One hundred years ago, from March 18 to May 30, 1871, the workers of Paris took power into their hands. In this period when the workers' movement was taking its first steps in Europe as a mass movement, the Paris Commune was the product primarily of a spontaneous uprising of the workers in Paris, not in any way foreseen or prepared for by the socialist tendencies of the time.
In the provinces, the workers in only a few cities showed solidarity. Throughout the world, the solidarity called for by the First International, at the urging of Karl Marx himself, was likewise limited. On the other hand, the French and German governments, which only a few weeks before had made a truce in the war they had been carrying on since the summer of 1870, immediately came to an understanding. And the Thiers government, which had retreated to Versailles, quickly rallied the repressive forces to crush the Paris Commune in a historically unprecedented carnage.
Thus, the bourgeois and landholding nobility of France and Germany, united, showed in their own way that they understood the profound significance of the Paris workers' uprising. They saw it correctly as the forewarning—the danger for them—of powerful workers' movements that would overthrow the capitalist system and create a worldwide socialist society.
The workers of Paris held power in their city for only seventy-one days. But this brief period was time enough for them to take a whole series of measures which, corresponding to their needs as an oppressed stratum and to their socialist aspirations, present an impressive picture, even a century later: abolition of the standing army and its replacement by the armed people; free education; separation of church and state; election, with the right of recall, of all public officials; abolition of night work in the bakeries; equal rights with French citizens for "foreigners"; elimination of private employment agencies, etc.
How many of the Paris Commune's measures have not yet been instituted—despite the vast strides of technology—even in countries where bourgeois democracy is most developed! How many of these measures are threatened with abandonment in practice today, as soon as the bourgeoisie shifts its orientation in a reactionary direction!
As a sign of its internationalism, the Commune declared that its banner was "that of the universal republic."
The Paris Commune was not without its weaknesses. It took political power from the bourgeoisie. It took many measures limiting capitalist exploitation and increasing the workers' chances to emancipate themselves. But it did not strike any blow at the economic power of capital. The most indicative example was its respectful attitude toward the Banque de France, the financial heart of the country, the institution par excellence of capitalism.
But in view of the youth and inexperience of the working class in this period, these weaknesses, studied since then by Marx and his followers, are quite insignificant in comparison with all that the Paris Commune contributed to the international workers' movement. Thus, it is natural that over the past century, the workers have made a reality of what Marx wrote while the Versaillais execution squads were relentlessly doing their work.
"Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be for ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them."
The aura of the Paris Commune is so great that everywhere the descendants of Pontius Pilate, and even the Versaillais of our time, are trying in one way or another to take over the name of this first experiment in workers' power. Reformists of every stripe, Social Democrats as well as Stalinists, are stressing the Commune's past weaknesses in an attempt to justify their present betrayals and crimes against the workers' movement. The bourgeois whose teeth were set on edge in May 1968 try to pretend that they see nothing in the Commune but an immense "festival" for the people of Paris, ignoring the 40,000 workers killed in this class confrontation.
According to Thiers, the unscrupulous careerist whom the French history books still refer to as the great man who "liberated" the national territory, the Versaillais repression was supposed to lay the specter of socialism forever. But at the very time he was saying this, the socialist and workers' movement had begun its rise in most West European countries. In France itself, repression held it back only a few years. By the end of the nineteenth century the movement was stronger than ever. And, despite the terrible defeat in August 1914 represented by the bankruptcy of the Second International, less than fifty years after the Paris Commune, the workers and peasants of the Czarist empire swept away an archaic regime, wrenched power away from capitalism, and set out on the road toward building a socialist society in one of the world's largest countries.
In the fifty years from the revolution of October 1917 to the one hundredth anniversary of the Paris Commune, the worldwide crisis has continued unabated. A third of the world and a third of humanity have been wrested from capitalist exploitation. In these years, of course, the working masses have also experienced grave defeats, such as the victory of Nazism in Germany, the expansion of fascism over a section of Europe, a second world war, and great bloodbaths far exceeding the Versaillais repression in many countries (e.g. Indonesia, Brazil, and others).
Contrary to the old Social Democratic reformists and the Stalinist neoreformists, all the gains and advances achieved at the expense of capitalism have not made this period of transition—which will end in the victory of socialism throughout the world—into an epoch of peaceful evolution. The progress made does not mean that from now on power can be taken by peaceful or parliamentary means. Just the opposite; capitalism—and particularly Yankee imperialism, its most powerful component—is determined to preserve its domination by every means at its disposal, including, if need be, methods that could endanger the very survival of humanity. On every continent it stubbornly defends every inch of ground.
