Revisiting the Paris Commune of 1871: “Glorious Harbinger of a New society”

By Sandra Bloodworth

Republished from Marxist Left Review.

Eleanor Marx wrote of the Paris Commune:

It is time people understood the true meaning of this Revolution; and this can be summed up in a few words… It was the first attempt of the proletariat to govern itself. The workers of Paris expressed this when in their first manifesto they declared they “understood it was their imperious duty and their absolute right to render themselves masters of their own destinies by seizing upon the governmental power”.1

Karl, her father, had addressed the International Workingmen’s Association (known as the First International) on 30 May 1871. He began with: “On the dawn of March 18, Paris arose to the thunder-burst of ‘Vive la Commune!’ What is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalising to the bourgeois mind?”2

Marx went on to describe why he was so inspired. The Paris Commune

was the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as the only class capable of social initiative, even by the great bulk of the Paris middle class – shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants – the wealthy capitalist alone excepted.3

Many of the lessons Marx drew from this momentous event have in the last half century been largely lost to workers struggling to get control over their lives. But if we listen to the voices of the women and men of the Commune, if we examine the barbarous response of the National Government headed by the reactionary Adolph Thiers, we find that the lessons are just as relevant to our struggle many years later. As Walter Benjamin argued so poetically:

The class struggle, which always remains in view for a historian schooled in Marx, is a struggle for the rough and material things, without which there is nothing fine and spiritual… [The latter] are present as confidence, as courage, as humour, as cunning, as steadfastness in this struggle, and they reach far back into the mists of time. They will, ever and anon, call every victory which has ever been won by the rulers into question. Just as flowers turn their heads towards the sun, so too does that which has been turned, by virtue of a secret kind of heliotropism, towards the sun which is dawning in the sky of history. To this most inconspicuous of all transformations the historical materialist must pay heed.4

In paying heed I will attempt to capture the incredible atmosphere of joy, experimentation and creativity which flourished. But we cannot flinch from the horror of that terrible last week, known as la semaine sanglante, where at least 30,000 people were slaughtered by a government determined to crush not just the physical presence of this social revolution, but also its spirit. The preparedness of the ruling class to inflict such violence should be burned into the consciousness of every anti-capitalist activist. Any movement with a vision of a new society must confront the vexed question of how to win in the face of such barbarism.

The Commune established a more thoroughly democratic society than capitalism has ever seen before or since. The reforms introduced were far in advance of anything the capitalists had ever sanctioned, some of which still have not been won in many countries. The 150th anniversary of this marvellous event is a good time to revisit the inspiring first steps of the revolutionary workers’ movement, and draw the lessons that can be learnt from its successes and ultimate defeat.

The uprising

It all began as the sun rose over the radical working-class arrondissements5 of Montmartre and Belleville on 18 March 1871. Soldiers began seizing nearly 250 cannon deliberately placed in these working-class areas by the National Guard, a popular Parisian militia. The soldiers had been sent there by the head of the new republican government, Adolphe Thiers. Among other things, Thiers was widely despised for his role in the brutal suppression of workers’ rebellions in 1848.

But contrary to Thiers’ expectation of a swift exercise, the affair spun out of control. The incompetent army had forgotten to bring horses to drag the cannon, which gave the Guardsmen time to fraternise with soldiers. Expecting a treasonous crowd, the soldiers began turning their rifles up as the streets rang with declarations of Vive la République!

The London Times correspondent describes the scene as women came out to buy bread and prepare for the day: “Small savage groups of blouses [were] making cynical remarks upon everybody’s cowardice… ‘If they had only left them to us to guard they would not have been captured so easily’.” This militancy and self-assurance of the working women of Paris, convinced that they could fight better than the men, will reverberate through the whole revolution. Our witness, moving along to the suburb of Belleville, recorded soldiers and Guardsmen finding they had much in common. Let’s pause to witness a typical scene:

There was something intensely exciting in the scene. The uncertainty for a moment whether the men were meeting as friends or enemies, the wild enthusiasm of the shouts of fraternization, the waving of the upturned musket, the bold reckless women laughing and exciting the men against their officers, all combined to produce a sensation of perplexity not unmingled with alarm at the strange and unexpected turn things were taking.6

Fraternisation, courageous defiance by the masses of Paris and mutiny were the hallmark of the day. When troops blocked the entrance to the church of Saint-Pierre to stop anyone ringing the tocsin in order to alert the National Guard and citizens to the danger, workers got into other churches, climbing into the steeples. The tolling of the tocsins brought increasing numbers crowding into the streets.7

The correspondent described these areas as “rugged open spaces where the lawless crowds of these parts love to hold their meetings and park their cannon”. Belleville, side by side with Montmartre on the right bank, is described as “[t]he most solidly working-class district in all of Paris, and the most revolutionary”.8 These cannon were regarded as their cannon, financed by workers’ subscriptions to the National Guard since the revolution of 1848. And they were the only means of defence against the Prussian army shelling the city since Thiers had moved his troops to Versailles. When the Times correspondent queried a National Guardsman about possible fighting, he was rebuked: “Sacrebleu, do you suppose we are going to allow these Canaille to take our cannon without firing a shot?”9 After all, the National Guard had deliberately positioned their cannon to defend these key suburbs.

Hostile crowds quickly gathered to block the soldiers trying to move the cannon. Eyewitness accounts all draw our attention to the large numbers of women and children. Louise Michel, one of the most flamboyant and radical figures of the Commune, later recalled the events at Montmartre:

Montmartre was waking up; the drum was beating. I went with others to launch what amounted to an assault on the hilltop. The sun was rising and we heard the alarm bell. Our ascent was at the speed of a charge, and we knew that at the top was an army poised for battle. We expected to die for liberty.

It was as if we were risen from the dead. Yes, Paris was rising from the dead. Crowds like this are sometimes the vanguard of the ocean of humanity… But it was not death that awaited us… No, it was the surprise of a popular victory.

Between us and the army were women who threw themselves on the cannons and on the machine guns while the soldiers stood immobile.10

General Lecomte three times ordered the soldiers to fire on the crowd. “A woman challenged the soldiers: ‘Are you going to fire on us? On our brothers? On our husbands? On our children?’” Lecomte threatened to shoot any soldier who refused to do just that. As they hesitated, he demanded to know if they “were going to surrender to that scum”. Michel recalled:

[A] non-commissioned officer came out from the ranks and…called out in a voice louder than Lecomte’s. “Turn your guns around and put your rifle butts up in the air!” The soldiers obeyed. It was Verdaguerre who, for this action, was shot by Versailles some months later. But the revolution was made.11

Later, Lecomte and another General, Clément Thomas, were taken prisoner before being shot. This incident would become the centre of controversy for years to come, trotted out by enemies of the Communards to demonstrate their barbarism. Of course, the two men’s role in perpetrating mass violence to crush the revolution of 1848 and Lecomte’s repeated orders to kill women and children are rarely mentioned.

Hostile witnesses viewed events through the jaundiced eyes of those accustomed to wielding unchallenged authority, but the narrative is the same. A Versailles army officer recorded that where he was in charge they were

stopped by a crowd of several hundred local inhabitants, principally children and women. The infantry detachment which was there to escort the cannon completely forgot their duty and dispersed into the crowd, succumbing to its perfidious seductions, and ending by turning up their rifle butts.12

A proclamation by Thiers was posted around the city: the taking of the cannon was “indispensable to the maintenance of order”, the intention of the government was to rid the city of the “insurrectionary committee” propagating “communist” doctrines, threatening Paris with pillage. This slur that the rebels wanted to destroy Paris, issued by the reactionary who had abandoned Paris to be shelled and occupied by the Prussians, was the source of even more determined resistance.

Once the horses arrived, some soldiers succeeded in beginning to move some of the cannon in Belleville. Guardsmen and residents responded by building barricades to physically prevent their removal. The crowd swelled, transforming itself from a mass of spectators to increasingly angry and active participants. One observer wrote that they saw

women and children swarming up the hillside in a compact mass; the artillery tried in vain to fight their way through the crowd, but the waves of people engulfed everything, surging over the cannon-mounts, over the ammunition wagons, under the wheels, under the horses’ feet, paralysing the advance of the riders who spurred on their mounts in vain. The horses reared and lunged forward, their sudden movement clearing the crowd, but the space was filled at once by a back-wash created by the surging multitude.

In response to a call by a National Guardsman, women cut through the horses’ harnesses. The soldiers began dismounting, accepting the offers of food and wine from the women. As they broke ranks they became “the object of frenetic ovations”.13

Some time later the Times correspondent returned to Montmartre and visited the barricade, the first stone of which he had seen laid. It had now

grown to considerable dimensions by reason of the rule which is enforced that every passer must place a stone, a pile of which is placed for the purpose on each side of the street… New barricades were springing up in every direction… It was now midday, and the whole affair wore a most strange and incomprehensible aspect to one not brought up to making barricades… Instead of a government blocking every street as was the case in the morning, a hostile cannon was now looking down every street.14

The barricades would develop their own centres of activity, drama and tragedy which would become a focus for historians. Eric Hazan, in his book The Invention of Paris, a History in Footsteps, includes a history of barricades and their “theatrical role” with reference to the Commune’s use of them.15

Cordons of soldiers had been replaced by National Guards supervising barricade-building. The streets, so quiet first thing in the morning, were now “swarming with [Guardsmen], drums were beating, bugles blowing, and all the din of victory”.16

By midday, General Vinoy, assigned to capture the cannon, was fleeing Paris. A Commune sympathiser wrote in his diary:

Legally we had no more government; no police force or policemen; no magistrate or trials; no top officials or prefects; the landlords had run away in a panic abandoning their buildings to the tenants, no soldiers or generals; no letters or telegrams; no customs officials, tax collectors or teachers. No more Academy or Institute: the great professors, doctors and surgeons had left… Paris, immense Paris was abandoned to the “orgies of the vile multitude”.17

How to explain this seemingly spontaneous mass mobilisation over a few hundred cannon? Paris had been under siege by the Prussians since 19 September 1870 and shelled relentlessly since 5 January. Anger with Thiers was intense. He had gone to war with Germany the previous July for the glory of the French empire. Confronted with defeat by Bismarck’s army, he baulked at the idea of arming the population of Paris. And the bourgeoisie refused to support any defence of Paris while the National Guard, with its working-class membership, remained in control of armaments. It was clear that to win the war with Bismarck, all cities, especially Paris, needed to be mobilised under arms. But the history of France since the revolution of 1789 had been one of recurring social upheavals which terrified the bourgeoisie. An army general later summed up the problem: “the diplomacy of the government and almost all of the defence revolved around one thing: the fear of revolt”.18 So Thiers had conspired with Prussia’s Bismarck to crush radical Paris as a condition of a treaty to end the war. Removing the cannon was part of that process.

“Paris armed is the revolution armed”, remarks Marx. And so Thiers, “by surrendering to Prussia not only Paris, but all France…initiated the civil war they were now to wage, with the assistance of Prussia, against the republic and Paris”.19

Attempting to seize the cannon was in reality simply the trigger which unleashed a well of bitterness fed by poverty and squalor in the overcrowded working-class districts. The restructuring of Paris by Georges-Eugène Haussmann,20 appointed by Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, who ruled from his coup d’état in 1852 until September 1870, had been devastating. New, wide boulevards cut swathes through workers’ districts, destroying 100,000 apartments in 20,000 buildings. This displaced thousands from central Paris, with the poor crowding into Montmartre and Belleville. In the midst of a booming economy, it is estimated that a majority of the working class required government assistance.21 Alongside growing misery, the wealthy enjoyed glitzy arcades packed with elegant stores and cafés within walking distance of their magnificent private residences. As Merriman says, “the bourgeoisie’s day had truly arrived”.22 The rebuilding of Paris, which was meant to stave off social unrest, had instead stoked it for decades.

The victorious movement of March 1871 had brought to life what became known as the Paris Commune. Its task was now to reorganise life in the city, based on principles of justice, equality and freedom from tyranny.

The Commune – a new power

As we follow events over the next 72 days we will witness truly awe-inspiring achievements. Innovative democratic institutions were established. And the experience of taking control over their society inspired mass involvement in debates about all aspects of their lives. They replaced the state with one under their control. They vigorously attempted radical reforms in the family, the conditions of women, in the workplace, and education, well ahead of the times, as they debated the role of science, religion and the arts in society.

Edmond de Goncourt – co-founder of the naturalist school of literature in France and whose will established the Goncourt Academy which annually awards the prestigious French literary prize – left this testimony to the Commune’s proletarian character:

The triumphant revolution seems to be taking possession of Paris…barricades are being put up everywhere, naughty children scramble on top of them… You are overcome with disgust to see their stupid and abject faces, which triumph and drunkenness have imbued with a kind of radiant swinishness…for the moment France and Paris are under the control of workmen… How long will it last?… The unbelievable rules…the cohorts of Belleville throng our conquered boulevard.

He is disgusted by their “mocking astonishment” at their achievement, noting that they wear their shoes without socks! He admits that the “government is leaving the hands of those who have, to go into the hands of those who have not”.23

By midday on 18 March, the population had established a situation of dual power: radical Paris in a standoff with the government in Versailles. On one side was Adolph Thiers, a reactionary through and through. His government, elected as recently as February, had already fled to the decadent safety of Versailles, accompanied by the army and a stream of bourgeois and respectable middle-class figures. Now it operated from the Grand Château of the Bourbon monarchy in Versailles, the reactionary centre of the centuries-old alliance between the Catholic church and the Bourbons. Thiers, determined to crush the Commune, would be backed by all of respectable opinion, both in France and across Europe.

On the other side of the barricades, workers created the most democratic institutions known to humanity at that time. Marx would write of their achievements: “[t]he great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence. Its special measures could but betoken the tendency of a government of the people by the people”.24 Such a state of affairs was a direct threat to the repressive rule of Thiers, the monarchy and the church.

Whenever the oppressed rise up and fight for their rights, a sense of revelry inevitably follows. This is what inspires sympathetic witnesses of revolutions to describe such moments as festivals of the oppressed. Paris in 1871 was no different. Even bitter enemies of the Commune could not but convey the joyous atmosphere in the wake of the victory of 18 March. One recorded the experience of standing in front of the Hôtel de Ville, the Paris town hall now occupied by the Communards, while the names of those elected to form a Commune Committee were read out:

I write these lines still full of emotion… One hundred thousand perhaps, where did they come from? From every corner of the city. Armed men spilled out of every nearby street, and the sharp points of the bayonets, glittering in the sun, made the place seem like a field of lightning. The music playing was the Marseillaise, a song taken up in fifty thousand resolute voices: this thunder shook all the people, and the great song, out of fashion from defeats, recovered for a moment its former energy.

…An immense sea of banners, bayonets, and caps, surging forward, drifting back, undulating, breaking against the stage. The cannons still thundered, but they were heard only in intervals between the singing. Then all the sounds merged into a single cheer, the universal voice of the countless multitude, and all these people had but one heart just as they had but one voice.25

The elected Commune Committee was entrusted with the momentous responsibility of defending the city against Versailles, organising food supplies, care for the wounded; indeed, of reorganising the entire life of the city.

The state

The old state power had been demolished, a significant move Marx emphasised:

[F]or the first time since the days of February 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, and that without any police of any kind. “We,” said a member of the Commune, “hear no longer of assassination, theft, and personal assault; it seems indeed as if the police had dragged along with it to Versailles all its Conservative friends”.

To emphasise the significance of this, Marx puts it in a broader context:

The direct antithesis to the empire was the Commune. The cry of “social republic” [the popular slogan of the mass movement]…did but express a vague aspiration after a republic that was not only to supersede the monarchical form of class rule, but class rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that republic.

Paris, the central seat of the old governmental power, and, at the same time, the social stronghold of the French working class, had risen in arms against the attempt of Thiers…to restore and perpetuate that old governmental power bequeathed to them by the empire. Paris could resist only because, in consequence of the siege, it had got rid of the army, and replaced it by a National Guard, the bulk of which consisted of working men. This fact was now to be transformed into an institution. The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people.26

This revolutionary move was the basis on which the new democracy that Marx celebrates could be built.

The majority of [the Commune Committee’s] members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time. The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms.

This was a key point Marx emphasised: how elected delegates and government officials can be made accountable. But not just elected delegates. “Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsible, and revocable.”27

Work

Marx concluded that these innovative democratic structures were “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour” and explained:

The political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundation upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labour emancipated…productive labour ceases to be a class attribute.28

The Commune Committee was not just left to get on with decreeing reforms while everything went back to the old normal. Historians have documented the incredible flowering of organisation, debate and social experimentation that took place, adding a tapestry of rich detail which illuminates Marx’s theoretical generalisations. Many of the organisations and their proposals were based on demands which had been discussed by socialists and worker militants for decades. The difference now was that they were not just topics for debate and protest. Now they became the expression of the poor and oppressed as they began to take control of their lives.

The Committee set up a range of Commissions to deal with specific areas. The Jewish-Hungarian worker, Léo Frankel, a member of the International and collaborator of Marx, was appointed minister of labour to deal with workers’ rights and working conditions. Night work by bakers was abolished; employers were banned from reducing wages by levying their employees with fines under any pretext, “a process in which the employer combines in his own person the parts of legislator, judge, and executor, and filches the money to boot”.29

Some issues were complicated due to conflicting priorities. Military supplies were obviously of paramount importance. But the Commune’s purchase of the cheapest equipment did not sit easily beside workers’ demands for decent wages. The commissioner for finance, Proudhonist François Jourde, baulked at rewriting contracts with employers, hardly surprising given the Proudhonists supported private property. But as Frankel pointed out, “the revolution was made exclusively by the working class. I don’t see what the point of the Commune is if we…do nothing for that class”. In response to the workers themselves, new contracts specifying a satisfactory minimum wage were agreed. The employers were not consulted.

An additional clause decreed by the Labour Commission stated that where possible contracts be awarded “directly to the workers’ own corporations”. Workers’ corporations can be understood here to refer to co-operatives, associations and trade unions. They were strongly backed by Frankel’s Commission as a vehicle for socialism. The Commission also decreed that the enterprises of any employers who fled to Versailles were to be taken over by its workers.30

Another of Marx’s collaborators in the International played a key role in influencing the Labour Commission.31 The Russian socialist Elisabeth Dmitrieff was central to establishing the Union des Femmes, or Women’s Union. It was the women’s section of the First International. A mariage blanc32 had provided Dmitrieff with an escape route out of Russia. She had spent the last three months in London, where she met with Marx almost daily, discussing theories of revolution. Prior to that she had joined the International in Geneva, where she had met the future Communards Eugène Varlin and Benoît Malon. According to historian Kristin Ross, the Union des Femmes became the largest and most effective organisation in the Commune.33 It met daily in almost every one of the twenty arrondissements. The membership was dominated by workers in the garment trades: seamstresses, laundresses, dressmakers and so on.34

The Union des Femmes’ discussions included theoretical questions about ending private property and the issues of gender-based inequality, as well as solving the day to day struggle to provide fuel and food to families. At the same time they participated in the defence of the Commune, maintenance of barricades, tending to the sick and wounded. Ross sums up: “In some ways, the Women’s Union can be seen as the practical response to many of the questions and problems regarding women’s labour that had been the discussion topic [for years]”.35

Another historian, Donny Gluckstein, argues: “[t]he Labour Commission’s work was shaped by, and depended absolutely on, the Women’s Union and the trade unions’ workers’ corporations, which in turn were empowered by the commission.”36 Spelling out their mission, the Union des Femmes declared: “We want work, but in order to keep the product. No more exploiters, no more masters. Work and well-being for all”. At their urging, the Commune set up cooperatives to make Guardsmen’s uniforms, which provided well-paid work under the women workers’ control.37

While women suffered special oppression, their working lives were also shaped by the broader conditions facing the working class. They made remarkable moves in the direction towards workers’ control, in spite of limited time and conditions of war: “There were a dozen confiscated workshops, above all those linked to military defence… Five corporations had begun searching out the available workshops, ready for their confiscation”. And state-owned establishments such as the mint and the national print shop were put under workers’ management. Even the café workers, given these leads, began to set up a trade union.38

The radical clubs

The tradition of radical political clubs, inspired by the 1789-92 revolution and revived in 1848, had emerged from the underground in the year leading up to the Commune. They discussed a wide range of issues: political strategy, which reforms to prioritise, women’s rights, attitudes to the church and science, how to better organise defence and strengthen the barricades and more. Previously these issues were confined to radical circles, but now the clubs attracted a wider audience and enthusiastic support for their proposals. Workers were the great majority of participants, but middle-class radicals also joined in. Between 36 and 50 clubs met daily, mostly in the working-class districts. Some were huge, involving thousands, with women playing a prominent role both in their own clubs and in mixed ones with men.39 Many discussions resulted in sending resolutions to the Commune Committee, and there was an ongoing debate regarding its relationship to the clubs.

An anti-Communard gave a sense of the spirit which made the clubs such a vibrant part of the new democracy:

From Rue Druout right up to the Montmartre district the boulevards had become a permanent public meeting or club where the crowd, divided into groups, had filled not only the pavements but also the road to the point of blocking…traffic. They formed a myriad of public assemblies where war and peace were hotly debated.40

Élie Reclus, an ethnographer given responsibility for the management and preservation of the Bibliothèque Nationale, called them “schools for the people”, where constructive debate flourished and a heightened sense of community was created. Ross describes the clubs as “a quasi-Brechtian merging of pedagogy and entertainment”.41

A week after the declaration of the elected Commune Committee, on the initiative of the club in the third arrondissement that was endorsed by the Commune Committee, churches across the city were commandeered as meeting places and organising centres. These venues, unlike street meetings, created a sense of seriousness and permanence in the clubs, even of high drama. Lissagaray, member of the International and author of one of the first books published about the Commune, penned a colourful description of one such meeting:

The Revolution mounts the pulpits…almost hidden by the shadow of the vaults, hangs the figure of Christ draped in the popular oriflamme. The only luminous centre is the reading desk, facing the pulpit, hung with red. The organ and the people chant the Marseillaise. The orator, over-excited by these fantastic surroundings, launches forth into ecstatic declamations which the echo repeats like a menace. The people discuss the events of the day, the means of defence; the members of the Commune are severely censured, and vigorous resolutions are voted to be presented to the Hôtel de Ville the next day.42

It is wonderful to imagine such revolutionary proceedings taking place beneath soaring ceilings and beautiful stained glass windows. Occupying these odes to privilege and power was a constant reminder of the momentous challenge the Commune had thrown down before the bourgeoisie, the monarchy and their ally, the church.

Separating church and state

Marx noted that once the state force was dismantled, the Commune

was anxious to break the spiritual force of repression…by the disestablishment and disendowment of all churches as proprietary bodies… The whole of the educational institutions were opened to the people gratuitously, and at the same time cleared of all interference of church and state. Thus, not only was education made accessible to all, but science itself freed from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had imposed upon it.43

Anti-church sentiment was not just the preserve of small numbers of radicals. The Catholic church had thrown its wealth and power behind Bonaparte’s dictatorship, never concealing its bitter hostility to republicanism. So the growing opposition to Bonaparte was organically anti-clerical, among both middle-class radicals and the urban poor. In the large cities, attendance at religious ceremonies had sharply declined before the revolution, especially among workers. It’s not difficult to see why. The church taught that the poor would be rewarded for their suffering by passing from this vale of tears to the glories of heaven. But to enter that heaven you had to silently endure endless misery. As well, the church, in this time of the Enlightenment and a rapidly changing world, was seen as a bastion of ignorance, summed up by the Syllabus of Errors in 1864 which denounced modern society.44 As Merriman writes: “[t]he church’s close association with people of means had long drawn popular ire; the birth of the Commune merely unleashed it”.45

State laws were strongly influenced by the church’s teachings about the family, women’s role and morality. So the programs for reforms raised in the clubs around such issues were more often than not entwined with anti-religious bitterness.

