The Struggle between Communality and Hierarchy: Lessons of the Paris Commune for the 21st Century

From Civil War to the Commune

Few events in the long history of capitalism have resonated with more symbolic significance than the two months from March 18th to May 21st of 1871 when the Paris Commune briefly came into being before it was brutally suppressed by the French National Army. On May 21, after weeks of artillery shelling, the Army broke through a surprisingly undefended gate at Point-du-Jour in the southwest section of the defensive wall surrounding Paris, and Adolphe Thiers, the President of the French National Assembly headquartered in Versailles, ordered his troops led by General Marshal McMahon on a savage rampage through Paris, slaughtering more than 25,000 Communards.¹ In the course of “La Semaine Sanglante,” or the “Bloody Week,” the relentless terror of Thiers Army exceeded by a factor of 10 the roughly 2600 counter-revolutionaries guillotined 80 years earlier in Paris during the more infamous 1793-94 Reign of Terror. For all the self-righteous chastising of the 1794 Jacobins for their brutality, rarely do we find an acknowledgement of the far greater inhumanity of the bourgeois Thiers and the French National Army that destroyed the Commune.

In terms of sheer backlash, few revolutionary actions have been crushed so quickly and so violently. Why and how that backlash became so extreme has led to some highly provocative arguments about the powers of capitalism to eliminate any radical ruptures to the system itself. But certainly the most famous was Karl Marx’s remarkable piece of critical journalism, The Civil War in France, which he composed in London (without any immediate access to the events in Paris) during the two months that the Commune was itself fighting for survival. This pamphlet was actually the most widely circulated (to that point) of any of Marx’s texts, and it instantly made him a famous and notorious figure, primarily because of the circulation in the press (both in the U.S. and in Europe) of misinformation and lies about the “Red Terrorist,” the demon, the puppet-master, Marx, who was said to have directed the entire Commune revolt from London. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, Marx himself had at first opposed the idea of the Commune because its locus of social transformation was too narrowly tied to Paris when he knew that any communist revolution had to have a much more international cast if it were to be less vulnerable to the massive forces of capitalism.² By this point in his life, Marx had come to oppose most forms of violence rather than protest, political organization, and education of the workers. But once the Commune began, he became one its most ardent supporters. Nearly fifty years later, the Commune also became the focal point of Lenin’s classic study, State and Revolution, where he elaborated upon Marx’s analysis, although he completely ignored Marx’s initial reservations. Most accounts of the Commune have described it as a political revolution, but Marx was correct to frame it within the political economy.

Without rehashing these complex debates about the Commune, it is possible to see outlined in this event the fundamental, dialectical tensions between communality and hierarchy, grand narratives and local policies, as they affect the geopolitical economy.³ Indeed, Marx himself altered in significant ways his entire understanding of political revolution as a result of his interpretation of the Commune. As such an exemplary moment, it was a time when the counter-movements against capitalism gained broad control of a city of nearly 2-million people. In some ways, this two-month experiment based on the views of worker cooperatives condenses some of the key issues in a more genuinely communist version of social life, where democratic decision-making would extend not just to the formal civic suffrage, but also to workplace production sites. This is hugely significant, because as Richard Wolff has explained, most all large-scale communist states have really been forms of state capitalism when viewed from the perspective of surplus analysis and worker participation in the organization of production (see Democracy). That is, the complex stories of the 20^th-century communist state experiments have more typically served as the model for the sins and glories of a centralized state, even if they rarely achieved the goal of worker-run associations controlling the mode of production.⁴

In our “post-truth” era of fake news fueled by a U.S. president who daily obliterates any concern for accuracy, precision, and the public commons, we may be more in need than ever for a reconsideration of one of the most significant (relatively) large-scale communal societies based on worker controlled social and economic production. Under today’s increasingly totalitarian regimes world-wide, the extreme versions of neoliberal economic policy for deregulation and austerity have led to the hyper-individualized and hyper-exploitive system that Nick Srnicek has called “platform capitalism” and Shoshana Zuboff has called “surveillance capitalism.” These latter desciptors are really just two different faces of the same process for managing big data in order to magnify otherwise diminishing profits for large corporations, and I will say a bit more about them at the end of this essay. I raise this brief picture of 21^st-century capitalist crisis because however new the technological dimensions of our contemporary circumstances, we still find the old patterns of the struggle for endless accumulation: hyper-individualism, privatization, escalating inequality, disregard for environmental catastrophe, and destruction of any version of the public commons in favor of private monopolies. In these circumstances, we need to reassess one of the historically most notable examples of organizing social life around communality.

In direct contrast to contemporary circumstances, the Commune directly opposed hierarchical individualism in favor of the public commons based on shared belief in reciprocity, mutuality, and interdependence as fundamental principles for social justice. Yet any and all accounts of this event have been lost from the media-generated representations of the privatized global economy, and this essay seeks to rectify that loss. After all, imagining alternatives to the dominant world-system has always been a crucial praxis for socialists, anarchists, Communists, and Marxists. What this essay aims to do is present a highly selective version of some of the gritty living conditions in 19^th century Paris, but always with an eye to the larger systemic effects framed by the contemporary capitalist crisis.

As always happens, the counter-movements to the dominant economic system of individualism, privatization, and competition for capital accumulation, struggle with the tensions between localized, participatory democracy and the desire to universalize their values through more centralized, thus hierarchical, political and economic structures suitable for large populations. Under these general conditions, the focus on formal rights for representative democracy at the state level often mutes any real attention to democracy in the organization of production, which is to say, worker control of production and distribution of the surplus. The Paris Commune struggled with exactly these tensions, just as activists in contemporary counter-movements both in the U.S. and in many places around the world have so recently struggled to negotiate the tensions between the open-ended collectives supporting local occupations and the larger international movements that seek to defend the public commons against private capital interests. But looking back from an historical perspective, we can see how powerful are the systemic, triumvirate links between the nation (based loosely on populations sharing geographical domains of cultural and linguistic homogeneity); the state (based in the military and bureaucratic structures of government supported by taxation); and capital (the basis of the world’s geopolitical economy): the increasing interdependence between the nation state and capital would prove violently capable of suppressing a local 19^th-century revolution, even though it occurred in what was then the second most populous city in Europe.

Before we turn to some of the details of the Commune itself, even a cursory overview of the political economy in mid-19^th century France provides empirical evidence that the tensions over debt, hierarchy, centralized control, war, and violence resonate, albeit in quite different ways, with contemporary circumstances. Despite the dramatic differences between industrial capitalism and 21^st century neoliberal capitalism, the earlier period experienced conditions not entirely dissimilar to contemporary life—such similarities are the effects of the historically shared frame of global capitalism. In both periods we find rising economic and social inequality; deteriorating working conditions and decreasing wages brought about by intensified market competition; extravagant displays of “spectacular” power and wealth by the ruling elites through monopoly control of markets; debilitating national debts; widely increased international “free trade” policies; costly and aggressive wars; financial control of the media by the wealthy, and its corollary, restrictions on freedom of the press; and increasing debt-financed militarization.

During the 19^th-century revolutionary period, universal claims for communality permeate both the local and international levels: universal suffrage was a specific decree passed by the Commune, but the hope was that the local enfranchisement would become the model for the Universal Republic of affiliated workers’ federations around the world. Mikhail Bakunin articulated these hopes at the time of the Commune in 1871, “The future social organization should be carried out from the bottom up, by the free association or federation of workers, starting with the associations” which would then spread outwards “to the communes, the regions, the nations, and, finally, culminating in a great international and universal federation” (Bakunin, “Paris Commune” 84). As Karatani explains, “The Proudhonists and Bakunin naturally believed that they were mounting a world revolution. They began the revolution assuming that it would spread into a European world revolution. Needless to say, this was an utterly arbitrary assumption on their part” (Structure 252). In our cynical age, such a federation as Bakunin imagined may seem no more than a wildly utopian dream, but the desire for universality was real enough at all levels, especially for the disenfranchised such as women, racial minorities, and non-property owners. Indeed, as the influential Communard and activist, Elisée Reclus, put it with respect to the vision of the Commune: “Our rallying cry is no longer ‘Long live the Republic’ but ‘Long live the Universal Republic’” (quoted in Kristin Ross, Communal, 22). The Paris Commune therefore stands as a key moment of crisis in the 19^th century British dominance of the capitalist world-system, and for that reason we should undertake a brief foray into the social conditions out of which the events of the Commune emerged.