The battle that has been raging for a number of years between the Vietnamese revolution and the military forces Washington has assembled in support of capitalism is now spreading to the entire Indochinese peninsula. In several countries of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, armed struggles are continuing. The Allende regime in Chile must not be permitted to engender any illusions. It will not establish a socialist Chile. As in every case in which a coalition government of parties claiming to represent the working class and bourgeois parties has been set up, this regime is only a prelude to an armed confrontation between the forces of the bourgeoisie and the working masses. In countries with a colonial-type structure, winning political independence has proved, and will continue to prove, insufficient to break the imperialist grip and enable these peoples to escape from their poverty. This can be achieved only where a revolutionary struggle is sustained not only against the foreign capitalists but also against their native counterparts. It can be accomplished only if the struggle is continued until these capitalists are overthrown and a government of the urban and rural working masses is installed, as well as collective and planned property relations.
For the first twenty years after the second world war, capitalism thought that it was rid of the specter of socialist revolution in the economically developed countries, above all in Europe, North America, and Japan. Hadn't "neocapitalism" and the few material improvements ascribable to a "consumer society" appeased broad strata of the working class? In practice, the unions and the old workers' parties (including the Communist parties) had become incorporated into the system. They demanded only limited improvements. They sought only more seats in parliament. From this situation, some "theoreticians" deduced that Marx was "outmoded," or, at most, that Marxism, which had been developed in the nineteenth century out of an analysis of the most modern capitalism of the time, might be applicable to the underdeveloped countries!
Suddenly, in the midst of this bourgeois euphoria—to the great surprise of the capitalists as well as the Social Democrats and Stalinists—in Paris, the Paris of the Commune, barricades went up again in May 1968. They acted as a detonator. The workers of France, and along with them broad sectors of the new middle classes, paralyzed all economic activity for more than three weeks and, with a general strike the likes of which the world had never seen, put in jeopardy the political regime, the celebrated "strong state" of de Gaulle.
May 1968 was no "accident" of French history. Since that time, demonstrations, strikes, and street battles have broken out in all the capitalist states. This has not been a revolt of the marginal strata untouched by the "benefits" of "consumer society." To the contrary, the rebels have been primarily the youth—university and high-school students, as well as young workers—who have not experienced the poverty, unemployment, and fascism of the years between the two wars. And by their revolt they have starkly exposed the most profound evils of capitalism, its shameful exploitation of the majority of humanity, its subordination of all human activities to its law, its lack of moral and cultural values, its subjecting everything to its quest for profit.
It has been the youth above all, displaying intellectual precocity, political enthusiasm, and selflessness in struggle, who have frightened the bourgeois world, as well as the old degenerated leaderships of the workers' movement. Stimulated by this combativity, the older generations of workers are becoming reinvigorated and beginning to look toward more extensive and uncompromising struggles.
Since May 1968 there is no longer any capitalist country, developed or not, where the class struggle is dormant. Broad strata (national minorities, women, and other groups) are challenging the most sacrosanct principles of the exploitation of man by man.
A century after the Paris Commune, the prospects for the triumph of socialism are more concrete than ever. But this victory will be achieved only through hard-fought struggles that will require not only great sacrifices but also very high-level training and organization of the international vanguard to lead these decisive struggles against capitalism.
In its spread over the planet in the past century, however, the socialist and workers' movement also learned that it had within itself forces with a much greater potential for holding it back and betraying it than could have been imagined by the first socialist thinkers. First it was the Social Democratic reformists and patriots who subordinated the workers' movement in each country to its respective bourgeoisie. Then the degeneration of the Russian Revolution showed above all what dangers could exist even after the seizure of power, and as a result of it.
From its inception, the workers' movement had a premonition of the dangers of bureaucratism. With the strong class instinct demonstrated by the workers of Paris, the Commune took measures that amounted in fact to putting an antibureaucratic program into practice. Elected representatives were made responsible to their constituencies and subject to recall at any time. Public officials were paid the same wage as workers.
Marx stressed this fact in his Civil War in France. On the eve of October 1917, Lenin, citing Marx's instructions on the state, repeated this program in State and Revolution. And in his April Theses, which contributed so much to rearming the Bolshevik party, we find:
"5) Not a parliamentary republic—to return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of Workers' Deputies would be a retrograde step—but a republic of Soviets of Workers', Agricultural Labourers' and Peasants' Deputies throughout the country, from top to bottom.
"Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy.*
"The salaries of all officials, all of whom are elective and displaceable at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker."
As the result of a combination of national and international factors, a few years after October 1917 a bureaucracy came to dominate the state in the Soviet Union. This bureaucracy, while maintaining itself on the basis of the new production relations, succeeded in stamping out all socialist and workers' democracy in this country. It reduced the Communist parties throughout the world to vassalage in order to convert them into instruments of its policy of "peaceful coexistence" with the capitalist states. Insofar as it can, it uses mass struggles as a quid pro quo in its relations with the capitalist world.
* ". . . i.e., the standing army to be replaced by the arming of the whole people."—Lenin.
In Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, this bureaucracy resorted to force when the working masses in these countries, where capitalism had been abolished, began to struggle for a system of workers' democracy.
The old Bolshevik party was exterminated by Stalin. His successors repress all those who, like Grigorenko in the USSR, Modzelewski and Kuron in Poland, and Petr Uhl in Czechoslovakia, fight to restore to socialism the meaning that it had in the heroic days of the Russian Revolution, when it was led by Lenin and Trotsky.
The mobilizations that have developed in several workers states, and most recently in Poland, show unquestionably that the antibureaucratic measures adopted by the Paris Commune remain fully applicable to these states. The demand must be added, however, for the right to have more than one party that supports the new production relations. Neither Marx nor Lenin envisaged conditions like those of Stalinism, which make every election a farce and which, in a society claiming to be socialist, have pushed wage and salary inequalities to an extreme. These demands are the essential components of the program of the antibureaucratic political revolution impending in all these countries that alone can establish socialist democracy.
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Proletarian revolution in the developed capitalist countries, a colonial revolution carrying forward its fight against imperialism until it becomes transformed into a struggle against the national bourgeoisie, an antibureaucratic political revolution in the workers states, all three interlinked and combined—all this represents the Commune which has never stopped battling away and moving forward, and never will until all exploitation and oppression have vanished from the earth.
The way to commemorate the Paris Commune on its one hundredth anniversary is not just to recall the seventy-one days during which the armed workers of this city held their fate in their own hands, but to participate in the struggles now being waged against the Versaillais of today so as to bring the Commune to final victory throughout the world.
The way to celebrate the anniversary of the Commune is:
• Support the Vietnamese and Indochinese peoples; fight for the withdrawal of all American troops and for the victory of the revolution in the Indochinese peninsula.
• Support the Palestinian fedayeen against the combined attacks of imperialism, the Zionist state, and the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois heads of the Arab states.
• Support the revolutionary struggles in Ceylon, East Pakistan, Colombia, Argentina, and elsewhere.
• Support the demands and the struggles of all national minorities and every oppressed stratum.
• Support the workers' struggles and help to broaden them by means of a program of transitional demands that raises the question of power.
• Support the struggle for proletarian democracy in the workers states—for workers' councils to exercise the power of decision in the economy and the state. Demand the release of imprisoned militants.
• Compel the release of all those held in prison or in concentration camps for working to emancipate their people or their class.
As the struggles grow in intensity on a world scale, the more prominent becomes the role American imperialism plays in leading the counterrevolutionary forces, and the more palpable becomes the need for an international organization of the revolutionary Marxist vanguard. This central task has been pursued indefatigably by the Fourth International ever since the Stalinist-dominated Communist International ceased to be the center of the world socialist revolution.
Members of the Fourth International have always participated in the struggles in their countries. Long a minority reduced only to propagating the ideas of revolutionary Marxism, for several years the Fourth International has been winning the support and adherence of thousands of young revolutionists on all continents. And in some sectors it is beginning to reach the point where it can lead struggles and thus demonstrate in action the superiority of revolutionary Marxism over all the ideologies teeming in the decay of Stalinism and Social Democracy.
This is only a beginning. But it is already enough so that Trotskyists are often blamed for the advance of revolutionary struggles in the world by all the supporters of capitalism and by the bankrupt and traitorous leaders of the Social Democratic and Stalinist parties. The Fourth International is being attacked, slandered, and persecuted today like the First International in the wake of the Paris Commune, and the Third International after October.
The way to celebrate the Paris Commune is also to strengthen the world vanguard, to join the Fourth International and its sections so as to assure tomorrow's victory.
Long live the Paris Commune!
Long live the international socialist revolution!
Long live the world commune!