Vive La Commune! The Paris Commune 150 years later

The Paris Commune took place 150 years ago this year in France. It was one of the most earth-shaking events in history up to that point, and it’s one that continues to have an impact even today. Marx said about it a few years afterwards that it was the most slandered event in human history, but what happened later was that it was pushed out of the picture almost altogether—especially, of course, in this country. Marx wrote extensively about it at the time, and there’s a pamphlet called The Civil War in France, made up of speeches that Marx gave during the time of the Paris Commune to the General Council, the leadership body of the First International. The third and main address is, I believe, one of the most brilliant, most impassioned and most bitterly satirical writings about politics that’s ever been written. In it you see Karl Marx in the midst of an all-out life and death struggle. The pamphlet is not very long, and it’s definitely worth reading or rereading. The Paris Commune was the first, although short-lived, workers’ state, workers’ republic. During its short life, which lasted only 72 days before it was brutally murdered by the so-called democratic bourgeoisie of France, it had so many experiences and such rich experiences and lessons that 50 years later the Bolshevik Party—Lenin and all of the Bolshevik Party—carefully studied the Paris Commune. Not only did they study it, they based the Soviet form of government on the Paris Commune. And then, 50 years after that, in 1969, when a new constitution of China was written, they cited the Paris Commune as being the example of the form of government they wanted to have. That’s how influential this 72-day-long Commune was in history. And that’s not all; there are many other examples. Based on the experience of the Commune, Marx and Engels felt that they had to make what was their only correction to the Communist Manifesto. They said that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” Instead, they said, the old state would have to be broken up, would have to be shattered and replaced by a completely new form; that is, that the workers could not use the state that the capitalists used. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/vive-la-commune-the-paris-commune-150-years-later/