Second Empire Extravaganzas: Social Injustice in the Political Economy

One over-riding circumstance characterizes both the last decades of the Second Empire in France and the first decades of the 21^st century in the United States: rapidly increasing economic inequality. During the Second Empire’s “roaring 1860s,” the gala masked balls in the Tuilleries Palace marked the period as a kind of libertine extravaganza. A wealthy new bourgeoisie were rife to celebrate with the Emperor, especially since Louis-Napoleon had championed industrial growth and expanded trade. As Eric Hobsbawm explains, the very word “capitalism” came into “the economic and political vocabulary of the world” (Age of Capital 1) during that very decade. The wealthy were growing wealthier at unprecedented rates, although, just as in the 21st century, in wildly disproportionate ways. The vulgar displays of wealth and pomp made less visible the deteriorating conditions for most citizens of France. Indeed, it was not hard to hide many of the grim realities since economic expansion was quite real during the period: according to Alistair Horne, “industrial production doubled and within only 10 years foreign trade did the same” (22).⁵ Nevertheless, the national debt had skyrocketed during the same period, so deficit financing could temporarily conceal the deeper troubles in the political economy.

The fabulous Paris exhibition of 1867 drew an almost unimaginable 15 million people to sample the wonders of this new industrial age. Royalty from around the world were courted in Paris. Illustrious monarchs such as the Sultan of Turkey, the Princess of Wales, the King of Prussia, and the Czar of Russia strolled the halls with their full entourages. It was truly one of the first real spectacles of globalization: “Each nation had erected stalls and kiosks where pretty girls or ferocious tribesmen served their customers in bizarre national costumes” (Horne 6). Outside the Exhibition Halls, nobility could promenade down the wide boulevards, marveling at the massive reconstruction of Paris under the direction of Prefect Haussmann’s remarkable new urban design. As Marx put it, a bit less enthusiastically, “financial swindling celebrated cosmopolitan orgies” (Civil War 56).

Ironically, at the very heart of the more than 50,000 displays was a large gallery, “The History of Labor,” that glamorized workers as the noble producers of the many social achievements of the Second Empire, with not a sign of sweat, blood, or poverty from their labor. The “History of Labor” gallery can be read as a massive ideological spectacle that completely camouflaged the historical realities of production. The gallery framed workers in a false, idealized myth of perpetual progress where worker contributions to industrial capitalism were represented as the glorious incarnations of the emerging technological advances of modern civilization. At the same time, this Eurocentric ideology actively avoided any acknowledgement of the escalating national debt, the increasing economic inequality, and the continued necessity for slavery in the Americas to supply the cotton for the European garment factories. As we have seen in the last chapter, the classical economists such as David Ricardo and John Say (just like 20^th century free-market theorists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman) had provided the theoretical justifications to separate the economic from the political: the idealized myths about self-regulating markets justified the false image of worker satisfaction in those market successes glorified in the “History of Labor” gallery. Outside the Exhibition park, they had even built many model “workers’ homes”—neat, sturdy buildings so completely unlike the shabby dwellings in the slums of Paris. One can only imagine workers wondering how anyone could have invented these homes so alien to their actual habitations. In short, the focus on market logic and consumable products kept the actual mode of production out of sight. The workers’ lived experiences were quite otherwise than the fabled display would have its visitors believe.

Beneath all the glitter of the 1867 Exhibition, “seldom had France known a year with more industrial stoppages” (Horne 6). Worker’s wages had modestly increased during the Second Empire, but nowhere near enough to keep up with inflation, so they experienced increasing poverty in the appalling slums, especially in the northeast quarters of the city, an area particularly important during the life of the Commune. Child labor meant that thousands of boys as young as 8 years old worked in factories; disease and malnutrition contributed to the malaise; there was no secure employment, no sickness benefits, and no pensions; there were restrictions on the rights to affiliate and organize; and freedom of the press was virtually non-existent (Horne 295). Marx understood clearly what Napoleon III had done with the economy: “The Second Empire had more than doubled the national debt, and plunged all the large towns into heavy municipal debts. The [Franco-Prussian] war had fearfully swelled the liabilities, and mercilessly ravaged the resources of the nation” (Civil War 44).⁶ In the brief, January 27, 1871 armistice agreement that ended the war with Prussia (2 months before the Commune broke), the French National Assembly agreed that within four years they would pay Germany five billion francs—around a billion dollars. Nothing like that would have been remotely possible, even in the best of times.

It was not quite meant to be so disturbingly unjust. When Napoleon III appointed Georges Haussmann Prefect in 1853, the idea for the redesign of Paris included many progressive features: more sanitary conditions with a new sewer system; reduction in the over-crowded population density; and wide streets to improve the transportation network and allow massive military maneuvers (thus easier to crush any demonstrations or rebellions). Napoleon III had been influenced by the socialist utopian Saint-Simon,⁷ but the actual implementation of the plan followed the basic capitalist system: authoritarian state control for organization and implementation without any public input, and the hiring of private enterprises to do the actual work. There was nothing local or participatory about these decisions. Indeed, the most authoritarian phase of the Second Empire occurred during its early years prior to the 1857 depression, and during the 1850s many Parisians were ordered to move in order to accommodate the new boulevards. The windy, narrow, congested medieval Paris was converted to its modern image in a kind of massive gentrification project: plans to relieve poverty in many instances actually increased it through displacement since there was no adequate compensation for those forced to move. Prefect Haussmann was himself well aware of the problem so that even in 1862 he assessed that “over half the population of Paris lived ‘in poverty bordering on destitution’” (Horne 25; see also Harvey, Paris 87).⁸

The grand new avenues were enjoyed by the increasingly wealthy shipping and industrial bourgeoisie at the same time that comfort was disappearing for the workers. “The Wealth of Nations” might have been on the rise for a small minority of nations, but it was equally clearly a case of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. As Eric Hobsbawn puts it, “the increasingly uneven distribution of national incomes” had clearly shown that the capitalist system was not merely “unjust, but that it appeared to work badly and, insofar as it worked, to produce the opposite results to those predicted by its champions” (Age of Revolution 242).

Financial inequality was also being magnified by the very kind of capitalist free-trade agreements that would later become the cornerstone of contemporary neoliberal policies for international financial systems. As Hobsbawm explains with respect to the 19^th century, “…a series of ‘free trade treaties’ substantially cut down the tariff barriers between the leading industrial nations in the 1860s” (Age of Revolution 37). For example, the 1860 Anglo-French Treaty of Commerce inaugurated a movement towards free trade throughout Europe. As John Nye argues, this bilateral agreement became “the strategic lynchpin of European liberalization” (10).

Although in the mid-19^th century there were then no international financial institutions (IFI) such as formed after the Second World War, the two dominant capitalist nations in the 1860s, Britain and France, set the agenda for the global market. The Anglo-French consensus, not completely unlike the contemporary Washington Consensus, protected and favored the dominant capitalist nations over the peripheral zones in other parts of the world. These new “free” trade laws “took the form of a European expansion in and conquest of the rest of the world” (Hobsbawm, Age of Capital 3). Clearly, the 19^th century expanded through direct colonial invasions, centralized imperialism, and slave labor, whereas the more recent postcolonial period depended more on financialization of the world system.

