On May Day-The Paris Commune and Its Lessons

Workers Vanguard No. 1087 8 April 2016 TROTSKY LENIN The Paris Commune and Its Lessons (Quote of the Week) The international socialist movement has historically celebrated March 18 as the anniversary of the 1871 Paris Commune, when the city’s working class seized power and established the first expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Leon Trotsky’s balance sheet of the heroic Paris workers uprising, which was crushed in a bloody massacre in May 1871, points to the key element that was absent in the Commune but decisive in the victory of the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia: a communist vanguard party. The workers’ party—the real one—is not a machine for parliamentary manœuvres, it is the accumulated and organized experience of the proletariat. It is only with the aid of the party, which rests upon the whole history of its past, which foresees theoretically the paths of development, all its stages, and which extracts from it the necessary formula of action, that the proletariat frees itself from the need of always recommencing its history: its hesitations, its lack of decision, its mistakes. The proletariat of Paris did not have such a party. The bourgeois socialists with whom the Commune swarmed, raised their eyes to heaven, waited for a miracle or else a prophetic word, hesitated, and during that time the masses groped about and lost their heads because of the indecision of some and the fantasy of others. The result was that the revolution broke out in their very midst, too late, and Paris was encircled. Six months elapsed before the proletariat had re-established in its memory the lessons of past revolutions, of battles of yore, of the reiterated betrayals of democracy—and it seized power. These six months proved to be an irreparable loss. If the centralized party of revolutionary action had been found at the head of the proletariat of France in September 1870, the whole history of France and with it the whole history of humanity would have taken another direction. —Leon Trotsky, “Lessons of the Paris Commune” (February 1921), reprinted in New International (March 1935)