Let’s Commemorate the Paris Commune of 1871 by Mobilizing the Masses for Communism Today
Part III: Workers Must Seize State Power
Paris workers and National Guard soldiers drove the French army out of the city and seized state power there on March 18, 1871. They established the Paris Commune. It was the first time that workers anywhere took power.
The Commune immediately abolished the police, replacing both police and army with the Paris National Guard, consisting of workers loyal to the commune. They aimed to build a society to meet the masses’ needs.
The crucial question they now faced was whether or not to march immediately to Versailles to destroy the French capitalists and their government there. The communards’ leadership was divided on this question.
The Marxists, led by Blanqui, advocated marching immediately on Versailles before the capitalists gathered enough forces to march on Paris to destroy the Commune. They called on sympathetic soldiers and workers throughout France to defend the Commune.
The Marxists, however, did not have a mass base for this strategy. They were not organized in a Communist Party to take their strategy to the masses to mobilize them for this.
On the other side, the anarchist leader Proudhon argued for negotiating with the government while setting up the Commune as a model of social transformation. This position, based on not understanding the murderous nature of the capitalist state, had more followers. Thus, instead of marching on Versailles, the Commune held elections for its new Council.
The capitalists in Versailles had no intention of negotiating. They were buying time to organize to crush the Commune and take Paris by force. They soon began shooting and bombing the outskirts of Paris.
For two months the communards kept the French army at bay, fighting pitched battles daily on the outskirts of Paris. But on May 21, the French capitalist army stormed the city itself with 200,000 French prisoners of war who were released by the German capitalists. They, too, were terrified of the workers’ revolution.
Masses of women and men set up barricades and fought bravely, but unsuccessfully, to defend the Commune. Aided by the German government and its army, the French rulers unleashed a campaign of mass murder and terror against the Parisian masses.
Tens of thousands were executed. Many more were imprisoned or exiled. The bosses tried to erase the memory of the Commune. They shed rivers of blood. But wipe out its memory? Never!
Instead, the Commune has remained a beacon of inspiration for 150 years. Its lessons have shaped the communist movement. We are learning from them today that we must overthrow capitalist state power and replace it with communist workers’ power.
As the Russian communist leader Lenin wrote in 1908 about the Paris Commune, “in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes.” He said the Commune was too easy on its class enemies.
Lenin concluded from the Paris Commune that the working class needs a communist party to lead the way to victory. The Bolsheviks built a disciplined communist party with a unified line of socialist revolution. They organized party collectives, especially in the factories and in the Tsar’s armed forces, to fight to turn the bosses’ war into a revolution for workers’ power.
Forty-six years after the Paris Commune, during World War I, the Russian workers and soldiers led by their Bolshevik Party seized and consolidated power over one-sixth of the world’s surface. This inspired an epoch of revolutionary struggle worldwide.
Also learning this lesson, the Chinese Communist Party led the Chinese working masses to take power in 1949.
But both parties fought for and built socialism supposedly as a transition to communism. Socialism kept money, banks, the wage system and production for buying and selling. It was state capitalism. It never has nor will lead to communism.
In the mid-1960s, masses of rural and city workers and youth organized the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to get rid of the “Red Capitalists” that socialism had created. The Shanghai People’s Commune, established in January 1967, was modelled on the Paris Commune. They fought for communism, the elimination of money, and production directly for human need. They were defeated because they hesitated to build their own communist party and fight decisively for power.
Today we are building the International Communist Workers’ Party to mobilize the masses to fight directly for communism, nothing less. We strive to take the lessons of the Paris commune to a higher level.
The communist collectives we build today will become the basis for communist workers’ power. When the communist masses take state power, we will organize to meet the needs of everyone.
The kind of party that the Russian and Chinese communists built to fight for socialism is not the party we need to fight for communism. That’s why ICWP is building a party of a new type: a disciplined and mass Party with unbreakable communist ties among the world’s masses, especially industrial workers and soldiers. A party that unleashes the masses’ imagination and creativity to enthusiastically build communism.
We need millions of critical thinkers and doers who constantly advance communist practice and theory. ICWP invites you to join a collective which fights to mobilize the masses for communism.
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