Interpretation of the Commune

By Lain Diez (Santiago di Chile)

1. The 28th of May, 1871, marks the end of an episode that shook European society and the whole world—the Commune of Paris. Since then, humanity has been shaken by so much more telling blows and disasters that this episode appears to be of secondary significance if it is judged only by its material proportions and the spectacular features of the events. However, from the ruins of 1871 there emerged a myth that gave nourishment to the revolutionary optimism for three-quarters of a century, that inspired beautiful columns and presided over the works of great creators of ideas and history. On the contrary, from the catastrophe of the second World War there remains nothing but desolate ruins and a pessimism invading the hearts and finding its theoretical expression even in the programs of those parties and individuals who had looked at the proletarian revolution as the culmination of their struggles and as a long-contemplated denouement. For this reason, it is good to dive once more into the record of the Commune, and, across the classical interpretations to release the brief and heroic pages of this memorable episode.

2. In spite of the impending schism of the First International, the two camps, that of Marx, as well as that of Bakunin, embraced with equal fervor the cause of the Commune, and, by a paradoxical identity of evaluation, both acknowledged the great import of the movement. Bakunin took over the defence of the revolution against Mazzini, who in the columns of his just created journal, Roma del Popolo, violently and unceasingly attacked the Commune, in which he saw nothing but an absurd movement without goal or direction. The importance of Bakunin's interpretation lies in the fact that he did for the socialist opinion of the Latin countries (Italy, Switzerland, Spain and France) what Marx did with his Civil War In France for the socialist sections of Germany, England, and the United States). (1)

3. Naturally, Bakunin regards the Commune as a movement in the direction of his own anarchist federalism. "I am a partisan of the Commune," he wrote in June, 1871, "because after having been crushed and drowned in blood by the hangmen of the monarchist and clerical reaction, it was reborn even mightier in the imagination and the heart of the European proletariat; I am its partisan, most of all, because it has been a bold and very outspoken negation of the State." (Oeuvres IV, 253.)

4. We recognise in these words the ideal of Proudhon, who counted not a few followers among the French militants of the International; but Bakunin adds a conception of his own in regard to the revolutionary development. the logic of the events obliged the democratic and Jacobinic leaders to adapt themselves to the program of the socialist minority. "Those generous Jacobins," remarks Bakunin, "at the head of whom we naturally find Delescluze, great soul and great character, longed ardently above everything else, for the triumph of the revolution; and since there can be no revolutions without masses, and as the masses to-day are entirely possessed by a socialist instinct, and can no longer make any other but an economic and social revolution, the Jacobins in allowing themselves in good faith to be carried away more and more by the logic of the revolutionary movement were at last unconsciously converted into socialists." (Oeuvres IV, 256.)

5. The most remarkable representatives of anarchism sided unreservedly with this judgment of the Commune. To Kropotkin, "the revolution of 1871 was above all a popular revolution. It was the achievement of the people itself, it sprang spontaneously from the masses, and it is among the great masses of the people that it found its defenders, its heroes, its martyrs. . . .At the same time, the spirit that roused it was the idea of the social revolution, certainly vague and perhaps unconscious, but nevertheless an effort to gain at last, after a hundred years of struggle, the true liberty, the real equality for all men. . . .Communal independence was only a means for the people of Paris, the social revolution was its goal." (Pamphlet, ed. London, 1896.)

6. The anarchists, in particular those of the famous Federation Jurassienne, to whom belonged J. Guillaume, the historian of the International, and a violent enemy of Marx, manifested a great surprise in face of the attitude taken by him, and they could not understand that he defended the Commune, and even less that he described it as a proletarian and social revolution. In their view, the Commune meant the negation of all that Marx stood for, and Bakunin went so far as to impute to this great revolutionary the quite natural but petty desire to profit by the enthusiasm that is called forth among the proletariat. "The effect of the Communal insurrection," wrote Bakunin, "made such gigantic impression everywhere that even the Marxists, whose every idea is negated by this revolution, found themselves compelled to pay homage to it. They went even farther, and, contrary to all logic and to their own inner sentiment, they made common cause with its program and its goals. It was a comical travesty, though a necessary one. Nothing else remained for them if they did not want to be repudiated by all, so strong was the surging passion that this revolution called forth in the whole world." (Quoted by Guillaume, L'Internationale, II, 192.) And Guillaume himself, improving on him: "The commune that was a protestation of the federalist idea, had nothing common with the socialist state or "Volksstaat," which the Marxist social democrats inscribed on their banners."

