In Honor Of The 144^th Anniversary Of The Paris Commune-All Honor To The Communards

 

Some events can be honorably commemorated every five, ten, twenty-five years or so like the French Revolution. Other events, and here I include the uprising which formed the Paris Commune, established on March 18, 1871, the first time the working class as such took power if only for a short time and only in one city, need to be honorably commemorated yearly because we can, those of us who still fight for such things, draw lessons from the experience. Draw lessons that might help in the fight against the human logjam that the international capitalist system, complete with its imperial coterie at the top, has bequeathed us almost a century and one half later and that is ripe, no overripe to be replaced by a more human scale way of producing the good of this wicked world (and making sure everybody gets a big share in the plenty) Hence the commemoration in this the 144^th anniversary year.

Some commentator I heard recently on a television talk show, reflecting the same sentiment I have heard elsewhere from other academic and ideological sources, had declared the French Revolution dead. By that he meant that the lessons to be learned from that experience has been exhausted, that in the post-modern world that event over two hundred years ago had become passé, passé in the whirlwind of the American century now in full bloom. While not arguing here with the validity of that statement on the French revolution, a classic bourgeois revolution when the bourgeoisie was a progressive movement in human history, there are still lessons to be drawn from the Commune. We still await that international working class society that such luminaries as the communist Karl Marx expanded upon in the 19^th century.          

Obviously like the subsequent Russian revolutions, the Chinese revolution, the Vietnamese, and others the Paris Commune was formed in the crucible of war, or threat of war. Karl Marx, among others, had noted that war is the mother of revolution and the defeat of the French armies and the virtual occupation by the victorious German armies around Paris certainly conformed to that idea that the then current government was in disarray and the social fabric after a near starvation situation required more. Moreover the Commune had been thrust upon the working masses of Paris by the usual treachery of the bourgeois government thrown up after Louis Bonaparte lost control. That is not the most promising start to any new society. But you work with what you have to work with and defend as Marx and precious few others did the best you can despite the odds, and the disarray. So no hard and fast blueprint on revolutionary upheavals could come ready-made from that experience.  

To my mind, and this is influenced by the subsequent Russian revolutions of 1905 and February and October 1917, no question the decisive problem of the Commune was what later became to be known as the crisis of revolutionary leadership. No serious party or parties were available to take charge and create a strong government to defend against the Thiers counter-attack.   It is problematic whether given the small weight of the industrial proletariat (mass factory workers rather than small shop artisans), the lack of weaponry to fend off both the Germans and the Versailles armies, and food supply whether even if such a revolutionary leadership had existed that the Commune could have continued but the contours for the future of working class revolution would have been much different. That is the bitter lesson we still before us today.