Follow Up Small Communist Gains
SEATTLE (USA), April 14—Our pre-May Day dinner featured a presentation by a comrade on the Paris Commune. Both the presentation and the discussion afterwards were very useful and led to suggestions for our current everyday work.
Most, including new comrades, had never heard of the Commune before we started organizing for this potluck.
People were especially interested when the comrade talked about Louise Michel, one of the most famous communards. She led the group of women up Montmartre hill to protect the Commune’s cannons. This sparked the Commune’s seizure of power.
Later Michel suggested sending someone to Versailles (where the bourgeois government had fled) to assassinate Thiers, its president. Her comrades argued (rightly) that this was not a good idea.
They also said it was not possible to get to Versailles, and here Michel proved them wrong. She disguised herself, sneaked through the lines and made it to a staging ground where government troops were being prepared for the assault. She didn’t miss the opportunity to present the Commune’s case to some soldiers.
Then she made it back to Paris, where she was among the Communards who made their last stand in the Montmartre cemetery. She is well known in France as a life-long revolutionary. Fifty thousand workers attended her funeral in 1905.
Someone asked if the Commune had followed up on Michel’s exploit. Did they send other people across the lines to talk to government soldiers? Apparently not.
Follow Up Is Key in War and Party Building
This led to a discussion of the principle of following up on successes. We agreed that not only is follow-up vital, but also that it’s vital to plan for follow-up.
We prepared posters about the commune for the dinner. Everybody took some to distribute to their friends and co-workers. As soon as the torrential rains let up, comrades went to the local high school to distribute Red Flag and the commune posters. A Boeing worker organized students to distribute more inside the school. A third of the student body got both the poster and the paper.
Students from another high school asked if communism had ever worked. They took papers. They were studying communism (actually the Soviet Union) in school. (The Soviet Union was socialist, not communist.) We suggested they take the papers to class and have some discussion.
At Boeing, a shop steward fell ill and couldn’t make it to the dinner. First thing the next week, she asked how it went.
We also gave her the poster and the latest issue of the paper. Then we started talking about Louise Michel and the need for communists to follow up on every success. She wanted details about the Commune.
After a thorough discussion, a comrade made the ill-advised comment, “You won’t find out about this communist history from the union.”
“I know that!” she answered.
Then the discussion got serious. She wanted to know how we got the paper out and who wrote the articles. We talked about how the editorial collective tries to build collectives all around the world to report on our communist work. And how we learned a good deal about collective leadership from the communards in Paris.
She noticed that Red Flag was different, not only in content, but also in the way it is produced. We even showed her a mock layout to emphasize that we all contribute to every aspect of producing the paper. We invited her to write and donate to the paper.
“How do you distribute this?” she asked. “In stores?”
“Not usually. We rely on workers like you,” answered a comrade. She was particularly interested in how the party and our friends in the shop got so many papers distributed at the local high school.
The discussion was cut short by work. We plan to follow up on these tasks: writing, distributing and donating. But most importantly, we plan to invite her to join the ICWP.
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