Who were the Anarchists of the Paris Commune?

[Jitsu]

For a long time I have been interested in the French Revolution, and a fan of the Play "Marat Sade". I especially like the moral debate between Jean Paul Marat and DeSade.

However, it is my understanding that the Jacobians were not the only significant faction of the peoples council. Im wondering if anybody knows anything about people who were vocal or influential advocates of Anarchism during what I consider a progressive yet authoritarian reign.

[Rawthentic]

I'm not so sure, but it is important to remember that they created the dictatorship of the proletariat, what anarchists freak about when they hear.

[Jitsu]

I would rather call it the "Dictatorship of the Vanguard", since it isnt actually the workers who are in control, but an elite class who makes decisions "on their behalf".

However, I understand that there was a major Anarchist contingent, though the Paris Commune was more on the Jacobian and Authoritarian Communist trip.

Kropotkin had a few things to say about it....a bit of a long winded speech.
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/ANARCHIST_ARCHI...n/pcommune.html (http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/ANARCHIST_ARCHIVES/kropotkin/pcommune.html)

[Enragé]

Originally posted by [email protected] 15, 2007 02:51 am
I'm not so sure, but it is important to remember that they created the dictatorship of the proletariat, what anarchists freak about when they hear.
not true really

they just distance themselves from the term (not the practice) because it has been discredited so often.

[Rawthentic]

Jitsu, I recommend you read Marx's Civil War in France before making such comments. Because the workers were in control of everything.

NKOS, I feel what you say.

[Tower of Bebel]

Anarchist was a swear word used against many who were in favour of radical political and economic changes.

[gilhyle]

Your first reference seems to me to be to the original French Revolution - Marat Sade takes place in that context rather than in the context of the Paris Commune, which was eighty years later. Wasn't there a guy called Anarchis Cloots or something like that ?......dont know much about him. Not even sure he was an anarchist in any meaningfull way. I think it was William Godwin who made the first real transition to a recognisable anarchist view and he was English and played no part in the French Revolution - although there was a guy called Radicati in the early eighteenth century who (it has always surprised me that) anarchism has never claimed.

As to the Paris Commune; of course Bakunin set himself up in Lyon for a few days, declared a revolution and had to flee. His followers in Paris had a low profile; but you must remember (if I have my timelines correct) that at that stage they were all First Internationalists, so its is not easy to distinguish between sympathisers of Marx and those of Bakunin. Marx had a personal representatative in Paris, but otherwise Vaillant and the other First Internationalists were not really 'Marxists', although they had much sympathy with him. I cant remeber the names of the Paris Commune exiles who subsequently sided with Bakunin.

The Proudhonist faction might have been the most likely 'anarchist' grouping, but their role was a bit pathetic, it was the Jacobins, some Balnquists and the minority FIrst International Faction who led the final struggle. At the earlier phases when Proudhonists were around, so were anti-bonapartists of all hues and none.....just cant remember any out and out anarchists....

Not anarchism's finest moment if memory serves.

[gilhyle]

Stupid me there was that woman Louise Michel, incredible fighter, but a bit mad

[Circle A]

Originally posted by [email protected] 15, 2007 11:26 pm
Stupid me there was that woman Louise Michel, incredible fighter, but a bit mad
Louise Michel became Anarchist after the Paris Commune.

[chimx]

Jitsu, I recommend you read Marx's Civil War in France before making such comments. Because the workers were in control of everything.

The Civil War in France is not a good historical monograph. It was written immediately after the communes defeat and is full of factual errors. In particular, the class nature of the commune itself was dominated by the middle class, such as doctors and republican journalists, and petite-bourgeois artisans. The industrial proletariat was extremely lacking.

Because of this, the political ideology was heavily tied to nostalgic republicanism of '48 and Jacobin fetishes of '79

[Rawthentic]

But it showed what the dictatorship of the proletariat really was. What Marx deducted from this, which is the most important concept, is that the working class must smash the bourgeois state and create its own.

[chimx]

while the working class may have smashed the bourgeois state, it was artisans and middle class professionals that created a new state with the paris commune.

[gilhyle]

Originally posted by [email protected] 16, 2007 03:18 am

Jitsu, I recommend you read Marx's Civil War in France before making such comments. Because the workers were in control of everything.

The Civil War in France is not a good historical monograph. It was written immediately after the communes defeat and is full of factual errors. In particular, the class nature of the commune itself was dominated by the middle class, such as doctors and republican journalists, and petite-bourgeois artisans. The industrial proletariat was extremely lacking.

Because of this, the political ideology was heavily tied to nostalgic republicanism of '48 and Jacobin fetishes of '79
Dont really agree with this - the errors are mostly trivial : most commentators say the opposite: given that it was a contemporary work written when all sorts of inaccurate stories were going around it is incredibly accurate - the bulk of it bears comparison with the main history books.

Marx didnt analyse the political nature of the Commune from the sociological origins of its main actors : he knew well from private reports who these people were and what they stood for.

But if you want a history book actually written by Marx, you could try Prosper-Olivier Lissaragay's book ghosted by Marx- hard to get.

Lissargay, so the myth goes was the last man standing on the last barracade, kept firing till his gun broke or ran out of bullets and then walked calmly away, disappearing as all around him were slaughtered.

Louise Michel was an anti-authoritarian at the time of the Commune; I dont think her politics changed much thereafter, though all the world around her changed.

[chimx]

Dont really agree with this - the errors are mostly trivial : most commentators say the opposite: given that it was a contemporary work written when all sorts of inaccurate stories were going around it is incredibly accurate - the bulk of it bears comparison with the main history books.

The problem with Marx's book is that he misunderstands the nationalist foundation of the 1871 rising.

[Rawthentic]

Well that might have been, but Marx correctly pointed out that the Commune was a worldwide struggle.

[chimx]

could you elaborate on what you mean by that?

[Rawthentic]

Well, since communism is a worldwide struggle because capitalism has made the world global in all aspects, Marx pointed out that the Communards struggle was also the struggle of proletarians around the world.

[chimx]

It was certainly fueled at least in part by class conflict, but it was more of a byproduct of the Franco-German war. I mean, how do you take into account that republicans and petit bourgeois were just as active as any of the "proletarian" participants?

[gilhyle]

Im not sure how serious an error that was. The real social basis of the Paris Commune was the intense decline of the craft worker layers of Paris society. For Marx nationalist indignation would not be sufficient to explain for the paris commune.

What I think Marx understated in that work (but I suspect fully understood) was that the Paris Commune was a creation of Thiers who artificially created the counterposition between the versailles forces and Paris with the explicit intention of founding a new French state on the basis of physically eliminating the left.

[Rawthentic]

It was certainly fueled at least in part by class conflict, but it was more of a byproduct of the Franco-German war. I mean, how do you take into account that republicans and petit bourgeois were just as active as any of the "proletarian" participants?
Well, I believe that the non-proletarians had their own goals and methods in mind when it came to the Commune, naturally according to their class outlook.

If they were as active back in 1871, I believe that it could have been a product of an underdeveloped proletariat not being able or politically advanced to draw clear class lines.

I though that Marx wrote in the Civil War in France that all Commune representatives were working-class or "acknowledged representatives of the working-class"?

[chimx]

I though that Marx wrote in the Civil War in France that all Commune representatives were working-class or "acknowledged representatives of the working-class"?

remember when I said, "The Civil War in France is not a good historical monograph." ;)

[Rawthentic]

So that was not true then?

[OneBrickOneVoice]

Originally posted by NKOS+April 15, 2007 09:28 pm--> (NKOS @ April 15, 2007 09:28 pm)
[email protected] 15, 2007 02:51 am
I'm not so sure, but it is important to remember that they created the dictatorship of the proletariat, what anarchists freak about when they hear.
not true really

they just distance themselves from the term (not the practice) because it has been discredited so often. [/b]
well without a state, its pretty impossible to excercise a dictatorship of the proletariat, no? And Hasta, there were anarchists in the Paris Commune because Lenin talked about it in State and Revolution and how they were "claiming it as their own success". I think they were Proudhonists and the like

[Rawthentic]

Yeah, I know there were anarchists, but what I mean that it is just a practical application, that of the worker's state.

But lets not turn this into a sectarian debate, lets focus on the Commune.

[OneBrickOneVoice]

yeah and there were anarchists in alot of revolutions. In some revolutions they fought with the communists and in others against

[gilhyle]

Originally posted by [email protected] 18, 2007 01:06 am

I though that Marx wrote in the Civil War in France that all Commune representatives were working-class or "acknowledged representatives of the working-class"?

remember when I said, "The Civil War in France is not a good historical monograph." ;)
I assume you mean the following "The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time. "

This is true, and particulary so once the sympathisers of Thiers had withdrawn.

I quote an 'historian':

On March 28th Paris went to the polls. From the register of 485,000,220,17 voted. ......compared with the ...municipal elections of the previous november the results did denoe a considerable advance in support of the revolutionaries....Paris' new municipal council was controlled by 'Reds' in a proportion of four to one, and they prompty assumed the title of 'Commune of Paris'.....

P.288 The Fall of Paris, Alastair Horne

[Joseph Ball]

As far as the French Revolution goes the anarchist writer George Woodcock in his book 'Anarchism' claims that the French revolutionary priest Jacques Roux and the enrage Jean Varlet were both of the anarchist tradition although the evidence for it seems a bit thin, Varlet made one anarchist statement, I don't think Roux made any. Roux was a member of the General Council of the Commune in the French Revolution.

I am sure Peter Marshall in 'Demading the Impossible...' has a section on anarchists in the French Revolution, but I can't rememberwhat it says offhand.

The Enrages fought both the aristocrats and the Jacobins. I suppose this sort of revolutionary middle of the roadism bears some resemblance to anarchism. To be honest I think its fair to say there was no developed anarchist thinking during the French Revolution, as oppossed to the Paris Commune.

The whole structure of the Commune, as described by Marx, was anarchist in inspiration. You have the stress on the recallability of elected officials and the insistence they follow mandates from their electors (i.e. they are delegates not representatives). You will find such principles among the anarcho-syndicalists still around today.

The influence of Proudhon was very clear in the kind of federalist structure they proposed for France. There was the emphasis on most political questions being determined at local level with only a few matters dealt with centrally (Marx says these would have been the most important matters but a lot of the Proudonist influenced communards might have disagreed).

The key point is the tension in proletarian revolution between the fact that the state is an evil which we want to get rid off with the fact that an army and police is necessary, before world communism is achieved, to prevent counter-revolution and foreign attempts to suppress revolution. Lenin, Stalin and Mao all grappled with this issue to varying degrees. The promotion by Mao of the ideals of the Paris Commune during the Cultural Revolution is the highest level to which this struggle has been taken so far. But its also worth noting that the Nepalese Maoists are formally re-constituting the structures of revolutionary government in some areas of Nepal (they never really went away, informally speaking), so we should certainly study this process too.

This dialectic illustrates why Marx could praise a political structure that had so much anarchist influence-because Marxists and anarchists both have the same aim-a stateless, communist society. It's just that anarchists think they can leap directly to this, when marxists know this can't be done and there needs to be a tranistion.

[Rawthentic]

The whole structure of the Commune, as described by Marx, was anarchist in inspiration. You have the stress on the recallability of elected officials and the insistence they follow mandates from their electors (i.e. they are delegates not representatives).
Actually, Marx saw this as the dictatorship of the proletariat, so I don't know how this can be called "anarchist."

[rebelworker]

I think you, and many anarchists misunderstand the true m meaning of the POD.

[Rawthentic]

POD? You mean DOP? No, I understand it quite well.

[whoknows]

how did we go off on the commune? Brother Jitsu is asking about THE French Revelution.
but since we're here now, do something for me. has any one read the following and if so which are progressive and useful and which are reactionary?

'Paris Commune" David Shafer
"Surmounting the Barricade" Carolyn Eicher
'Paris Babylon" Christiansen
'Insurgent Identities" Gould
'Revolutionary Exiles"