Indeed, 19^th century private industrial expansion led to British dominance of the global capitalist system, just as the late 20^th century IFI’s orchestrated the U.S. hegemony of the multinational world-system. About the time the Civil War in France broke out in 1871, the British hegemony was reaching “a temporary, domination of the entire world” but one that “was about to reach its climax” (Hobsbawm, Age of Capital 26). Increasing social tensions in both Britain and France meant that the counter-attacks, such as registered in the Paris Commune, were gaining force to alter that dominance. In both the late 19^th- and the early 21^st-centuries, rapid economic expansion fueled a small, but remarkably wealthy elite more and more distant from the lives of average citizens (see Pinketty).

Whereas the 1867 Exhibition clearly celebrated the triumphs of capitalism, three other events also took place during that same year, each a signal that the counter-movements to the dominant political economy were gaining power. On September 2^nd, the Congress of the International Working Men’s Association met in Lausanne (remarkably, as it may seem, Louis-Napoleon supported this organization—another sign of his contradictory belief that he could support both capital and labor at the same time); in Paris, the 1867 Freedom of Press Act repealed the tough repressive law of 1852 imposed by the Second Empire that denied publication rights to anti-monarchist, anti-empire views; and later that same year, Marx published Das Kapital.

By 1870, the conditions in France had completely deteriorated, especially during and after the disastrous Franco-Prussian War with the four-month siege of Paris. The Prussians literally starved the Parisians to capitulation during the siege by surrounding the walled city and cutting off all food supplies. During the siege, economic inequality had been further exacerbated through the unequal distribution of the dwindling food reserves. By the time of the final capitulation to the Prussians in January, 1871, most of the remaining monarchists and bourgeoisie had abandoned Paris because of the deplorable conditions. This left the opening for radicals, socialists, and the new worker movements led by the Proudhonists, Blanquists, and Bakunin to gain political control, at least within the city.

To make a long story short, the Commune began with a peaceful resistance to a military action by Thiers’ Army: when, on the night of March 18^th, the National Assembly soldiers reached the hills of Montemarte with the intention of seizing the 200 canons the Parisian National Guard had sequestered there, the soldiers refused to fire on the largely unarmed women and men standing before the canons. Here we see a momentary instance of the people of the nation standing in solidarity against the state military government led by Theirs. Instantly realizing that the situation was now precarious, with many of his own soldiers deserting the Army to join with the Parisian armed militias, Thiers quickly withdrew all his forces to Versailles. The door was now left open for the radicals to establish the Commune which they did in an amazingly brief space of time. On March 26^th, the Commune officially came into being as Parisians voted for their new government.

On March 29^th they set up 10 Commissions for the provisional life of the Commune. Two social transformations stand out that are worthy of attention. First, by immediately eliminating the Police force, they openly challenged every bourgeois and monarchist fear that crime would run rampant without the protections offered by a police state. But the opposite seems to have happened: even as they were almost continuously under attack by the Versailles forces, the crime rate in Paris seems almost to have disappeared during the brief duration of the Commune. As Marx explained “no more corpses at the morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely any robberies” (Civil War 67). Secondly, Paris had rarely looked so clean: the workers and communards apparently now taking control of the conditions of their own lives took great care in cleaning the streets and disposing of trash. Self-governing clearly had not deteriorated into mob disorder and filth as predicted (and inaccurately described) by the bourgeois presses in the provinces outside Paris. This is an enormously important point because it provides clear evidence that an active citizenry participating in the social means of production leads to better results than any private enterprise with respect to some very basic everyday living conditions, such as a reduction in violence.

In any case, of the ten Commissions, one of the most important was the Finance Commission. Their key task was to organize the financing for all aspects of the Commune, from the pay for the arming of the citizen-based National Guard which had now expanded to about 400,000, to the salaries for government officials, to the operation of basic human services such as providing water, food, education, and healthcare. Merely because of his age, the 75-year old Charles Beslay served as Chair of the Commune, but he also became one of the chief members of the Finance Commission. Even though he had failed as a banker, his first real task was to take control of the Bank of France. This powerful institution had been left in the hands of the Marquis de Plaeuc, who organized his staff to stand guard against Beslay when the latter arrived at the Bank to execute the take over. The Marquis had over four hundred employees armed with sticks, and when Beslay arrived with his four compatriots, they were easily intimidated, and so they retreated hastily to the Hotel de Ville where the Commune had centered its activities. According to Horne, the aging Beslay told the members of the Commune that the Marquis had successfully made the case “that if the Commune laid hands on the Bank there would be ‘no more industry, no more commerce; if you violate it all promissory notes will become worthless’” (302). Remarkably, the Commune somehow acceded to this claim, a kind of self-blinding belief in the narrative frame espoused by the capitalists: take this money, and the workers and peasants throughout France will all suffer. Nothing could have been further from the truth—as if funding for the truly disenfranchised would upset the entire system.

Nevertheless, the Finance Commission had managed to borrow 500,000 francs from the Rothschilds, and they had also managed to secure another 9 million from the Bank itself. The Commune thus momentarily had enough resources to survive, so it might seem reasonable that there was less immediate pressure to overtake the Bank. Both Marx and Lenin argued that one of the great failures of the Commune was its reluctance to appropriate the huge sources of funding that lay in the National Bank. What Marx didn’t know at the time was even more distressing: the head of the bank, the Marquis de Plaeuc, was, quite literally, sneaking out the back door, and clandestinely carrying more than 250 million francs to Versailles along with the plates for printing more money and banknotes. Without these massive funds, Thiers could never have rebuilt the military might of the Versailles forces so rapidly and so powerfully.

The myth of the sanctity of private property was crucial: the money slipping out the back door of the Bank was primarily public as it was explicitly based on tax revenues from the people of the nation, yet it went almost exclusively to rebuilding the state army in Versailles so that they could better execute the wishes of the private monied classes who sought to crush the rebellion and take even greater control of the political economy. Not one working person or peasant benefitted in any direct way from these mis-directions of national public resources: both the rural peasants and the urban workers in 1870s France bore the brunt of the debt for financing the state army that crushed the Commune.

Without those funds, and surrounded by both the Versaillais in the south and west, and the Prussians on the north and east, the Commune was doomed. Thiers made sure of that through the sheer brutality of la Semaine Sanglante. With respect to any attempts at negotiations, he would accept no compromises: “I shall not listen to you….I have no conditions to accept, nor commitments to offer. The supremacy of the law will be re-established absolutely….Paris will be submitted to the authority of the State” (quoted in Horne 362). In his eyes, his mission was to save the Republic from lawless anarchy, so much so that afterwards, he crowed over his victory: “we have got rid of Socialism” (Horne 430). On that score, at least, he was wrong many times over, although it was true that the pure anarchist belief in a truly decentralized, stateless system of cooperative production could rarely thereafter affect labor struggles except in local and sporadic circumstances. All subsequent socialist reformations tended towards some form of state-run organization of an otherwise capitalist market economy. In fact, the violent crushing of the Commune fueled the rising force of the socialist movement, organized labor, and worker resistance to capitalist exploitation leading to the creation of socialist democracies and welfare state policies for redistribution of wealth. Despite various ideological rifts within the International, its membership expanded exponentially over the coming years as the global economy between 1873 and 1896 entered what many have called the “Great Depression,” even though it was never as precipitous a fall as the 1930s Depression. Nevertheless, capitalist expansion in general slowed in the years following the Commune (just as global expansion shrunk after the 2008 crisis). Marx had himself presciently predicted what he called the “falling rate of profit” [FROP]) that would afflict the capitalist enterprises during the late decades of the 19^th century even as British imperialism increased in the effort to compensate for sagging local markets (see Hobsbawm, Industry 126-33). Marx also seems to have correctly deduced the remarkable powers of capitalism to restore its systemic contradictions (such as between market freedom and state/capital domination) through powerful reassertions of monopoly control linking production, finance, and state powers.⁹ As Thomas Piketty has now documented, capital developed many alternative ways of adjusting and recovering from cyclical periods of diminished profits (see Capital 52-55).

