A-Infos (en) UK, ACG: Vive La Commune! - This article is dedicated to all those who will turn their guns on their officers (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

'We revolutionaries aren't just chasing a scarlet flag. What we pursue 
is an awakening of liberty, old or new. It is the ancient Communes of 
France, it is 1703; it is June 1848; it is 1871. Most especially it is 
the next revolution on which is advancing under this dawn.' Louise 
Michel ---- 'The Commune was the biggest festival of the nineteenth 
century. Underlying the events of that spring of 1871 one can see the 
insurgents' feeling that they had become the masters of their own 
history, not so much on the level of "governmental" politics as on the 
level of their everyday life.' Situationist International

This year marks the 153rd anniversary of the Paris Commune. This 
momentous event marked the spectacular and agonising beginning of the 
period in which the working class has made consistent attempts, through 
revolutions around the world, to break with the system of exploitation 
and inequality and to usher in a new society and a new civilisation 
based on equality and freedom. The forms of organisation developed by 
the Parisian masses, be they artisans, workers, unemployed, artists and 
writers, youth and children, women and men, are demonstrated again and 
again in the revolutions that were to break out throughout the twentieth 
century and into this one. They are the heralds of a new way of 
organising socially and of behaving honourably and nobly towards each 
other. They are an inspiration to all those who wish to clearly break 
with this society of corruption, brutality, and of the most despicable 
and venal apologies for human beings running the show. As Louise Michel 
one of the finest and most magnificent revolutionaries who ever drew 
breath was to remember of those communards she had survived: 'To those 
who in falling, have opened so wide the gates of the future, through 
which the revolution will pass!'

After the disastrous Franco-Prussian War and the adventures of Napoleon 
III, France was defeated by Prussia. The Prussians advanced to the 
outskirts of Paris. The National Guard, a sort of home army/militia 
supported by public subscription refused to countenance the surrender of 
artillery to the Prussians, as connived at by the new republican 
government that had replaced the old imperial regime. This government 
sent in troops to regain the artillery. They were confronted by a crowd 
that refused to relinquish the guns situated on the heights of 
Montmartre. The officers barked out orders to fire on the crowd but the 
soldiers refused and turned their guns on their officers on March 18th 
1871. This was the birth of the Paris Commune.

Free elections called by the National Guard followed. They elected a 
council made up of a majority of old style Jacobin revolutionaries 
(harking back to the 1789 Revolution) and a minority of working class 
socialists, mostly left-wing Jacobins, influenced by Auguste Blanqui and 
those under the sway of Proudhon, who had envisaged a more libertarian 
and federalist form of organisation. The Commune of Paris proclaimed 
Paris to be autonomous and called for the creation of a confederation of 
communes throughout France. The Commune itself was, in theory, 
recallable, and paid an average workers' wage. It had a mandate to 
report back to those who had elected it. At the same time, a whole host 
of clubs and associations in the Paris neighbourhoods began to develop, 
concerned both with the administration of the local areas and with 
visions of how a new society should operate. The anarchist movement, 
which was developing at this point in history, was enthused by this, as 
its thinkers had predicted just such a development. The Russian 
anarchist Bakunin commented at the time, 'Revolutionary socialism has 
just attempted its first striking and practical demonstration in the 
Paris Commune'. The Commune called for the re-opening of workplaces run 
in a cooperative fashion and by May 1871, forty-three workplaces were 
operating in this way. The Engineers Union voted at a meeting on 23rd of 
April that since the aim of the Commune should be 'economic 
emancipation' it should 'organise labour through associations in which 
there would be joint responsibility' in order 'to suppress the 
exploitation of man by man.' Similarly Marx and his followers hailed the 
coming of the Paris Commune. Marx was to write that the Council of the 
Commune 'was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal 
suffrage in the various wards of the town.' This majority in the final 
days of the Commune voted to establish a Committee of Public Safety 
which would act to defend Paris against the advancing 
counter-revolution. Those of a more libertarian bent within the Commune 
opposed this arguing against the dictatorship of this 'majority'. As the 
anarchist Kropotkin noted, the Paris Commune did not 'break with the 
tradition of the State, of representative government, and it did not 
attempt to achieve within the Commune that organisation from the simple 
to the complex it inaugurated by proclaiming the independence and free 
federation of the Communes... if no central government was needed to 
rule the independent Communes, if the national Government is thrown 
overboard and national unity is obtained by free federation, then a 
central municipal Government becomes equally useless and noxious. The 
same federative principle would do within the Commune'.

The Paris Commune faced two ways: backwards towards the old ways of 
functioning of the 1789 Revolution, with its centralisation, 
authoritarianism and terror; and forwards to a libertarian, decentralist 
and humane way of functioning. The old ways as represented by the 
central administration of the Commune hindered and crippled the new ways 
as represented in the clubs and associations that had developed at the 
grassroots level. The State was not abolished and representative 
government remained in place. As Kropotkin was to note, 'instead of 
acting for themselves . . . the people, confiding in their governors, 
entrusted them the charge of taking the initiative. This was the first 
consequence of the inevitable result of elections' with the central 
council acting as 'the greatest obstacle to the revolution'. He went on 
to note that, 'immobilised there by fetters of red tape, forced to 
discuss when action was needed, and losing the sensitivity that comes 
from continual contact with the masses, they saw themselves reduced to 
impotence. Paralysed by their distancing from the revolutionary centre - 
the people - they themselves paralysed the popular initiative'. In 
addition, again according to Kropotkin, the central council, 'treated 
the economic question as a secondary one, which would be attended to 
later on, after the triumph of the Commune . . . But the crushing defeat 
which soon followed, and the blood-thirsty revenge taken by the middle 
class, proved once more that the triumph of a popular Commune was 
materially impossible without a parallel triumph of the people in the 
economic field'. The council of the Commune become more and more 
isolated from the people who elected it, and thus more and more 
irrelevant. And as its irrelevance grew, so did its authoritarian 
tendencies, with the Jacobin majority creating a 'Committee of Public 
Safety' to 'defend' the 'revolution'. The Committee proved to be inept 
and ineffectual and in practice was ignored by the Parisian masses as 
they fought to defend their gains against the armed forces of the French 
government which had advanced on Paris. On May 21st, government troops 
entered the city, and seven days of fierce street fighting followed. The 
army and armed units of the upper classes roamed the streets, shooting 
down batches of Communards, women, men and children. At least 30,000 
people were killed in the street fighting, many executed after they had 
surrendered. Their bodies were thrown into mass graves, some of them 
still alive. Many fled into exile, whilst many others were imprisoned 
for long periods of time. The appalling massacre of the aftermath of the 
Paris Commune left deep scars in French society which still exist today. 
The Paris Commune was the preface to whole chapters of revolution. Let 
the final words soon be written and let the gates swing wide for the 
birth of a new, free and fair society!
--------
The above is an updated version of an article written in 2011 by a 
member of the ACG in 2011, when he was still in the Anarchist 
Federation. It was originally written to mark the 140th anniversary of 
the Paris Commune.

https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2024/03/20/vive-la-commune-2/
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