There were no bounds to the irreverence displayed once the churches were commandeered. Mock masses, holy water replaced with a pile of tobacco, statues of the Virgin Mary dressed in the uniform of women supplying provisions to the National Guard, sometimes with a pipe in her mouth. At the same time the Communards in many cases allowed ceremonies for the devout to go ahead in the mornings before the clubs met. As such the meetings would often take place amidst flowers, crucifixes and other religious paraphernalia left behind from morning mass and other religious events.

Church properties provided much needed venues, a practical issue which just happened to intersect with the anti-church sentiment. Notre-Dame-de-Lorette became a barracks at one stage, then a jail for those arrested for refusing to fight. The Women’s Union’s cooperative was housed in Saint-Pierre in Montmartre, also used as a storage place for munitions and a school for girls. Another became a medical facility.46 In a reversal of the old order, speakers in the clubs insisted that the clergy pay rent to the Commune for use of ecclesiastical spaces for “their comedies”. Proceeds were to go to the widows and orphans of the fighting. The club of Faubourg Saint-Antoine suggested that church bells be melted to make cannon.47

The hostility to the church is a theme in many records of the time. For instance, when the archbishop, who had been arrested, called the head of police and court officials “my children”, the sharp response was: “We are not children – we are the magistrates of the people!” Merriman cites a document in which the archbishop is described as “Prisoner A who says he is a servant of somebody called God”.48

While one third of all students attended religious schools, the church exercised a virtual monopoly over the education of girls, a fact directly related to the lower rates of literacy among women.49 In general, religious education was backward and stifling. A commission headed by a range of artists, teachers and songwriters instigated closing down the church schools and removing religious symbols.50 Where necessary, crowds took direct action to shut schools taught by religious figures, who had never been required to have the qualifications demanded of regular teachers. Many of them resigned, asking for lay teachers to replace them. By May religious teaching was banned in all schools.

Education

Members of the First International were prominent in debating and proposing innovations on a number of intersecting questions around education. The official journal of the Commune records that they were active in organising public educational meetings and reorganising education “on the largest of possible bases”. Ross puts well how central was the issue:

A lived experience of “equality in action”, the Commune was primarily a set of dismantling acts directed at the state bureaucracy and performed by ordinary men and women. Many of these dismantling acts were focused, not surprisingly, on that central bureaucracy: the schools.51

Discussions about education went well beyond secularisation. A third of children had no access to education at all, and the Commune would try to implement compulsory and equal education for both boys and girls. Teachers’ wages were raised, with women and men on equal pay. A school of industrial arts was established with a woman as director. Students would receive scientific and literary instruction, then use some of the day for the application of art and drawing to industry. One of the most enthusiastic supporters of the polytechnic schools was Eugène Pottier, member of the International and a supporter of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier’s concept of “attractive work”. A son of a box-maker, Pottier was a fabric designer and a poet. Unlike today, theoretical and practical debates about education were not carried out in the rarefied circles of academia, but in the clubs around the city. Declarations reflecting those debates were printed as posters and pasted on walls in the streets. One which bore Pottier’s name read in part:

That each child of either sex, having completed the cycle of primary studies, may leave school possessing the serious elements of one or two manual professions: this is our goal…the last word in human progress is entirely summed up by the simple phrase: Work by everyone, for everyone.52

“Secular nurseries” were also set up near workplaces employing women. They were guided by principles laid down by the utopian socialist Charles Fourier: caregivers were not to wear black or dark-coloured clothing, and were rotated to avoid boredom or tiredness setting in, “it being important that children should be looked after only by cheerful and young women, whenever possible”. Religious representations were replaced with pictures and sculptures of real objects such as animals and trees, including aviaries full of birds. Boredom was thought to be “the greatest malady” of children.53 We get a glimpse of some of what those children were taught in this anecdote from a gentleman who witnessed a “band” of 200 “toddlers” marching behind a drum and a small red flag. “They sing at the top of their lungs ‘La Marseillaise’. This grotesque parade celebrated the opening of a lay school organised by the Commune.”54

Marx’s collaborator, Benoît Malon, helped set up an asylum for orphans and runaways, where they could be offered basic instruction. Paule Mincke opened one of the first schools for girls. They requisitioned a Jesuit school, because it was endowed with the most advanced equipment and laboratories. Édouard Vaillant set up a professional school of industrial art for girls, occupying the École des Beaux Arts. This school introduced a new approach to teaching. Any skilled worker over the age of 40 could apply to become a professor.55

The emphasis on science as fundamental to the advance of society was a powerful theme. A young scientist from the US, Mary Putnam Jacobi, happened to be in Paris. Her experience in that spring “led to a political awakening” and inspired her to spend the next three decades campaigning against sexist assumptions about women’s biology. She became a powerful advocate for the equal contribution of women to medicine and developed the philosophy that the advance of science and the advance of women were one and the same objective. She depathologised menstruation by disproving the then widely held notion that rest was necessary in order to prevent infertility, one of the reactionary ideas of the Proudhonists.

Women’s rights and the family

Marx mocks “the absconding men of family, religion, and, above all, of property”, and writes:

In their stead, the real women of Paris showed again at the surface – heroic, noble, and devoted, like the women of antiquity. Working, thinking, fighting, bleeding Paris – almost forgetful, in its incubation of a new society, of the Cannibals at its gates – radiant in the enthusiasm of its historic initiative!56

As already discussed, women were involved in pushing many of the Commune’s most radical proposals. This is not surprising. Women – due to the specific nature of their oppression – can be the bearers of more conservative ideas in stable times, especially when trapped in the home. But when they challenge their chains of oppression, they often become the most dynamic element of mass movements, with less to lose and more to gain from a fundamental transformation of the status quo.

The Commune immediately made farsighted and fundamental improvements to women’s lives. The remission of rents and the ban on sales of goods deposited at the pawn shops lifted a huge burden from workers’ families. A decree on 10 April granted wives – legal or defacto – of Guardsmen who were killed defending the Commune a pension of 600 francs. Each of her children, legitimate or not, could collect 365 francs until they turned 18. And orphans would receive the education necessary “to make their own way in society”.57 As Edith Thomas, in her social history of women in the Commune, remarks: “This was an implicit recognition of the structure of the working-class family, as it really existed, outside the context of religious and bourgeois laws”. Unions libres were common among workers but not recognised by the church or the state, denying women their dignity, to say nothing of economic discrimination given that unmarried women were not eligible for any widow’s allowance. And “[i]n a city where about a quarter of all couples were unmarried, the church, which normally charged 2 francs to register a birth, demanded 7.50 francs [about two days’ wages for many] for an ‘illegitimate’ child”.58

Thomas comments that the widows’ pension was “one of the most revolutionary steps of its brief reign. That this measure outraged the bourgeoisie, and that it was received with jubilation by members of the Commune are indications of its significance”. 59

But women weren’t passive recipients of reforms. It was mostly women who dragged the guillotine into Rue Voltaire and burned it on 10 April. Women were some of the most militant in both women’s and mixed clubs. They were particularly strident in their denunciation of marriage. In a club in Les Halles, a militant woman warned that marriage “is the greatest error of ancient humanity. To be married is to be a slave. In the club of Saint-Ambroise a woman declared that she would not permit her sixteen-year-old daughter to marry, that she was perfectly happy living with a man “without the blessing of the Church”.60 At least one other club also voted in favour of divorce, a policy which was implemented by the Commune Committee. These kinds of discussions in the clubs were the catalyst for the kinds of reforms we have seen. They didn’t just come from the Commune Committee on high. And marriage ceased to be a formal contract, it was simply a written agreement between couples, easily dissolved.61

Michel’s Club de la Révolution, along with others, raised the right to abortion, which was endorsed by the Committee. At the Club of the Free Thinkers Nathalie Lemel – a book binder, and member of Marx’s group in the International who worked with that other comrade of Marx, Elisabeth Dmitrieff and her Union des Femmes – along with Lodoyska Kawecka, who dressed in trousers and wore two revolvers hanging from her sash, argued for divorce and the liberation of women.62

Many of the ideas about women’s liberation, just as those about education, did not originate in the Commune. Marx’s grouping in the International, along with feminists such as André Léo, had created a tradition of support for these attitudes among the most militant workers and socialists. But the revolutionary movement opened up a whole new opportunity for their ideas to win popular support.

The role of art

The anti-capitalist, anti-elitist orientation of the International naturally attracted artists, writers and other intelligentsia whose dependence on patronage and state subsidies curtailed their artistic and political expression.

Eugène Pottier has become famous for his authorship of The Internationale, a song imbued with all the internationalism and irreverence of the Commune. Before that he also wrote the founding manifesto of the Artists’ Federation in which he penned the term “Communal luxury”, adopted by Kristin Ross as the title of her book.63 The founder and president of the Federation was Gustave Courbet, later persecuted because he was accused of ordering the demolition of the Vendôme column.64 The Federation held debates about the role of art and the artist in society, the integration of art into everyday life and how to overcome the counterposition between beauty and utility. It attracted well-known artists such as Corot, Manet and Daumier, who scorned those who fled Paris for Versailles such as Cézanne, Pissarro and Degas. Émile Zola, who associated with the reactionaries in Versailles, disgraced himself with mocking attacks on Courbet for his participation in politics, a sphere considered foreign to artists.65

The Federation refused to deal with any artistic creations which were not signed by their creator. This was a response to the previous practice of artists having to sell their works unsigned so that a dealer could pocket the profits. The personal history of Napoléon Gaillard, another member of the International, demonstrates their theories. A shoemaker, Gaillard was appointed commissioner for barricades. But how to sign a creation as immense as a barricade? An enemy of the Commune explained how Gaillard solved this problem:

[He] appeared so proud of his creation that on the morning of May 20, we saw him in full commandant’s uniform, four gold braids on the sleeve and cap, red lapels on his tunic, great riding boots, long, flowing hair, a steady gaze…and with his hand on his hip, had himself photographed.66

In harmony with the theories developed in the Federation, Gaillard would write philosophical treatises on the foot and the boot, and invent rubber galoshes. There were people who would not wear any other shoe than those he designed, years after his death. From exile he wrote “[t]he Art of the Shoe is, no matter what one says, of all the arts the most difficult, the most useful, and above all the least understood”. He insisted that he be known as both a worker and an “artist shoemaker”. His stance and writings summed up the Artists’ Federation’s arguments for overcoming the counterposition of the useful to the beautiful, calling for the public to demand shoes made for the foot as it is, rather than as it is assumed it should be.67

The attempt to overcome the separation of art from industry and life in general became a subject of much debate and experimentation, strongly influencing the British socialist novelist and fabric designer William Morris.

The Commune’s internationalism

Marx and Engels had argued in The German Ideology decades earlier that workers could only become fit to create a new society through struggle against the old. Paris in March 1871 illustrated their point dramatically. France had been at war with Prussia since July 1870, yet the Commune was determinedly internationalist in spirit: “Within sight of that Prussian army, that had annexed to Germany two French provinces, the Commune annexed to France the working people all over the world”. A Jewish-Hungarian worker was appointed to the key position of minister of labour. They “honoured the heroic sons of Poland [J Dabrowski and W Wróblewski] by placing them at the head of the defenders of Paris”. And “to broadly mark the new era of history it was conscious of initiating, under the eyes of the conquering Prussians on one side, and the Bonapartist army…on the other, the Commune pulled down that colossal symbol of martial glory, the Vendôme Column”.68

This was not just a militant, spur of the moment act. Great thought and planning went into the removal of the statue that was on top of the column. There is a photograph of a pile of rubble in the Place Vendôme, all that remains of Bonaparte’s statue, surrounded by undamaged buildings: the Communards had employed their most skilled engineers and workers to bring it down. Indeed, their original goal was to move the monument to a museum, but it proved too fragile to survive the toppling. The Place Vendôme was renamed Place Internationale.69

Like many of the reforms being proposed, the ideas of internationalism had been developing among radical workers before March 1871. Lissagaray outlines the development of a combative working class, independent of the increasingly conservative liberal bourgeoisie. In 1870, as rumours circulated about the coming war with Prussia:

[T]he revolutionary socialists crowd the boulevards crying, Vive la paix! And singing the pacific refrain – “The people are our brothers/And the tyrants are our enemies”… Unable to influence the bourgeoisie, they turn to the working men of Germany… “Brothers, we protest against the war, we who wish for peace, labour and liberty. Brothers, do not listen to the hirelings who seek to deceive you as to the real wishes of France”.70

The Commune’s embrace of foreign militants in their midst and the demolition of the symbol of imperial might demonstrated that their internationalism was more than rhetorical.

Reorganising society democratically

Contemporary observers, both hostile and sympathetic, commented that the Commune’s elected leaders were unknown. That was not as true as it might seem; many of them had already made their name in debates in the popular clubs. To respectable society, then as now, such mass leaders were invisible. The other comment which recurs throughout the observations then and through all the histories is their inexperience. And how could it be otherwise? As Marx stresses, this was the first time workers had been sufficiently formed as a class to lead a movement for change. So even experienced activists were tackling new questions.

Donny Gluckstein looks at the way the democracy worked in some detail. He correctly puts it in the context of having to defend the Commune against Versailles with its trained army against the much smaller numbers of the rag-tag forces of the National Guard. Prisoners of war were released by Bismarck to help crush Paris. They were bombarded with lies and horror stories about the intentions of the Parisians, whipped into a frenzy of hatred that would be unleashed in the last week of May. But that murderous final stanza was merely the conclusion of growing bombardments and incursions into Paris by the army. These attacks killed scores of Guardsmen, with many others arrested.

Given these conditions, the humanitarian principles the Commune sought to live by often conflicted with the need for defence. For instance, the abolition of the death penalty distanced the idea of revolution from such cruelty. But in the face of massacres and hostages disappearing into the Versailles jails, it was reinstated. Only three were ever executed, but as we subsequently saw following the October Revolution in Russia, there is an unavoidable tension between honourable long-term goals and the immediate question of survival.

Gluckstein shows how the Commune Committee – headquartered in the Hôtel de Ville – related to the network of committees in the arrondissements, the clubs, and myriad other organisations which flourished. He argues that “the main living link between the mass movement and the Communal Council was the clubs”. 71

We cannot understand how democracy functioned in the Commune without grasping the vibrant life of those clubs. They argued for the creation of a stronger leadership in the form of a Committee of Public Safety, which provoked widespread debates. The name invoked the terror of the Great Revolution, which contradicted the image of remaining lawful and pacific which the leaders at the Hôtel de Ville had insisted on. Some women formed their own vigilance committees in spite of reluctance from the Commune Committee. The club Saint-Séverin, possibly where supporters of the International had some sway, asked the Commune to “finish off the bourgeoisie in one blow [and] take over the Banque de France”, a point Marx had made on multiple occasions.

A meeting of 3,000 at Louise Michel’s Club de la Révolution on 13 May, just a week before the final bloody week, unanimously called for the abolition of magistrates, the immediate arrest of priests and the execution of a hostage every 24 hours until the release of political prisoners by Versailles.72 These are the demands of some of the most radical Communards, which shows both the level of debate and how arguments made by organised militants could get a mass audience. This was partly helped by the indecision in the Hôtel de Ville, which inflamed popular impatience.

Clubs insisted they should oversee the actions of the Commune Committee. Eleven of them formed a federation to produce a bulletin, some summoned the Council members to attend their meetings so there was more of an exchange of views. These chaotic events reflected both the dynamism which had been unleashed, but also much confusion about how to win against the increasingly threatening Versailles troops. Gluckstein concludes that it was the “sections” which included organisations such as the Union des Femmes that most effectively worked with the Hôtel de Ville, establishing a “strong and reciprocal” relationship: “In education, for example, much of the momentum came not from the Commune’s commission but from the pre-existing bodies of educators”. And we have already seen the reciprocal role of the Union des Femmes in relation to the Commission of Labour and the Commune Committee.73

This issue of how the clubs pressured the Commune Committee, took initiatives and demanded that the Committee inform them of their decisions is important in understanding the role of women in the revolutionary process. Judy Cox correctly challenges Gay Gullickson who, like most historians, downplays the advances for women because they weren’t members of the elected Commune Committee. This is doubly mistaken. Firstly, like many feminists, Gullickson assumes that men can’t represent women’s interests. But support for women’s rights is not simply a question of gender, but of politics. As Cox points out, “The Marxist wing of the First International was the only political organisation in France which supported the female franchise. At least four socialist male members of the Commune – Eugène Varlin, Benoît Malon, Édouard Vaillant and Leó Frankel – took initiatives that promoted women’s equality in their areas of responsibility”.74

But it was not simply a matter of principled men standing up against oppression. As already indicated, women’s voices were loud and clear in the clubs, on the barricades and in every activity of the Commune. To modern supporters of women’s liberation, the fact that women weren’t granted the right to vote in the elections seems shocking. But there is no evidence that women demanded it. As Ross says:

The [Women’s] Union showed no trace of interest in parliamentary or rights-based demands. In this its members were, like Louise Michel, Paule Mincke and other women in the Commune, indifferent to the vote (a major goal in 1848) and to traditional forms of republican politics… Participation in public life, in other words, was for them in no way tied to the franchise.75

This is true, but the National Committee of the New Guard assumed, when they found themselves at the head of a successful insurrection, that they should operate legally. So the elections for which they got agreement from the mayors were held under the government’s existing law, which only allowed for male suffrage. We don’t know what the outcome would have been if prominent women had led a fight for female suffrage, but it is clear that many would have backed them.

Gullickson takes the positions of the right-wing Proudhonists – against whom Marx campaigned relentlessly – as evidence of a general chauvinist male culture which sidelined women. But even the left of the Proudhonists, such as Lefrançais, supported women’s rights. And in spite of her feminism, Gullickson does not respect the voice of André Léo,76 a prominent feminist from well before the Commune and editor of the magazine La Sociale. To bolster her case Gullickson quotes an account Léo published of New Guard officers and a physician who acted disrespectfully towards women volunteers. Yet Léo concluded that very article with: “we noticed the very different attitudes present. Without exception the [middle-class] officers and surgeons showed a lack of sympathy that varied from coldness to insults; but from the National Guards came respect and fraternity”. And, because she aired the grievance against the officers, Louis Rossel, the Commune’s war delegate, asked her for advice about involving more women in the military campaign.77

Of course not everyone was immediately convinced of the most radical points described here. The point is that women were challenging backward views, agitating for the reforms they needed, and the Commune endorsed their demands. The majority of Léo’s articles in La Sociale dealt with issues not specifically about women. But when she did, she emphasised the need and the potential for solidarity between the sexes. One of her articles was titled “Toutes avec Tous” (all women and men together).78

We can add a further point. Gullickson can’t recognise the immense advances that women made, and the tradition they left for the working class to learn from because she, like other liberal feminists, focuses on elected leaders. While what happens at that level is not irrelevant, socialists should focus on the changes taking place below the surface, where workers were busy establishing democratic structures, raising new ideas and taking incredible initiatives. In the tumultuous events that characterise any revolution, the democratic character of the process cannot be fully understood simply by analysing constitutions or formal structures. It is about the dynamic of that process, and the incipient tendencies that emerge spontaneously through the struggle which can be developed further by conscious political intervention.

Much of the retrospective critiques of the Commune identify their failure to seize the wealth stored in the National Bank as a key mistake. Yet this itself was partly a product of the rigorous democracy that was the norm throughout the Commune. Raoul Rigault, a Blanquist and member of the International, was in charge of the “ex-Prefecture of police”. He was a colourful figure with a history of political agitation and organising, dubbed the “professor of barricades” by a magistrate in one of his many trials.79 He ordered some guards to seize the Bank of France to nationalise the wealth stored there. But prone to the elitism typical of the Blanquists, he did not consult with the rest of the Communal Council, and so the proposal was blocked by the Proudhonists. One of them insisted that the bank “should be respected as private property belonging to the shareholders”! By the time the Communal Council considered Rigault’s instruction, the opportunity had been missed.80

Engels maintained that “[t]he bank in the hands of the Commune – this would have been worth more than 10,000 hostages”. It is debatable whether this would have pushed Versailles to settle for peace as Engels asserted, but it is clear that the money within could have been used to deepen the Commune’s achievements. For instance, the Commune had to spend 21 million francs on defence, leaving just 1,000 francs for education, an issue dear to the heart of virtually all who participated. More to the point, such reluctance to take on a bastion of governmental power and the bourgeoisie reflected the constant desire to operate within the bounds of bourgeois legality and to avoid being cast as responsible for the civil war raging around them.81 While there are examples of a lack of accountability from some leaders, the weaknesses historians identify have to be seen in the context of the siege, the civil war, and social and economic breakdown. The significant achievement is that which Marx emphasised: the embryo of a workers’ democracy, with elected and recallable representatives, plus judges and officials at every level. This historical breakthrough warrants our main emphasis, rather than the understandable shortcomings.

A final point. The structures established by the Commune cannot be taken as a direct model for revolutionaries today. The working class in Paris was the largest group, numbering 900,000, surrounded by 400,000 petty bourgeois running 4,000 greengrocers’ shops, 1,900 butchers, 1,300 bakeries. However, Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris had discouraged the establishment of large workplaces. Those that were established were mostly in the outer rim of Paris. The Cail plant in north-east Paris, employing 2,800 to produce steam engines and locomotives, was the exception rather than the norm. Workplaces of over 10 workers were only seven percent of the total, with 31 percent employing between two and ten. Gluckstein concludes:

The nature of production…had an influence on the organisational structure of the 1871 movement… Trade union action was difficult to mount and broad activities could not easily be built from tiny workplaces. Such units of production could not provide a collective focus for the working class. Instead that came from the National Guard and the clubs which offered a framework for collective expression and organisation.82

In the Russian revolution of 1905 workers would take another leap forward and create soviets, reflecting the huge growth of the industrial working class, brought together in workplaces massively larger than anything in Paris in 1871. This meant that the focus of organisation shifted to the workplace, even as the streets remained an important focal point for large and united protests that brought workers from across different industries together. This is profoundly important. As Rosa Luxemburg argued, “where the chains of oppression are forged, there they must be broken”. Nevertheless the principles of the Commune lived on in the soviets: all delegates and people in places of responsibility to be recallable at any time, accountable to the electors, paid workers’ wages and remaining at work where they experienced the conditions about which they made decisions. The Paris Commune is therefore best understood as a premonition, or a harbinger, of a future society. In Marx’s words:

The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par décret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation…they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society.83

Some aspects of the Commune have been superseded by subsequent developments, and we do not know precisely how the working-class revolution of this century might look. However the basic principles of collectivity and democracy it established remain vitally important to the modern working class.

