Rise of the working class
Source: Labor College lecture
First published: Labor College Review, November 1986
Transcription, mark-up: Steve Painter
During the revolution of 1848 the working class came out as an independent force. They imposed their demand on the provisional government and fought a four-day battle on the barricades in defence of these demands. In a situation of fluctuating class fortunes the bourgeoisie opted once again for military rule so that trade and industrial business might proceed uninterrupted. The bourgeoisie bowed to the sword, to use Marx’s phrase. The workers through inexperience were seduced into a commission to talk out problems with the employers while the bourgeoisie organised against the working class. Thus valuable and critical time was lost and the working class found itself isolated and unprepared for the bourgeois onslaught.
The military government known as the Second Empire was headed by Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew Louis Napoleon. During the Second Empire, 1852-70, industry and trade increased greatly. The national wealth doubled in the period 1851-69. Small-scale industry and handicrafts were yielding to large-scale industry, resulting in widespread petty bourgeois ruin. With the bankers in control, the Second Empire ruled through the blackest reaction. Military cliques, bureaucracy and the clergy ruled unchecked. The schools came completely under the power of the church and the press was strictly censored. But as the years went by and the industrial bourgeoisie grew stronger, Napoleon lost its support and sentiments for a republic once again became very strong. In the elections of 1869 the opposition, despite repressive measures, was able to muster three million for its position, as against 4.5 million for the government. Clearly the Second Empire was nearing its end.
The growth of French industry was not followed by a growth in the French proletariat. Up to the 1870s, workers in small-scale industries, handicrafts and domestic work still predominated. Of the 422,000 workers in Paris only 50,000 were engaged in large-scale industry. The method of production kept workers’ politics within the sphere of the petty bourgeoisie, which explains the large following for Proudhon.
However, the ferocity used against Strikes and the collapse of the Proudhonist Labor Credit Bank in 1868 weakened the hold of Proudhon on the workers. The French section of the International was also savagely suppressed in 1868. These factors pushed the workers towards organising along class lines but by the time the Franco-German war broke out there was no clear outlook and the movement still embraced Proudhonists, Blanquists and Bakuninists. There was a Paris branch of the International Workingmen’s Association, founded by Marx and others in 1865. However, the International was a mixed body and its members were only one of the elements that went to make up the Paris Commune. The Commune started without any clear theory or conception of what it was to do.
By 1870, Emperor Napoleon III had fully resolved to make war on Germany, and the Prussian leader Bismarck wanted war also. Finding the International an obstacle in his path, Napoleon banned its Paris branch on July 8, 1870. Nine days later he declared war.
Meanwhile on July 12, the Paris members of the banned body published a manifesto calling for united action against war. “Brothers of Germany!” said the manifesto, “Our division would only result in the complete triumph of despotism on both sides of the Rhine … Workers of all countries! We send you the good wishes and the salutations of the workmen of France.”
Several replies came from Germany, one from a meeting of delegates representing 50,000 workers of Chemnitz. They said: “We are happy to grasp the fraternal hand held out to us by the workmen of France …. We shall never forget that the workmen of all countries are our friends and the despots of all countries are our enemies.” Marx commented that this exchange of workers’ peace and goodwill messages in countries at war was unparalleled in history and opened the vista of a brighter future.
The Emperor Napoleon III was not like his more famous namesake. He was a bad general of a badly organised and badly supplied army. In a month he and an army of 100,000 were captured by the Germans. A fortnight later, the Prussians were besieging Paris. Meanwhile, a republic had been proclaimed.
However, the Paris deputies of the old parliament succeeded in heading off the mass movement by getting themselves, just 12 individuals, installed as a Government of National Defence. The workers supported it because they were passionately keen to defend Paris against the invaders. But from the beginning, as Marx put it, the Government of National Defence did not hesitate to turn into a government of national betrayal. Its main fear was not victory of the Prussians but a victory of the Paris workers — the same fear that haunted the men of Vichy and led them to capitulate to Hitler in 1940.
