by DOUG ENAA GREEN
The history of the Paris Commune has become a touchstone of great importance for the question: How should the revolutionary working class organize its tactics and strategy in order to achieve ultimate victory? With the fall of the Commune, the last traditions of the old revolutionary legend have likewise fallen forever; no favorable turn of circumstances, no heroic spirit, no martyrdom can take the place of the proletariat’s clear insight into … the indispensable conditions of its emancipation. What holds for the revolutions that were carried out by minorities, and in the interests of minorities, no longer holds for the proletariat revolution. … In the history of the Commune, the germs of this revolution were effectively stifled by the creeping plants that, growing out of the bourgeois revolution of the eighteenth century, overran the revolutionary workers’ movement of the nineteenth century. Missing in the Commune were the firm organization of the proletariat as a class and the fundamental clarity as to its world-historical mission; on these grounds alone it had to succumb.
— Franz Mehring1
In 1919 at the end of the failed January Uprising in Berlin, Rosa Luxemburg observed the following in one of her last articles:
The whole path of socialism, as far as revolutionary struggles are concerned, is paved with sheer defeats. And yet, this same history leads step by step, irresistibly, to the ultimate victory! Where would we be today without those “defeats” from which we have drawn historical experience, knowledge, power, idealism! Today, where we stand directly before the final battle of the proletarian class struggle, we are standing precisely on those defeats, not a one of which we could do without, and each of which is a part of our strength and clarity of purpose.2
Luxemburg’s words applied just as much to the Paris Commune as to the German Revolution. In the 150 years since its defeat, the Commune has haunted and inspired. Generations of revolutionaries, such as Marx, Engels, and Lenin, have pondered its meaning and mistakes in order to do better in the future.
In the months before March 18, Marx had warned Parisians that an uprising would be “an act of desperate folly.”3 Once the revolution was an accomplished fact, he hailed the commune for “storming the heavens.”4 During its existence, Marx followed the commune’s every step, praised its initiatives, and did everything in his power to further its cause. Even though the commune did not follow Marx’s advice, he was willing to learn from a living revolution.
Just two days after the last barricades had fallen, Marx offered his first reflections on the Paris Commune to the General Council of the First International. Marx’s The Civil War in France was written in a white heat: an impassioned work that clearly grasped the historical significance of the Paris Commune.
First and foremost, Marx believed that the great lesson of the commune “was its own working existence” as the first example of the dictatorship of the proletariat: “It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.”5
As the world’s first socialist revolution, the commune proved in practice that the working class cannot seize the existing bourgeois state. Rather, that state must be destroyed and replaced by a new one after the example of the commune. According to Marx, the “next attempt of the French revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic military machine from one hand to another, but to break it, and that is essential for every real people’s revolution on the Continent. And this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris are attempting.”6
As Engels noted, “One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.’”7 What the Communist Manifesto implied before — that the proletariat could seize the already-existing state to make socialism — was now obsolete.
Proletarian Jacobinism
While analyzing the historic significance of the commune, Marx and Engels also noted its weaknesses. Chief among them was that the commune lacked any guiding organization or cohesive leadership. None of the major factions of the commune were ready to exercise power, nor did they have a clear program. As a result, the communards shrank from the fierce and decisive measures that a revolution needs to survive.
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