Ruling class savagery – la semaine sanglante

Marx had argued that we make our own history, but not in circumstances of our choosing.84 The uprising which erupted on 18 March forced the Communards to reorganise society amidst a Prussian siege and a bitter civil war. These factors strongly contributed to the defeat of this heroic uprising.

On Sunday 21 May, troops from Versailles stormed Paris. New barricades went up in street after street, as the population mobilised for a final heroic attempt to maintain their Commune. An eyewitness described how one of the barricades was constructed and defended by “a women’s battalion of around a hundred and twenty. At the time that I arrived, a dark form detached itself from a carriage gate. It was a girl with a Phrygian bonnet over her ear, a musket in her hand, and a cartridge-belt at her waist. ‘Halt, citizen, you don’t pass here!’”85 We see how women have developed from pleading with soldiers not to shoot in March, to now playing a role as proud, fighting combatants in May, prepared to die with dignity and honour.

Just one week later, 30,000 or more people had been murdered by the counter-revolutionaries. The chapter headings used by Lissagaray in his book sum up the experience: “The Versailles fury”, “The balance sheet of bourgeois vengeance”. The essence of the events is captured in the title of John Merriman’s book, Massacre.86 Though there are debates about the death toll, I see no point in quibbling about the precise figures. Many casualties were never recorded, their bodies thrown into mass graves and later incinerated. Countless others disappeared into jails or colonial transportation, where who knows how many died. Others fled to seek sanctuary, and there are few records of who survived wounds inflicted in the fighting. This barbarity was at first cheered on in the respectable bourgeois papers of Europe, whose journalists had followed the army around “like jackals”. One journalist had called for “an end to this international democratic vermin” of Red Paris. But faced with “the smell of carnage”, swarms of flies on corpses, trees stripped of leaves, the streets full of dead birds, even some of these bourgeois commentators were repulsed. “Let us not kill any more”, pleaded the Paris Journal, “Enough executions, enough blood, enough victims” lamented the Nationale.87

But the upper classes who lived off the labour of those being massacred expressed no such limits to their savagery.88 Respectable women took tours of the dungeons where the arrested were incarcerated, holding their lace-edged handkerchiefs – made by the women at whom they gawked – to their noses against the stench of filth and dying Communards. In particular, they took delight in poking the women with their parasols. Many public figures, including judges and other respectable bourgeois and middle-class types, continued to bay for blood. To justify this frenzy, they invented lies which appealed to the prejudices of this scum. An anonymous Englishman described the Communards as “lashed up to a frenzy which has converted them into a set of wild beasts caught in a trap”. This, in his opinion, “render[ed] their extermination a necessity”.89 The ruling class especially hated the women Communards, whom they depicted as “vile”, “wild” and sexually depraved.

Their fury was stoked by hysterical stories of the infamous pétroleuses, supposedly prepared to burn down the whole of Paris. So the legend of the pétroleuses demands our attention. Edith Thomas titled her book on the women of the Commune Les Pétroleuses, translated as The Women Incendiaries. She examines the evidence and concludes that it’s not clear whether there were any pétroleuses in the way reactionaries used the term. At the same time, the Communards clearly did use fire as a weapon of war to destroy buildings from which the Versaillese could gun people down. Fire was also used as a form of barricade, a wall of flames to keep the soldiers back, set by the fighters who must have included women and possibly even children.90 Merriman documents orders given by the war delegate with the National Guard, Charles Delescluze, the ageing Jacobin, and others, including men in the Commune Committee, to blow up or set fire to houses. Delescluze, aware that it had become impossible to muster the kind of military response necessary to repel the soldiers, “adopted a strategy of mass popular resistance”. Generals of the National Guard specifically ordered “the burning of a number of monumental Parisian buildings, all in the fancy parts of town”, as well as official buildings. One of the Communard generals ordered the Tuileries Palace to be set ablaze. Gustave Lefrançais, the most left-wing Proudhonist, admitted that he was one of those “who had shutters of joy seeing that sinister palace go up in flames”. When a woman asked Nathalie Lemel what it was she could see burning in Montmartre, Lemel replied simply, “it’s nothing at all, only the Palais-Royal and the Tuileries, because we do not want a king anymore”.91

Marx was right to defend the burning of the city:

The working men’s Paris, in the act of its heroic self-holocaust, involved in its flames buildings and monuments. While tearing to pieces the living body of the proletariat, its rulers must no longer expect to return triumphantly into the intact architecture of their abodes. The government of Versailles cries, “Incendiarism!” and whispers this cue to all its agents…to hunt up its enemies everywhere as suspect of professional incendiarism. The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar!

…The Commune used fire strictly as a means of defence. They used it to stop up to the Versailles troops those long, straight avenues which Haussmann had expressly opened to artillery-fire; they used it to cover their retreat, in the same way as the Versaillese, in their advance, used their shells which destroyed at least as many buildings as the fire of the Commune. It is a matter of dispute, even now, which buildings were set fire to by the defence, and which by the attack. And the defence resorted to fire only then when the Versailles troops had already commenced their wholesale murdering of prisoners.92

The heroism of children, women and men as they fought to defend their “Communal luxury” would live on in the memory of the socialist movement and workers. Fighting and dying became a sign of revolutionary honour. Memoirs often recall scenes like this one from Lissagaray about the barricade of the Faubourg du Temple:

[T]he most indefatigable gunner was a child. The barricade taken, all its defenders were shot, and the child’s turn also came. He asked for three minutes’ respite; “so that he could take his mother, who lived opposite, his silver watch in order that she might at least not lose everything”. The officer, involuntarily moved, let him go. Not thinking to see him again; but three minutes after the child cried, “Here I am!” jumped onto the pavement, and nimbly leant against the wall near the corpses of his comrades.

Lissagaray concluded, “Paris will never die as long as she brings forth such people”.93 And Victor Hugo, who did not originally support the Commune, but responded in solidarity in the face of the massacre, wrote a poem about this incident. He ends with the wishful thought that the officer pardoned the child.94

Gustave Courbet recalled:

The drunkenness of carnage and destruction had taken over this people ordinarily so mild, but so fearsome when pushed to the brink… We will die if we must, shouted men, women and children, but we will not be sent to Cayenne.95

Louise Michel became famous for her confrontational stance at her trial:

Since it seems that every heart which beats for liberty has only right to a little lead, I too demand my part. If you let me live, I shall not cease to cry vengeance… If you are not cowards, kill me.96

Out of fear that she would become a martyr around which workers could mobilise, she was condemned to transportation to New Caledonia, where she met Nathalie Lemel. During the defence of Paris, Lemel had taken command of a contingent of the Union des Femmes. They marched, red flag in the lead, from a meeting in the mairie97 of the fourth arrondissement to defend Les Batignolles. There, the 120 women held back government troops for several hours. Those who were taken were shot on the spot, one of whom was the dressmaker Blanche Lefebvre, an organiser of the Union des Femmes and another member of Marx’s circle. Some held a barricade on Place Pigalle for a further three hours, but all were killed on what Lissagaray called “this legendary barricade”. Lemel cared for the wounded for hours. Her comrade Elisabeth Dmitrieff was at Montmartre with Louise Michel and Léo Frankel in the last hours.98

The mass of the poor had few options but to die bravely, which they did with pride. The more educated, if fortunate, found their way into exile. Frankel was smuggled out by a coach driver and escaped to Germany with Dmitrieff. They could be disguised as a Prussian couple because they spoke German fluently. Dmitrieff would return to Russia, only to go into exile in Siberia with a revolutionary with whom she had a genuine marriage. Because of her isolation, she never heard of the amnesty and so lived out the rest of her life in the tundra where so many revolutionaries perished. Michel kept her word and eventually returned to France under the amnesty, was arrested on a demonstration of unemployed workers in 1883 and sentenced to six years of solitary confinement, arrested again in 1890. She returned to France from England, to where she had escaped, and died of pneumonia in January 1905.99

A doctor commented on the bravery of the Communards:

I cannot desire the triumph of your cause; but I have never seen wounded men preserve more calm and sang-froid during operations. I attribute this courage to the energy of their convictions.100

And this is how the Commune’s supporters interpreted the courageous resistance. It inspired generations, illustrating why the sentiment “it is better to die fighting than to live on your knees” is the most principled response to ruling-class barbarism. If they had meekly surrendered in the name of avoiding violence, there is no evidence that lives would have been saved, and the revolution would surely not have inspired generations of working-class and socialist activists.

Political assessments

“We’ll change henceforth the old conditions” runs a line of Pottier’s Internationale. But how is it to be done? Which politics and theory related best to the needs of the Commune? When remembering workers’ struggles, assessing the political ideas tested in battle is an important part of honouring their memory. If the suffering of the masses in defeat is to be worth the blood spilled, it is the responsibility of those inspired by them to try to learn the lessons, lest their sacrifices be endlessly repeated. In the last article Rosa Luxemburg wrote before being murdered in January 1919, she made reference to the Paris Commune as a metaphor for the fate of the revolution unravelling around her. But, from the perspective of the historic mission of the working class, such defeats served a purpose:

Where would we be today without those “defeats”, from which we draw historical experience, understanding, power and idealism?… [W]e stand on the foundation of those very defeats; and we cannot do without any of them, because each one contributes to our strength and understanding.101

Again and again, in the intervening 150 years, workers have shown that if only they can take control, they would build a humane society, a socialist world. In every struggle we can celebrate the signs of this, and that inspiration unites those of many different politics on the left. Just think. One hundred and fifty years ago, when the fight for women’s rights was in its infancy, the more radical clubs in Paris demanded and got support for the right to abortion.

However, the question which has eluded workers so far is how to win control and hold it, how to defeat the powerful forces of capitalism arrayed against them. Proudhonists, Jacobins and Blanquists were the most influential political groups in the Commune Committee. Marx’s International had thousands of members, but was far from cohered around his theory and politics. None of these groups could offer the lead required.

The National Guard had elected a Central Committee only a couple of weeks before the uprising. Though inexperienced, they gathered to consider what to do in light of the spontaneous insurrection. By the end of the day the Hôtel de Ville was occupied as the headquarters of the insurgents. But they lacked the confidence to assert their authority and organise the necessary defence and reorganisation of the city. In their political confusion, they turned for leadership to the only constitutional body left in Paris, the mayors, who were appointed by the hated central government! The Central Committee of the National Guard insisted that only a newly elected body could take on all the urgent tasks the city confronted. It was eight days before negotiations with the mayors enabled the election of an authoritative body, in which valuable time was lost to the advantage of the Versailles soldiers threatening Paris. Élie Reclus asked on voting day: “What does legality mean at a time of revolution?”102

Virtually every historian who has written about it comments on the shambolic nature of the National Guard, which ensured that the Versailles government’s victory was easier than it should have been. Similarly, most make a point of discussing the Commune’s flat-footed response to the mass uprising. Few, however, draw any political conclusions or seriously explain what went wrong. Edwards sums up the reasons for the disaster: the main concern of the majority of the Committee “was to ‘legalize’ its situation by divesting itself of the power that had so unexpectedly fallen into its hands”. The Blanquists urged a march on Versailles, “a plan which might well have succeeded” following the fraternisation between the army and the Guardsmen.103 Gluckstein argues that Thiers and Co. would never be weaker than in those first hours and days after 18 March 1871. Military discipline had evaporated, and the French army was yet to be buoyed up by prisoners of war released by Bismarck. Supporting this view is the fact that Thiers rejected a request for troops to set up an anti-Commune outfit inside Paris: “Neither 5,000, nor 500, nor five; I need the few troops still available – and in whom I don’t yet have full confidence – to defend the government”. A Commune supporter reported that in Versailles the regular troops were not even trusted to patrol the streets.104

Auguste Blanqui shared with Marx the expectation that the war would create a situation ripe for revolution. But unlike Marx he did not see the working class as the agent to make that revolution, only as supporters for a coup. As a result, his supporters had not built roots in working-class organisations or communities, and he languished in jail throughout the revolution due to his involvement in an attempted insurrection just months before. “Blanqui’s own account of the debacle [of August 1870] is painfully honest”, Gluckstein explains. Blanqui wrote of the response of the workers of Belleville to these gun-toting strangers calling for them to rise up: “[t]he population appeared dumbstruck…held back by fear”. And he concluded “We can do nothing without the people!” In spite of their history of organising conspiratorial coups by tiny numbers, the Blanquists participated with great enthusiasm in the mass uprising and the institutions it threw up. Their strength was their preparedness to organise and respond with the necessary violence to defeat the murderous forces arrayed against the Commune.105 However, lacking their most authoritative leader, the Blanquists were defeated in the debate about marching on Versailles, and a critical moment was missed.

Despite their hostility to organisation, the Proudhonists took many of the leading positions in the Commune Committee. Their tradition had long cultivated a hostility to political organisation of all kinds, which manifested in a reluctance to give elected bodies of the Commune real authority. This then undermined the confidence of those bodies to act decisively, providing Versailles time to get on the offensive. The Proudhonists’ respect for private property was also responsible for the decision to leave the enormous wealth of the bourgeoisie safe in the National Bank, and informed a general reticence to take decisive measures in the field of economic and military policy.

Proudhonism today is dead as a political current; however, Proudhon’s disciple, Bakunin, still influences some activists. In a typical formulation, Bakunin wrote in his critique of the Commune: “the cause of [humanity’s] troubles does not lie in any particular form of government but in the fundamental principles and the very existence in government, whatever form it takes”.106 But this radical-sounding generality obscures the fact that the Commune’s troubles came not from an abstract category, but from the very real power of Thiers’ counter-revolutionary army. Only an equally organised power based on working-class democracy could have defended the Commune from the massacre that was to come. Bakunin’s abstract slogans – which live on in anarchist milieus today – provide absolutely no guide for what to do in the face of the threat posed by the brutal machine that is the bourgeois state. Workers could not – and still cannot – ignore politics and organisation.

But it wasn’t just the question of defence. The demand of the bakers to end night work raised a lot of debate because Commune Committee members, influenced by such ideas as Bakunin articulates, refused to issue a decree to abolish night work, even though they supported it. Bakers had been campaigning for two years, hampered by the tiny size of the bakeries which mitigated against effective organisation. The Committee’s response was ludicrous. They opposed any state action on principle, and argued that the workers should “themselves safeguard their interests in relation to the owners”. Benoît Malon represented the views of the bakers, 3,000 of whom marched to the Hôtel de Ville demanding a decree: “until now the state has intervened against the interests of workers. It is at least fair that today the state intervene for the workers”.107

Abstract shibboleths against all organisation are no guide to how the left should have related to the radical organisations such as the Union des Femmes, the Artists’ Federation, and the clubs. If you took these principles seriously you would boycott them, a completely sectarian and destructive attitude which would make you irrelevant, unable to contribute to developing people’s consciousness and winning arguments for strategies to win.

It was Marx and Engels who best generalised the lessons of the Commune. Marx had been committed to a view of working-class self-emancipation well before the Commune showed a glimpse of how it could be done. He had witnessed the radical workers’ societies and, critically, the Silesian weavers’ revolt of 1844, and had subsequently never doubted the creativity and organisational genius of the organised proletariat. His Theses on Feuerbach answered the question of how workers could be “educated” for a new society: they educate themselves through their own conscious activity. Marx and Engels developed this idea further in their German Ideology, where they argued that to build a socialist society, “the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution”.108

Now the Parisian masses had revealed the answer to the question of what to do about the repressive state. Marx had been grappling with this since he concluded in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that the problem had been until then that “[a]ll revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it”.109 But what could take its place? Two days after la semaine sanglante, Marx gave his address to the International, emphasising the achievements of the Commune and its importance to the future of the workers’ movement. He had warned against such an uprising in the weeks previous, fearing it was premature, yet did not hesitate to leap to its defence. As with so much of his political work, his writings on the Commune emphasise its fundamental aspects. Unlike the bourgeois revolutions which primarily benefited a minority of capitalist exploiters, the potential of a workers’ revolution to liberate the whole of humanity was now shown in practice. He explains how the democratic structures, with the army and police disbanded and the population armed, were the foundation on which workers can be emancipated from the exploitation of their labour. In this way, the practice of the workers of Paris actually broke new ground; their heroism created the conditions for Marx and Engels to clarify and concretise their previous ideas regarding the self-emancipation of the working class. Overall, Marx’s writings on the Commune stand in sharp contrast to the abstract shibboleths in Bakunin’s work.

But it would be Lenin who brought all these elements together, transcending what is usually assumed to be a contradiction between spontaneous revolts and organisation.110 The counterposition between spontaneity and organisation abounds in Bakunin’s critique, and is taken for granted by many activists today. The issue is particularly fraught when women are involved. Women’s activities in rebellions like this are often portrayed as elemental, unplanned and not very political. This emphasis on spontaneity is often sexist and downplays the role of leadership, foresight and planning by the women themselves. The Commune perfectly illustrates Lenin’s arguments. To begin with, there can be no revolution without spontaneity. The radicalisation sufficient to generate the Paris Commune did not develop incrementally, it exploded and shocked the world. It’s true that the uprising that seized the cannon in Montmartre emerged in a context of rising discontent and bitterness, but the rebellion in turn radicalised and transformed the situation decisively.

The Commune shows how there is not some barrier between a revolutionary upsurge itself and the activities and politics that exist beforehand. For instance Eugène Varlin and Nathalie Lemel were involved in workers’ campaigns for women’s rights and equal pay in the 1860s. In the growing number of strikes before 1871, some workers had learnt from their experiences. A strike by 5,000 bronze workers in 1867 won with support from the International, which organised funds from workers in other countries. The lesson of international solidarity was not forgotten. And other workers – significantly in textiles from where women participated in Dmitrieff’s Union des Femmes – began to see the value of organisation and strikes in a number of cities. In a strike by miners in the Loire region workers’ wives had fought bravely against the gendarmes during a strike at Le Creusot in 1870. Ideas promoted by the Proudhonists, who argued that “women should stay indoors and avoid the physical and moral dangers of workshops”, were now rejected by working-class men. They declared that women should exercise their independence and “will march alongside us in the exercise of democratic and social cooperation”. Those ideas could most effectively be kept alive and popularised if taken up by organisations, rather than being left to the whimsy of individual happenstance.111

Lenin’s most significant theoretical breakthrough was to see that the task for revolutionaries is to prepare for the spontaneous outbursts before they happen. This preparation is not a purely intellectual exercise, but entails participating in every struggle, raising ideas which challenge participants to reject the ideas of capitalism. Not all workers will develop class consciousness at the same time; consciousness will always be uneven, as it was in the Commune. This means revolutionaries need to build a party which organises the most class-conscious and militant workers, the “vanguard” as Lenin called them. Such a revolutionary party needs to raise the level of class consciousness generally, by which Lenin meant the degree to which workers understand the role of their own class, and that of all other social layers, and how much they understand their class power. They need to understand that their class can and must lead other classes in a revolution if capitalism is to be overthrown. The party needs a history of participating in and leading struggles so they gain a wide understanding of the momentum of struggle, how to judge different strategies and the arguments of different political organisations. Only this offers the best chance that the arguments of those who always support compromise and moderation will be defeated.

The vanguard must have burned into their consciousness that if our side seriously challenges the ruling class and their state, there is no limit to their “undisguised savagery and lawless revenge”, in Marx’s words. Revolutions have time and again crashed against the seemingly timeless existence of the state, and the mistake of seeking to remain within the “rule of law”. Lenin’s solution was to organise the vanguard to be prepared to repeat the first acts of the Commune: to disband the police and army, and to arm the working class and poor. It must not shrink from responding to ruling-class violence in order to defend the revolution.

The Commune’s legacy

In the Paris Commune, the ruling class saw the shape of a new society. They understood that such a world of equality and justice could only be built on the ruins of capitalism. So they sought to systematically obliterate its memory.

In the Louvre today, images of the royal family overthrown in the Great Revolution are sympathetically portrayed. But a small collection from the Commune is hidden away in the basement. A collection of artefacts, documents and the like is included in the museum dedicated to the art of Paul Éluard in Saint-Denis. Ironically it is housed in an old Carmelite convent. It was originally set up by the Communist council of Saint-Denis.

In the 1870s the bourgeoisie set out to refashion Paris with monuments to the Republic. The last quarter of the nineteenth century has been referred to as “a golden age of monument building” as part of the effort at “self-definition” following the trauma of 1870-71. Restoring the Vendôme column was, of course, a huge priority. Sometimes the purpose of new monuments or buildings was made explicit. The church of Sacré-Coeur was built on Montmartre. When laying the foundation stone, architect Charles Rohault de Fleury declared that Sacré-Coeur reclaimed for the nation “the place chosen by Satan and where was accomplished the first act of that horrible Saturnalia”.112

It is easy to see the negation of the Commune in the grotesque splendour of the Sacré-Coeur. But a lot of the reconstruction was not so explicit. Much of the art which was promoted and the spaces reorganised were merely presented as celebrations of the Republic. But try as they may, the memory often reverberated in what was not said or built. One space allowed to socialists was the Mur des Fédérés (Wall of the Federals),113 located in the Père Lachaise cemetery where the blood of unknown numbers was spilled in the last days of the Commune. Presumably authorities thought this the most fitting memorial: calculated to sear our souls and to signal that attempts at anti-capitalist rebellions will always be drowned in unimaginable savagery. But they were mistaken. Visitors leave a constant sea of red roses, and leave with a renewed hatred of the bourgeoisie and a desire to fight for the promise of the Commune. In 1907, the Parisian municipal council planned to install Paul Vautier-Moreau’s Monument to the Victims of Revolutions, sculpted from the stones of the barricades, on which was engraved Victor Hugo’s clarion call to end the “vengeance”. There was such an outcry from supporters of the Commune, who preferred to keep that space simply for the Communards, that it had to be placed outside the wall of the cemetery.114

William Morris paid homage to the destruction of the Vendôme column in his novel News from Nowhere, published in 1890. The apricot orchard which replaces Trafalgar Square, dominated by the statue of Admiral Nelson is, as Ross says, a “symbolic revisioning [of] both the Place Vendôme and Trafalgar Square…their aesthetic of nationalistic and timeless monumentality become supra-national space”.115

In spite of the efforts of the descendants of the butchers who saturated Paris in blood, the memory of this first workers’ revolution cannot be completely suppressed. So a social history of Paris, published in English in 2010, revisits some of the accounts by its participants and supporters. Eric Hazan, the author, reminds us how modern day charlatans, rather than obscure the history completely, cynically attempt to co-opt the inspiration of the Commune for their own opportunistic reasons. A plaque in Paris has inscribed on it: “The last barricade of the Commune resisted in the Rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi. A hundred and twenty years later, the Socialist party and its first secretary Pierre Mauroy render homage to the people of Paris who sought to change their lives, and to the 30,000 dead of the Time of the Cherries”. Hazan, who documents the truth of those days, reminds us: “This trumpery makes short work of history, for Louis Blanc, the Mauroy of his day, maintained that ‘this insurrection is completely to be condemned, and must be condemned by any true republican’.”116 Le temps des cerises to which the inscription refers is a song written in 1866. It became popular during the Commune, with verses added as it was sung on the barricades and in the clubs. The title is a metaphor for the hope for a new life after a revolution, making the hypocritical inscription by the reformist party even more galling.

For decades workers remembered the Communards’ courageous defiance. On May Day 1901, thousands of mourners joined the funeral procession for Paule Mincke through the streets of Paris. They chanted “Vive la Commune!” and “Vive l’Internationale!” as more than 600 police, 500 soldiers and 100 cavalry guarded the streets against any possibility of a repeat of 1871.117 More than 100,000 attended Louise Michel’s funeral in Paris in 1905. Socialists and anarchists celebrated the Commune every March. The ghastly images of tortured women beamed around the world by the bourgeois press could not undercut the sense of pride and solidarity that their courage inspired. In the NSW outback mining city of Broken Hill, for at least a decade into the twentieth century, the Socialist Sunday School organised the annual anniversary commemoration of the Commune. In another piece I concluded that “[it] certainly was not portrayed as a celebration of male achievements, as is often claimed by feminist historians: ‘What greater and grander sublimity can be depicted than that of men and women who are prepared to sacrifice their lives for even a dream?’” An article in the socialist paper in the town “emphasised female bravery”, telling the story of when soldiers tried to force Communards to kneel before their guns: “one woman with a child in her arms refused to do so, shouting to her companions: ‘Show these wretches that you know how to die upright’.”118

An historian of the annual events which continued for decades writes:

They drew on the Commune as an example of international cooperation, drawing on their shared class identity. The Commune was rewritten annually, creating a palimpsest. Speakers drew on the Commune as a symbol of working-class government, or of revolution, a symbol of warning and hope, of past, present and future, something to learn from, and revere.119

In spite of so many efforts to obscure its history, the Commune is still invoked as a reference point for the idea of revolution, or challenges to authority to this very day. As I write, a post by Buzzfeed, “Stormings of History Ranked from Best to Worst”, appeared in response to the invasion of the Capitol by far-right Trump supporters. The Commune is their second-best example, second only to the October Revolution.120 Even the prestigious Lancet in the year of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary pays homage to the Commune with an article about Mary Putnam Jacobi. The conclusion is a tribute to the power of the Commune to inspire hope for a better world: “The origins of her philosophy, a philosophy that provides the seed for an American renaissance today, lay in the blood spilt on the streets of Paris 150 years ago”.121

Conclusion

We began with the image of the “sphinx” conjured by Marx to convey how the Commune terrified the bourgeoisie and their hangers-on. We leave it as the world descends into ever more horrifying chaos which creates catastrophes one after the other. The World Bank warns governments around the globe to avoid making premature cuts to measures taken to prevent the economy from completely collapsing. This advice is not driven by humanitarian concern for those who would suffer from the cuts, but by fear of revolt. The sphinx haunts them still.

The Paris Commune reminds us of what Walter Benjamin said, that the fine and spiritual aspects of life we hunger for can only be won by the struggle for the rough, material things which make them possible. And that “they are present as confidence, as courage, as humour, as cunning, as steadfastness in this struggle”. That is why the Paris Commune still commands our attention, and is worthy of serious study. And why it still has the power to inspire our confidence in the working class to create a “Communal luxury” for humanity to this day.

References

Benjamin, Walter 1968, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, Essays and Reflections, Schocken Books.

Bloodworth, Sandra 2005, “Militant spirits: the rebel women of Broken Hill”. https://sa.org.au/interventions/rebelwomen/militant.htm

Bloodworth, Sandra 2013, “Lenin vs ‘Leninism’”, Marxist Left Review, 5, Summer. https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/lenin-vs-leninism/

Buzzfeed 2021, “Stormings of History Ranked from Best to Worst”, January. https://www.buzzfeed.com/tessred/stormings-of-history-ranked-from-best-to-worst-dogxsiwtv3?utm_source=dynamic&utm_campaign=bfsharefacebook&fbclid=IwAR0Bm0V61HcfuBZsc6jth8J51i6z-enf8-N_WefnVp1pITFqvlRQoAa9_kI

Cox, Judy 2021, “Genderquake: socialist women and the Paris Commune”, International Socialism, 169, 5 January. http://isj.org.uk/genderquake-paris-commune/

Edwards, Stewart (ed.) 1973, The Communards of Paris, 1871 (Documents of Revolution series, Heinz Lubasz, general editor), Thames and Hudson.

Eschelbacher, Andrew 2009, “Environment of Memory: Paris and Post-Commune Angst”, Nineteenth Century Art World, 8 (2), Autumn. https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn09/environment-of-memory

Gluckstein, Donny 2006, The Paris Commune. A Revolution in Democracy, Bookmarks.

Hazan, Eric 2011, The Invention of Paris. A History in Footsteps, translator David Fernbach, Verso.

Horton, Richard 2021, “The Paris Commune and the birth of American medicine”, The Lancet, 397, (102070), 16 January. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00086-6/fulltext

Landrigan, Aloysius Judas 2017, Remembering the Commune: Texts and Celebrations in Britain and the United States, MA thesis, University of Melbourne. https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/handle/11343/198112

Lissagaray 1976 [1876], History of the Paris Commune of 1871, translator Eleanor Marx, New Park Publications.

Luxemburg, Rosa 1919, “Order Prevails in Berlin”, Die Rote Fahne, 14 January. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1919/01/14.htm

Marx, Karl 1845, Theses on Feuerbach. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm

Marx, Karl 1852, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/

Marx, Karl 1871, The Civil War in France. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/index.htm

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1932 [1846], The German Ideology. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/index.htm

Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin 2008, Writings on the Paris Commune, Red and Black Publishers.

Merriman, John 2016, Massacre. The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871, Yale University Press.

Ross, Kristin 2016, Communal Luxury. The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, Verso.

Thomas, Edith 1966 [1963 as Les Pétroleuses], The Women Incendiaries, Secker and Warburg.

Tod, MK 2020, Poetry about the Paris Commune, blog, 10 September. https://awriterofhistory.com/tag/poetry-about-the-paris-commune/

* The phrase “glorious harbinger of a new society” is from Marx 1871. Thanks to the sharp eyes and insights of Omar Hassan and Mick Armstrong, the final result is vastly improved on the original draft.

1 Lissagaray 1976, introduction, p3.

2 This address would be published as part of the pamphlet, The Civil War in France.

3 Marx 1871.

4 Benjamin 1968, pp254-255.

5 An arrondissement is similar to a suburb in Australian cities.

6 Edwards 1973, pp58-59.

7 Merriman 2016, p41.

8 Edwards 1973, p15.

9 Edwards 1973, pp59-60.

10 Gluckstein 2006, p13.

11 Merriman 2016, p44. The government is often referred to as Versailles because it was ensconced there.

12 Gluckstein 2006, p13.

13 Merriman 2016, p43.

14 Edwards 1973, pp60-61.

15 Hazan 2010, pp236-245.

16 Edwards 1973, pp61-62.

17 Gluckstein 2006, p14.

18 Edwards 1973, p22. Italics in Edwards.

19 Marx 1871.

20 Usually known as Baron Haussmann.

21 Gluckstein 2006, pp68-69.

22 Merriman 2016, pp7-8.

23 Merriman 2014, pp46-7.

24 Marx 1871.

25 Gluckstein 2006, p53. Bold in Gluckstein.

26 Marx 1871.

27 Marx 1871.

28 Marx 1871.

29 Marx 1871.

30 All the examples and quotes about the Labour Commission from Gluckstein 2006, pp28-31.

31 The International included this grouping, but also Proudhonists, who dominated the French section, Blanquists and others.

32 Many revolutionary women escaped the stifling pressure from their families by entering a “white marriage” in which the man expected no sexual relationship.

33 Ross 2016, pp27-29.

34 Thomas 1967, pp62-63.

35 Ross 2016, p27.

36 Gluckstein 2006, p50.

37 Ross 2016, pp26-28.

38 Gluckstein 2006, p31.

39 Gluckstein 2006, pp48-49.

40 Gluckstein 2006, pp45-46.

41 Ross 2016, p17.

42 Quoted in Gluckstein 2006, p49. Lissagaray uses oriflamme for scarlet banner which, in its literary meaning, denotes a principle or ideal that serves as a rallying point in a struggle.

43 Marx 1871.

44 Merriman 2016, pp10-11.

45 Merriman 2016, p104.

46 Merriman 2016, pp107-109; Gluckstein 2006, p49.

47 Merriman 2016, p105.

48 Merriman 2016, p101.

49 Merriman 2016, p11.

50 Ross 2016, pp39-40.

51 Ross 2016, p40.

52 Ross 2016, p44.

53 Ross 2016, pp41-42.

54 Merriman 2016, p104.

55 Ross 2016, pp40-41.

56 Marx 1871.

57 Thomas 1967, p53.

58 Merriman 2016, p105.

59 Thomas 1967, p54.

60 Merriman 2016, pp105-106.

61 Gluckstein 2006, pp32-33.

62 Cox 2021.

63 Ross 2016.

64 See below for an explanation of this demolition.

65 See Ross 2016, pp42-65 for an account of the debates in the Artists’ Federation and the artists involved.

66 Ross 2016, pp55-56.

67 Ross 2016, pp55-56.

68 Marx 1871.

69 Ross 2016, p23.

70 Lissagaray 1976, pp10-12.

71 Gluckstein 2006, pp46-53.

72 Gluckstein 2006, p49.

73 Gluckstein 2006, p50.

74 Cox 2021.

75 Ross 2016, p28.

76 This was the pseudonym of Victoire Léodile Béra, under which she wrote several novels, and the name she is known by in the records of the Commune.

77 Gluckstein 2006, pp188-190.

78 Gluckstein 2006, pp185-191.

79 Merriman 2016, p16.

80 Gluckstein 2006 pp156-157. For an analysis of why Proudhonists were on the right of the Communards, see Gluckstein, pp71-76.

81 Marx et al 2008, p71.

82 Gluckstein 2006, pp69-71.

83 Marx 1871.

84 Marx 1852.

85 Hazan 2010, p238.

86 Lissagaray 1976; Merriman 2016.

87 Lissagaray 1976, pp307-11.

88 Lissagaray 1976, pp146-174; Merriman 2016, chapters 9 and 10. Their accounts give more detail than belongs in an article of this length.

89 Merriman 2016, p226.

90 Thomas 1966, pp140-159.

91 Merriman 2016, pp156-159.

92 Marx 1871.

93 Lissagaray 1976, p287.

94 Tod 2020.

95 The notorious penal colony in French Guiana. Merriman 2016, p147.

96 Lissagaray 1971, pp343-344.

97 Local town hall.

98 Thomas 1966, p132.

99 Merriman 2016, p245.

100 Lissagaray 1976, p238.

101 Luxemburg 1919.

102 Edwards 1973, p26.

103 Edwards 1973, p26.

104 Gluckstein 2006, p130.

105 Gluckstein 2006, pp76-80.

106 Bakunin, “The Paris Commune and the idea of the state”, in Marx et al 2008, p78.

107 Gluckstein 2006, pp28-29.

108 Marx and Engels 1932, p60.

109 Marx 1845.

110 For my assessment of Lenin, see Bloodworth 2013.

111 Gluckstein 2006, pp68-71 for details of strikes and the maturing of working-class activists.

112 Eschelbacher 2009.

113 As the Guardsmen were often referred to.

114 Eschelbacher 2009.

115 Ross 2016, p60.

116 Hazan 2010, p291.

117 Cox 2021.

118 Bloodworth 2005.

119 Landrigan 2017, p78.

120 Buzzfeed 2021

121 Horton 2021.

Thomas Piketty and Karl Marx: Two Totally Different Visions of Capital

By Eric Toussaint

Republished from CADTM (Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt).

In his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century,(1) Thomas Piketty has gathered his data meticulously and provided a useful analysis of the unequal distribution of wealth and income, yet some of his definitions are somewhat confusing and even questionable. Consider, for instance, his definition of capital: “In all civilisations, capital has served two great economic functions: on the one hand to provide dwellings (that is to say, to produce “housing services,” the value of which is measured in terms of the rental value of the dwellings: this is the value of well-being of having a roof over one’s head as opposed to being outside); and, on the other hand, as a factor of production for producing other goods and services.” He continues: “Historically, the early forms of capitalistic accumulation seem to concern tools (from flint, etc.), agricultural infrastructure (fences, irrigation, draining, etc.), and rudimentary dwellings, before evolving into more sophisticated forms, such as industrial and professional capital and increasingly elaborate dwellings.(2) Piketty proposes a scenario that suggests capital has been present from the origins of humanity and that revenue from a savings account held by a limited-income retired person is the same as revenue derived from capital.

Capital according to Thomas Piketty

This major confusion is present in the heart of his analysis he develops in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. For Piketty, an apartment worth €80,000 or €2,000 on a savings account(3) may be defined as capital, in the same way as a factory or commercial premises worth €125 million. The ordinary citizen who owns an apartment, has some reserves in a savings account and a life insurance policy worth, say, €10,000 will readily agree with Piketty’s definition, which corresponds with those found in standard economic textbooks and repeated by their bank manager. However, they are wrong, because capital in our capitalist society is much more complex than these simple definitions. Capital is a social relationship that enables a minority (the richest 1%), to get richer by exploiting the labour of others (see below).

Yet when Piketty talks of a progressive tax on capital, he makes no distinction between the kind of “wealth” represented by a €1,000 savings account and the fortune of a Jeff Bezos, a Bill Gates or an Elon Musk.

The same confusion is to be found in his analysis of income: Piketty considers that the income from renting out an €80,000 apartment is a capital gain of the same kind as the income Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook, derives from his empire.

As far as wages are concerned, Piketty considers that all income declared as wages is wages, whether this means the €3 million salary package of the CEO of a banking group (an amount that is in fact revenue from capital and not a wage or salary(4)) or the €30,000 salary of a bank employee.

Capital according to Karl Marx

We should question the meaning Piketty gives to words like “capital” and define revenue from capital and revenue from labour differently. Piketty presents capital as something that exists in all civilisations and that has necessarily always existed. In this he is in tune with the political economy of the 18th and early 19th century, as found in the writings of Adam Smith in particular, before Karl Marx threw light on what Capital (and wages) really are and developed his critique of the political economy of his time.

Karl Marx has ironical comments on contemporary writers who, like Piketty does, considered the first silex tools to be the original form of capital or just capital: “By a wonderful feat of logical acumen, Colonel Torrens has discovered, in this stone of the savage the origin of capital. “In the first stone which he [the savage] flings at the wild animal he pursues, in the first stick that he seizes to strike down the fruit which hangs above his reach, we see the appropriation of one article for the purpose of aiding in the acquisition of another, and thus discover the origin of capital.” (R. Torrens: “An Essay on the Production of Wealth” &c., pp. 70-71.)»(5)

In his Capital, he states: “We know that the means of production and subsistence, while they remain the property of the immediate producer, are not capital. They become capital only under circumstances in which they serve at the same time as means of exploitation and subjection of the labourer.”(6) Marx explains that an artisan who owns his/her own tools and works for her/himself does not own capital and does not receive a wage. During the centuries that preceded the victory of the capitalist class over the old order, the overwhelming majority of producers worked for themselves, both in towns and in the country. Artisans organised into corporations and peasant families made up the majority of producers, who owned their tools of production, and in the countryside the majority of peasant families owned land, and in addition could make use of communal lands to feed their livestock or glean firewood. Between the end of the 15th century and the end of the 18th century in Western Europe, the developing capitalist class needed the support of the State to dispossess this mass of producers of their tools and/or their land(7) and force them to submit to becoming wage-workers in order to survive. The capitalist class needed to take organised action in order to impoverish and dispossess the working classes and thus force them to accept being wage-workers. That process did not take place all by itself. Karl Marx analyzes the methods that enabled the primitive accumulation of capital in a detailed and rigorous way. In Volume One of Capital, he reviews all the methods used to dispossess producers of the means of production, and thus of their means of subsistence.(8)

Marx draws an anecdote from a book by Edward Gibbon Wakefield (20 March 1796–16 May 1862) to illustrate the idea: “Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, ’Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.’”(9) Marx comments ironically: “Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!” This is because in Australia at the time there was a profusion of land available and the workers were able to find a patch of land on which to set themselves up. Marx, through his comment regarding this fiasco experienced by the capitalist Peel, wants to show that as long as producers have access to the means of subsistence–in this case land—, they are not forced to submit to serving a capitalist.(10)

Marx concludes

So long, therefore, as the labourer can accumulate for himself–and this he can do so long as he remains possessor of his means of production–capitalist accumulation and the capitalistic mode of production are impossible. The class of wage labourers, essential to these, is wanting.“(…)”the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production.

He adds:

the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the labourer.

Karl Marx writes:

property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative–the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will.

We should also point out that Marx, in the same section of Capital dedicated to primitive accumulation, vehemently denounced the extermination or forcible subjugation of the indigenous peoples of North America and the other regions that fell victim to colonial domination and the primitive accumulation of capital:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.

Consequences of Thomas Piketty’s definition of capital

To return to Piketty, the definition of capital he gives introduces complete confusion. Let’s look at his definition again:“In all civilisations, capital has served two great economic functions: on the one hand to provide dwellings (…) and, on the other hand, as a factor of production for producing other goods and services.”So, for Piketty, Capital has existed in all civilisations; he goes all the way back to prehistory when he writes:“Historically, the early forms of capitalistic accumulation(11)seem to concern tools (from flint, etc.) (…) and rudimentary dwellings, before evolving into more sophisticated forms, such as industrial and professional capital and increasingly elaborate dwellings.“For Piketty, a prehistoric flint tool, a cave, and a computer assembly plant are all capital. If we believe him, “capitalistic” [sic] accumulation goes back as far as the first assembly of a few pieces of flint that had been chipped and shaped. That definition throws no light on the historic specificity of capital, its genesis, how it is reproduced and accumulated, to which class it belongs, or the social and property relations to which it corresponds. The list of examples of capital Thomas Piketty gives resembles a supermarket catalogue; in a way it’s an inventory like the one in Jacques Prévert’s poem”Inventory“… with only the raccoons missing.(12)

Speaking of capitalist accumulation today, Piketty limits the discussion almost exclusively to the role of inheritance and fiscal policies that are favourable to capitalists; but in reality these factors, though they play a tangible role in transmitting and strengthening capital, are not what create it. Historically, for the capital held by the capitalist to begin a process of enormous accumulation, it was necessary to forcibly dispossess producers of their tools and their means of subsistence and exploit their labour power. The accumulation of capital as it continues today requires the continuing exploitation of working people and of Nature. Capital plays no useful role for society; on the contrary, continuing the accumulation of capital and the activities that generate it is literally deadly. Piketty’s failure to acknowledge that leads him to make a statement such as this:

If capital plays a useful role in the production process it is natural that it earns a return.(13)

Piketty’s confusion is undoubtedly the result of his fundamental convictions:

I am not interested in denouncing inequalities or capitalism as such (…) social inequalities are not a problem in themselves if they may be justified, that is to say for the common good. (…)(14)

My critique of Piketty’s definitions in no way minimises the interest of the monumental portrait his research has drawn of the wealth and income inequalities that have developed over the last two centuries. And, putting aside undeniable fundamental disagreements regarding the notion of capital, it is important, if anti-neoliberal fiscal reform is to be achieved, that we endeavour to bring together a broad spectrum of movements and individuals ranging from Thomas Piketty to movements of the anticapitalist Left. And if it is also possible to come together to demand cancellation of the public debts held by the European Central Bank (for a total amount of over 2,500 billion euros), it must be done. I do not regret having co-signed the call for the cancellation of sovereign debts held by the ECB(15) in February 2021 along with Thomas Piketty. But like the other members of the CADTM who signed that text, I consider that more must be done–beginning, for example, with levying a large Covid tax on wealthy individuals and major corporations. The CADTM feels that cancellation of public debts must be accompanied by a series of anticapitalist measures, and it is not certain that Thomas Piketty would support all of them.

Thanks to Anne-Sophie Bouvy, Christine Pagnoulle, Brigitte Ponet, Claude Quémar and Patrick Saurin for their readings.

Translated by Snake Arbusto

Footnotes

1. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2013

2. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, p. 337.

3. Note that according to Piketty, the amounts held in France in savings accounts, check-book accounts, etc. account for only 5% of (private) assets! p. .

4. It’s very convenient for capitalists to include the very high revenues of a corporation’s executives, which also include dividends and stock options, in calculating total payroll.

5. Source: Note 9 to Capital, Book One: The process of production of capital. Part VII, Part III: The Production of absolute surplus-value, Chapter 7: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value, available on the Internet: www.marxists.org. Also available in audiobook form, see next note. In the German original and the French translation, Marx jokingly adds a note of wild etymology, suggesting that stock as a reference to capital derives from the German word for stick.

6. Karl Marx, Capital–Book One: The process of production of capital. Part VIII: Primitive accumulation. Chapter Thirty-Three: The Modern Theory of Colonisation. The text from which the excerpts quoted in this article is available on the Internet: www.marxists.org ; it is available in audiobook form at www.marxists.org

7. Confiscation of land by capitalists began in England in the 15th century with what is known as the “Enclosure Movement,” which consisted in ending the traditional right of use of the land and the commons via the Enclosure Acts and turning them over as private property to wealthy aristocrats and bourgeois. Read Chapter 27 of Volume 1 of Marx’s Capital: Expropriation of the Agricultural Population From the Land: www.marxists.org, available as audio – www.archive.org

8. The section of Capital in which Marx details the various sources of primitive accumulation of capital is Book One: The Process of Production of Capital –Part VIII: Primitive Accumulation (First English edition of 1887, translated: Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels). There is an audiobook version of Part Eight (see link in earlier note).

9. E. G. Wakefield: England and America, vol. Il, p. 33. Cited by Karl Marx.

10. Writing of the specific situation of North American and Australia in the early 19th century, Marx explains that the possibility for colonists from Europe to become owners of land or begin working for themselves enables “The wage-worker of to-day [to become] to-morrow an independent peasant, or artisan, working for himself.” In North America, Australia and other regions colonised by Europe, the situation gradually changed over the course of the 19th century and the early 20th century, and the great mass of independent producers whose ancestors had emigrated from Europe were also dispossessed of their means of production.

11. Author’s bold.

12. Excerpt from the poem ”Inventaire“ (”Inventory”) by Jacques Prévert (published 1946):
    “A stone
    two houses
    three ruins
    four gravediggers
    a garden
    flowers
    a raccoon (…)” coonytanuki.tumblr.com

13. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, p. 674

14. Idem, p. 62

15. See the French version : www.cadtm.org The French version has been published by Le Monde, La Libre Belgique and RTBF

Class, Gender, Race & Colonialism: The ‘Intersectionality’ of Marx

By Kevin B. Anderson

Republished from Monthly Review.

Publisher’s Preface

Marx’s writings have sometimes been misrepresented. Many consider them to be no longer relevant for the 21st century on the mistaken assumption that he was obsessed only with class and had little appreciation of how issues of gender, racism and colonialism inter-related with class and the struggle for human emancipation. But as Kevin Anderson explains in this pamphlet:

It is important to see both [Marx’s] brilliant generalisations about capitalist society and the very concrete ways in which he examined not only class, but also gender, race, and colonialism, and what today would be called the intersectionality of all of these. His underlying revolutionary humanism was the enemy of all forms of abstraction that denied the variety and multiplicity of human experience, especially as his vision extended outward from Western Europe. For these reasons, no thinker speaks to us today with such force and clarity.

