, disciplined armed body controlled by the proletariat. Marx and other contemporaries learned from this, and they drew what was good from it and criticized what went wrong; Lenin and his comrades also did this, and that is why the formulated the system of democratic centralism for the vanguard party and all people’s organizations. Engels wrote this in “On Authority”:

A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough? [Source]

That is why we not only praise the Commune, but we criticize it and understand what should have been done so that we know what we must do when the time comes for the proletariat in our time and place to seize state power.

Study the Paris Commune! Defend its successes and criticize its faults! Uphold proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat!