Paris Commune Anniversary Forum: Inspiration for Today

Paris Commune Forum here ♦ Forum Inspires MTA workers to build ICWP here ♦ Talking about the Paris Commune here ♦

Paris Commune of 1871: How Communism Will Win

You, communards, men and women, showed us the path,

And we have taken it, widening it with your lessons we remember.

Red Flag is our newspaper that owes so much to your journey:

It dazzles brightly, in reddened embers, without surrender.”

—from an original poem by a comrade (translated from Spanish)

March 20—In today’s international forum, with speeches from the industrial and military areas, songs, videos and poems, the International Communist Workers’ Party made a collective effort to make the historic events of the Paris Commune known to more of the world’s working class.

When we talk about the Paris Commune, we mean the struggle of our class to emancipate itself from capitalist exploitation. For the first time, workers took power, not to change bourgeois politicians but to take over the means of production. This heroic struggle left invaluable lessons for future generations of revolutionary communists. It laid the basis for the Russian and Chinese revolutions.

These lessons are fundamental for the strategy of our International Communist Workers’ Party: to mobilize the masses to build a world without classes, without money, racism, sexism, xenophobia and imperialist wars. A communist world to meet our collective needs.

“This history of struggle is what motivated me to join the ICWP. I am fighting so that there are no exploited and no exploiters,” said a worker leader.

Working women played a key role in all aspects of the Commune. They gave both political and military leadership, convincing the soldiers in the government army to join the side of the Parisian masses, helping to build barricades, and fighting heroically to the end to defend them.

The Commune immediately abolished the police.   It replaced both the police and the army with the Paris National Guard, made up of workers loyal to the Commune.

That’s why a comrade soldier said, “We must organize and take communist ideas to the soldiers in the bosses’ army. We must win soldiers to join the workers’ revolution. They can turn their guns around and not shoot their class brothers and sisters.”

The communards changed all aspects of life, from production to education to social relations. They eliminated rent and evictions. They freed education from the control of the Catholic Church and insisted that girls be educated as well as boys. The masses converted the town halls into mass dining halls and closed-down theaters into centers for Red Clubs that housed refugees and became forums for daily organization and debates.

But negotiating with the capitalists weakened the Commune. Illusions about the nature of the capitalist state meant that the communards wasted valuable time while the French capitalists were planning to attack them. Those who fought against negotiating with the capitalists, who saw that the capitalist state was the mortal enemy of the workers, were not organized into a communist party to mobilize the masses for this.

By the time the communards marched to Versailles, the French capitalists had regrouped. They had surrendered to the Germans. In exchange, the German capitalists, equally afraid of workers’ insurrections, freed thousands of captured French troops to attack the Commune.

Even so, the communards kept the French army at bay for two months, waging battles every day. Finally, at the end of May, the French capitalist army attacked Paris with 200,000 troops. Aided by the German government and its army, they unleashed a campaign of terror and murder against the Parisian masses.

During a week of intense combat, the masses set up and bravely defended huge barricades, but they didn’t have a centralized plan. Thousands of communards died. Afterwards, tens of thousands more were executed by orders of the French government (supported by all the other capitalist governments) trying to drown in blood the memory of the Paris Commune.

A key lesson of the commune was the need to get rid of the capitalist state and to build a centralized communist party to mobilize the masses for revolution. Lenin and the Bolsheviks took this lesson to heart. They mobilized the Russian masses to take power in Russia in 1917.

“I had gone away from the Party for a while, but I have seen that, only by being organized in the ICWP, can I help in the struggle to implement the system of the working class, communism. I’m glad to be with you again,” a comrade said with great emotion.

Today we are building collectives of the International Communist Workers’ Party in different parts of the world. These are similar to the clubs in the working-class neighborhoods that the communards established to build and consolidate the revolution. But they are different in that they are mobilizing directly for communism, nothing less. We are striving to take the lessons of the Paris Commune to a higher level.

Paris Commune Forum Inspires MTA workers to build ICWP

LOS ANGELES, USA— “Inspiring,” said a comrade about the forum about the Paris Commune on Saturday, March 20.

For several years, the workers’ club, including members of ICWP and mechanics of public transit (MTA) and others, has met every Friday. This meeting included six mechanics. The main topic was our impressions of the forum, in which three MTA comrades participated.

We said that the Paris Commune is a very inspiring historical event because it shows that at certain moments in the historical process, workers rise up to fight. And that generally the working class wants change and dreams of a communist society.

The leadership of the old communist movement has always lagged behind, instead of being at the head of the working class. It has often showed itself almost fearful of communism, tailing the workers’ movement. That has led to the failure of many of the workers’ struggles internationally.

Socialist theory has been based on the idea that it was necessary to go through various anterooms to reach communism. However, history has shown us, with much of our class’s blood, that struggles for reforms or struggles trying to implant communism through the back door will always fail. And we carry the dead, the failures.

And the cynicism that is created in the working class after these failed attempts to seize power through the back door, or through electoral or reformist means, is a serious obstacle we have to overcome.

However, history is on our side. In our group, the reactions were very positive and there were demonstrations of support for continuing the fight until the final victory.

“It motivates me to continue organizing. For the next meeting I will invite other workers from the base,” said U.

“I will also begin to gather my base, with four or five workers with whom I will organize another cell or committee,” added D.

I believe that we all left with greater revolutionary enthusiasm and that we will advance the struggle under our political line by mobilizing the masses for communism.

Talking about the Paris Commune: Building a Mass Base for Communism

“You’re back!” A bus driver and regular Red Flag reader welcomed a comrade who had been away for a year due to the pandemic.

Another driver took a paper and later came back to talk. He thought that “the election was stolen.” When asked for specifics, he offered that the Democratic Party nomination was stolen from Bernie Sanders. He still supports Sanders. He hates Biden. (A retired bus driver, who asked for Red Flag, said much the same.) The first worker also mentioned having once belonged to a communist group.

I explained briefly why we don’t support Sanders or any candidates. How elections trap workers in capitalist exploitation. That socialism has never led to communism and never will. That our solution is to mobilize masses for communism.

This last idea interested him. “Suppose we had a mass base for communism here at this transit division,” he mused. “How would that help us elect people to City Council or the County Board of Supervisors?” he asked.

“It wouldn’t,” I replied. “Communism would abolish them. Our path to power is revolution, not elections. If we had a mass base for communism right here, transit workers would spread it to other workers in their families and neighborhoods who could take it to their jobs. To schools and barracks. The network of party collectives we build that way would become the basis of communist political organization as well as production and distribution.”

As I talked about this, the Paris Commune jumped to mind. I referred the worker to the Red Flag article and told him a little about it.

“My friend told me not to talk to you,” the worker admitted. “I will read the paper and tell you what I think.”

Comrade in Los Angeles (USA)

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