The pamphlet is part of a series published by Daraja Press entitled Thinking Freedom. We will be publishing other short, pamphlet-sized publications that address key topics / issues related to current struggles for emancipation, justice, dignity and self-determination targeted at the growing generations of activists, members social movements, and unions. Our aim is to produce short, easy to read, jargon free, pamphlets as print, pdf, ebook and, in some cases, audiobook formats. The pamphlets will aim to stimulate reflection and debate. In some instances, the publications will be accompanied by webinars and podcasts. The  idea is to make popular materials that encourage deeper reflection on the meaning and possibilities for emancipatory politics that does not blindly follow established dogma, but reviews the ‘classics’ and international experiences critically.We have published a series of interviews / podcasts in relation to Organising in the time of Covid-19 that can be accessed at darajapress.com.

If you have suggestions about topics that you think should be included in this series, please get in touch at info [at] darajapress.com.

For a PDF version of this pamphlet, please visit Daraja Press.

—Firoze Manji
Publisher, Daraja Press

Class, Gender, Race & Colonialism: The ‘Intersectionality’ of Marx

It is clear today that the emancipation of labour from capitalist alienation and exploitation is a task that still confronts us. Marx’s concept of the worker is not limited to European white males, but includes Irish and Black super-exploited and therefore doubly revolutionary workers, as well as women of all races and nations. But, his research and his concept of revolution go further, incorporating a wide range of agrarian non-capitalist societies of his time, from India to Russia and from Algeria to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, often emphasising their gender relations. In his last, still partially unpublished writings, he turns his gaze Eastward and Southward. In these regions outside Western Europe, he finds important revolutionary possibilities among peasants and their ancient communistic social structures, even as these are being undermined by their formal subsumption under the rule of capital. In his last published text, he envisions an alliance between these non-working-class strata and the Western European working class.

“Proletarians [Proletarier] of all countries, unite!” It is with these ringing words that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously conclude their Communist Manifesto in 1848.[1] This suggests a broad class struggle involving millions of workers across national and regional boundaries against their collective enemies, capital and landed property. In that same Manifesto, Marx and Engels also write, in another well-known passage, that “the workers have no country,” and further that “national differences and antagonisms between peoples [Völker] are shrinking more and more” with the development of the capitalist world market.[2]

An Abstract, General Theory of Capital and Labour

In the Manifesto, we are presented with large social forces, the proletariat or working class and its opponents, contending with each other on an international scale, where differences of culture, nationality, and geography have been overturned, or are being overturned, as capital is coming to rule the world and the workers are organising their resistance to it. Marx and Engels are writing here at a very high level of generality, abstracting from the specificities of the life experience of Western European and North American workers, and predicting that their lot will soon become that of the world’s working people, at that time mainly peasants labouring in predominantly agrarian societies.

It is in this sense that Marx and Engels also write that capitalism has “through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.” They add: “National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible.”[3] Capital creates a world culture alongside its world market, forcing itself into every corner of the globe. They go so far as to applaud, in terms imbued with Eurocentric condescension, how capitalism “draws even the most barbarian nations into civilisation” as it “batters down all Chinese walls” and forces these “barbarians … to adopt the bourgeois mode of production.”[4]  While pain is produced as old societies are destroyed, capital is carrying out its historic mission, the creation of “more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations put together.”[5]

Two decades later, in the 1867 preface to Capital, Marx writes, with a similar logic emphasising abstraction, that the “value form” that is at the core of capitalist production cannot be studied only empirically with regard to specific commodities produced. He adds: “Why? Because the complete body is easier to study than its cells.” Therefore, to analyse capitalism and its value form properly and fully, one must resort to “the power of abstraction” in order to examine commodity production as a whole.[6]

There is clearly a universalising pull under capitalism, a globalising system whose extension homogenises, regularises, and flattens the world, uprooting and changing it as needed to maximise value production, a quest that forms the soul of a soulless system. That same universalising pull creates a deep contradiction, the revolutionary opposition of the modern working class, “united and organised by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production.”[7]

The experience of the working class is similarly homogenised. Shorn of its means of production (land, tools, etc) and reduced to a group of propertyless wage labourers, prototypically in giant factories, Marx’s working class is both alienated and exploited in ways specific to capitalism. As early as 1844 Manuscripts, he wrote of alienated labour, a concept deepened in Capital in the section of commodity fetishism. In the capitalist production process, human relations are fetishised because the products of labour come to dominate their producers, the workers, in a jarring subject–object reversal. These workers then experience that domination as the impersonal power of capital, which is itself produced by their labour. Capital lords it over them, turning human relations into “relations between things,” with the working class objectified to the extreme.[8]

Raya Dunayevskaya is among the few to emphasise Marx’s additional statement to the effect that these relations “appear [erscheinen] as what they are”.[9] The German verb erscheinen [like the word apparaissent he uses at this point in the French edition] is not a false or “mere” appearance and it differs from scheinen [French: paraissent], which means “appear” in the sense of semblance or even false appearance. Thus, we are not dealing with a false appearance that conceals “true” and humanistic human relations, but a new and unprecedented reality based upon “the necessity of that appearance because, that is, in truth, what relations among people are at the point of production” in a capitalist system.[10] In the long run, of course, such a thing-like human relationship is false in the sense that it will be rejected and uprooted by the working class, which seeks a society controlled not by capital but by free and associated labour. But, it remains utterly real while we are under the sway of the capitalist mode of production.

At the same time, the workers suffer harsh material exploitation, as the surplus value they create in the production process is appropriated by capital, in a system characterised by the greatest gulf in history between the material lot of the dominant classes and those of the working people. This exploitation grows in both absolute and relative terms as capital centralises and develops further technologically, in the process of the greatest quantitative increase in the development of the productive forces in human history.[11]

Marx pulls together these two concepts, exploitation and alienation, in his discussion of capital accumulation, wherein the “capitalist system” turns the labour of the workers into stultifying “torment,” serving to “alienate” from the workers “the intellectual potentialities of the labor process,” while at the same time, the rate of exploitation increases: “the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse” relative to the vertiginous accumulation of surplus value by capital.[12]

Marx’s Concrete Dialectic

The kind of analysis presented above shows Marx as our contemporary, not least his grasp of the limitless quest for surplus value by capital, and the concomitant deep alienation and exploitation that it visits upon the working people, from factories to modern call centres.

At the same time, these kinds of statements, especially when read out of context, have been used for decades by Marx’s critics, both conservative and left-wing, to portray him as a thinker whose abstract model of capital and labour occludes national differences, race, ethnicity, gender, and other crucially important aspects of human society and culture.

On the one hand, these critics are wrong because capitalism is in fact a unique social system that overturns and homogenises all previous social relations, tending towards the reduction of all human relations to that of capital versus labour. Thus, one cannot understand contemporary family and gender relations, ethno-racial and communal conflict, or ecological crisis fully without examining the underlying relationships described above. For the family, the ethnic tableau, and the natural environment are all conditioned by the underlying fact of a capitalist mode of production.

But, on the other hand, these critics pose questions that make us look more carefully at Marx’s theoretical categories. It is very important in this regard to realise, if one truly wants to appreciate Marx’s originality, that his concept of capital and labour was posed not only at a high level of abstraction, but that, at other levels, it encompasses a far wider variety of human experience and culture. As Bertell Ollman[13] has emphasised, Marx operated at varying levels of abstraction.

The present article centres on three related points.

• First, Marx’s working class was not only Western European, white, and male, since from his earliest to his latest writings, he took up the working class in all its human variety.

• Second, Marx was not an economic or class reductionist, for throughout his career, he considered deeply various forms of oppression and resistance to capital and the state that were not based entirely upon class, but also upon nationality, race and ethnicity, and gender.

• Third, by the time of Marx’s later writings, long after the Communist Manifesto, the Western European pathway of industrial capitalist development out of feudalism was no longer a global universal. Alternate pathways of development were indeed possible, and these connected to types of revolutions that did not always fit the model of industrial labour overthrowing capital.

In terms of a concrete dialectic, Marx follows in the wake of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. This is true from his earliest writings to Capital, where he writes of “the Hegelian ‘contradiction,’ which is the source of all dialectics.”[14] One striking feature of Hegel’s dialectical framework, despite its overall universalising thrust, is its rejection of abstract universals, while also avoiding a mere empiricism. No previous philosopher had drawn history and social existence into philosophy in this way, as seen especially in the Phenomenology of Spirit, a book so crucial to our understanding of the present moment that two new translations of it have appeared in 2018. Again and again in this work, Hegel rejects the abstract universal as “the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black.”[15] The concreteness of his universals is also seen in the ascending concrete forms of consciousness that develop along the universal pathway towards the freedom of the human spirit, from ancient Rome to the Reformation and the French Revolution of his own time, each of them limited by their historical, social, and cultural context. Of course, Marx also rejects aspects of Hegel’s idealism, especially his stress on the growth of human consciousness as the most important result of the dialectics of history, as opposed to the actuality of human freedom and healthy development in a society that has been revolutionised from below. In short, Hegel’s dialectic, while social and historical, remains somewhat dehumanised.

Such stress on the concrete universal in no way negates my earlier citation, where Marx writes that one needs the “power of abstraction” to get at what is really crucial about capitalism, its value form and the dehumanised, fetishised existence experienced by those who live under its domination. No, the solution has to be approached from both directions. The abstract rests upon the concrete, but at the same time, the abstract concept has to concretise itself, to become determinate. However, Marx equally rejects what Karel Kosík called the “pseudoconcrete,” a type of concrete that cannot think beyond the immediately given under capitalism. As against such false or distorted forms of consciousness, dialectics “dissolves fetishised artefacts both of the world of things and the world of ideas, in order to penetrate to their reality.”[16]

Thus, Marx is hostile to mere empiricism, embracing a dialectical form of totality. He at the same time castigates, as did Hegel, the abstract universals of traditional idealist philosophy and of modern liberalism, with its human and civil rights that are so often little more than formulaic to those at the bottom of society. Yet, at the same time, he embraces what he and Hegel called the concrete universal, a form of universality that was rooted in social life, and yet pointed beyond the given world of the “pseudoconcrete.”

One example of the concrete universal can be glimpsed in how Marx argues that we cannot adequately measure the world of capitalist exploitation and alienation either in its own terms (the “pseudoconcrete”) or by comparing it to past forms of domination like Western European feudalism, the ancient Greco–Roman world, or the “Asiatic” mode of production. Instead, he measures capitalist society against a different yardstick, the unrealised but potentially realisable horizon of a communist future of free and associated labour, as has been emphasised in two recent studies.[17] But, this is not merely an imagined republic, as Niccolò Machiavelli characterised the abstract and schematic models of the good society found in ancient Greco–Roman thinkers like Socrates. Marx’s vision of the future was based upon the aspirations and struggles of a really existing social class, the proletariat, to which his writings sought to give a more universal and concrete form.

The Working Class in All Its Human Variety

From the outset, Marx saw Britain as the country where the capitalist mode of production was most developed, far ahead of any other country. This can be seen especially in Capital, where British examples of both capital and labour predominate. But the British working class was by no means homogenous. As the industrial revolution surged in Manchester, the cutting-edge city of 19th-century capitalism, it did so by exploiting a working class with deep ethnic divisions between English and Irish workers. Engels discusses this issue at length in his 1845 book, The Condition of the Working Class in England published just after he and Marx began to collaborate. Marx regarded this book as one of Engels’s greatest contributions, citing it more than any other of his friend’s writings in Capital.

Marx himself took up the Irish potato famine of the 1840s as a tragedy rooted in the process of capital accumulation, especially in Capital. He wrote as well about Irish workers in Britain, especially in 1869–70, at a time when the First International was substantially engaged with supporting Irish revolutionaries. While he was able to convince the International to support the Irish, it was a difficult battle. At the same time, this was a battle that needed to be fought and won, because it got to the heart of why, despite its large-scale industrialisation and organised working class, Britain had not seen the level of class struggle predicted in texts written at an abstract level like the Communist Manifesto. He offered an explanation in a “Confidential Communication” of the International issued in early 1870:

[T]he English bourgeoisie has not only exploited Irish poverty to keep down the working class in England by forced immigration of poor Irishmen, but it has also divided the proletariat into two hostile camps … The common English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers wages and the standard of life. He feels national and religious antipathies for him. He views him similarly to how the poor whites of the Southern states of North America viewed black slaves. This antagonism among the proletarians of England is artificially nourished and kept up by the bourgeoisie. It knows that this split is the true secret of the preservation of its power.[18]

Marx also saw this antagonism based upon the double oppression of the Irish workers, as both proletarians and as members of an oppressed minority in dialectical terms. He viewed the Irish as sources of revolutionary ferment that could help spark a British revolution. Thus, we have here the analysis of a really existing working class at a specific point in time, Britain in 1870, as opposed to the more general and abstract manner in which he and Engels conceptualised the working class in the Manifesto.

Marx viewed the racially divided working class of the United States (US) in similar terms. He strongly opposed slavery and advocated abolitionism within the working-class movement, attacking those like Pierre Joseph Proudhon who were more ambiguous on the subject of slavery.

He conceptualised African slavery as central to capitalist development, writing as early as Poverty of Philosophy (1847):

Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry.[19]

During the 1861–65 Civil War in the US, Marx strongly, albeit critically, supported the North against the slave South. He regarded the war as a second American revolution that had created some real possibilities for the working class. He intoned in Capital:

In the US, every independent workers’ movement was paralysed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin. However, a new life immediately arose from the death of slavery. The first fruit of the American Civil War was the eight hours agitation, which ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California, with the seven-league boots of a locomotive.[20]

At this point, he noted that a large national labour congress took place in 1866, one year after the end of the Civil War, where the demand for the eight-hour day was put forward.

Here, the abolition of slavery is seen as the precondition for a real working-class movement in the racialised capitalism of the US.

If Marx’s working class was not exclusively white, nor was it exclusively male. In her study of Marx and gender, Heather Brown concludes that in the parts of Capital devoted to the life experience of the workers, “Marx not only traces out the changing conditions of the male worker, but also gives significant emphasis to the role of women in this process.” While he sometimes lapsed into “echoing paternalistic or patriarchal assumptions” in his descriptions of female workers, it is hard to argue, as some have, that he ignored working women in his most important book.[21]

This can also be seen in his dialectical discussion of changes to the family and gender relations brought about by capitalist industrialisation, which has “dissolved the old family relationships” among the workers, as women and children were forced into horribly exploitative paid employment outside the home:

However terrible and disgusting the dissolution of the old family ties within the capitalist system may appear, large-scale industry, by assigning an important part in socially organised processes of production, outside the sphere of the domestic economy, to women, young persons, and children of both sexes, does nevertheless create a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of relations between the sexes.[22]

Marx returned to gender and the family as a research topic at the end of his life, as seen in his Ethnological Notebooks of 1880–82[23] and other notebooks from that period. In these notebooks, he explored gender relations across a number of societies, from preliterate Native Americans and Homeric Greeks, to precolonial Ireland and contemporary Australian aborigines. Some of these notes became the basis for Engels’s Origin of the Family. Although that work contains many important insights, it treats the rise of gender oppression in an economic and class reductionist manner that was far less subtle than the notes Marx left behind and which Engels used as source material.[24] These notebooks are also concerned deeply with colonialism, an issue discussed below with which Engels did not engage.

Revolutionary Subjectivity Outside the Working Class

It is important to note that Marx’s interest in gender issues was not limited to the study of working class women. From his earliest writings, he pointed to gender oppression as a crucial, foundational form of social hierarchy and domination. In the 1844 Manuscripts, he wrote:

The direct, natural, necessary relationship of human being [Mensch] to human being is the relationship of man [Mann] to woman [Weib]. … Therefore, on the basis of this relationship, we can judge the whole stage of development of the human being. From the character of this relationship it follows to what degree the human being has become and recognised himself or herself as a species being; a human being; the relationship of man to woman is the most natural relationship of human being to human being. Therefore, in it is revealed the degree to which the natural behaviour of the human being has become human.[25]

Here, Marx is concerned not only with working-class women, as discussed above, but with other strata of women as well, and across the full trajectory of human society and culture, not just capitalism. He takes up the oppression of modern women outside the working class in his 1846 text, “Peuchet on Suicide,” where he focuses on middle- and upper-class French women driven to suicide by gender-based oppression from husbands or parents, writing at one point of “social conditions … which permit the jealous husband to fetter his wife in chains, like a miser with his hoard of gold, for she is but part of his inventory.”[26] These concerns did not end with Marx’s youth. In 1858, he wrote movingly in the New York Tribune about Lady Rosina Bulwer Lytton, who had been confined to a mental institution by her politician husband for having attempted to speak out on political issues.[27]

Nor did Marx focus on the industrial working class to the exclusion of the peasantry, which he saw as an oppressed and potentially revolutionary class. Considerable attention has been paid to his characterisation of the French peasantry as somewhat conservative in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). In other contexts, though, he discussed the revolutionary potential of peasants, for example, during the 16th-century Anabaptist uprising in Germany. Concerning his own time, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), he castigated Ferdinand Lassalle for labelling the “peasants” as inherently conservative, since Lassalle’s organisation had written off “all other classes” besides the working class as “one reactionary mass”.[28]

And, while condemning racist and imperialist forms of nationalism, Marx also strongly supported nationalist movements that exhibited a clear emancipatory content. Long before Vladimir Ilich Lenin articulated a concept of national liberation, in an 1848 speech on Poland, Marx drew a distinction between what he termed “narrowly national [étroitement national]” movements and national revolutions that were “reforming and democratic,” that is, ones that put forth issues like land reform even when it targeted the indigenous upper classes rather than just a foreign enemy or occupying power.[29]

Even in the Communist Manifesto, where, as discussed above, he and Engels had written that national differences were disappearing, this was at a general, abstract level. For, when it came down to concretising the principles in terms of a set of immediate goals and slogans in a final section, “Position of the Communists in Relation to the Existing Opposition Parties,” Polish national emancipation from under Russian, Austrian, and Prussian occupation was nonetheless singled out: “In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846”.[30] Marx continued to support a Polish national revolution until the end of his life. He greeted the Polish uprising of 1863 with enthusiasm and in his writings celebrating the Paris Commune of 1871; he singled out the important contribution of Polish exiles in the military defence of revolutionary Paris. Fittingly, in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the graves of the Communards include that of Polish General Walery Wróblewski, only steps away from those of Marx’s French descendants.

In the 1870 Confidential Communication on Ireland, the peasantry and the national movement were also intertwined as revolutionary elements. An equally prominent point in this text is Marx’s defence of the International’s public support of Irish national emancipation, including appeals to the Queen to stop the execution of Irish militants. On this issue, Marx and the International’s General Council in London had come under attack by the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin’s faction, which took a class-reductionist position, rejecting “any political action that does not have as its immediate and direct aim the triumph of the workers’ cause against capital”.[31] In response, Marx wrote in the Communication:

In the first place, Ireland is the bulwark of English landlordism. If it fell in Ireland, it would fall in England. In Ireland this is a hundred times easier because the economic struggle there is concentrated exclusively on landed property, because this struggle is at the same time national, and because the people there are more revolutionary and angrier than in England. Landlordism in Ireland is maintained solely by the English army. The moment the forced Union between the two countries ends, a social revolution will immediately break out in Ireland.[32]

Moreover, he hinted that such a process could also break the impasse in which British workers were stuck:

Although revolutionary initiative will probably come from France, England alone can serve as the lever for a serious economic Revolution … It is the only country where the vast majority of the population consists of wage laborers … The English have all the material conditions [matière nécessaire] for social revolution. What they lack is a sense of generalisation and revolutionary passion. It is only the General Council that can provide them with this, that can thus accelerate the truly revolutionary movement in this country, and consequently everywhere … If England is the bulwark of landlordism and European capitalism, the only point where official England can be struck a great blow is Ireland.[33]

He conceptualised more explicitly this notion of the Irish struggle for independence as a detonator for a wider British and European working-class revolution in a letter to Engels of 10 December 1869:

For a long time I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working-class ascendancy. I always expressed this point of view in the New York Tribune. Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. That is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.[34]

Here, Marx also acknowledges explicitly a change of position, from an earlier one, where he saw proletarian revolution spreading from the core industrial nations to the periphery. At this point, he is beginning to develop the notion of a transnational communist revolution beginning in the more agrarian, colonised peripheries of capitalism, and then spreading into the core nations. During the last years before his death in 1883, this was to become a major concern with respect to societies outside Western Europe and North America.

Late Marx: India, Russia, and Beyond

In The German Ideology of 1846, Marx and Engels conceptualised several successive stages of historical development in Eurocentric terms, later called modes of production: (i) clan or tribal, (ii) slave-based ancient Greco–Roman, (iii) serf-based feudal, (iv) formally free wage-labour-based bourgeois or capitalist, and, it was implied, (v) freely-associated-labour-based socialist. A decade later, in the Grundrisse of 1857–58, Marx discussed modes of production originating in Asia, especially India (the “Asiatic” mode of production) as a type of pre-capitalist system that did not fall easily under either (ii) or (iii). It represented something qualitatively different, without as much formal slavery, and with communal or collective property and social relations continuing in the villages for a very long time.

For Marx, this constituted a more global and multilinear theory of history, with premodern Asian societies on a somewhat different pathway of development than Western Europe, especially ancient Rome. In Capital, Vol I, he referred to “the ancient Asiatic, Classical-antique, and other such modes of production,” where commodity production “plays a subordinate role” as compared to the modern capitalist mode of production.[35] Marx’s distinction between Asian and European pre-capitalist societies was banned in Stalinist ideology, which clung to the slavery–feudal–bourgeois model of successive modes of production, something that required mental gymnastics to fit societies like Mughal India or Confucian China into the “feudal” or “slave” modes of production. Even as late as the 1970s, the noted anthropologist and Marx scholar Norair Ter-Akopian was dismissed from the Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute in Moscow for having published a book on the Asiatic mode of production.

In notes from his last years not published until after Stalin’s death, Marx summarised and commented upon his young anthropologist friend Maxim Kovalevsky’s Communal Property (1879), especially its treatment of precolonial India. Although appreciative of much of Kovalevsky’s analysis, Marx inveighed against his attempts to treat Mughal India, with its highly centralised state system, as feudal: “Kovalevsky here finds feudalism in the Western European sense. Kovalevsky forgets, among other things, serfdom, which is not in India, and which is an essential moment.” Marx concludes that concerning “feudalism,” “as little is found in India as in Rome”.[36]  These notes, available in English since 1975, did not find their way into the Collected Works of Marx and Engels. Nor can any of the notes on Kovalevsky or other late texts on India be found in the most recent collection of Marx’s India writings.[37] However, Irfan Habib’s comprehensive introduction to this volume does mention briefly the late Marx’s notebooks on India his “objection to any designation of the Indian communities as ‘feudal’.”[38]

All this would be only an academic topic had Marx not tied these issues to the contemporary issues of colonialism and world revolution. In the years 1848–53, Marx tended toward an implicit support of colonialism, whether in forcing a traditionalist China into the world market, as quoted above from the Communist Manifesto, or in his 1853 articles on India, which celebrated what he saw as modernising and progressive aspects of British rule. In 1853, he portrays India as backward in socio-economic terms, incapable of real change from within, and unable to mount serious resistance to foreign invasion due to its social divisions. Therefore, he could write that year in his Tribune article, “British Rule in India,” that British colonialism was carrying in its wake “the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.”[39]To be sure, Edward Said and others have caricatured his 1853 India articles as completely pro-colonialist, ignoring another major one a few weeks later, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” which attacks the “barbarism” of British colonialism and applauds the possibility of India being able one day “to throw off the English yoke altogether”.[40] Nonetheless, some of Said’s criticisms are on target with regard to the Eurocentrism and ethnocentrism of the 1853 writings.