The national guard divisions were thrown into battle indiscriminately in the hope that they would be wiped out and the bourgeois government saved by a Prussian defeat of the armed workers. As General Trochu, military governor of Paris and a member of the government, said: “If 20,000 were to fall in a great battle, Paris would surrender.”
Marx refers to this government as “a cabal of place-hunting barristers”. He gives a vivid description of its leader Adolphe Thiers who was a dwarf: “A monstrous gnome,” he called him, “with class prejudices standing him in the place of ideas and vanity in the place of a heart … his private life as infamous as his public life was odious,” who in his long political career had “never been guilty of even the smallest measure of any practical use.”
The Thiers government signed an armistice with Bismarck on January 28, 1871. The Paris forts were yielded up to the Prussians, and the regular forces, numbering a quarter of a million, were disarmed. Together with the civilian National Guard these could have made a fighting defence of Paris fully possible. But Thiers and his men were not concerned with defence, they were concerned with their class interests.
Under shelter of the armistice they arranged elections for a National Assembly. In these elections Paris voted for the republic and vigorous conduct of the war, but the millions of peasant voters gave Thiers the overall majority he wanted.
Of the 740 delegates elected to the assembly 450 were monarchists. The assembly concluded peace with Prussia, agreeing to pay an indemnity of five milliard Francs and ceding Alsace and Lorraine.
However, Thiers came up against one big obstacle, the National Guard of Paris. This was a citizen militia force, raised from the citizens of each area primarily, in the first place, for service in that area. Workers were at first largely kept out but more and more they were allowed in under the pressure of the siege.
By early 1871 the great majority of all Paris citizens were members of the National Guard, which numbered 300,000 all told. It was predominantly working class and it had arms. It still had arms when the regular force was disarmed.
The government began the process of disarming the workers by firstly depriving them of their pay and secondly withdrawing the suspension of rent and debt repayments introduced during the siege. Thirdly, on March 18, 1871, the government sent troops to seize 150 cannons belonging to the National Guard.
Women waiting in food queues sounded the alarm, which was a signal for an armed rising in Paris. Control of Paris was taken over by the central committee of the National Guard, elected by the battalions. The rising was virtually bloodless. The people seized the City Hall and raised the red flag.
The central committee of the National Guard proclaimed itself a provisional government. (In its first manifesto it said: “The proletarians of Paris, amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling class, have understood that the hour has struck for them to solve the situation by taking the direction of public affairs into their own hands.”)
Thiers and his followers fled to the old royal city, Versailles. His army now numbered a mere 20,000, poorly organised and equipped with no will to fight. But the National Guard did not pursue and destroy them. It let them escape — a costly mistake.
The central committee of the National Guard, socialist in character, baulked at the huge responsibility suddenly confronting them. They sought to evade this responsibility by ordering elections for a Commune to which they might transfer all power. These were held on March 26, 1871, and the following day 200,000 citizens of Paris, streamed through the streets to inaugurate that Commune.
Marx gave the answers to these questions in a speech delivered two days after the final suppression of the Commune. He said the Commune was “essentially a working class government … the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour”. The working class could not win socialism under the old form of state, even where it was a parliamentary democracy. It could not, Marx said, “simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes”. The Commune, then, was a new kind of state that made it possible for the workers to enforce their will and create a socialist society.
It was not organised on parliamentary lines but as a working political body taking on both legislative and executive duties. All officials were elected, subject to recall and in receipt of a salary not exceeding the wages of a skilled worker. These measures were intended to stem the growth of a new worker bureaucracy.
The Commune was elected by universal suffrage. It had about 90 members, and its first act was to abolish the old regular army and declare the National Guard as the sole military force in Paris. All able to bear arms were to be enrolled in it.
Next, the Commune set itself to break up the bureaucracy. It set up a number of commissions, each numbering six to eight people — a military commission, an education commission and so on. Francois Jourde, a young accountant, a member of the International, led the Treasury commission. Leo Frankel, a young jewelry worker either German or Hungarian by birth and also a member of the International, led a very competent commission on labour, industry and exchange.
These commissions needed officials to work through, of course, but they aimed to keep these down to a minimum and made them subject to recall at any time. Judges were to be elected by the people and subject to recall. The police were turned into servants of the Commune.
The Commune was international in its outlook and confirmed in their posts all foreigners elected to it. It appointed as its military chief a Pole, Jaroslav Dombrowski. He led the defence of Paris skillfully and courageously in the most difficult circumstances, dying a hero's death.
The Commune was also secular in its outlook. It separated church and state. No more state funds were to be used for religious purposes. Church property was declared the property of the nation. Education was made secular.
The Commune’s social measures were outstanding. It annulled the payment of all house rents over a nine-month period and forbade the eviction of tenants. It extended the time for debt repayments and eased the terms. It closed the pawnshops. It prohibited night baking. It fixed bread prices. It abolished the right of employers to impose fines on workers on various pretexts. It set up labour exchanges in every part of Paris, urged because of the widespread unemployment that had developed. It managed to feed daily on an emergency basis upwards of 300,000 people in urgent need.
It has also more far-reaching plans that it had no time to operate. It took a record of all factories shut down by the employers and worked out plans for the work in these to be operated by the workers formed in co-operative associations, which would later be integrated in one large trade union.
It was a remarkable program to have set in motion in such a short time, even if there were some vital things that the Commune missed doing, notably taking over the Bank of France with its vast holdings of more than 2000 million francs and its great power over the nation’s economic life. The Commune left that nerve centre of capitalism untouched.
About one third of the members of the Commune were industrial wage earners, another third or more were recognised members of the working class movement, and the working class character of the Commune showed up ever more clearly. At first it had the support also of the large Paris middle-class — shopkeepers, traders, merchants. These had been ruined by Napoleon’s policies and his heavy taxes, they were angry over the betrayal of France to the Germans, they were pleased with the Commune law on debt payments.
Later their support fell away, and for the most part it was only the workers who finally remained faithful to the Commune. And the peasants, historically such a big factor in French society? They were, as a whole, deeply conservative. The great French revolution of 1789 had given them land and they feared the Communist bogeyman coming to take it away. But they hated the war, the taxes, the tyranny of the local officials, in fact the whole Napoleon III regime.
The plan worked out by the Paris Communards, for Communes to be elected in every country, town and village, with decentralisation of powers and no swollen bureaucracy and no great standing army, was in fact the peasants’ real hope. But the Paris Commune was never able to get close enough links with the peasants to be able to answer the lying propaganda against it.
In the municipal elections held throughout the country towards the end of the Commune the reactionaries lost ground very badly, which suggests that the worker-peasant alliance might have been forged if there had been more time.
Thiers began shelling Paris on April 1. At first he found it very hard to rally an army, but Bismarck helped him out by simply releasing tens of thousands of French prisoners of war and sending them to Versailles well-armed. He knew full well that the consequences to Paris would be.
This deal between the French and German butchers caused Marx to make the comment: “Class rule is no longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform. The national governments are as one against the proletariat.’
The last weeks of the Commune were to a degree clouded, not only by the advance of Thiers’s forces but by internal divisions. These were partly of a personal, partly of an organisational nature, but at bottom they were ideological.
Traditionally there were two main schools of socialism in France and they both strongly influenced the Commune. The followers of Blanqui were the majority. Blanqui was above all a master conspirator, who spent half his long life in jail and was in jail during the Commune.
Blanqui believed in a working-class elite. He believed power would have to be seized by a small, highly organised minority. True, his followers adapted themselves on the whole very well to the situation in which the masses were rising up through the Commune, the National Guard, and so on. But they had to learn their lesson as they went, and the tendency to tight control from the top asserted itself towards the finish, especially in the appointment of a powerful Committee of Public Safety of five people.
The members of the International opposed that measure but were continually being outvoted at this stage.
The other main school was that of Proudhon, who was really the spokesman of the peasants and artisans, the small independent people struggling for their independence. He hated large-scale industry and in general opposed trade unions. His followers also learnt as they went and found themselves approving of plans that were the opposite of their doctrine.
But one is struck in reading the day-to-day record of the Commune by the absence of a common guiding idea among its participants. One is struck by their many fine qualities, their fine record despite everything, but there were heart-breaking hours of futile dissension at some of the most critical stages, showing a dire need for clear, correct political direction.
During May, nearly all the energies of the Commune were devoted to the battle against the attacking armies, which closed in steadily, and when they reached the occupied areas around the city the Prussian forces stepped aside to let them through. Thiers’s troops met with little resistance in the wealthy West End of Paris, but the workers’ suburbs fought heroically from street to street and from house to house.
Many Paris building and monuments were destroyed in the fighting, some burnt by the retreating Communards, others shelled by the invading forces. Day by day the men and women of the Commune fought on, fiercely, knowing their own position was desperate but knowing also that by their own sacrifices they were helping to build the future of humanity.
On the May 28, 1871, the Commune fell.
After the battle came the revenge — a savage, cold-blooded massacre that lasted until mid-June. Between 20,000 and 30,000 working men, women and children were shot and nearly 50,000 were more arrested of whom 15,000 were executed, jailed or sent to New Caledonian. In all, Paris lost about 100,000 of its people, including more than half the workers in some trades.
Marx said: “The civilisation and justice of the bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their master. Then this civilisation and justice stand forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge. A glorious civilisation indeed, the great problem of which is how to get rid of the heaps of corpses it made after the battle was over.”
Thiers then said: “An end has been put to socialism for a long time.” But there he was wrong. Just five years later a workers’ congress was again held in Paris. Not long afterwards a French Socialist Party was formed with a Marxist program. This organisation in 1920 turned itself into the French Communist Party by majority vote.
The Commune, meanwhile, stirred the whole socialist movement throughout Europe. In March 1917, after the overthrow of the Russian Tsar, while Lenin was still in exile, he wrote his so-called Letters from Afar to the Russian workers, in which he urged them to follow “the path indicated by the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871”. In March 1918, after the socialist revolution in Russia, Lenin spoke of the great advantage the Russian worker had because, he said, “we are standing on the shoulders of the Paris Commune”.
In outline we produce some of the mistakes emphasised in Marx’s The Civil War in France, a document that was later adopted by the First International.
1. After March 18, the National Guard should have marched against Versailles, and could have done so with every chance of annihilating the enemy. The delay of ten days while elections were held for setting up the Commune gave the Versailles government time to organise counter-revolution.
2. Handing power over so quickly to the Commune added to confusion. The National Guard was more united and stronger in proletarian character than was the Commune and consequently could have acted in a more united and speedy manner.
3. Relying on a compromise with Versailles, the National Guard did not deprive the bourgeoisie of the vote. Seventeen representatives elected by bourgeois vote refused to participate in the Commune and resorted to all manner of organised treachery before being suppressed.
4. The Bank of France fell into the hands of the Commune. Its holdings amounted to three milliard francs, but instead of appropriating this money and using it to bargain against the bourgeoisie, petty bourgeois influences prevailed on the Commune and this wealth treated as private property, carefully guarded for the bourgeoisie.
5. Similar inducements and the ideology of “justice for all” led to the Commune rejecting a proposal to confiscate the railways and annual debt obligations.
6. Failure to contact the provinces led to isolated insurrections in Lyons, Marseilles and Saint Etienne, which were easily suppressed.
7. The Commune failed to understand the class war and consequently the methods necessary for victory. Force of circumstance compelled the Commune on to the road of class dictatorship, but with a lack of understanding. On the other hand, Thiers and his government at Versailles were determined to wage the class war with the objective of crushing the Commune.
The manner in which the Commune was elected and its activities distinguish it clearly from our present-day bourgeois parliamentary democracy. Says Marx:
The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time … Instead of deciding once in three years or six which members of the ruling class was to represent the people in parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.
Engels, in his introduction to the third edition of the Civil War in France, in which he criticises the German labour leaders for thinking a change in the bourgeois state secures a victory for the workers, wrote:
They think they have made a fearfully bold step in getting rid of their belief in the hereditary monarchy and pinning their faith to the democratic republic. Actually, the state is nothing but the machine by which one class suppresses another, in a democratic republic no less than in a monarchy.
Engels concludes the introduction with a challenge to the German movement:
Would you know, gentlemen, what this dictatorship is like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat.