By MICHEL GOULART DA SILVA*

More than a century later, the Paris Commune continues to be not only an inspiration but an example for workers to take action against the bourgeois order and build their own power.

When referring to the Paris Commune, Karl Marx stated that “this was the first revolution in which the working class was openly recognized as the only class capable of social initiative”.[I] This passage is found in civil war in france, text written shortly after the massacre of this fundamental experience of proletarian government, in France, between March 18 and May 28, 1871.

Originally written as “Third Message of the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA),” Marx’s text, a landmark in the analysis of the class struggle, shows the process of revolution and the policies of revolutionaries toward the State. Marx’s text simultaneously portrays the brief existence of the Paris Commune, which lasted 72 days, and a call to action for the French working class against the repression practiced by the military forces of the bourgeoisie.

Karl Marx conducts a thorough historical and political analysis of the process. One of the aspects highlighted in his analysis is the extent to which the State still maintained vestiges of the Ancien Régime. According to Marx, “centralized State power, with its omnipresent organs, its permanent army, police, bureaucracy, clergy and magistracy – organs designed according to a plan of systematic and hierarchical division of labor – has its origins in the times of the absolute monarchy and served the nascent middle-class society as a powerful weapon in its struggle against feudalism. Its development, however, remained obstructed by all sorts of medieval remnants, by seigneurial rights, local privileges, municipal and corporate monopolies and provincial codes.”[ii]

Marx showed the bourgeoisie’s connivance with these feudal remnants and the need to overcome the organs of state repression, which could only be done by organizing the workers in arms. Marx said: “Paris was able to resist only because, as a result of the siege, it got rid of the army and replaced it with a National Guard, the main contingent of which consisted of workers. This fact now had to be transformed into a lasting institution. That is why the first decree of the Commune ordered the abolition of the standing army and its replacement by the armed people.”[iii]

Karl Marx places the Paris Commune as part of the political process that had been unfolding in the previous decades. With Louis Bonaparte's coup d'état on December 02, 1851, the proletarian organizations were annihilated and driven underground. At the end of the 1860s, with the economic crisis and the strengthening of the workers' movement, the Bonapartist regime was in decline. Marx states: “The Second Empire had more than doubled the national deficit and plunged all the large cities into heavy municipal debts. The war had increased the nation's liabilities astonishingly and mercilessly devastated its resources.”[iv]

In August 1870, as part of the Franco-Prussian War, Napoleon III's troops invaded what would soon become a unified Germany. The result was not what the French government had expected. On September 2, the emperor and 100 soldiers were captured by the army of Bismarck, the Prussian prime minister. In France, on September 04, the bourgeoisie proclaimed the Republic, installing a new “Government of National Defense” with a regular army. The workers, supported by the National Guard, were willing to defend Paris under siege from Bismarck's troops. However, for the French bourgeoisie, the people in arms were much more dangerous than Bismarck's own army. In that context, according to Marx, “all the rival factions of the ruling class conspired together to crush the people, and also conspired against each other to restore each its own monarchy.”[v]

Faced with the siege of Paris, which made the living conditions of the workers increasingly unbearable, the government made clear its intention to capitulate to the Germans, which officially occurred on January 28, 1871. Adolphe Thiers, an old French politician, was elected by the assembly as head of the executive and requested a truce from the Prussians, which was granted by Bismarck. The truce agreement included the election of a French national assembly, which would have the authority to establish a definitive peace; for the Germans, this was synonymous with French surrender, the handing over of territories and the payment of large indemnities. The French National Assembly met in Bordeaux on February 13, 1871, and appointed Thiers the first president of the Third French Republic. However, as Marx pointed out, even in the face of these conspiracies, “an armed Paris was the only serious obstacle in the way of the counterrevolutionary conspiracy. Paris had therefore to be disarmed.”[vi]

The agreement, negotiated by Adolphe Thiers, was signed on February 26 and ratified on March 215. However, in the face of the surrender to the Germans and the threat of monarchical restoration, the National Guard had to transform itself: a “Central Committee of the Federation of National Guards” was elected, representing 2 battalions, equipped with 450 cannons and XNUMX firearms. With the new statutes adopted, the National Guards now had the absolute right to elect their leaders and to revoke them at any time.

Karl Marx pointed out: “Paris could not be defended without arming its working class, organizing it into an effective force and training its ranks in war itself. But armed Paris was the armed revolution. A victory for Paris over the Prussian aggressor would have been a victory for the French workers over French capitalism and its state parasites. In this conflict between national duty and class interest, the Government of National Defense did not hesitate for a moment to transform itself into a Government of National Defection.”[vii]

This situation of “dual power” was untenable for the provisional government, which had fled to Versailles. In response, on March 18, 1871, 20 regular soldiers were sent to Paris to recover the cannons. However, a crowd of workers, including women and children, surrounded the operation and soon the National Guards arrived. The result was fraternization between the crowd, the regular soldiers and the National Guard. This was in fact the government of Paris.

The worst fears of the bourgeoisie seemed to have been realized, with a workers’ government demanding a response from the exploiters and their armies. However, after two months of hard fighting, the Paris Commune was crushed, leading to what Marx called the “carnage of Paris.”[viii]

The regular French army, aided by the Germans, rescued more than 100 soldiers who had been captured in the Franco-Prussian War. A brutal attack on Paris began on May 21. The Versailles troops advanced neighborhood by neighborhood, while the Commune erected hundreds of barricades with paving stones and sandbags. Communards were more numerous, but few had military training. In the days following the fall of the last barricade, on May 28, 1871, more than 30 Parisians were executed. In the words of Bismarck, then, “delights in the corpses of the Paris proletariat. For him, this means not only the extermination of the Revolution, but also the annihilation of France, now decapitated in fact and by the work of the French government itself.”[ix]

Em civil war in france, Marx emphasizes how the workers' struggle relates to the situation of dual power, where a government instituted by the bourgeois state faced off against organized workers. According to Marx, the Commune “was a completely flexible political form, whereas all previous forms of government had been fundamentally repressive.”[X] Marx shows how the Parisian proletariat defended the city against invaders, demonstrating that the bourgeoisie was incapable of acting consistently in this process.

The work Civil War in France presents one of the first exercises in analyzing a concrete situation of the structure and action of the State, showing that workers cannot limit themselves to assuming positions within the bourgeois state machine, but must destroy it. Marx stated: “the working class cannot simply take possession of the State machine as it presents itself and use it for its own purposes.”[xi]

In this work, Marx also demonstrates that for the bourgeoisie there is always a greater enemy than another government or country, that is, the proletariat. Between countries there can always be divergences and disputes of self-interest, which will always be resolved through negotiation or, if necessary, even through conspiracies.

However, there are no differences between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but rather an antagonism rooted in the process of exploitation of the labor force, which can only be resolved with the possibility of overcoming private property and the end of the bourgeoisie as a class. According to Marx, the secret of the Commune was that it was “a government of the working class, the product of the struggle of the producing class against the appropriating class, the political form finally discovered for carrying out the economic emancipation of labor.”[xii]

That is why the French and Prussian bourgeoisies, despite their momentary disputes, needed to defeat the common enemy that placed the destruction of capitalism on the horizon. This process shows the workers the need to place the overthrow of capitalism at the center of the struggle, with the horizon not of the impossible reform of bourgeois democracy, but of the complete overthrow of the institutions that legitimize the exploitation of workers. Any strategy that aims at the defense or even the reconstruction of the regime will be a disaster for the workers.

Karl Marx concludes his work by stating: “The Paris of the workers, with its Commune, will be eternally celebrated as the glorious precursor of a new society. Its martyrs are engraved on the great heart of the working class. As for its exterminators, history has already chained them to that eternal pillory, from which all the prayers of its clergy will avail nothing to redeem them.”[xiii] More than a century later, a period marked by so many other revolutionary experiences and many defeats, the Paris Commune continues to be not only an inspiration, but an example for workers' action against the bourgeois order and for the construction of their own power.

 *Michel Goulart da Silva He holds a PhD in history from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) and a technical-administrative degree from the Federal Institute of Santa Catarina (IFC).

Notes

[I] Karl Marx. The Civil War in France. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2011, p. 61.

[ii] Karl Marx. The Civil War in France. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2011, p. 54.

[iii] Karl Marx. The Civil War in France. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2011, p. 56.

[iv] Karl Marx. The Civil War in France. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2011, p. 44.

[v] Karl Marx. The Civil War in France. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2011, p. 41.

[vi] Karl Marx. The Civil War in France. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2011, p. 46.

[vii] Karl Marx. The Civil War in France. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2011, p. 35.

[viii] Karl Marx. The Civil War in France. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2011, p. 77.

[ix] Karl Marx. The Civil War in France. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2011, p. 77.

[X] Karl Marx. The Civil War in France. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2011, p. 59.

[xi] Karl Marx. The Civil War in France. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2011, p. 54.

[xii] Karl Marx. The Civil War in France. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2011, p. 59.

[xiii] Karl Marx. The Civil War in France. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2011, p. 79.

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