7. Strange error of Guillaume, as the program of the social democrats was not Marxist, not even at the time of the Congress of Gotha in 1875 that united the two current composing the workers' movement in Germany: that of Lassalle, who died in 1864, the most important one, and that of Liebknecht and Bebel, who professed adherence to the teachings of Marx. The latter sharply criticised the theoretical concessions of his partisans, as well as their craving for unity at all costs. He expressed at the same time and in conformity with his evaluation of the Commune an irreducible opposition to the State whose intervention he rejects in all fields, and especially in those of education and of the co-operatives. "What should be entirely rejected is an 'education of the people by the State.'. . . On the contrary, the Government and the Church must be equally excluded from any influence upon the schools." Marx does not even tolerate the intervention of the State in the co-operatives. These latter "have value only in so far as they are independent creations of the workers and are not fostered either by the governments or by the bourgeoisie." And in order to leave no doubt in regard to his anti-Statism, he rages against the unification program as "despite its democratic trimmings, it is tainted through and through with the servile belief of the Lassallean sect in the State." (2) [Servile belief . . . in the State is closer to Marx's German phrase, and seems somewhat stronger, too, than 'belief or subjection' of the State.—K.K..]

8. In the opposite camp, Engels, too, gives proof of a strange lack of comprehension of the anarchist position. "But what is still more remarkable is the correctness of so much that was actually done by the Commune in spite of its Blanquist and Proudhonist composition. Naturally the Proudhonists were chiefly responsible for the economic decrees of the Commune, for those that are praiseworthy as well as those that are not, and the Blanquists were responsible for the political achievements and failures. And in both cases the irony of history decreed—as usually happens when doctrinaires take the helm of the State—that both did the opposite of what the doctrines of their schools prescribed." (3)

9. This peculiar identity of the criterion used in confronting the acts with the theories of the adversary, results from a mistaken estimate of the relative importance of the doctrines and the experience, i.e., of the revolutionary practice. It has become an everyday word to say with Trotsky: "It is the program that makes the party (and not the reverse)." The idea, the theory, are thus allowed to occupy a pre-eminent place at the cost of the sentiment, of the instinct and the will of the masses, of their spontaneous action. In practice, Trotsky never went so far as Lenin, who did not hide his scepticism in respect to the workers' initiative and his contempt of the "adorers of spontaneity." Rosa Luxemburg, on the contrary, regarded the "self-activation" (the word used by Rosa Luxemburg) of the masses as the fundamental condition of success in the revolutionary fight.

10. We must remember that Lenin maintained that "the working class, left to its own resources, can develop not more than a merely and exclusively trade-unionist consciousness, i.e., the conviction of the need to group itself into associations, to fight a battle against "the boss," to demand from the government such or such a law that is needed for the workers, etc." And he proceeds to an even more extreme position by adding, further down, in a peremptory manner, that "in Russia the theory of the social democracy developed quite independently from the spontaneous currents of the workers' movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable consequence from the ideological development of the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia." (4.) On this subject one may also consult the two essays of Rosa Luxemburg, Leninism or Marxism? and The Russian Revolution, and the additional evidence presented by Sprenger in his remarkable essay about Bolshevism. (5.)

11. In order to support this dualist concept of the socialist development, his theory of the co-existence and of the parallel evolution of the workers' movement and of the ideology, Lenin leans on the authority of Kautsky, who had then just stated his opinion on this point in connection with a proposed change of the platform of the Austrian party. The views quoted by Lenin in 1902 from Kautsky's article in Die Neue Zeit (vol. XX, 1901-02, pp 68ff) run as follows: "In this context the socialist consciousness is made to appear as a direct and necessary result of the proletarian class struggle. But this is incorrect. . . . The modern socialist consciousness can only arise on the basis of a profound scientific insight. In fact, present-day economic science is a preliminary condition for socialist production, just as much as is present-day technology, while the proletariat even with the best of intentions can not create either the one or the other; both emerge from the present process of society. However, the carrier of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia (underlined by K. Kautsky); modern socialism originated in the minds of certain individual members of that layer; they handed it on to the most advanced and most distinguished proletarians, who in their turn introduce it into the class struggle of the proletariat wherever conditions permit. For this reason the socialist consciousness is something that is introduced into the class struggle of the proletariat from without, and not something that has arisen congenitally from within." This essential identity between the thought of the "renegade" Kautsky and that of Lenin has had a number of grave consequences for the fate of the Russian revolution and of the world, more important than the differences of second order referring to the greater or lesser proportion of democracy or dictatorship, or the greater or lesser dose of terror which constitute the central theme of the polemics of Lenin and Trotsky against Kautsky and which have only served to obscure the underlying problem.

12. The explanation of the "paradox" of the Commune is easily found if one takes account of a fundamental aspect of Marxism that has been far too much neglected in the Leninist history as well as in the Bolshevik practice. I refer to the primary philosophy of Marxism that is summed up in the thesis according to which "the main social ideas and spiritual trends express the aims of the classes, i.e., the needs of social development, and change with the class struggles themselves. . . . This is the content of Marxism, as it grows among the workers as a living and stirring power, as the theory expressing their growing power of organisation and knowledge." (6.) This interpretation agrees with the Marxist thesis of the determination of ideas by society or, more strictly conceived, by the classes. It agrees with its most general philosophic formula according to which it is not the idea that determines the being, but on the contrary the being that determines the idea. (7.) The secret of the success of a revolutionary theory consists exactly in its power to interpret and to express the struggle of a class for its emancipation. This is the reason why Marx adapted his ideal communism to the real communism that strove to assert itself in the Paris of 1871 and that was only a certain stage of the development of the French proletariat which had originated from the Sections of the Commune from 1791 to 1793.

13. The dualism of Lenin which justified his critics of the left, Pannekoek, Ruhle, Sprenger, Mattick amongst others, to speak of the bourgeois role of Bolshevism, derives from his pessimist conception of the creative capacity of the proletariat on the one hand, and, on the other hand, from his authoritarian and ultra-centralist concept of organization. The Bolshevik party, with its iron discipline, was an excellent weapon for the conquest of power, but it was not fit to arouse the struggle of ideas in the hearts of the working class nor to develop its capacities for criticism and to stimulate all its peculiar and creative abilities for the purpose of sustaining genuinely proletarian institutions that would be apt to inaugurate a new era in the history of human civilization. Trotsky was aware of the danger. In 1904, in his controversy with Lenin, he wrote: "The organization of the party substitutes itself for the party; the central committee substitutes itself for the organization; the dictator substitutes himself for the central committee." The evolution of "the workers' state" reproduced this scheme of Trotsky, for the new form of government was not more or less than the party made into State. It is true that historic circumstances, among them the isolation and the backward state of Russia, as well as its huge peasant population, permitted the rapid rise of a parasitic bureaucracy and the degeneration towards a regime of dictatorial State capitalism.

14. However, the historic circumstances are after all only conditioning factors that may delay, accelerate or diverge a movement to a certain extent. What really determines the general law of its development is the inner logic of a movement. And this again is nothing but the reflection of the play of forces aiming at a balance. Among these forces, the decisive weight rests with the conscious volition of the party that assumes the historic responsibility of the movement. Thus, the State that arose from the coup of October was nothing else but the continuation of the power of the Bolshevik party whose orientation was determined by the own laws of this party, together with the tasks which the particular situation of Russia imposed and with the personal conceptions of Lenin. The convergence of the material current and of the ideological current concentrated itself in the Bolshevik party, and, at the eve of the "coup d'etat" endowed it with a determining specific weight, that from day to day acquired a more and more decisive importance from the instant in which the Bolsheviks consolidated their power. To oppose the sound theory of Bolshevism of "before" to the despotic practice of "after," with its elimination of sovietism as a dominant political factor, means to fall into a new social illusionism that raises itself as a formidable obstacle against the efforts of the working class to find the path to its liberty.

15. Even Trotsky, in his admirable History of the Russian Revolution, and in his polemics with Stalin, has contributed to separating the principles of the development of the U.S.S.R. from its historic contents; he concentrated his attention on the conditioning circumstances, the details of the economic structure, in short, on the form. It is a characteristic feature of Bolshevism, exaggerated by the Stalinist practice, and in general by the bureaucratic spirit, to sacrifice the essence to the form, as has been demonstrated by Marx in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. (8.) This process of dissociation imposed itself on Trotsky, who, although aware of the danger of the bureaucratization and fighting against it with all his strength, alas too late, declined to find his historic antecedents in Bolshevism. His idealization of the Bolshevik party, after having incorporated himself in it—in part the consequence of a revolutionary optimism, which never abandoned him—is a remarkable example of "before" and "after" that is characteristic of the wake of a great historic commotion. He could find a theoretical justification for his "Leninism" in the accidental coincidence of his theory of the permanent revolution with the theory of the continued revolution sketched in an article on "The Stages, Tendencies and Perspectives of the Revolution," that had been written at the beginning of 1908 (Selected Works, III, 134-5). It had anticipated the revolutionary tactics of 1917 and the abandonment of the idea of stopping at the bourgeois and agrarian stage of the revolution, which until the Theses of April of 1917 had inspired the program of the Bolshevik party. It is certain that the personality of Lenin contributed to the decisive step taken by Trotsky, besides such other and secondary aspects as the isolation that threatened him more and more, as his group of Mezhrayontsi was crumbling under his eyes, while concurrently the Bolshevik party was constantly growing both in the number of its followers and by the support of the working masses. His adhesion to Bolshevism was for him a question of political life or death, and, by the "realism" that becomes a great agitator, he understood the necessity of a step that, though fruitful for a good number of his revolutionary initiatives; comprised the secret of his future impotence. There are few historical examples that could present in a more tragic manner, and with more sinister consequences for the fate of humanity, what is illustrated by the singular maxim of Goethe: "In the first step we are free, in the second we are slaves."

16. The Commune of Paris became a favorite topic for all those who, attached to the norms of the Marxist education, studied the past for their present orientation and for deriving from it the strategic and tactical lessons of the revolution, and so to enable themselves to wage the struggle in a given situation. Lenin and Trotsky have dedicated to it many pages of their writings. However, the reader is left with the impression that they have rather looked for a parallel with the Russian revolution in order to exalt the success of the latter in comparison with the failure of the insurrection of '71. Their interpretation reveals a hardly dissimulated apologetic intention, and does not present an explanation of the present through the past, but, on the contrary, of the past through the present. They project the revolution October and the Bolshevik dictatorship upon the insurrection of March, and the personal problems they had to face themselves, upon the scenery of the Commune. Trotsky, in particular, finds in its lack of consistent terrorism one of the chief reasons of its defeat. (9.) That is why the Address of the First International, entirely written by Marx, remains the outstanding document for the evaluation of the episode of the Commune. Nowhere else is it possible to find an equally exact and vivid picture of its essential features. There is no example in socialist literature of an equally eloquent and passionate defence of a lost cause. Profound analysis, crushing moral portraits, burning indignation, biting irony—all these blend to accomplish a well-balanced literary form that is ennobled through an ardent passion of justice and truth. Marx's Civil War in France was summed up by Engels in the following words: "Well, gentlemen, do you want to know what the dictatorship of the proletariat means? Look at the Commune of Paris. That was the dictatorship of the Proletariat."

17. The verdict passed on the Commune by the founders of scientific socialism naturally raises the problem of the evaluation of the Spanish revolution. The socialists formerly grouped around Living Marxism (10)—Mattick, Pannekoek, Korsch and a number of other who refer themselves to the movement of the Workers' Councils and who to-day represent the most authentic form of the Marxist thought—were certainly right in taking an attitude of sympathy and admiration towards it. Aside from purely political errors it is incontestable that the collectivization applied by the FAI and the CNT in Spain in 1937 has been much more in the tradition and in the further revolutionary extension of the Paris of 1871 than the Bolshevik practice of an authoritarian and centralized socialism that has only succeeded in creating a convenient field for bureaucratic degeneration. The achievements of the economic regime in Catalonia were remarkable and surpassed all predictions. the final defeat, following the treason of the "democratic" powers, and the blackmail of Stalin, can not obscure the fact of the success of this collectivist attempt, that made it possible for the loyalist armies to make a good stand for more than two years against a much superior and powerfully armed enemy. The Spanish revolution was a socialist victory that turned into a military defeat, in contradistinction from the Russian revolution as a military victory that turned into a socialist defeat. However, the legacy of the revolution in Catalonia is positive and demonstrates the superiority of the worker's initiative, of his class-organization for solving "from the bottom to the top" the problems of communistic production and distribution. It is therefore with full justification that we can say of the civil war in Spain, in parody of Engels: "Do you want to know what the dictatorship of the proletariat means? Look at the Commune of Catalonia."

Bibliography:—
(1) Edward S. Mason, "The Paris Commune," MacMillan, New York, 1930. From this coldly objective book we draw the texts of Bakunin, Kropotkin and Guillaume quoted in this article.

(2) Marx, "Critical Comments on the Platform of the German Labor Party, 1875" The Gotha Program, by Workers' Literature Bureau, Melbourne, 1946.

(3) Engels: Introduction to the third ed. of Marx: "The Civil War In France" (Address of the General Council of the W.M.I.A.), ed. Kerr, Chicago, 1934, p. 21.

(4) Lenin: "What Is to Be Done?" 1902, Spanish ed. by Claridad, Buenos Aires, 1938, p. 45.

(5) Rudolph Sprenger: "Bolshevism, Its Roots, Its Role, Its Class-concept, Its Method," published by International Review, New York, s/d (1937?).

(6) Anton Pannekoek: "Lenin as Philosopher." A critical examination of the philosophical basis of Leninism. English ed. by New Essays, New York, 1948, pp. 67-68.

(7) Marx-Engels: "Ludwig Feuerbach," chap. II, Idealism and Materialism.

(8) Consult also S. Frank: "The Bureaucratic Spirit," in New Essays (continuation of Living Marxism), vol. VI, No. 3, 1943, pp. 17-23.

(9) Trotsky: "Terrorism and Communism" (Anti-Kautsky), London, 1935 (chap. V).

(10) Living Marxism, particularly vol. IV, No. 3, May, 1938, and No. 6, April, 1939.