By the time of the Grundrisse of 1857–58, with its discussion of precolonial India being on a different historical trajectory than ancient Rome, Marx was also coming out publicly, again in the Tribune, in support of both the anti-British sepoy uprising in India and Chinese resistance to the British in the Second Opium War. But, his support for this anti-colonial resistance remained at a rather general level. Marx did not embrace the overall political aims or perspectives of the Chinese or Indians resisting imperialism, which seemed to be neither democratic nor communist.[41] This differs from his late writings on Russia, which saw emancipatory communist movements emerging from that country’s communal villages. Thus, Marx’s thinking on these issues seems to have evolved further after 1858.

Multilinear Pathways of Development and Revolution

During his last years, Marx never finished Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, although he reworked Vol I painstakingly for the French edition of 1872–75, altering several passages that were seen to imply that societies outside the narrow band of industrialising capitalism would inevitably have to modernise in the Western industrial sense. In the original 1867 edition, he had written: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future”.[42] Even the usually careful scholar Teodor Shanin viewed this passage as an example of “unilinear determinism”.[43] He, therefore, drew a sharp distinction between Capital (determinist) and Marx’s late writings on Russia (open-ended and multilinear). But, Shanin and other scholars who taxed Marx for this passage did not notice that in the subsequent 1872–75 French edition, the last version of the book he himself saw to publication, he recast this passage: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to those that follow it up the industrial ladder [le suivent sur l’échelle industrielle], the image of its own future.”[44] In this way, he removed any hint of unilinear determinism and, more importantly, suggested that the future of societies outside Western Europe might follow a different pathway.

Marx made a much more explicit statement concerning his multilinear approach to the historical possibilities of agrarian societies outside Western Europe in the draft of an 1877 letter, where he criticised strongly any idea of “transforming my historical sketch [in the “Primitive Accumulation” section of Capital—KA] of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of the general course fatally imposed on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves placed,” a letter in which he also quoted the French edition of Capital.[45]

Marx also returned at length to the subject of India in his above-cited 1879 notes on Kovalevsky[46], his Notes on Indian History[47], and his 1880–82 Ethnological Notebooks.[48] During these last years, he wrote of Russian peasant “primitive communism” as a locus of resistance to capital and of possible linkages to the revolutionary working-class communist movement in the West. This is seen in a famous passage from his last published text, the 1882 preface he and Engels contributed to a new Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto:

If the Russian revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, then the present Russian common ownership [Gemeineigentum] may serve as the point of departure [Ausgungspunkt] for a communist development.[49]

In his late writings on Russia and notebooks on South Asia, North Africa, Latin America, and a number of other agrarian, pastoral, or hunter-gatherer societies, Marx is deeply concerned with the rise of gender and social hierarchy during the decline of communal social formations.[50] It is also very likely that he was interested in South Asian, North African, Latin American villages, like the Russian ones, as possible loci of resistance to capital and therefore potential allies of the working classes of Western Europe and North America.

For example, in Marx’s notes on Kovalevsky’s lengthy discussion of India, he traces in great detail the shift from kin-based communal village organisation to one grounded more in mere residency. At this stage, he has clearly rejected his earlier notion of an unchanging India until the arrival of capitalism via the British. However, as against his writings on Ireland, he never acknowledges this change explicitly, as in his 1869 letter to Engels on Ireland cited above. (Of course, we have less information on Marx’s thinking in his last years. By 1879, Engels, his most regular intellectual interlocutor, was no longer in faraway Manchester receiving Marx’s letters, but a neighbour who visited almost daily but without leaving much of paper trail of their conversations. Marx’s letters to Kovalevsky were also burned by his friends in Russia, who went to his house to do so, out of fear of them falling into the hands the police, which could have endangered the young anthropologist.)

As seen above, as early as the 1857 sepoy uprising, Marx seems to have moved away from his earlier notion of India as a passive civilisation that did not offer much resistance to foreign conquest. He recorded detailed data on Indian resistance in another set of notes taken around 1879, on British colonial official Robert Sewell’s Analytical History of India (1870), published in Moscow as Marx’s Notes on Indian History[51] without awareness that this volume consisted mainly of passages excerpted from Sewell’s book. In these notes, Marx records dozens of examples of Indian resistance to foreign invaders and domestic rulers, from the earliest historical records right up through the sepoy uprising. Moreover, Marx’s notes now view Mughal, British, and other conquests of India as contingent rather than the product of ineluctable social forces.

But, Marx’s main focus in these late notebooks on South Asia, North Africa, and Latin America is the structure and history of communal social relations and property in these regions, and on how colonialism uprooted these earlier social relations. At the same time, as a dialectical thinker, Marx also notes the persistence of remnants of these communal social forms even after they had been greatly undermined by colonialism. Did he come to believe that the Indian, Algerian, or Latin American village could become a locus of resistance to capital, as he had theorised in 1882 concerning the Russian village? That is what I have concluded after years of study of these notebooks.

To be sure, he never said such a thing explicitly. Moreover, in his late writings on Russia, in the drafts of his 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich, he even noted a key difference with India, that Russia had not “fallen prey, like the East Indies, to a conquering foreign power”. [52]

Still, I find it hard to believe that Marx engaged in such a deep and extended study of the communal social formations in precolonial and even colonial South Asia, North Africa, and Latin America without an aim beyond purely historical research. As the Italian Marx scholar Luca Basso notes, Marx was in his late writings on Russia and other non-Western societies, operating on “two planes,” that of “historical-theoretical interpretation” and that of “the feasibility or otherwise of a revolutionary movement” in the context of what he was studying.[53] The fact that he undertook this research in the years just before his clarion call in the 1882 preface to the Manifesto about an uprising in Russia’s communal villages that would link up with the Western proletariat as the “starting point for a communist revolution” suggests the connectedness of all of this research on primitive communism. As Dunayevskaya argued in the first work that linked these notebooks to modern concerns with revolution and women’s liberation: “Marx returns to probe the origin of humanity, not for purposes of discovering new origins, but for perceiving new revolutionary forces, their reason.”[54]

It is important to see both his brilliant generalisations about capitalist society and the very concrete ways in which he examined not only class, but also gender, race, and colonialism, and what today would be called the intersectionality of all of these. His underlying revolutionary humanism was the enemy of all forms of abstraction that denied the variety and multiplicity of human experience, especially as his vision extended outward from Western Europe. For these reasons, no thinker speaks to us today with such force and clarity.

Kevin B. Anderson’s authored books include Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies and Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism. Among his edited books are The Power of Negativity by Raya Dunayevskaya (with Peter Hudis), Karl Marx (with Bertell Ollman), The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (with P. Hudis), and The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence (with Russell Rockwell).

Notes

See Bibliography below.

1. MECW 6: 519; MEW 4: 493, sometimes my translation) ↵

   1. MECW 6: 502–03; MEW 4: 479 ↵

   2. MECW 6: 488 ↵

   3. MECW 6: 488 ↵

   4. MECW 6: 489 ↵

   5. Marx 1976: 90 ↵

   6. Marx 1976: 929 ↵

   7. Marx 1976: 166 ↵

   8. Marx 1976: 166; MEW 23: 86; Marx 1994: 607 ↵

   9. (Dunayevskaya 1958: 100, emphasis in the original) ↵

   10. Marx 1976: 929 ↵

   11. Marx 1976: 799 ↵

   12. Ollman 1993 ↵

   13. Marx 1976: 744 ↵

   14. Hegel 2018: 10 ↵

   15. Kosík 1976: 7 ↵

   16. Hudis 2012; Chattopadhyay 2016 ↵

   17. MECW 21: 120, emphasis in original ↵

   18. MECW 6: 167 ↵

   19. Marx 1976: 414, emphasis added ↵

   20. Brown 2012: 91 ↵

   21. Marx 1976: 620–21 ↵

   22. Krader 1974 ↵

   23. Dunayevskaya 1982; Anderson 2014; Brown 2012 ↵

   24. Quoted in Plaut and Anderson 1999: 6, emphasis in original; see also MECW 3: 295–96 for an earlier translation) ↵

   25. Plaut and Anderson 1999: 58 ↵

   26. Dunayevskaya 1982; Brown 2012 ↵

   27. MECW 24: 88–89 ↵

   28. Marx 1994: 1001, my translation from the French original; see also MECW 6: 549 ↵

   29. MECW 6: 518 ↵

   30. Quoted in MECW 21: 208 ↵

   31. MECW 21: 119–120, translation slightly altered on basis of French original in Marx 1966: 358–59 ↵

   32. MECW 21: 118–19, translation slightly altered on basis of French original in Marx 1966: 356–57 ↵

   33. MECW 43: 398, emphasis in original ↵

   34. Marx 1976: 172 ↵

   35. Krader 1975: 383 ↵

   36. Husain 2006 ↵

   37. Husain 2006: xxxv ↵

   38. MECW 12: 132 ↵

   39. (MECW 12: 221). ↵

   40. Benner 2018 ↵

   41. Marx 1976: 91 ↵

   42. Shanin 1983: 4 ↵

   43. Marx 1976: 91, my translation, see also Anderson 2014 ↵

   44. Shanin 1983: 136. ↵

   45. Krader 1975 ↵

   46. Marx 1960 ↵

   47. Krader 1974 ↵

   48. Shanin 1983: 139, see also MECW 24: 426 and MEW 19: 296, translation slightly altered ↵

   49. Some of these notebooks are still unpublished and will appear in the Marx–Engels Gesamtausgabe or MEGA, but their aspects have been discussed in Brown 2012; Pradella 2015 and Anderson 2016. ↵

   50. Marx 1960 ↵

   51. Shanin 1983: 106 ↵

   52. Basso 2015: 90 ↵

   53. Dunayevskaya 1982: 187 ↵

Bibliography

• Anderson, Kevin B (2014): Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, New Delhi: Pinnacle Learning.

• — (2016): Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, Expanded edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• Basso, Luca (2015): Marx and the Common: From Capital to the Late Writings, Trans David Broder, Leiden: Brill.

• Benner, Erica (2018): Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels, Reprint edition, New York: Oxford University Press.

• Brown, Heather (2012): Marx on Gender and the Family, Leiden: Brill.

• Chattopadhyay, Paresh (2016): Marx’s Associated Mode of Production, New York: Palgrave.

• Dunayevskaya, Raya (1958): Marxism and Freedom, New York: Bookman Associates.

• — (1982): Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, Sussex: Harvester Press.

• Hegel, G W F (2018): Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans Michael Inwood, New York: Oxford University Press.

• Hudis, Peter (2012): Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, Leiden: Brill.

• Husain, Iqbal (ed) (2006): Karl Marx on India, New Delhi: Tulika Books.

• Kosík, Karel (1976): Dialectics of the Concrete, Trans Karel Kovanda and James Schmidt, Boston: D Reidel.

• Krader, Lawrence (ed) (1974): The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, Second Edition, Assen: Van Gorcum.

• — (1975): The Asiatic Mode of Production, Assen: Van Gorcum.

• Marx, Karl (1960): Notes on Indian History (664–1858), Moscow: Progress Publishers.

• — (1966): “Le conseil générale au conseil fédérale de la Suisse romande,” General Council of the First International 1868–1870, Minutes, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

• — (1976): Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol 1, Trans Ben Fowkes, New York: Penguin.

• — (1994): Oeuvres IV, Edited by Maximilien Rubel, Paris: Éditions Gallimard.

• [MECW] Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels (1975–2004): Collected Works, Fifty Volumes, New York: International Publishers.

• [MEW] Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1968): Werke, Berlin: Dietz Verlag.

• Ollman, Bertell (1993): Dialectical Investigations, New York: Routledge.

• Plaut, Eric A and Kevin B Anderson (1999): Marx on Suicide, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

• Pradella, Lucia (2015): Globalisation and the Critique of Political Economy: New Insights from Marx’s Writings, Milton Park: Routledge.

• Shanin, Teodor (1983): Late Marx and the Russian Road, New York: Monthly Review Press.

Remembering the Original Black Panther Party

By Aneesh Gogineni

In 1966, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, two students attending Merritt Community College in Oakland, founded what would be one of the most infamous organizations in US history, The Black Panthers. In fact, the FBI director at the time, J. Edgar Hoover regarded the Black Panthers’ breakfast program, not their guns, as the greatest threat to the nation’s internal security. Separating themselves from other black liberation groups at the time, the BPP was fighting the underlying evil that shapes and supplies racism — classism.

The Black Panthers were a Marxist group based on the ideology of revolutionary intercommunalism, a theory formed by Huey Newton that recharacterized imperialism and its relation to black subjugation. The theory rejected Western and neoliberal systemic issues in favor of Leninist style resistance to the neoliberal world order through means of a vanguard party to achieve socialist dictatorship of the proletariat. The Black Panthers were one of the largest domestic left-wing groups in the US that revolted against police brutality, systemic racism, racial capitalism, and worldwide imperialist efforts by the US empire. Running on what they called the Ten-Point Program, they believed in Black freedom and liberation at the same time as the abolition of capitalist systems of oppression and exploitation. At the height of the BPP, there were 68 chapters within the US from Chicago to Oakland to Louisiana. The BPP extended farther than just the United States as it had connections with similar organizations in Algeria, India, South Vietnam, and many other countries. Comprised of predominantly young, black members, very prominent activists were originally BPP members. Fred Hampton, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur are a few of the activists that were either a part of the BPP or influenced heavily by its core beliefs.

The Black Panthers engaged in various modes of Black resistance. This included violent and peaceful means of resistance. Some of the violent methods included community protection and surveillance in which many Black Panthers armed themselves and patrolled black communities to prevent police brutality and anti-black crime. This resulted in lots of violence between the group and the cops as the cops were very brutal towards black people within black communities. On the other end of the stick, the party also engaged in peaceful, radical action. Some of this action included educating children with non-whitewashed history rather than public school learning. They also created community food programs that had free breakfast for children in school. In fact, this program founded by the BPP is what has led to free lunch and breakfast in nationwide public schools. Through these violent and peaceful programs, they were able to establish a radical commune predicated on fulfilling material needs for everyone in the community rather than profiting off of exploitation of workers and POC within the community.

As the Black Panthers became more prominent around the world, they ascended the FBI’s list of threats to the nation’s internal security. In 1956, COINTELPRO was an FBI operation founded to disrupt the activity of socialist entities such as the Communist Party of the USA or the Socialist Workers Party. As the Black Panther Party gained power, COINTELPRO placed them at the top of the list and sent agents to begin infiltration. In December 1969, the FBI shot and killed multiple leaders around the US. They staged police raids in neighborhoods in order to assassinate leaders. This resulted in the deaths of multiple black panthers including young leader Fred Hampton. However, the Black Panthers were able to remain intact throughout the 70’s and 80’s and continue to spread radical ideas. The demise of the Black Panthers can be attributed to dissolution of leadership as leaders either moved away from the party or were killed. In 1989, Huey Newton was killed and the party came to an official end.

The Black Panthers had a very large domestic and international reach. Multiple chapters throughout the nation replicated the communist praxis of the BPP with pioneers like Fred Hampton leading it in different areas. However, the reach of it extended farther than the US borders into the international spector. By establishing ties with other black liberation movements around the world, they were able to spread revolutionary intercommunalism and influence other areas of the world. An example of how strong their influence was can be seen in the Dalit Panther Party. In India, there is a hierarchal caste system based on what family one is born into. The Dalits were the lower caste that were constantly dehumanized, killed, subjugated and legally oppressed. Thus, the Dalit Panther Party was formed as a method of resistance and rejecting the caste system. Mentioned in the BPP magazines, the Dalit Panthers were a wonderful example of the original party’s reach.

Similarly, in Dallas, the group known as Guerilla Mainframe participates in community aid programs as a method of resistance. They also engage in militant protests to police brutality within their community, which is very reminiscent of the Black Panthers. The legacy of the BPP has been carried on around the world with the Yellow Panthers in Vietnam, the Vanguard Party of the Bahamas, and many more groups that studied and copied the Black Panthers’ model of organizing resistance. Thus, we should remember The Black Panther Party not as a terrorist group but rather as an inspirational Party that was key in the fight for black liberation and abolition of class. Thus, in the name of the Black Panthers and the millions of other deaths resulting from capitalism, we must endorse alternative methods of communing.

Sources

https://viewpointmag.com/2018/06/11/intercommunalism-the-late-theorizations-of-huey-p-newton-chief-theoretician-of-the-black-panther-party/

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Black-Panther-Party/Legacy

How the Media Legitimizes Gentrification

By Noah Streng

Republished from Michigan Specter.

If you’ve ever seen an episode of HGTV’s Good Bones or any other “house-flipping” show, you’ll know that like all reality TV shows they depict dramatized situations as a way of increasing the stakes and encouraging viewers to keep watching. However, when watching these types of shows, it is important to recognize what narratives they are promoting. Whose voices and stories do they center? What underlying assumptions are left unchallenged?

In the strange world of reality TV, there’s an entire genre dedicated to “home improvement” where wealthy individuals will buy homes in “rundown neighborhoods’’ and “make them beautiful again” (all while making a significant profit for themselves, of course). These shows like to promote the idea that the house-flippers are courageous underdogs venturing into an uncharted and dangerous land to save target homes from the scary, filthy people who live in them. Euphemisms like “up and coming” and “transitional” are often used to describe low-income, minority neighborhoods starved for investment.

In a dramatic scene from an episode of HGTV’s Good Bones, the gentrifiers are seen “scouting” a house that they bought and breaking through a window because the doors of the house are locked — a sign that people have been staying there. The scene depicts the gentrifiers as being frightened by the possibility of encountering a squatter and being disgusted by the house’s “filth.” However, what’s never asked or included in these shows is questioning why the person living in that house needed to squat in the first place.

Did the state fail to provide them affordable housing? Are they suffering from a mental health issue and lack insurance? Did they get evicted from their former home? Instead of analyzing the root causes of this person’s housing insecurity and seeking to address it, the squatter is demonized as singularly responsible for their failures. Not only that, but the content of these characterizations is highly racialized, contributing to the white supremacist and colonial themes of the show.

These shows almost never consider the perspective of the tenants evicted by gentrifiers who rip their apartments out from under them. In some cases, there will be depictions of scary, drugged-up squatters who are illegally occupying the gentrifiers’ new passion project. In an article titled ‘We Bought a Crack House,’ house-flippers Catherine Jheon and Julian Humphreys detail their “brave” story of buying a house for $560,000 and encountering the tenants — whose home had just been sold by their landlord without consent — still living in the house when they arrive. Some of the home’s residents are experiencing problems with drug addiction, and are even caught by the gentrifiers using crack in an upstairs room.

What’s not mentioned here is how poverty, and these people’s recent condemnation to homelessness by their landlord, may have influenced their decision to use drugs to cope with the immense hardships they face. When Jheon and Humphreys ask the former tenants to leave the home so that they can start renovating, the tenants refuse, citing that they have nowhere else to go and that this is their rightful home. Jheon writes about her frustration with this, as every day she can’t renovate the home is money lost. In the end, she and Humphreys bribe one of the tenants to leave the house and call the police to forcibly remove the rest of them.

This is a classic example of how law and the media intersect to legitimize the violence of colonization and gentrification which continues in our cities today. The poor are demonized and gentrifiers are portrayed as innocent white saviors who are just trying to make a living — but they are doing so by displacing poor, housing insecure black and brown people. The police advance these projects of colonization by using their monopoly on violence to aid gentrifiers in their mission of displacing community residents so that their house can be fixed up and eventually sold to a rich white family.

While seeming innocent on their face, these shows can have devastating effects on the lives of the millions of people in the United States who experience housing insecurity. Not only do these television networks make money off of stories of tragic displacement of poor people, but they frame these stories in a way that valorizes gentrifiers and legitimizes a landlord’s right to hoard property and force destitute people into homelessness. Oftentimes, the excuse that gentrifiers will use when evicting tenants is “it’s our house now.” However, this statement is highly ideological and reinforces the social dynamic between property owners and the property-less in our capitalist society.

Who controls housing is not something that is natural or written in the stars. It is a power arrangement forged by the deliberate decisions of actors within an economic system that prioritizes profit over human life. House-flipping shows are just one part of the larger media trend of legitimizing societal oppression.

TV companies make political decisions when they choose to only highlight the voices of landlords, realtors, and house-flippers over tenants and the housing insecure. The depiction of low-income, predominately black people as filthy, dangerous, and lazy — rather than victims of a violent, exploitative, and racist economic system — feeds into the narrative that gentrification is good for society at large. How the media depicts people’s interactions with the law and frames which laws are just has real consequences. When the media chooses to center the story of the colonizer over the colonized, it legitimizes the displacement, land theft, and systemic impoverishment that millions of people face every day.

Reclaiming Hope in a Neoliberal Age

[Photo credit: Joe Brusky]

By Yanis Iqbal

In the second declaration of Havana - delivered on February 4, 1962 - Fidel Castro said, “It is the duty of every revolutionary to make the revolution.” Piercingly clear and searingly sharp - this statement demystifies our coldly scholastic and meek attitude toward socialism. In a world where leftists submissively mold themselves to the contingencies of history, Castro invites us to collectively dare for a firmly definite objective: overthrowing the bourgeoisie state. Such lucidity and precision - apart from organically integrating the ultimate goal of socialism into the planning of concrete action - foregrounds the little explored territory of hope - hope that love and solidarity will survive in the face of barefaced barbarism; hope that the masses will indignantly demand what is theirs; hope that the spirit of revolution will seep through the cracks of hunger and poverty.

Hope

The globalization of capital, the move toward post-Fordist economic arrangements of flexible specialization, and the consolidation of hyper-individualized culture has resulted in a shift from a politics of hope to one of despair. The drastic weakening of the Left has heralded a new age of defeatist literature, absolutely incapable of battling with shifting conjunctural equations. In sum, a historically informed understanding of capitalism and the immense power possessed by the wretched of the earth has given way to theoretical abstractions devoid of any sense of class struggle. What is urgently needed, therefore, is a re-affirmation of the potentialities for liberation and the crystallization of hope as an important element in the entire panorama of endless efforts.

In his book Pedagogy of Freedom, the great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire noted, “our being in the world is far more than just “being.” It is a “presence”…that can reflect upon itself, that knows itself as presence, that can intervene, can transform, can speak of what it does, but that can also take stock of, compare, evaluate, give value to, decide, break with, and dream.” Insofar that we constitute a living “presence”, we are capable of understanding structural conditionedness in depth, in its essence, detaching it from its contingent factuality, from its sheer concrete “being there”.

As human beings, we are conditioned by social relations, not determined by them; the past influences us and our actions, but does not determine those actions or what the future will bring. As soon as we grasp this fact and emerge out of our submersion in reality, we start to treat obstacles as problems rather than as givens and thus, gain the ability to act to change them as well as reflect on the consequences of that action. When we reclaim human agency, our day-to-day interaction with the existential universe acquires an element of hope: since the future is open-ended rather than closed, what we want to create always exists as a true possibility within the womb of our present society. The tomorrow which we want to see has yet to be fashioned by the transformation of today, the present reality. It is something not yet here but a potential, something beyond the barriers we face now, which must be created by us beyond the limits we discover.

Hope acts as the bond between the utopia we desire and the obscenely harsh reality we live in. It is a response to an existential reality that pushes a person forward in anger, indignation and just rage, forcing him/her to negate the ugliness of everyday life. Without hope, there is no possibility for resistance, dissent, and dialogue. It is the prerequisite for all forms of critical agency which aim to radically reconstitute our society. Hope expands the space of the possible, and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present while providing the foundation for informed action. While despair is passive - we are the objects, closed in on by time in a way that we see as inevitable, hope is active - we exercise agency, piercing through time by seeing the alternatives, the possibilities available to us in moving beyond a particular obstruction.  

In Pedagogy of Hope, Freire says, “We need critical hope the way a fish needs unpolluted water… After all, without hope there is little we can do. It will be hard to struggle on, and when we fight as hopeless or despairing persons, our struggle will be suicidal. We shall be beside ourselves, drop our weapons, and throw ourselves into sheer hand-to-hand, purely vindictive, combat.”

Hope can never be divorced from practice and action. It is effective only when undergirded by struggle. Freire writes: “Hope, as an ontological need, demands an anchoring in practice. As an ontological need, hope needs practice in order to become historical concreteness. That is why there is no hope in sheer hopefulness. The hoped-for is not attained by dint of raw hoping. Just to hope is to hope in vain.” Thus, hope, rigorous and intellectual, requires struggle and action. It is not naïve optimism; it is critical and reflective action.

Hope must be concrete, a spark that not only reaches out beyond the surrounding emptiness of capitalist relations, anticipating a better world in the future, but a spark that also speaks to us in the world we live in by presenting tasks based on the challenges of the present time. In The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, the German philosopher Ernst Bloch argues that hope cannot be removed from the world. Hope is not “something like nonsense or absolute fancy; rather it is not yet in the sense of a possibility; that it could be there if we could only do something for it.”

The inseparability of hope from concrete struggle necessitates that it always be social in nature, rather than individual. Hope is not about individual aims, desires, or ambitions; it is beyond simply dreaming of a better day and into consciously thinking about how to work toward a collective vision. Hoping is not tied to having hope-for something, a state of mind that is closer to desire. Hope is concerned with a collective act of hope-in something, rather than with an individual future. It must be capable of producing people willing and able to expand and deepen their sense of themselves, to think of their socio-economic environment critically, to imagine something beyond their own self interest and well-being, to serve the public good, and struggle for an egalitarian future.

Utopia

Without hope, humans would despair in the face of their unfinishedness and would become immobilized. It is hope that helps in leading the incessant pursuit of the oppressed towards humanization. It is hope, in other words, that drives us ever onwards as travelers, wayfarers, seekers, in pursuit of completeness. In this pursuit of completeness, in this hope-driven search for fully realized humanity, education is extremely important. For Bloch, hope left to itself is undisciplined and “easily led astray”, taking the form of wishful, magical “meaningless hope” or, when manipulated by the bourgeoisie, a domesticated, privatized and “fraudulent hope”.

Hope may also manifest itself as passive patience while on the other it may take the form of an unfocused rebelliousness. Since such impatient hope is at risk of turning into defeatism, it needs to be bolstered by careful attention to and analysis of material data. A reckless false hope, an over-zealous hope fails to consider counter-acting forces and ends up in a welter of immobilizing frustration.

Education is, therefore, required in order to provide “contact with the real forward tendency into what is better”. By means of utopian images, hope can be educated, taught, “trained unerringly, usefully, on what is right”. Freire, too, argued that undisciplined, naïve, spontaneous hope needed education in order to connect it tightly to the project of humanization - to sharpen, clarify and illuminate its objective. The need for utopian, humanizing education is rendered all the more important because of the continual operation of dehumanizing forces. As the dominators “have nothing to announce but the preservation of the status quo”, they invariably try to cage the future and make of it “a repetition of the present”. In this context, “the struggle for the restoration of utopia [is] all the more necessary. Educational practice itself, as an experience in humanization, must be impregnated with this ideal”.

In The Politics of Education, Freire outlined what such a utopia can look like: “Revolutionary utopia tends to be dynamic rather than static; tends to life rather than death; to the future as a challenge to man's creativity rather than as a repetition of the present; to love as liberation of subjects rather than as pathological possessiveness; to the emotion of life rather than as cold abstractions; to living together in harmony rather than mere gregariousness; to dialogue rather than silence; to praxis rather than ‘law and order’; to men who organize themselves reflectively for action rather than men who are organized for passivity; to creative and communicative language rather than empty verbosity; to reflective challenges rather than enslaving slogans; and values which can be lived rather than to myths which are imposed.”

Informed by utopia, the language of hope becomes a medium of struggle of those who refuse to lose their grip on reality. This is the language of sound and sober hope, an educated hope grounded in a careful study of material conditions. Educated hope demands that the fact in which it believes be abandoned the moment concrete experience is against it. This method requires continual alertness to indicators that call hope into question and entail a change in praxis.

Faith in Class Struggle

In his book Beyond US Hegemony: Assessing the Prospects for a Multipolar World, Samir Amin states: “There are no ‘laws of capitalist expansion’ that assert themselves as a quasi-supernatural force. There is no historical determinism prior to history itself. Tendencies inherent in the logic of capital encounter the resistance of forces that do not accept its effects. Real history is therefore the outcome of this conflict between the logic of capitalist expansion and other logics stemming from the resistance of social forces that suffer the effects of such expansion.”

As is evident from the quotation, capitalism is not an essentially closed and immutable phase of history, standing above the vagaries of class struggle. Rather, it is a hegemonic arena of constant push-and-pull, open to the possibility of hope. When that hope is recognized by socialists, there emerges a “weak teleological force of open possibilities” - the belief that the collective struggle of the masses will steer the undecidedness of the world process toward a better future. Today, we need to reclaim hope so that we can navigate through the indeterminacy of history and prepare the working class for a revolutionary upheaval.

Yanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at yanisiqbal@gmail.com

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Socialist Within

By Stephen Joseph Scott

To date, the image and memory of Martin Luther King Jr., social justice warrior, peace activist and civil rights icon in the United States, and around the world, has been manipulated, watered-down or diminished of meaning to serve the very forces of capitalist power and domination that the man spent his life in opposition to. In school textbooks in the U.S. for example, young people are taught about King the moderate man of peace, but not the radical King who, criticized by other civil-rights-leaders for speaking out against the Vietnam war, proclaimed, on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City, the U.S. to be, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” By sanitizing the image of the man, they, corporate and governmental powers, not only control the narrative, but they dumb-down and oversimplify the message by lobotomizing the historical record. As W.E.B. Du Bois, American intellectual, asserted: “The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example: it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.” What Du Bois was saying is that by stripping, containing and distorting historical narratives the learner is robbed of the substance, nuance and otherness that history should provide. Each year in January as King is honored in the eyes of the public, there is little mention of the demands of the man and his mission: his fight for economic justice in a society that was built on inequality from the very start, “We can’t have a system where some of the people live in superfluous, inordinate wealth while others live in abject, deadening poverty.” King the radical has been passed-over and neutralized in order to make a moderate image of the man more digestible, not only to whitewash the general public and students alike, but to also pacify the capitalist and white supremacist power structures that he so fiercely opposed.

In an early and intimate correspondence, written in 1952, to his then jeune amour Coretta Scott, King declared “I am more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic.” When addressing a book sent to him by Coretta: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887, King expressed: “On the negative side ... Bellamy falls victim to the same error that most writers of Utopian societies fall victim ... idealism not tempered with realism.” King was a pragmatist who understood fully the cause and effect of a capitalist system that pushed aside the needs of its populous in the name of profit, “So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. So I think Bellamy is right in seeing the gradual decline of capitalism.” This letter reveals that King was an admitted Socialist and firm in his agreement with Bellamy’s prediction of the inevitable degeneration of capitalism.

Reflecting upon his longtime hero and mentor, Norman Thomas, King espoused the 1932 Socialist Presidential nominee’s views as an inspiration to his own antiwar stance concerning Vietnam in an article published in Pageant magazine in June 1965, “Thomas, a Presbyterian minister, found his interest in socialism stimulated by the antiwar declaration of the Socialist Party in 1917.” It was to President Franklin Roosevelt’s acclaim, that he, once in office, took on much of Thomas’ socialist platform when putting together his well-known New Deal program: “Old-age pensions for men and women 60 years old; Abolition of child labor; The six-hour day, five-day week with no wage reductions; Health insurance and maternity insurance; and, Adequate minimum wage laws.” King inspired by Thomas’ unorthodox socialist approach to the issues of his day, steadfastly admired his principled stand calling him “The Bravest Man I’ve Ever Met,” and embodied Thomas’ following sentiments in words and deeds, “The hope for the future lies in a new social and economic order which demands the abolition of the capitalist system.” The seeds were planted; the capitalist opponent and unyielding guardian of socialist values stood evident throughout King’s ministry.

January 10, 1957 marked the birthday of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, founded by Martin Luther King Jr. and his father, to fight for civil rights and economic fairness. Increasingly throughout the 1960s, King became more anticorporate; and, more explicitly judgmental of capitalism as a system of innate inequality. In May 1967, while speaking at a SCLC staff meeting, King pushed radical against the injustices baked into the fundamental structure of capitalism, as well as the corrupt and unethical political system that allowed it to ride roughshod over its own population, “We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.” Meaning, the movement had to demand a radical-paradigm-shift in the administrative and monetary structures that undergirded the American system of capitalism, “We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together you cant [sic] really get rid of one without getting rid of the others the whole structure of American life must be changed.” Again, in August 1967, at a SCLC annual conference, King asked, “Why are there forty million poor people in America? ... When you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth ... you begin to question the capitalistic economy.” King was insistent that the resistance to an unjust system of inequality had to arise. In fact, in that same speech, in defense of workers’ rights, King invoked Walter Reuther, leader of organized labor, founder of the United Auto Workers of America and civil rights activist, “Walter defined power one day. He said, power is the ability of a labor union like UAW to make the most powerful corporation in the world, General Motors, say ‘Yes’ when it wants to say ‘No.’ That’s power.” King, the supporter of cooperative ethics, denoted unions and the ability of workers to bargain collectively against corporate supremacy as an essential tool in checkmating capital and its abuses.

As explained by historian Thomas Jackson, in his work From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice, King was definitive as to where public policy in the U.S. needed to go, “Policy must ‘reduce the gap’ between the poor and the majority by making the poverty line a percentage of median income." King argued, raising the poverty line, which was inordinately low in 1964, would bring a response to millions of working poor that President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty overlooked. In King’s estimation, the inadequacy of the government’s solution to the War on Poverty coupled with the war in Vietnam equaled a travesty that disproportionately punished the disenfranchised:

[T]he war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons ... to die.... So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools ... I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

The war in Southeast Asia, in King’s view, was not only a brutal attack on a distant and poor “third-world” country half way around the globe, but a direct assault on America’s poor and working class populace. Again, what King was asserting was that race, war and economics were inextricably woven within the fabric of the U.S. political economy.

A New York Times editorial, dated April 7, 1967, published just three days after King’s powerful antiwar declaration above, encapsulated the prevailing counter assessment of the time. By ignoring class altogether, the conservative view of the day was camouflaged by “temperance,” insisting that the war in Vietnam and racial injustice in the United States had nothing to do with each other, “The moral issues in Vietnam are less clear-cut than he suggests; the political strategy of uniting the peace movement and the civil rights movement could very well be disastrous for both causes.” The point this editorial avoided was the enormous sums of public funds spent on the war, and their violent social and economic impact domestically, which King defined as wasteful and destructive, “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money.” In place of King’s economic mandate, the editorial used an erroneous conflation designed to convince the reader that melding the anti-war movement with civil rights was more about coupling the issues of race and militarism rather than King’s actual emphasis, economic justice.

King first announced his Poor People's Campaign (a multiracial non-violent crusade focused on jobs and dignity for the poor) at a staff retreat for the SCLC in November 1967. After having crisscrossed America building an alliance for his PPC, gathering support through a coalition of Blacks, farm workers, Native Americans and poor Whites, King delivered a speech, on March 10, 1968, in NYC (just a month prior to his assassination), entitled “The Other America.” King sermonized before a union, Local 1199, mostly comprised of African Americans, “If all of labor were to follow your example of mobilizing ... our nation would be much closer to a swift settlement of that immoral, unjust, and ill-considered war.” It was this kind of tutelage, this kind of unifying, enlisting and organizing of King’s multiracial army of the poor and working class, that threatened the establishment, i.e., government officials, corporate elites and mainstream media. Furthermore, in that same speech, King challenged not just the establishment and its propaganda, but also those among his ranks that doubted the efficacy of his mission to end the war:

I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war.

King, the theologian, in defense of his anti-war stance, harkened back to the teachings of the social gospel as his grounding – itself, a radical pacifist document; and, a passionate plea for the rights and dignity of the poor.

On a prior date, April 14, 1967, at Stanford University, King had given a different version of the same speech, one in which he invoked Frederick Douglass, abolitionist, author and former slave. King publicly attacked the United States and its long vicious history of elite control, systematic racism and unjust class bigotry:

This is why Frederick Douglas [sic] could say that emancipation for the Negro was freedom to hunger ... freedom without roofs to cover their heads. He went on to say that it was freedom without bread to eat, freedom without land to cultivate. It was freedom and famine at the same time.

King’s acknowledgement of Douglass helps to clarify his radical view of the long and inhumane historical narrative, which defined America. He was telling his audience that in a system founded on greed, white supremacy and inequality, freedom was not “freedom” if one was Black or poor. Written from his cell years earlier, in 1963, in his now celebrated Letter From a Birmingham Jail, King penned, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” In a top-down system of cascading violence King, the shepherd, attempted to give voice to the voiceless and consciousness to the beleaguered masses.

When matching the inequities of the American economic system against other systems, in May 1965, while speaking before the Negro American Labor Council, King lauded the Scandinavian modus of democratic socialism and demanded a fair and just redistribution of America’s affluence: “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.” Again, years earlier, from his jail cell in Birmingham, King, the radical humanist, had elegiacally weaved together the socialist values of the collective within faith, race and socioeconomic condition, “I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states ... We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Additionally, public statements like, “I think black people and poor people must organize themselves ... we must mobilize our political and economic power,” congealed King’s position as a “Communist,” as well as a dangerous man whose every move needed to be tracked. Even if one publicly condemned communism as King certainly did, as far back as his Atlanta sermon, given on September 8, 1953, asserting, “Let us begin by stating that communism and Christianity are at the bottom incompatible. One cannot be a true Christian and a true Communist simultaneously.” A open denunciation of communism of this sort mattered little to the foundations of power that were bitterly opposed to the rights and unification of Blacks, the poor and the working class, “Perhaps the quintessential example of a target of state surveillance was Martin Luther King Jr. The surveillance of King was carried out with great intensity by the FBI, in concert with local police forces.” The powers of the State were now solidified and King was the target of that solidification, “[King was] subject to increasing scrutiny and harassment from the FBI, which had wiretapped his phones since 1963,” however, it did not begin under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations; it began much earlier, as early as the first freedom marches in Montgomery Alabama in the mid-1950s.

The FBI directive, dated January 4, 1956, is proof positive that the U.S. government was purposefully investing manpower and resources into tracking King as early as 1955: “On 7 December [1955], the FBI’s Mobile Office began forwarding information on the bus boycott to FBI director J Edgar Hoover.” The document, although redacted, reveals that the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge was working closely with a Montgomery Police Officer gathering, with intent, as much defamatory evidence as possible against King in order to take him and his non-violent call for social-justice down.

The security state not only tracked King’s every movement, but it also harassed him for years using an array of methods from penetrating surveillance to psychological coercion. The foundations of power were deeply distressed by King’s radical decrees, and, his non-violent movement of civil disobedience, “The FBI was so concerned about King’s radicalism and potential for inciting a black revolution that it deemed his activities a threat to national security.” In fact, the FBI sadistically mocked, taunted and provoked King to commit suicide in an anonymous letter sent to him November 21, 1964 - just nineteen-days prior to his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway:

You are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that ... like all frauds your end is approaching ... your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you ... It is all there on the record, your sexual orgies ... you are done ...  there is only one thing for you to do ... and you know what it is.

This FBI missive proves that the forces within government were willing to stop at nothing to end, what they considered, an imminent threat to the status quo. In fact, by April 3, 1968, after returning to Memphis (one day prior to his assassination), King’s hostility toward the U.S. political economy and its endemic inequalities grew into an overt attack on corporate America, “We are asking you tonight ... to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis ... Tell them not to buy–what is the other bread? Wonder Bread.” This direct challenge to the pecuniary interests of American business only intensified the image of King as a menace.

Governmental forces so loathed King the man and what he stood for, that they pursued the diminution of his persona for years after his murder in Memphis, Tennessee, “While the FBI did intensely track King through his death, it actually continued to besmirch his name even after he was assassinated,” but what authoritarian forces working on behalf of capitalist interests could not completely eviscerate they inevitably subsumed. During his speech on the creation of a national holiday for King - November 2, 1983, some fifteen-years after King’s brutal assassination, Ronald Reagan was one of the first conservatives to publically confiscate, misappropriate and alter King’s image to that of the “extraordinary” American, “In the fifties and sixties, one of the important crises we faced was racial discrimination. The man whose words and deeds in that crisis stirred our nation to the very depths of its soul was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” In spite of the fact that Reagan, and most reactionaries in the U.S., long considered King a traitor, a communist subversive, and, an adversary to corporate and state power, Reagan used King’s words not only to support conservative ideals and policies, but also for his own political gain. Facing re-election in 1984 and waning poll numbers, “[Reagan and] his political advisers hoped for some positive effect among black and moderate white voters.” Reagan, in what can be considered a public-relations-coup, exalted King’s words through a histrionic burst of American exceptionalism, "All of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning ... land where my fathers died ... from every mountainside, let freedom ring," which, as preformed before the nation, deliberately sanitized, ignored and diminished the purpose of King’s mission which stood in direct opposition to the destructive forces of corporate greed.

Finally, what this conservative, and later neo-liberal, approach to King’s views conveniently overlooked, whether in political-thought or school textbooks, is King’s class oriented fight for justice. Throughout his brief life, King affirmed, in private and in public, his socialist beliefs – from his stance on race, war and poverty, to his evaluation of the global political economy. What the foundations of power have attempted to subvert, at all costs, was King’s clarion-call for the unification of the poor, “There is amazing power in unity. Where there is true unity, every effort to disunite only serves to strengthen the unity.” Again, Martin Luther King Jr. was a Socialist and radical humanist at his core, a resolute teacher of the social gospel, a committed supporter of cooperative principles and a firm champion of collectivist values. As a result of his commitment to those ethics, principles and values - he, not only fell victim to the pernicious and menacing powers of the capitalist state, but he also steadfastly and resolutely sacrificed his own life.

Stephen Joseph Scott is  a singer/songwriter, humanist/activist, record producer and actor – a self-taught musician, writer and performer; now living in Philadelphia.  As a musician, He uses American Roots Music, a blend of influences including Country, Soul, Rock, Rhythm and Blues, Bluegrass and Folk to illustrate the current American social and political landscape.  In the tradition of Woody Guthrie, Steve explores the inward and outward fragility of the human condition within a decimated working class – to which far too many fall victim. Emanating from his own humble origins, Steve expresses what he calls the “wrenching torment” of common folk: abuse, neglect, regret, struggle, sacrifice and loss! His latest video: "We Know They Lied" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4_oSycHBCM

From Neoliberalism to Nowhere

By Thomas McLamb

From 1932-1945, FDR responded to the Great Depression by way of the New Deal to temporarily put a bandage on the crises of capital. This creation of the American Welfare State served as the response to the occasional short-term downturns of capitalist expansion. From FDR’s term until the Oil Crisis in the early 70s, the United States capitalist system enjoyed a period of steady growth and a stable rate of profit, whose occasional declines were solved by way of a variety of government programs that sent one clear message; the government existed to serve the people.

When Nixon took office, the processes of persistent economic inflation became apparent, indicating that this long period of economic expansion and stability was changing. That said, Marxist analyses of economic patterns of expansion, contraction, and long-term growth should stray away from the use of inflation as an economic pattern. Inflation is merely the process by which bourgeois economists summarize the degeneration of working-class buying power and strengthening of capitalist class buying power. In one short phrase – the dollar is fundamentally worth less to the worker than it is to the capitalist. While the capitalist is able to purchase more money with less, an exponential process depending on how much capital has been accumulated, the worker is dependent on purchasing essential life commodities, healthcare, food, housing, etc. with their dollar; the worker does not enjoy the luxury of purchasing more money with less, a process that inevitably leads to the phenomenon neoclassical economists refer to as inflation. Regardless of the actual relationship of inflation and the working-class, the aforementioned cycle of profits and growth from the post-war periods came to an end with the ’73-75 recession. The long wave of capitalist expansion had begun to wane, signaling the forthcoming period of long-term stagnation of working-class wages still underway today.

The end of the doctrine of the Welfare State led directly into a new doctrine of economic policy. The dominant economists of the period suggested that government welfare was wasteful and inefficient, that the occasional patterns of economic recession could be solved by allowing the markets to regulate themselves. The general assumption of these economists, i.e. Friedman et. al., was that government welfare resulted in an exponential process of inflation that could be remedied by a revival of liberal economics. This renascent adoration of laissez-faire capitalism came to serve as the genesis and framework of neoliberalism – the doctrine of cutting government expenses by any means necessary. Following the birth of neoliberalism, austerity quickly set in. The government responded to crises by allowing the bottom to hit the bottom, and externalizing and outsourcing previously domestic forms of labor that had now suffered from a declining rate of profit.

Alongside the externalization and outsourcing of labor from the United States, a process that signaled the shift of the U.S. to a strictly service and information economy, came a renascent nationalism and patriotism within the United States. This renascent nationalism served as the popular justification for the endless oil wars in the middle east, the incessant and undemocratic CIA-backed military coups in Latin America, and the continuous starving acts of tariffs and embargoes against foreign governments who refused to kneel to the imperialist war cry of neoliberalism. In industries where the rate of profit waned in the United States, the government merely cut popular welfare programs to fund the imperialist war machine to appropriate resources, governments, and economies of foreign governments, continuing the accumulation of capital and comfortable seat of influence of America.

Away from the wars, coups, and starvation acts outside of American borders, American workers waded through an ever-changing industry of employment in the United States. The neoliberal response to the discovery of ‘inflation,’ better understood as another symptom of the declining rate of profit, resulted in the same outcome the neoliberal economists and politicians believed they would be avoiding – a period of long-term stagnation of working-class wages and the devaluation of the buying-power of the working-class by large-scale privatization and imperialist efforts to sustain the total economic growth of the U.S. economy. Of course, these solutions worked to create more wealth than ever and higher profitability that ever before in the United States, but the measure of the total economy and its exponential growth ignores the continuous struggle of the non-propertied class. Marx’s theories of surplus value provide us with the truth that all profit is derived solely from labor. With that understood, wherever labor costs can be reduced, they will be, and profits will increase. Additionally, the buying-power of those wages themselves have been structurally diminished long-term by the neoliberal doctrine. This process of the stagnation of working-class buying power can be observed in the history of wages since the beginning of the neoliberal period. Real per capita wealth in the U.S. has more than doubled since 1964 while average real wages have barely increased. From 1964 to 2018, the buying power of the average worker in the United States increased by only 11.7% while the actual average wages themselves have increased by 806%. This mass rate of inflation is not an aberration of capitalist market economies – it is precisely a function of the long and short waves of capitalist development; all of which is accelerated and exaggerated by neoliberal austerity.

Over the past 50 years, over 90% of all growth in income has gone directly to the top 5% of households in the United States. Just short of 3% of total economic growth went to the bottom 20% of households, while more than half went to the wealthiest 20%. Wealth inequality from the late sixties throughout the development of the neoliberal period can be described in one sentence – the rich got richer and the poor get poorer.

The bottom 95% of families have experienced within themselves disproportionate rates of economic growth relative to productivity. While workers are producing more than ever for their bosses, hikes in productivity in the neoliberal period haven’t resulted in higher wages at all. Drew DeSilver has pointed out in his work through the Pew Research Center that while productivity amongst workers has increased by 80% over the past 30 years, the data will show that the buying power of the wages those workers earned has moved up barely a percent and a half.  Despite this near doubling in productivity, neoliberal austerity and market purism have made more money than ever for those at the top, and stolen more than ever from those at the bottom. The general tendency of money to move upwards on the capitalist market has resulted in exponential gains for the ultra-rich, which as mentioned before, creates an exponential increase in the buying-power of the rich and a stagnating or decreasing buying-power of the poor.

Alongside the hikes in productivity and slow growth of wages, nearly 80:1 from 1987-2017, there has been a drastic shift in employment by major industry sector amongst the total workforce. From 1948-1975, the total employees in the United States increased by 65.67%, around 2.43% annually. From 1975-2017, total employees increased by 79.23%, or 1.89% annually. Even though productivity and total wealth increased exponentially over the neoliberal period, employment decreased in growth year after year.

Amongst the general change in total employment, specific industries saw drastic changes during the neoliberal period compared to the period of government intervention policy stemming from the FDR era. Manufacturing jobs have disappeared in mass numbers since the beginning of the neoliberal era. Manufacturing has been pushed abroad to keep up with the ‘cutting costs’ doctrine of neoliberalism, while more workers than ever are forced into low-paying service and information jobs, since these are the only jobs that exist anymore. Retail positions have increased proportionally with total employment, but many of these positions are occupied by formerly well-employed manufacturing jobs. The shift in employment by major industry sector can be observed as a primary vehicle for the slow-growth of working-class buying power, as well as an expression of ever-disappearing manufacturing jobs.

In terms of buying power of the working-class, the numbers represent a similar transformation of shares of economic expansion, though the buying-power can illuminate a more concrete examination that accounts for the bourgeois notion of inflation and market behaviors.

From 1967 to 2017, the buying power of the lowest 80% of families grew at a similar rate to the actual dollar amount in the previous data set. From a sliding scale of the least to most wealthy in terms of economic expansion, the buying-power of the poor increased by around half compared to their dollar-amount wages while the buying-power of the wealthiest percentile classes increased by around 2.1 times. Though these numbers from the census do adjust buying power to examine the market behaviors and adjust the wages to paint a more accurate picture using consumer price indexes, these numbers are not adjusted to account for factors that only affect growth amongst the ultra-rich, i.e., debt, investments, property, etc. Furthermore, the tendency of capital upwards results in exponential increases in the buying-power of those at the top, but commodities can only grow so expensive before those at the bottom can no longer pay for them, thus the tendency of the rate of profit to fall despite exponential levels of expansion for the most-high spheres of capital.

Of course, the most wealth 5% of households in the United States have enjoyed economic expansion that dwarfs that of those at the bottom, a near 60-40 split. This is largely due to the existing ownership of the means of production and investment spheres by the ultra-rich maintaining their positions through one of the largest hikes in productivity in the history of capital itself.  The bureau of labor statistics provides us with a catalogued measure of productivity increases by major industry sector, though some catalogs only go back as far as 1987. Despite this, the numbers are still useful to examine the production and profitability levels of economic industry relative to real wage increases.

There are data series on productivity in the manufacturing sector using the same measuring scale as the data set above, though the historical series only date back to 1987, presenting several problems, but the data itself is still very useful. The data is included in the above chart, though 1967-1986 are omitted for mentioned reasons.

Referring to the real average household incomes of the same time-set discussed above, we can build a relationship by percentile class of the wage-productivity increase from 1967-2017. Listed below are both the data from 1967-2017 as well as a smaller section from 1987-2017 to include manufacturing data relative to the other major industry sectors.

Regardless of year and industry, there is a general tendency both within the latent capitalist mode of production as well as the neoliberal tendency for exponentially disproportionate ratios of growth to productivity depending on income class. Since 1987, there has been a harsh stagnation of wages especially amongst the poorest 20% of households in the United States that was not shared in years prior. Following the tendency of the income-productivity relationship upwards can illuminate the fact that the neoliberal period has resulted in the richest few in the United States have received the overwhelming majority of money and buying-power from the bottom. The philosophy of trickle-down economics combined with the furthering development of the capitalist tendency towards class-monopoly has resulted in both the longest period of wage stagnation in the history of American capitalism as well as the largest wealth inequality in the history of this country. Hikes in productivity are useful for examining the rate at which working-class wages are outpaced by economic growth, but these productivity measures also help illuminate the mass-level of accumulation and theft that the billionaire class has taken part in over the past 50 some-odd years.

In all industries, sans manufacturing, the highest 20% of household incomes have reaped the rewards of the increased productivity of the bottom 80%. The outsourcing and evisceration of American manufacturing deals primarily with the need for a higher profitability from labor by those who own the manufacturing means, as well as the systemic decline in union membership and labor solidarity from Reagan to present. Furthermore, the top 5% of families have almost exclusively reaped the rewards of hikes in productivity, being the only percentile class in the country that has achieved a level of economic growth that is even barely comparable to the growth of productivity. Again, this wage-productivity relationship only grows more dramatic and exponential as you examine those higher and higher up on the wealth ladder. For those at the very top, their economic growth makes that of those of the bottom 99% seem like raindrops in the vast open ocean.

In the period of FDR, there were three solutions to the crisis of capitalism across the world – Bolshevism, fascism, and social-democratic government policy. If the policy of FDRs social-democratic platform was to sustain the rate of profit through bailing out the worker through mass government programs, the policy of neoliberalism was to simply allow the economy to bottom out, so that the rate of profit could be restored organically in the market. The neoliberal period which proceeded from the welfare state allowed for mass accumulation of capital by the ultra-rich at exponential levels. In the early 20th century, bailing out the ultra-rich would not allow for an organic recovery of the rate of profit since the raw inequality between the rich and poor paled in comparison to that of the 21st century. However, in 2020, the capitalist system has been able to sustain its profits by doing precisely what couldn’t be done 100 years ago – bailing out the 1% of the 1% time after time. The capital that has been accumulated in disproportionate amounts over the past 100 years has facilitated this very process of the reintroduction of mass government programs that serve the market, only this time, they serve those at the top instead of those at the bottom. The program of neoliberalism is the death knell of capital, whose only defense is to consume its very mechanism of its own creation and sustenance.

The rate of profit is in decline. There are two paths forward from neoliberalism. The first path is the possibility that capital can save itself through the false-promises of several decades of social-democratic reform, recreating the conditions that led to the development of neoliberalism. The second path is the dissolution of capital by its own hand. Capitalism has dug its own grave through the doctrine of neoliberalism, resulting in the greatest wealth inequality in the history of capital and the ever-growing contradictions of labor and productivity. The path forward from the death knells of capital cannot be understood as some sort of communist eventuality. Capital will certainly die, but what takes is place is certainly indeterminate.

Neoliberalism has wreaked havoc on the worker for half a century now. Corporate tax cuts, the starvation of the worker, and the greatest wealth inequality the country has ever seen – these are the legacies of neoliberalism. Its doctrine has been nothing but the largest heist in the history of capitalism, with the ultra-rich stealing more every day from the pockets of the worker. The path forward must address these concerns, lest we allow the economy to bottom out, and leave authoritarianism and failed bourgeois economics to dominate the world as it has for the past century.

Thomas McLamb is a Lebanese-American Marxist writer, historian, and graduate student residing in the so-called United States. Thomas has spent the last few years researching historic wages, economic expansion, recession, and the currents of capitalism both in the so-called United States as well as internationally.

Voting Doesn't Beat the Far Right

Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta

By Ezra Brain

Republished from Left Voice.

The Far Right, emboldened and egged on by Donald Trump, stormed the U.S. Capitol Building yesterday with little resistance from the police. Their occupation of the Capitol — which came while Congress was in session ratifying the electoral college vote — is a far cry from the tear gas, rubber bullets, and mass arrests which took place during the Black Lives Matter movement last summer. But, this isn’t too surprising: we’ve always known that the cops will treat the Right with kid gloves and even aid and abet them, just like we saw during last year’s anti-lockdown protests and in Charlottesville. What these mobilizations reveal is, once again, that voting and elections won’t defeat the Far Right — especially not when the alternative is the Democratic Party, a capitalist party that helped fuel its rise. 

During the 2020 presidential election, figures from Barack Obama to Noam Chomsky to Angela Davis were telling everyone who would listen that voting for Joe Biden was necessary because it would defeat the Far Right forces that Trump has been stoking for more than four years. Many members of the Left bought into this argument and voted for Biden against their better judgement because they wanted to put a stop to Trump’s authoritarian and right-wing tendencies. In some sense, this is understandable — after all, if Trump is the one emboldening this right-wing movement, why wouldn’t getting rid of him help kill it? The events that transpired over the last few days clearly show that this is mistaken thinking. Whether in the White House or out of it, Donald Trump and his far right-wing base will continue to mobilize and play a role on the political stage. In fact, a staggering 75 percent of Republicans believe that the elections were rigged, highlighting the widespread influence of Trumpism. It is naïve to believe that these folks will just go home on January 20th.

Further, the idea that elections can defeat Trumpism misses  that politicians can’t create movements in a vacuum — they tap into existing sentiments and give political expression to them. The global rise in right-wing extremism is a response to the dire conditions created by the economic crisis. The current spike is a more direct result of the decline in living conditions for ordinary Americans over the past few decades, culminating in the 2008 financial crisis, which the capitalists resolved by implementing devastating austerity that robbed millions of social services, education, job opportunities, and health care. This created a deep polarization which had left- and right-wing populist expressions. 

In this context, right-wing extremism emerged because it spoke to the despair of (typically) white men. By tapping into the racism that capitalism is built on, right-wing extremism channels anger at the establishment and converts material struggles into xenophobia, racism, and neo-fascism. And Donald Trump was the political expression of this right-wing polarization, strengthening, giving voice to it, and, now, mobilizing it on a larger scale. This movement rallied around Trump because it believed that he represented a challenge to the established order and, now that he has been defeated by yet another neoliberal, it is mobilizing to defend him. 

But we should be clear: this rise in right-wing radicalization is a product of the Obama years as well as the escalation in the Trump years. Given this, it is not only incorrect but deeply dangerous to think that Biden’s warmed-over neoliberalism in the midst of a devastating economic crisis will do anything but escalate the problem.

Indeed, the escalations from the right that we saw on Wednesday come less than 24 hours after the Democrats won both senate elections in Georgia and took control of Congress. Trump was defeated at the ballot box in November and then again in January, but the social base of Trumpism is emboldened, not diminished. With Trump out of office, it provides him with a bigger platform to speak to this right-wing base, not smaller, because he will no longer be held back by having to work within the established structures. The “adults in the room” are gone, and full-fledged right-wing populism can reign at Trump rallies, on Trump’s Twitter feed, and the vast network of right-wing media outlets. 

So if the solution to defeating the Right isn’t voting for the Democrats, what is? 

The way to defeat the organized Right is with an organized Left independent of all capitalist parties. There are no shortcuts, no substitutes for the organizing we need to do. We need to build powerful and militant worker organizations in our workplaces and in the streets that can resist the Far Right, all the politicians who cater to them, and the neoliberal austerity that creates them. This resistance will involve both openly confronting the Far Right in the streets but also using our power as workers to resist them. For example, workers in DC could go on strike to protest the Far Right occupation of the Capitol building, forcing the government to evict them from the streets.

Strong Left organizations are also important because they can fight back the ideological advance of the Right. Many young people are drawn to the Far Right because they believe that it offers solutions to their struggles. If there were Left organizations that were putting forward a strong message against both the Far Right and neoliberalism, it could help to prevent some of these people from being drawn into right-wing extremism, thus preventing these movements from growing. It is vital in the fight to defeat the Right that we provide a real and meaningful alternative. And for people who become fascists, we agree with Trotsky when he said, “If you cannot convince a Fascist, acquaint his head with the pavement.”

In this, the failure of leftist leaders like Chomsky and Davis becomes clear: not only were they wrong that defeating Trump at the polls would defeat the Far Right, but they also sewed false illusions in Biden. Chomsky and the other leftist leaders who asked us to support Biden told us that he could keep us safe from the Far Right. He can’t — and he won’t. By funneling the energy of the Black Lives Matter movement into support for Biden, these leaders intentionally or not worked to undermine what could have been the foundations of the type of mass social movement we need to protect against the Far Right. Voting for Biden got us further away from defeating the Right, not closer.

History is littered with examples of this. From Franco in Spain to Hitler in Germany, the liberals always choose to side with the fascists over the socialists because fascism is less of a threat to the capitalist order than socialism is. So we can’t be fooled when liberal politicians wring their hands about the rise of the Far Right — they aren’t on our side, and we cannot support them in their elections, even when they are running against a representative of the Far Right. Liberal victories at the voting booth will not defeat the Right — but class struggle and worker organizing will. And given the right-wing mobilization yesterday, it’s clear that we need independent organizing in the current moment. 

Fascism, and How to Fight It

[PHOTO CREDIT: John Minchillo/AP]

By Peter Fousek

Both the name and the ideology of fascism originated in Italy in the early 20th century, where it arose as a spontaneous mass movement. It relied on a combination of large-scale, militant mobilization of working-class and middle-class people, with organization and financing provided by a wealthy elite. Its leader Benito Mussolini, having learned the power of popular discontent during his socialist days, was elevated to ruling status without any government background, in a time and place where such ascendancy was all but unheard-of.

The present Trumpist movement in the United States is analogous to this origin story of fascism. It is a movement relying on mass support, on a populist appeal to working and middle-class people who are terrified of losing an undue sense of social superiority, itself the product of longstanding practices of systemic racism and discrimination against marginalized minorities. Such practices of bigoted repression serve, more than anything else, to provide that angry and exploited demographic with an enemy based on racial sectarianism, such that they are convinced to direct their anger at the alien other designated thereby, rather than at their true exploiters and oppressors.

Those angry, white, working-class masses are the fuel of the fascist fire. They are not the directors but rather the foundation of the movement; the members of the society convinced that they stand to gain the most from the preservation of the present order. They are privileged by the longstanding system, kept complacent in the belief that they are not an exploited proletariat, but rather members of the ruling class. They are convinced of such a blatant lie (that is, their status as rulers, rather than their systemic privilege, which itself is quite real) only in being elevated above the marginalized minorities who they are told, quite falsely, are the enemy at fault for their own sufferings and shortcomings. In Italy, these masses of the privileged-oppressed were the landed peasantry and the petty-bourgeoisie. It does not take much imagination to locate them in the United States today.

In drawing this parallel, it is important to consider the underlying social and economic currents that lead to the rise of fascism, which provide its appeal as a popular movement. Broadly, fascism becomes possible only when the standard resources of an existing government prove unable to maintain the equilibrium of society. In such times, under such conditions, it is easy for a small contingent of the elite, acting as the agent of fascism, to inflame a group of people already in the throes of desperation on account of economic hardship and poverty within a world where they have been told over and over that their success, or lack thereof, is entirely up to them. When this proves false, when an elite few grow richer while they become more and more destitute, these masses need someone to blame. It is antithetical to the worldview that they have been taught, to consider their suffering a necessary byproduct of market fundamentalism, and it would be suicidal for them to consider it a personal failure.

As Hannah Arendt writes, “men in the midst of social disintegration and atomization will do anything to belong” (Origins of Totalitarianism). Due to their worldview of individualism, the belief that hard work alone necessarily begets success, the financial hardship they experience in times of economic instability (instability and hardship both necessary products of the “free market”) forces them to question their own value as they have come to understand it. Here we must remember that, however obvious it might seem that the exploitative economic system is at fault for their suffering, the ideology of that system forms the basis of their reality. To call that reality into question is a far more difficult task than to assign the blame to some other place or group, however imaginary the link may be. The ingenuity of the fascist is the ability to provide such a scapegoat, coupled with a promise of salvation through the fight against that designated “other”.

In Italy, fascism only filled this role because of the failure of their socialist movement at the time. In the years after the First World War, working-class revolutionaries took power over factories and gained political power, stagnating only due to a lack of organization and progression, and their abandonment by the social democrats. Subsequently, to keep their members out of direct conflict and combat, the worker’s movement made concession after concession, making way for an antithetical mass movement ready to promise ambitious goals and, more importantly, to project a sense of natural aristocracy. Mussolini succeeded by appealing to the historical glory of Rome, by associating his followers with that legendary state. Such an appeal came at the welcome cost of demonizing their enemies as lesser, in so doing providing to the in-group that sense of belonging and superiority that they had lost in the period of instability.

In the United States, Trumpism appeals to the revolutionary movement that founded the nation. We see a parallel appeal to that employed by Mussolini, in response to mirrored crises of economic origin, occurring simultaneously with disorganized left-populism. The noble struggle of the Left in this country, advocating for long-needed alterations to a repressive state apparatus rooted in the slaveholding origins of the nation and its exploitative economic tendencies, have been again and again abandoned by the supposed “left” establishment (Democrats), which exists blatantly as a neoliberal, center-right party dedicated to maintaining the status quo. On top of that abandonment, massive for-profit media machines foment division through overt and omnipotent identity politics, furthering the divides among factions of the working class along sectarian lines.

Thus, the clear and decisive rhetoric of the new American Right has been welcomed with open arms by many frustrated and alienated members of the working class. They have been drawn in by anti-establishment slogans and promises of radical change; worse still is how readily Trumpists have heralded temporary economic upswings (largely ones for which the Right is not responsible) as material evidence of the truth behind their claims. This temporary and false sense of material success is necessary for the fascist to come into power fully. Its mass-movement supporters act as a battering ram, thoroughly destroying political and social obstacles in its path. We have seen this in the Trumpist destruction of the Republican Party, the undermining of the rule of law, and the delegitimization of the most basic truths. A state’s transition to fascism does not mean that the state apparatus itself is dismantled or dissolved; instead, it means that the apparatus is transformed into a tool for the suppression of political opponents, and for the defense and propagation of its own ideology.

These trends have clearly been shockingly evident as products of the Trumpist movement. Trump has put 234 federal judges into office, hand-picked according to ideological leanings. He has appointed three Supreme Court justices, with his party taking unprecedented measures to push them through against popular mandate and in direct hypocrisy to their own procedural convictions. He carried out an unheard-of ten federal executions this year alone, while doling out 92 pardons to partisan criminals as personal favors. He has deployed police and military to violently suppress peaceful protesters, and attempted to enact education reform in order to force a rightist ideological curriculum on public school students; he has suppressed minority voters while actively engaging in the most devastating attempt in history to destroy the democratic processes of the United States. And now, in a final effort to achieve that end, he incited his followers to an act of insurrection, their dogmatic devotion (the direct result of the fascist appeals explained above) making them all too willing to attempt a violent overthrow of the government, for his sake.

All the while, he has used the tools of the state—the police, the military, the courts—to further his fascist ends. The state apparatus, with its own origins deeply intertwined with racist and classist repression, leapt to attack and suppress the marginalized and the left with neither prompt nor justification. With nearly one trillion dollars in federal defense spending (more than the next ten countries combined), and similarly outsized police expenditures dominating local budgets as well, the repressive state apparatuses of the military and police forces have been used abroad as agents of imperialism, and domestically to attack minorities and activists on the left. Nonetheless, when the Trumpist insurrection stormed the Capitol, these state forces all but ushered them in, alleging that they were overwhelmed by the rioters despite the vast resources at their disposal. That hypocrisy, far from accidental, is the foremost symptom of fascism; the willingness of the state to assent to the fascist mob indicates that this trend not only enabled Trump, but will outlive him.

The times of social crisis which facilitate the rise of fascism may alternately be moments of dramatic progressive upheaval. In order to achieve that greater end, though, the lower-middle and working class must unite in the direction of their own liberation. The fascist tendency will win when one contingent or sub-contingent shifts instead towards the Right. Considering the present right-wing terrorism and violence, we can no longer fail to actively address the threat illustrated by the results of the most recent election. Trump lost, yes, and his party lost the house and senate as well. Nonetheless, in the face of the greatest social and economic chaos this country has seen in modern times, nearly 11 million more voters felt compelled to keep Trump in office than had sought to elect him in 2016. The fascist trend is moving definitively upward, and while Trump is an incoherent and unstable loudmouth guided more by hatred and narcissism than any ideology, there are plenty of far more intelligent, ideologically driven, and capable politicians, pundits, and celebrities on the right, willing and able to step into the spotlight and turn an already devastating movement into something from which we will never recover.

But all hope is not lost! It is crucial, if we are to reach a better end, a brighter, just, and egalitarian future, rather than one of despair, that we recognize this fascist movement for what it is, and that we recognize the state apparatus that gave birth to it. We cannot return to the old status quo if we are to be redeemed. Its failings, which not only enabled this fascist Trumpism but made it inevitable, cannot be simply reformed. A system based on market fundamentalism is innately tied to an individualist ideology, to the fundamental belief that one’s prosperity is a reflection of one’s worth, and therefore that exploitation is justified along with obscene excess in the face of terrible poverty and starvation. Such a corrupt moral mandate makes an eventual breakdown unavoidable: the cavalier risks taken by financial institutions for the sake of their own gain will, as we have seen in the past decade, push the exploited masses to the point of demanding change. And the time for change, whether we want to accept it or not, has now arrived—that much is clear.

If we ask ourselves, then, what combination of circumstances can turn the working class towards progress rather than reactionary repression and division, we wouldn’t find a more favorable set of conditions than those facing the USA today: economic instability, vastly inflating the wealth of an increasingly marginal elite while over a fifth of our country goes hungry, the blatant state-sanctioned racism assailing people of color, the disintegration of the rule of law and of sociopolitical norms, the crisis of democratic republicanism made clear by the rise of Trump, and the self-exposure of the Democratic establishment as unwilling to enact radical change. These conditions will only continue to ripen as corporations trend towards legal monopolization, as financial interests dominate more and more of our “representative” politics, as automation eliminates jobs and the effects of climate change wreak more and more devastation and increase resource scarcity. If we, the Left, are to have any hope of winning out, then we must accept the inadequacy of our present party and state institutions to handle the current crises, much less those to come. That basic fact can no longer be denied. Once it has been accepted, we can begin to engage with alternatives that might work better, and to organize with the goal of enacting them. But we must act fast, with the exigency of a people fighting for their very survival, because the Right is well on its way to dragging us down the opposing path.