The terrifying ferocity of Thiers orchestration of the bourgeois backlash against the alternative to capitalism represented by the Commune took on a kind of patriotic nationalist ring in the French press, as if Thiers (provisional President of the new French Republic) had saved the country from terrorist rebels who deserved their violent fate. It is a cruel irony, to be sure, with respect to who actually served up terror: Thiers’ centralized, authoritarian, nearly dictatorial take over as President was represented as a form of liberation from the potentially oppressive alternatives to capitalism embodied by the Commune. We can’t help but hear these 19^th-century lies about liberation reverberating in President Trump’s “liberation” of the U.S. economy from regulation and concern over climate change.

Spectacular Tales: Media Ownership and Freedom of the Press

From its ill-fated beginnings, the Commune faced an insurmountable public relations problem. The National Guard troops in Paris were often depicted by the bourgeois press as drunken and disorganized which, of course, they were at times, given their difficult situation. At the time of the Commune, while writing drafts of The Civil War, Marx complained in a letter to Engels of the “wall of lies” (quoted in Kristine Ross, Communal, 86) put up by the French and German presses that reported only the Versaillais version of the events and vilified Marx. But these popularized distortions illustrate the ideological problem: the French General Ducrot descried the Communards as “the conscienceless mob, what M. Thiers rightly called the ‘vile multitude’” (Horne 229). And these latter views were being disseminated by most of the newspapers around France, thus serving as an early sign of the “society of the spectacle” whereby the private media serve the state-authorized ruling classes by creating images deliberately concealing the actual conditions: fake news has had some powerful progenitors. Capital and state can thereby gain ideological control of the people of the nation so that in a kind of feedback loop, the people of the nation yearn for the stability of the centralized state: Capital-Nation-State, as Karatani explains, became more integrated domains during the late 19^th century.

In 1871, the Communards had little practical ability to control what was said outside the city about their own occupation within the Parisian city walls. As Kristin Ross argues, the Communards made extensive efforts to explain their solidarity with the peasants and all oppressed peoples through extensive printed documents, that could only be distributed outside Paris by carrier pigeon, balloon, or in secret, but the Versaillais was able to destroy most every one of these communication efforts (Communal, 83-85). Even though the 1867 Freedom of Press Act made theoretically possible the publication of dissenting views, the bourgeoisie still managed the dissemination of news.¹⁰ The Republican forces controlled the newspapers outside Paris because the large printing presses were mostly owned and operated by wealthy magnates so they could say what they wanted to win the favor of not only their fellow bourgeois peers, but also to garner the allegiance of the peasants in the rural areas throughout the country who came to fear the insurgent revolutionaries more than the stability of the monarchy. And it was quite a show for the conservative presses: Le Figaro screamed “No clemency is possible for these monsters, these ferocious beasts... eliminate these…vermin” (quoted in Gluckstein 158). This attitude was carried around the world so that the New York Herald likewise cheered on the powers of Versailles to: “Make Paris a heap of ruins if necessary, let its streets be made to run rivers of blood, let all within it perish” (quoted in Gluckstein 158). That pretty well sums up what did come to pass.

Despite these uproars, the 1867 repeal of the tough censorship Act of 1852 had opened a crack in the door for a rapid growth in free press publication, and alternative leaflets and magazines began to emerge, not completely unlike the impact for the contemporary counter-movements of alternative online news sources and social networking. Significantly, the expansion of publication venues became one of the most noticeable characteristics of the period immediately preceding and during the brief life of the Commune. Indeed, various clubs, associations, committees, and informal organizations began to buzz with activity (Ross, Communal 14-18). Nearly every Paris printing house in the city began to devote itself to news stories and pamphlet production to serve the cause of the Commune, or perhaps more accurately, to get the diverse news and points of view internal to the life of the Commune spread throughout the urban area. They were also particularly concerned with trying to communicate to the peasants outside the city the idea that they shared the same basic commitments, contrary to everything the latter had been told by the bourgeois presses.¹¹ Differences abounded, but within the city at least the relative freedom of the press made participatory democracy possible because it requires an informed citizenry.

In fact, one of the first things the Commune set up was an official journal to communicate its actions. Many decrees and resolutions had been passed after the election of the Executive Council on March 26^th, all of them enacting specific policies. But on April 19, 1871, the “Declaration au people francais” (or what some have called the “Programme of the Commune”) was published in their journal. The Declaration was of a different order because it included not just a summary of the particular demands established by the Commune, but also some of the key philosophical justifications for those policies. Although it was only three pages long, in many ways it is a remarkable document because of the sheer audacity of its ambitions, but also because it sought to rectify the many egregious misrepresentations of the Communards as scoundrels and madmen perpetrated by the conservative and monarchist forces that dominated the national press.¹²

Although the Communards faced an insurmountable uphill battle, they still had hopes that their “Declaration” might be circulated outside the city and the country, and it did find its way to London and other metropolitan areas both in and outside France. So it is worth taking a closer look at the document itself. In many ways, because of its invocation of universal human rights, it can be calculated as a kind of explicit precursor of the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), of the 1962 SDS Port Huron Statement, as well as the 2011 statements by leaders of the Occupy movements and other resistance movements.¹³ The Commune’s “Declaration” insists on the autonomy of the citizens to administer their own government and their own economy, and it articulates the universality of human rights, foreshadowing the UDHR’s basis for “the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms” (“Preamble” to the United Declaration, n. pag.).¹⁴ In addition to the many practical organizational policies, the “Declaration” articulates the “inherent rights of the Commune” to establish and preserve “the absolute guarantee of individual liberty and liberty of conscience, the permanent intervention of the citizens in communal affairs by the free manifestation of their ideas and the free defence [sic] of their interests” (Fetridge 151). The aim was clearly to establish broad-based forms of communality through non-hierarchical, participatory forms of democratic social life.

Particularly significant among these accomplishments was the active participation of women in all stages of the Commune’s activities. On April 11, 1871, the Unions des Femmes (Women’s Union) was formed, largely by the leadership of the twenty-year-old Russian, Elisabeth Dmitrieff. Several thousand women attended the meetings of this organization, and at one point they drafted a manifesto which they brought to the Labor Commission: it “was a magnificent combination of political strategy, women’s emancipation, immediate practical steps and the overcoming of the alienation under capitalism” (Gluckstein 23). Whereas women’s wages had been no more than 50% of men’s wages, the manifesto put in place a policy of “equal pay for equal work;” they reduced the exploitive work hours; they eliminated the distinctions between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” relationships; and they assured that pensions would be paid to all dependents regardless of their marriage status. Mary Wollstonecraft’s vision of gender equality seems to have materialized in the Commune. As Donny Gluckstein summarizes: “The Women’s Union was not patronized and sent away after lobbying. It was quickly incorporated into the fabric of the Commune….With Labor Commission backing it began setting up an entire structure of syndical chambers out of which would emerge production units under workers’ control and a Federal Women’s Chamber” (24).

The Commune’s reformation of education was also remarkable. Most forms of institutionalized education at the time were under the control of the Catholic Church where the curriculum consisted of little more than reciting the catechism (about one third of school age French children attended no formal schooling at all), yet the Commune insisted on the separation of church and state, and they established the basic principles for public school systems that would be free to all citizens. Religious beliefs were left open to families, but religious oaths were banned from the public schools. Several of the Paris newspapers stressed the need for education for girls. They had many plans for the development of professional education and higher education, but of course they never had time to implement these ambitions.

The Commune also envisioned the liberation of workers as tied equally to the liberation of culture and the arts of free expression. Consequently, more than four hundred people met to establish the Artists’ Federation that organized a celebration and festival of their new-won rights as enfranchised citizens. The Artists’ Federation included sculptors, painters, engravers, architects, writers, and many others; the well-known painter Gustave Courbet served as President. In fact, as Donny Gluckstein explains: “In a move a century ahead of its time the federation overthrew the elitist division between fine arts and applied arts [a product of Romantic idealism] and promised that both would enjoy equal status in future communal exhibitions” (32). They even tried to eliminate the gender-based addresses of “monsieur” and “madame” in favor of the term citizen that emerged from the 1790’s French Revolution. Theater companies put on daily performances; there were concerts and events celebrating the arts right up to the crushing last weeks of the Commune.

As the general “Declaration” for the Commune stipulated, no one was to be excluded from the common rights that all citizens had when assured that “produce, exchange, and credit have to universalize power and property according to the necessities of the moment” (Fetridge 152). Because the anarchist factions of the Commune had largely authorized the document, they critiqued the Versailles government as “nothing but centralization, despotic, unintelligent, arbitrary, and onerous” (152). In contrast, the Commune represented itself as a new kind of “political unity…a voluntary association of all local initiative, the free and spontaneous co-operation of all individual energies with the common object of the well-being, liberty, and security of all” (152). Again, what is so notable about these claims in 1871 is how they register striking claims to abolish unnecessary and unjust forms of hierarchy in favor of the more just practices of communality.

Local Associations and Global Hopes

Singularly striking about the Paris Commune was that, for the first time in history, workers and the disenfranchised took control over the occupation of a major metropolitan area (Paris had a population of nearly 2 million people, the second largest city in Europe at the time, after London). A measure of communality became an historical actuality, not just a theoretical possibility. The event, for all its two months brevity, has resonated through history as both myth and reality, paradigm for freedom and model of insurrection, depending on your politics. Before I look a bit more closely at some of the tensions embedded within the political activities of the Commune, it is worth pausing a moment to highlight the scope of what they did enact. In the course of its brief two months, the Commune Council actually passed more than 390 resolutions, including universal suffrage (for women as well as all other citizens); the establishment of worker pensions; the reduction of working hours; the abolition of a standing army and police force; the separation of church and state; the elimination of the death penalty; the legalization of divorce; the limitation of all government officials to no more than 6,000 francs; the worker-based organization of factories in the city; and many other reforms.

Every previous major revolutionary action (1789, 1830, 1848--a period Eric Hobsbawm calls the “Age of Revolution”) ended up with concessions from the monarchy for the bourgeoisie, not the workers or the peasants. In stark contrast, the Paris Commune represented, however briefly, the first genuine self-governing assumption of power by the workers and many otherwise dispossessed citizens. Understandably, then, Karl Marx recognized the Paris Commune as having momentous consequences for his account of class struggle. It was, for a brief time anyway, as Marx put it, “a government of the people by the people” (Civil War 65). For many of the Communards, the ultimate ambition of the Civil War was to extend such worker controls throughout the nation, and eventually around the world, as a revolutionary alternative to the capitalist system. Indeed, when Marx addressed the First International in 1870, he cited the manifesto of the organization drafted in July of that year where they explicitly claim to seek “peace, labour and liberty!”, and he endorsed their unmistakably international intentions of aiming for the Universal Republic: “Workmen of all countries! … we, the members of the International Working Men’s Association…know of no frontiers” (Marx, “First Address,” Civil War 24) .

Of course, the historical realities were more compromised than the idealized accounts, (and Marx certainly had contributed to those idealizations), but the revolutionary action had such a dramatic impact on him that both he and Engels later came to wish they could have amended the Communist Manifesto, and later they did, in fact, compose a new preface to that work.¹⁵ His basic claim was that the Commune was “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour” (Civil War 60). But he gradually came to understand some major revisions to his theories of class struggle. First, the Commune made clear that social revolution could not just be an emancipation of labor, at least not narrowly conceived as employed proletarian workers;¹⁶ and, secondly, the corollary that the Commune provided concrete evidence that the proletariat could not just seize control of the state by way of a violent revolt, and make the state serve workers’ interests. Even more than he could have known from London, the actual political orientations of the Communards differed dramatically on both ideological and material levels. Ideologically speaking, there was a wide range of political beliefs represented from the anarchists to the Jacobins, and they often got in heated arguments.¹⁷ In terms of material circumstances, there were not only employed workers, but small craftsmen and artisans, shop owners, liberal lawyers and judges, restauranteurs, teachers and professors, bakers, artists, writers, and various kinds of small merchants and businessmen.¹⁸ These divisions within the Commune are worth attending to because they prefigure some of the most divisive issues that the counter-movements have ever since struggled with.

First of all, the Commune was noticeably not “communist,” at least not in the narrow sense, although it was thoroughly communal/communist in the broad sense. The First International had little to do with it directly, although 20 of 90 members of the Commune Council were Internationalists, and this latter group served as a strong majority on the important Commission on Labor, Industry, and Exchange, so there was certainly a proletarian coloring to many of the important actions of the Commune. Nevertheless, many of the anarchist leaders following Louis Blanqui, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, or the great geographer and activist, Élisée Reclus, were in constant interaction with the revolutionary Jacobins (who distrusted the startling new philosophy advocated by the followers of Karl Marx), as well as with the socialist utopian followers of Charles Fourrier or Henri de Saint-Simon. As Alistair Horne puts it, “from the day it assumed office, the danger was apparent that the Commune might be overloaded, indeed overwhelmed, by the sheer diversity of desires as represented by so polygenous a multitude of personalities, ideologies, and interests” (299). Given this broad range of differences, it is quite amazing the degree of consensus through participatory democracy they did in fact achieve as evidenced in the many decrees issued by the Council.

Marx himself even lamented that sometimes the Commune was wasting time in unproductive debates without action. As he wrote in May, 1871 to two of the Internationalist leaders of the Commune: “The Commune seems to lose too much time in trifling affairs and personal quarrels….none of this would matter, if you had the time to recover the time already lost” (quoted in Horne 332). But as the pressure from Versailles mounted, the tensions within the Commune took identifiable binary form between the radical anarchists and the liberal Jacobins.

These powerful divisions within the Commune between participatory democracy and more centralized infrastructures mirrored what later became manifest in the conflict between Bakunin and Marx. This same division later became paradigmatic of the rift within the Left between bottom-up participatory democratic models of social organization and top-down centralized forms of state command.¹⁹ By simple inversion it is also possible to use this division to characterize Left and Right: the Left socialist orientation has generally advocated the former even as it has sometimes slipped heavily into the latter; the Right capitalist orientation has generally tended towards top-down, hierarchical, and centralized forms even as it has sometimes produced (and mythically advocated for) “free,” anarchic, and decentralizing forces. Michael Harrington articulates well this “counterposed phenomena: the growing centralization and interdependence of capitalist society under the control of an elite; and the possibility of a democratic, bottom-up control by the majority” (8).²⁰ His main point is that despite all their differences, many of the anarchists, socialists, and communists all have shared a common aim of establishing a bottom-up, non-authoritarian social organization. The Commune clearly represented the latter even as it slid towards centralization in the last weeks of its life. In short, the Commune brought to a head the tensions between communality and hierarchy internal to the counter-movements: the struggle for local, participatory democracy, and the need for a centralized infrastructure of state institutions to orchestrate that democracy.

Indeed, on April 28, 1871, the old Jacobin from the 1848 Revolution, Jules Miot, put before the Commune Assembly a move to create a Committee of Public Safety to exercise executive functions. The anarchists, the socialists, and the members of the International among the Assembly strenuously opposed this move that seemed far too much like a resurrection of the more infamous 1793 Committee of Public Safety, but in the end, with growing fear of their own safety under Thiers bombardments and threats, “the Commune Assembly voted, 45 to 23, in favour of Miot’s proposal” (Horne 333). This was clearly a turning point, as the Jacobins sought centralization, hierarchy, and control rather than bottom up democratic participation. Unfortunately, with their demise only a few weeks away, there was little any of them could do to prevent the backlash that was about to be mounted by the Versailles forces.

Indeed, once the Commune had been crushed, differing interpretations of the events heightened tensions between the anti-statist anarchists and the political organizations of the communists. The historical event of the Commune prefigured in powerful ways the key dialectical tensions--local and global, decentralized and statist orientations, communal and hierarchical social organization--that would beset nearly all the counter-movements ever since that time. For instance, these very tensions over the political significance of the Commune precipitated Marx’s 1872 expelling of Bakunin from the First International meeting in the Hague Congress.²¹ In 1870, Bakunin had organized a failed revolutionary action in Lyon, and even though he was not an active participant in the Paris Commune, he was one of its strongest defenders, seeing it as an exemplification of workers taking revolutionary action against both the centralized state and capitalism. Marx was likewise a strong defender of the Commune, but on different terms. The conflict between Bakunin and Marx stemmed from Bakunin’s deep fear of a creeping authoritarianism in Marx’s version of the communist state even though it was Bakunin arguing for violent revolution and Marx decrying the resort to immediate violence. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” was something he feared, not something he sought to achieve by organizing workers to create a centralized state. But, clearly, Marx also distrusted Bakunin and thought of him by that time as an imposing, overweight lout whose critical thinking was shallow at best and lacking in the scientific rigor regarding the analysis of the political economy that Marx had brought to all four volumes of Capital.

Bakunin had, for the most part, short-sighted Marx’s deeper commitments to democracy and communal life especially as Marx modified his views after the Commune, but the former’s fears certainly seem prescient with respect to world history given the 20^th and 21^st century rise of many centralized, authoritarian, left-wing regimes. It was the event of the Commune that significantly changed Marx’s thinking about the role of the proletariat. Basically, Marx came to more deeply appreciate that the universal values for social justice carried out by the Commune were diametrically opposed to hierarchical state rule; he subsequently gave up as ahistorical his earlier theories that the proletariat could simply assume hierarchic control of the state mechanisms. As Michael Harrington explains, “To the very end of his life … [Marx]…insisted that the state would eventually ‘wither away,’ [Engel’s term, actually] a utopian formulation if there ever was one. And when he once tried actually to describe the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ Marx saw it prefigured in the Paris Commune, a quasi-anarchist body that provided for the immediate recall of all elected officials” (20).

Nevertheless, it now appears clear that Marx’s binary separation of the economic base from the cultural superstructure works only as a dialectical process, but in its reductive versions it can, and has had the fatal effect of making the state appear as a mere ideological “superstructure” that would “wither away” once the cooperative economic base had been established on communistic principles. This theoretical liability sometimes conceals the deeply integrated realities of capital, nation, and state. Nations of people governed by state military bureaucracies could facilitate capitalist forms of production and exchange to serve the will of an elite plutocracy: as Karatani puts it, “state ownership and capitalism are not incompatible” (Structure 249). Marx would agree with that assessment as he never put faith in a centralized state, but his way of formulating the historical dialectic of class struggle as primarily a base-superstructure model still tended to theoretically separate the economic from the political/ideological at a deep level so that, according to the theoretical presumptions, the state might conceivably wither away as easily as Plato’s ultimate Forms could dispel the world of appearances. We must, then, return to the activism of the ongoing dialectic as a process for social change.

But the historical reality regarding the Commune was never so polarized with respect to communal participation and central hierarchical organization. Even the Commune had to form an Executive Council of representatives, although they were duly elected on instant recall. What remains striking in the Communards actions is the effort to dialectically unite the grand, universal aspirations for communal social life with the contingent struggles of the local associations that inevitably called for leadership as well. Marx continued to favor the integration of local and universal aspirations as exemplified in the Commune, but his support of those radical efforts split the International movement. The Commune failed because it ended up having no international traction (and very little communication with the peasantry outside Paris) despite their idealizations. After this event, “Marx would become extremely cautious about the idea of leaping over historical stages” (Karatani, Structure 255). Indeed, as Kevin Anderson has now made eminently clear, Marx took from his interpretation of the Paris Commune a more complex sense of history, revolution, and cultural difference. Anderson argues that by the 1880s Marx had “created a multilinear and non-reductionist theory of history” where he more fully “analyzed the complexities and differences of non-Western societies, and to have refused to bind himself into a single model of development or revolution” (Marx 237).²² No longer was Marx’s “theory of social change…exclusively class-based,” but it became much more attuned to the “intersectionality of class with ethnicity, race, and nationalism” (244). Contrary to what many people have often thought about Marx, he refused later in his life to collapse “ethnicity, race, or nationality into class” (245). Although Marx is clearly “not a philosopher of difference in the postmodernist sense” (244), these significant revisions in his own theories suggest a richer attunement to the dialectical interaction between large scale frames and deeply historical particulars than most assessments of “Marxism” have been willing to acknowledge. In short, Marx understood how the new powers of capital “reached into every society and created a universalizing worldwide system of industry and trade for the first time, and with it a new universal class of the oppressed” (244). On this score, Marx should be given credit for so often (with the exceptions I have pointed out, above) sustaining an ongoing dialectical analysis aimed at making warranted generalizations while avoiding “formalistic and abstract universals” (244) that radically disengaged theory from the rich contexts of social life.

Revisioning Communality and Hierarchy for the Counter-Movements

Here we leave this brief sketch of the Commune for the long and complicated history of the counter-movements, but the gist of the split can be briefly characterized as growing out of the basic tensions that emerged late in the life of the Commune. First, the revolutionary anarchist hopes that local cooperative modes of production and exchange could be internationalized came to a tactical closure: it was just too evident after the events of the Commune that the interlocking hegemony of capital, state, and nation was far too powerful to be displaced by idealized dreams of reciprocity and mutuality, no matter how crucial such visions of cooperation might be to human life. In short, anarchist revolutions had proven to be not viable in the European centers; or at least, any revolutionary hopes now had to move to the periphery, which is what large tracts of Russian geography were as a developing nation. Consequently, new forms of socialist organization came into being, mostly pinned on more reformist hopes tied to working within parliamentary democracies in England and Germany: regulating capitalism and welfare state forms of redistribution were the best hopes in this scenario. Marx objected to the aims of “state socialism,” as he made especially clear in his 1860s rebuttals of the arguments put forward by his sometimes-friend, sometimes-rival foe, the German political activist Ferdinand Lassalle (who was killed in a duel in 1864), and in his scathing critique of the German Social Democratic Party’s Gotha Program.²³ Indeed, beginning especially with the 1889 formation of the Second International, a sharp rift widened between the German Social Democrats (SPD) led by Karl Kautsky, and the rapidly expanding Bolshevik movement in Russia led by Vladimir Lenin beginning in the early 20^th century. Both Kautsky and Lenin claimed to be the true followers of Marx, but their split exemplifies what we found in the split within the Commune.

In simple terms, Kautsky came to accept that Marxism could only come about through the establishment of a democratic but centralized state. He recognized that the bourgeois state worked from authoritarian, top-down models, so his commitment was to the creation of social democracy from the bottom-up. For Kautsky, it was binary but not really dialectical since it was an either/or situation with just two end-point possibilities: capitalist state or socialist state, but always a state, and no in-between mixture or radical alternative and no dialectical oscillation. Socialism for Kautsky became “ownership by the democratic state of the large-scale industry, which is the inevitable outcome of capitalist development” (Harrington 50). Kautsky’s definition became enormously influential, but it was vigorously opposed by Lenin, who saw Kautsky as the betrayer of the radical potential of communism.

For Lenin, in State and Revolution, Kautsky’s fateful definition would lead to the centralization of authority in Communist states, which Lenin opposed (at least until the final years of his life).²⁴ In the 1917 “Preface” to the first edition of State and Revolution, Lenin therefore calls Kautsky the “great distorter” (6), and he goes on to explain that Kautsky’s goal is “to perfect the state machinery, whereas it must be shattered, broken to pieces (25).”²⁵ Lenin’s fear was, of course, much realized. There would come into being, then, not decentralized communes, socialist working associations linked by looser networks of affiliation and worker-run sites of production for both peasants and proletarians aiming for a post-national Universal Republic, but modern state-run enterprises and bureaucracies that dictated tasks for workers and peasants (rather than the reverse) in the inevitable competition with other capitalist nation-states. His arguments that the violent revolution by workers would lead to a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat that would then “wither away” follows from Marx’s and Engels’ theories about the ultimately disappearing state, but they clearly call for a new mode of production based on worker controlled industries—an ideal contrary to the role that Lenin found himself in at the end of his life. As Harrington explains, “In the years between the October Revolution in 1917 and his death in January, 1924, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin acted first upon the most utopian, antistatist definition of socialism, then moved abruptly to a statist, anti-utopian model and, in the last months of his active life, turned toward Asia for the solution to difficulties he found all but insuperable” (62-63).²⁶ In either case, however, we again see Lenin’s reliance on Marx’s model of economic base and cultural-state superstructure less as a dialectical process than as a rigid binary seeking to become a singularity, so he mistakenly comes to believe that the “withering away” of the state could become an actual possibility even though any version of a Universal Republic would necessitate some forms of affiliation and hierarchy on a grand scale. This too seems like another trace of ahistorical idealism that Marx himself resisted, especially later in his life, and it is a tendency that underestimates the deeply interwoven dimensions of culture, capital, nation, and state in the geopolitical economy. Inevitably, any concrete event or individual action may take place within one dimension more than another, but a strong materialism requires that we consider the effects (or lack of effect) in all of those entwined domains.

Without elaborating on the details of these debates, their historical significance should not be missed. Kautsky’s statist version of socialism came to dominate the formation of most socialist states. The historical shifts in the 20^th-century of the Soviet Union and China, among others, to socialist statism came to serve as the universal essence of all versions of socialism and communism.²⁷ They could then be more easily demonized for the relative failures of their centralized states (which is exactly the strategy that Hayek took in his famous 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom), but conversely, the ideological bias prevented most people in the West from fairly assessing the real achievements of the socialist and communist states. The right wing has widely benefitted by representing socialism as always and everywhere tied to the historical dictatorships that called themselves Marxist, communist, or socialist nations. While most all of these historical manifestations struggled with the idea of worker run enterprises and communal affiliations, to varying degrees many of them also slipped into repressive, centralized state bureaucracies that destroyed participatory democracy by workers and disenfranchised people. These slippages are also understandable, as Wallerstein argues, because the communist and socialist nations had no choice but to compete with the capitalist world-system that sought to crush them (see World Systems). However, by focusing on the centralized oppressions of the socialist states, we have failed to assess the degrees of communality that were in many instances achieved, and conversely, we have often neglected to account for the oppressive degrees of hierarchy established by corporate controls. In order to do that, we have to more fully theorize the interlocking system of capital, nation, and state, rather than an economic base producing a cultural superstructure.

Even with this brief look back at the Paris Commune, it is easy to see that Louis Napoleon had ludicrous fantasies that a state-sanctioned war with Prussia would aid his empire, but, instead, the war precipitated economic collapse throughout France, and most obviously in Paris where its citizens were left hungry and destitute, eating rats and vermin to survive during the four month siege of the city. But the capitalist world-system calls for an interlocking system of nation-states with one nation typically gaining some form of hegemony, and the French demise made it possible for the British Empire to more totally become that center. As we have seen, Napoleon III took on the mantle of the rising bourgeoisie (as had his famous uncle 70 years earlier) and consequently he had initiated many of those same capitalist goals even though they were orchestrated around a political economy based on expanding industrial monopolies. He created a huge backlash that would not go away.

Even today we see many of the 21^st-century resistance movements hearkening back to a rhetoric so reminiscent of the Communards’ “Declaration” from another moment of crisis. David Harvey asks the crucial question about the various localized irruptions that have taken place in the 21^st century in many cities around the world: “if these various opposition movements did somehow come together…then what should they demand?” And his answer to his own question is “simple enough: greater democratic control over the production and use of the surplus” (Rebel 22). That remains a demand widely shared by many people engaged in the activist struggle for a more just kind of social, political, and economic life.

The lesson of the Paris Commune is that there was no social justice when the reign of capitalists could be integrated with the state and the national identity so much as to destroy the possibility for bottom-up democratic processes such as represented by the Commune. There is no social justice when the will of the vast majority of citizens for social reproductive security in the areas of child care, health care, education, and participatory parity in the public sphere gets crushed as it is by austerity measures serving private capital interests. In the 21^st century, the old capitalists drives for endless accumulation, monopolized economic control by the few, and ideological control through the mass media (or social media, today), work in new ways, technically speaking, but we can be deceived into thinking that a version of “green capitalism” and the “sharing economy” will solve inequality and climate change without deeper transformations. As Nick Srnicek describes it, “platform capitalism” “came to be centred upon extracting and using a particular kind of raw material: data” (39). When the natural resources of the planet are reaching exhaustion, a new kind of raw material, data, is readily available. Under these circumstances, technological innovation serving the elites has geometrically magnified corporate power to design, program, and produce massive online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Uber, Airbnb, etc. Generally speaking, these “platforms are digital infrastructures that enable two or more groups to interact” (Srnicek 43). “Often arising out of internal needs to handle data, platforms became an efficient way to monopolize, extract, analyse, and use the increasingly large amounts of data that were being recorded” (42-3). These digital platforms market themselves as a liberal kind of sharing economy, but nothing could be further from the truth: they are really intensifications of communications among people to reach the lowest wage possible for any given service or product. A kind of hyper-individualism and customization is touted as a virtue when it masks the centralization and hierarchical control by the multi-billion dollar corporations while the individual end-users of these platforms are often struggling for survival. Almost any move we make in our electronic environments can be subject to digital surveillance, even without our knowledge, as Shoshana Zuboff elaborate in her description of this process as “surveillance capitalism,” the system when profit and surveillance name virtuallly the same thing. But think of these systemic changes in terms of labor. For example, consider this contrast: in 1962, “GM had 605,000 employees,” whereas in 2017 “Facebook has 12,000” (Srnicek 4) despite the latter’s much wider global reach. In short, platform capitalism fuels much greater profits for the few through technology with much less employed labor for the many. Consider that “in 2016 Facebook, Google, and Alibaba alone will take half of the world’s digital advertising” (Srnicek 96). Such escalating inequality destroys communality.

Srnicek’s brief hope at the end of his book is that perhaps the monopolistic tendencies of these mega-platforms can be resisted through the “building up of cooperative platforms,” (127) even while he recognizes many of “the traditional problems of coops (e.g. the necessity of self-exploitation under capitalist social relations)” (127). Perhaps there is hope that the state, like its previous breakup of monopoly corporations, can intercede to control the centralizing power of the private platforms. Perhaps, even more, we can “create public platforms,” or “postcapitalist platforms,” but for anything like this to happen “we must collectivise the platforms” (128). However unlikely or difficult to achieve, these alternatives can only be aided by attending to the lessons of one of the greatest of collective moments in the Paris Commune, followed by the rise of the modern socialist, communist, and labor movements.

As Marx understood so clearly, capitalism seeks to enclose the public commons, but the Paris Commune sought to establish the common good for all citizens of Paris. Their failures were not internal to their own organization so much as imposed upon them by the brutal repression of the bourgeoisie who sought to restore the system that had given the latter the power to control the political economy. But also, one of the key lessons we might carry away from even this brief sketch is that the resistance represented in the spring of 1871 Paris did not die with the Commune. As Kevin Anderson argues, any positive alternative to capitalism will come out “of dialectical imagination, where Marx takes revolutionary aspirations and trends inside the present order—like the Paris Commune of 1871—and moves them much further” toward what Marx called a “’an association of free human beings’” (“Marx’s Capital” 4). Even though many of the Communards were buried alive in mass graves, and contrary to the false myth the that universal free market lives on, there is also a long tradition of the counter-movements that seek a “new society,” one more just, equitable, and based on participatory democracy. Such critical-utopian wishes have some very material consequences if we hope to avoid the destruction of the planet by market-driven exploitation of dwindling resources.

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Footnotes

1 As Engels put it in his 1891 Introduction to Marx’s book: “The massacre of defenceless men, women and children, which had been raging all through the week on an increasing scale, reached its zenith. … at the Pere Lachaise cemetery, where the final mass murder was consummated, is still standing today, a mute but eloquent testimony to the savagery of which the ruling class is capable as soon as the working class dares to come out for its rights” (Marx, Civil War 17). There have been ongoing debates over the exact number of Communards murdered, and they have ranged from the conservative 25,000 (which I have adopted) to as many as 40,000.

2 As Karatani explains, Marx “foresaw that the Commune would immediately encounter interference and obstruction from foreign states. It is impossible to abolish the state in one country while leaving it intact elsewhere” (Structure 251). Marx believed that “Rather than usurp state power…socialists should first devote themselves to rebuilding Paris and France from the chaos of defeat in war” (250). Marx’s initial objections to the Proudhonist/Bakuninist plans for the revolution in Paris have not been well-known because he did not publish them, expressing them primarily in private correspondence.

3 As Kristin Ross argues, one of the enduring legacies of the Commune was “the way hierarchy came to be contested in the realm of the social imagination of the Communards before it was attacked on the political and economic level” (The Emergence 4).

4 See, for instance, Jodi Dean’s critique of the familiar ahistorical sense of a fixed essence shared by communism, the Soviet Union, and Stalinism.

5 Of course, the fact of industrial growth in the 19^th century here marks the most obvious contrast with the contemporary situation. Prior to our current crisis, it was not industrial production but financial manipulation that was expanding at record pace.

6 Change the name of the war, and those last two sentences sound hauntingly familiar to the contemporary situation in the U.S. and other parts of the world such as the E.U.

7 See Hobsbawm and his qualifications of the “nutty” Saint-Simonians and the kinds of contradictions between socialist universal justice and technological versions of capitalism (Age of Capital 57).

8 As Donny Gluckstein puts it: “Haussmann’s central Paris became a haven for the rich, a ‘Babylon,’ a nineteenth-century theme park known ‘for its carnival flash, a crazy tinsel circus of all fleshly pleasures and all earthly magnificence’” (52).

9 On this point, a common misinterpretation of Marx is that he held the belief that capitalism would eventually self-destruct under its own corrosive contradictions. But as David Harvey argues, “I cannot actually find where Marx said this, and from my own reading of him I think it extremely unlikely that he would ever have said such a thing” (Seventeen 220).

10 Under the Second Empire, as Alistair Horne explains, “Political meetings were virtually banned, and censorship of the Press was complete….On Louis-Napoleon’s coming to power a large number of Socialist deputies have been proscribed and expelled from France” (28). But with the new freedom of press act, as David Harvey explains, “The means of representation and communication were multiplying rapidly….By the late 1860s, newspapers and journals were opening up every month” (Paris 263).

11 According to one eye-witness account, Prosper Olivier Lissagaray relates the remarkable tale of trying to use balloons to carry manifestoes to the surrounding peasants (182).

12 The full text of the document called the “Programme” can be found in William Pembroke Fetridge’s personal account of the Paris Commune that he published in August of 1871. Fetridge’s narrative stands as one of the most hostile representations of the Commune, and he throughout accuses the Communards of “stupid arrogance” (132), and he ridicules the “absurdity” of their claims and the “insane terms” represented in the “Programme” (153). Fetridge was an American editor at Harpers, producing among other texts such popular ones as Harpers Guide-Book to Europe and the East, and no doubt the Parisian experiment put a damper on American tourists in France.

13 See Tom Hayden who provides a useful critical analysis of the significance of the Port Huron Statement to the contemporary Occupy Movement.

14 Similarly, the Port Huron Statement empowered “the individual as autonomous but interdependent with other individuals, and the community as a civic society” (Hayden 14).

15 In 1872, Marx and Engels wrote a preface to the second edition of the Communist Manifesto, basically explaining how recent events in world history, most explicitly the Paris Commune, required them to amend their earlier argument that the proletariat alone could assume control of the state.

16 David Harvey puts it in the context of the struggle over urban control. (See Rebel 128).

17 In Harvey’s assessment, the Commune “pitted ideals of centralized hierarchical control (the Jacobin current) against decentralized anarchist visions of popular control (led by the Proudhonists)” (Rebel 8). See also his book, Paris, where he explains that “the politics of the Commune were hardly coherent…” (325).

18 Hardt and Negri’s work on the “multitude” explicitly tries to negotiate broad solidarity despite remarkable local differences (see Multitude). See also Victor Wallis, “Capitalism Unhinged.”

19 Kristin Ross offers a wise caution about highlighting the Marx/Bakunin conflict, but she arrives at a similar assessment of key strategic tensions: “The intricacies and drama of the Marx/Bakuin split have dominated our perception of the politics of the period immediately after the Commune and let to an often reductive and overdrawn opposition—still bitterly and tiresomely rehearsed today—between an anarchist focus on political domination on the one hand and a Marxist focus on economic exploitation on the other” (Communal 108).

20 Harrington argues throughout for the virtues of socialism: As he explains, “under capitalism, there is a trend toward a growing centralization and planning that is eventually global, but it takes place from the top down; under socialism, that process is subjected to democratic control from below by the people and their communities” (9).

21 In his subsequent 1873 publication of Statism and Anarchy, Bakunin had made clear his objections to any effort to take over the state bureaucracy, and, in particular, he worried deeply over the rise of the German Empire. As David Harvey puts it,”In 1872…there occurred the radical political break between the Marxists and the anarchists that, to this day, still unfortunately divides so much of the left opposition to capitalism” (Paris 8).

22 Karatani likewise argues that in this period, for Marx, “issues of nation and ethnicity became increasingly important, taking their place alongside issues of class” (Structure 258).

23 Unfortunately, it appears that, according to William Henderson, Marx also, in a letter to Engels, made some very racially derogatory comments about Lassalle’s complexion and hair suggesting that he was “niggerlike” (71).

24 Of course, Marx and Engels gave Kautsky much to go on with respect to seizing and holding state power. As they explain in Critique of the Gotha Programme, “the proletariat will, from the beginning, have to seize into its hands organized political State power and with its help smash the resistance of the capitalist class and reorganize society” (Critique 58).

25 Lenin also devoted a whole book to the topic: The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.

26 As Harrington elaborates, for Lenin: “There would be no ‘state’ above the people, no parliament that, once elected, would acquire a life of its own. The masses in their workplaces and villages would be the executive and the legislature all in one. The model was Marx’s idealized version of the actual practice of the Paris Commune of 1870-71” (65).

27 Particularly significant in this context is the recent work by Jodi Dean; Bruno Bosteels (The Actuality of Communism); the collection, The Idea of Communism, edited by Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek; Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A Critique of Marxism; and Peter Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism.