Lessons of the Paris Commune [1]¶
Core Argument¶
Lessons of the Paris Commune
The Paris Commune stands as a testament to the heroism of the working masses, yet its fate was sealed not by the strength of its enemies but by its own fatal weaknesses: indecision, a tendency to halt after initial successes, and the absence of a revolutionary party. The Parisian proletariat seized power on 18 March 1871 not through deliberate revolutionary action but because its adversaries had fled to Versailles. The Central Committee of the National Guard, lacking a centralised party to lead it, squandered the moment by pursuing legal elections and negotiating with mayors instead of crushing the Versailles government immediately. It substituted the task of proletarian revolution with a petty-bourgeois demand for communal autonomy. This passivity and particularism, a heritage of the dead past, proved disastrous.
The chapter contrasts this failure with the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd in November 1917, where a centralised party with iron discipline prepared the insurrection openly. The Bolsheviks used the Second Congress of Soviets as a fixed date, bound themselves to the garrison, and created a Revolutionary War Committee as a legal organ of insurrection. The party’s intimate contact with the masses and its correct judgement of the conjuncture allowed the insurrection to triumph almost without bloodshed. The Commune, by contrast, had the opportunity to win over peasant regiments but undertook nothing towards this end; the fault lay in revolutionary strategy, not class relations.
The question of electing military command was central to the conflict with Thiers. Electability served a political task: purging counter-revolutionary officers and splitting the army along class lines. However, elected command is typically weak technically and disciplinarily. Simple democracy must be supplemented by selection from above, through an organ of experienced, reliable organisers empowered to choose and educate commanders. The Central Committee of the National Guard, lacking proletarian party leadership, lost its head, transmitted powers to the Commune, and then competed with it. The Commune should have reorganised the National Guard with a strong hand, imposing strict discipline, but it too was crushed, lacking a powerful revolutionary directing centre.
The single, inescapable lesson is this: a strong party leadership is indispensable. The French proletariat needs an organisation strong as steel, with leaders controlled by the masses. The Communards lacked clarity in method and a centralised leading organisation; hence they were vanquished. In the present epoch, the proletariat will face well-organised resistance from bourgeois governments and must prepare a skilful, well-timed attack, requiring a centralised organisation that openly guides mass movements while maintaining a clandestine insurrectionary apparatus.