3. The Paris Commune¶
Core Argument¶
3. The Paris Commune
The Paris Commune of 18 March 1871 represented the first historical instance of the proletariat seizing governmental power, and in doing so, it understood that it could not simply operate the existing state machinery. The centralised state, which had originated under absolute monarchy and developed through successive bourgeois regimes, had become the national power of capital over labour—an engine of class despotism that intensified its repressive character after every revolutionary advance. The Second Empire was the ultimate, most corrupt form of this state power, which the Commune directly opposed.
The Commune’s first decree suppressed the standing army and replaced it with the armed people. It was a working, not parliamentary, body: its members were elected by universal suffrage, revocable at any time, and paid workmen’s wages. The police and all public officials became responsible, revocable agents of the Commune. Churches were disestablished and disendowed, education made free and secular, and judges made elective and revocable. This political form was to serve as a model for all France, replacing centralised government with the self-government of producers through a hierarchy of revocable delegates bound by formal instructions. The unity of the nation was to be organised, not broken, by destroying the parasitic state power.
The Commune was a thoroughly expansive political form—essentially a working-class government, the political form at last discovered for the economical emancipation of labour. It aimed to expropriate the expropriators, transforming the means of production into instruments of free and associated labour. The working class had no ready-made utopias but sought to set free the elements of the new society already developing within collapsing bourgeois society.
The Commune was simultaneously the true representative of all healthy elements in French society, the genuinely national government, and the international champion of labour. It admitted foreigners to die for its cause, made the German worker Leo Frankel its Minister of Labour, and placed the Polish heroes Dabrowski and Wróblewski at the head of Paris’s defenders. It pulled down the Vendôme Column to mark the new historical era. Its great social measure was its own working existence: it abolished night work for bakers, prohibited employers from fining workers, and surrendered closed workshops to workmen’s associations. Its financial measures were sagacious and moderate. It did not pretend to infallibility, publishing its doings and shortcomings. It transformed Paris: streets became safe without police, prostitution vanished, and real working women emerged. Versailles, by contrast, was an assembly of ghouls from defunct regimes, propped up by Bonapartist generals, with Thiers uttering constant lies about the bombardment and the Commune.