'the world's first Marxist society'

  1. bricolage
    bricolage - 21st March 2010, 13:35
    Do you think this is really an accurate way to define the Commune? Even Marx later admitted 'the majority of the Commune was in no wise socialist, nor could it be'. This is not an attempt to denigrate the legacy or achievements of the Commune just to suggest we need to approach it in an honest manner.
  2. Weezer
    Weezer - 21st March 2010, 19:23
    Do you think this is really an accurate way to define the Commune? Even Marx later admitted 'the majority of the Commune was in no wise socialist, nor could it be'. This is not an attempt to denigrate the legacy or achievements of the Commune just to suggest we need to approach it in an honest manner.
    The same could argued for any revolutionary socialist/Marxist society.

    They will always be people who argue that the USSR is state capitalist and/or degenerated worker's state. They will always be people argue that the USSR was healthy worker's state.

    Every society taken over by workers does not strictly follow what Marx said, depending if Anarchists or Leninists or ___ists took over said territory, due to the dogma each strain of Marxism has. They will never be a perfect worker's state or stateless society, but that doesn't mean it isn't for workers and by workers.

    Look at the history of the Paris Commune, and tell me how it can't be socialist.
  3. bricolage
    bricolage - 22nd March 2010, 10:49
    But this wasn't about following what Marx said (the actual impact of 'Marxism' on the Communards was negligible) this was about Marx assessing the Commune after it had happened. In any case you are right we should look beyond what a few dead white men might have said and I have studied the history and you cannot conceivably argue it was a socialist society, there was no concrete seizure of the social means of production, they didn't even take the bank! The most commonly used example for the Commune being socialist is the 16th April decree but if you look at it it only referred to abandoned workshop and they were happy to pay the owners compensation, I don't even think many (if any) got collectivized, most probably due to the short amount of time they had available to do so.
    Once again this is not to slander the Commune, it was a fantastic time and we can learn lots from it but it was not socialist by any mark.
  4. A.R.Amistad
    A.R.Amistad - 2nd April 2010, 05:17
    *deleted*
  5. RedZelenka
    RedZelenka - 28th November 2010, 13:22
    The Paris Commune wasn't Marxist. It was communist/socialist. It had as much basis in Babeuf as it did in Marx.
    Bricolage, you say it wasn't socialist. Why not? What definition do you have of socialism that it has not lived up to?
  6. Rooster - 26th March 2012, 09:56
    The Paris Commune wasn't Marxist. It was communist/socialist. It had as much basis in Babeuf as it did in Marx.
    Bricolage, you say it wasn't socialist. Why not? What definition do you have of socialism that it has not lived up to?
    Marx said that it wasn't socialist and nor could it be.

    http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx...s/81_02_22.htm

    For one, there still were wages and class society. Bourgeois property was not expropriated in any large extent. It was just located within Paris. It provided a frame work for which these things could have happened but what Marx is saying, the best they could have done is reached a compromise with Versailles. Engels called it the DotP.

    Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
    http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx...postscript.htm

    And the thing that impressed them was that there was a great expansion of democracy, the elected could be instantly recalled by the electors, etc. You could vaguely equate this with the Petersburg Soviet in Russia before the October "revolution" but you could not really apply this to the whole Soviet experience.