Groucho Marxism

In the mid-1800s Paris was industrializing at a fantastic rate. However, over half the population of the city lived in poverty bordering on destitution. Meanwhile, French bosses had never had it so good. Profits at the Anzin collieries to the north of Paris had increased by 300% between 1852 and 1870, whilst the miners’ wages went up by a mere 30% during the same period. The rotten regime of Emperor Louis Napoleon, with his absurd pretensions of imperial grandeur, was exposed in the war with Prussia in 1870. When French troops suffered a major defeat at the battle of Sedan, the anger of the people of France boiled over. The next day the National Guard, a conscript defence force, marched on the French assembly, elected a new government of Paris, and forced Napoleon into exile.

Leon Trotsky would later write that with a revolutionary leadership that had prepared itself for just such a crisis in society, and that had a clear grasp of the steps needed to seize victory, the French workers could have taken power in 1870. Instead, the new government immediately stepped up the war effort. In September that year, 150,000 Prussian laid siege to Paris. Living conditions became even worse than they had been under Napoleon: food supplies dried up and Parisians were forced to cats and dogs to survive. The government, fearing defeat, kept up the war effort for fear of the masses turning against them if they surrendered, and spread false rumours of imminent Prussian collapse. As each rumour proved untrue, workers became more and more disillusioned with their new government.

The bosses and landlords wanted a swift end to the war. But to the workers, Paris was the city of revolution that had to be defended to the last drop of blood. After many futile attempts to break the siege, the National Guard and the workers realized it could not go on. In January 1871 they marched to the Hotel de Ville and instigated the Paris Commune, a revolutionary government. In response, Prussian occupying forces colluded with French capitalists and declared a ceasefire to try to isolate the revolution. A treaty was signed handing over the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to the German emperor as a sign of good will, and the Prussian army marched triumphantly through Paris, further alienating the city’s population.

In February the National Guard organised a march of 300,000 against government plans to disband and disarm them. They broke into artillery depots, taking 200 cannons which they felt were public property to be protected from Prussian hands. In response, the government ordered regular soldiers to retrieve them and around 18,000 troops arrived in the dead of night. The next morning immense crowds of National Guards and workers arrived to defend their cannons. Many regular soldiers mutinied and joined the revolt. The National Guards seized the Hotel de Ville and revolutionaries crowded in, forcing the government to desert the city. For the first time the revolutionaries were the undisputed masters of Paris.

The task facing the revolutionaries now was to consolidate their rule in the capital, transform economic relations, and rouse the rest of the country. The revolutionary government demanded an elected municipal council, genuine municipal liberties, suppression of the police, the right of the National Guard to appoint its own leaders, and the postponement of all rent arrears. However by attempting to legalise the new workers’ government by holding elections, valuable time was lost and a call for a mass march to seize the retreating government was pushed to the background. This turned out to be a fatal mistake as a counter-revolution was brewing. The old government regrouped in Versailles and clearly stated that “after this atrocity, there can be no negotiations with Paris.”

In March Paris went to the polls and the revolutionaries won by a landslide. They purged the state and schools of religion, abolished capital punishment, cancelled nine months’ rent arrears, set the salaries of all public representatives at the level of the workers, and started the nationalisation, under workers’ control, of all abandoned factories and mills. Paris was alive and jubilant. But the revolutionaries still did not launch the expected attack on the old government in Versailles, which was not about to let things continue like this. In April the old government launched an attack on Paris and the city once again found itself under siege. However this time the defending forces were proud, brave, willing revolutionaries with a belief that what they were doing was right.

Throughout the siege the revolutionary government continued to make sweeping changes, such as banning gambling and prostitution and abolishing all fines on workers. These changed culminated with a bulletin, posted all over the city, which declared: “The communal revolution, begun by the popular initiative of 18 March, inaugurates a new political era, experimental, positive, scientific. It is the end of the old government and clerical world, of militarism, of monopolism, of privileges to which the proletariat owes its servitude, the nation, its servitude and disasters.” However in May the Versailles troops entered Paris and a bloody battle ensued. By the end of the fighting the Hotel de Ville was in flames and most of the revolutionaries were either dead or arrested.

The Paris Commune is an object lesson in how, if only for a few weeks and only in one city, the working class can take control and exercise its power. It demonstrates that the working class cannot simply take  hold of the existing state machine and use it to transform society, but must instead destroy the capitalist state and build its own democratic structures. Unfortunately indecision, vacillation, and unclear direction led to the demise of the Commune and the deaths of thousands of revolutionary workers. Today we still have capitalism and rampant imperialism to defeat in the struggle for world socialism. But if we learn the lessons of history, ultimately we will be victorious and avenge the deaths of the heroic communards.