Revisiting the Paris Commune of 1871: “Glorious Harbinger of a New society”

By Sandra Bloodworth

Republished from Marxist Left Review.

Eleanor Marx wrote of the Paris Commune:

It is time people understood the true meaning of this Revolution; and this can be summed up in a few words… It was the first attempt of the proletariat to govern itself. The workers of Paris expressed this when in their first manifesto they declared they “understood it was their imperious duty and their absolute right to render themselves masters of their own destinies by seizing upon the governmental power”.1

Karl, her father, had addressed the International Workingmen’s Association (known as the First International) on 30 May 1871. He began with: “On the dawn of March 18, Paris arose to the thunder-burst of ‘Vive la Commune!’ What is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalising to the bourgeois mind?”2

Marx went on to describe why he was so inspired. The Paris Commune

was the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as the only class capable of social initiative, even by the great bulk of the Paris middle class – shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants – the wealthy capitalist alone excepted.3

Many of the lessons Marx drew from this momentous event have in the last half century been largely lost to workers struggling to get control over their lives. But if we listen to the voices of the women and men of the Commune, if we examine the barbarous response of the National Government headed by the reactionary Adolph Thiers, we find that the lessons are just as relevant to our struggle many years later. As Walter Benjamin argued so poetically:

The class struggle, which always remains in view for a historian schooled in Marx, is a struggle for the rough and material things, without which there is nothing fine and spiritual… [The latter] are present as confidence, as courage, as humour, as cunning, as steadfastness in this struggle, and they reach far back into the mists of time. They will, ever and anon, call every victory which has ever been won by the rulers into question. Just as flowers turn their heads towards the sun, so too does that which has been turned, by virtue of a secret kind of heliotropism, towards the sun which is dawning in the sky of history. To this most inconspicuous of all transformations the historical materialist must pay heed.4

In paying heed I will attempt to capture the incredible atmosphere of joy, experimentation and creativity which flourished. But we cannot flinch from the horror of that terrible last week, known as la semaine sanglante, where at least 30,000 people were slaughtered by a government determined to crush not just the physical presence of this social revolution, but also its spirit. The preparedness of the ruling class to inflict such violence should be burned into the consciousness of every anti-capitalist activist. Any movement with a vision of a new society must confront the vexed question of how to win in the face of such barbarism.

The Commune established a more thoroughly democratic society than capitalism has ever seen before or since. The reforms introduced were far in advance of anything the capitalists had ever sanctioned, some of which still have not been won in many countries. The 150th anniversary of this marvellous event is a good time to revisit the inspiring first steps of the revolutionary workers’ movement, and draw the lessons that can be learnt from its successes and ultimate defeat.

The uprising

It all began as the sun rose over the radical working-class arrondissements5 of Montmartre and Belleville on 18 March 1871. Soldiers began seizing nearly 250 cannon deliberately placed in these working-class areas by the National Guard, a popular Parisian militia. The soldiers had been sent there by the head of the new republican government, Adolphe Thiers. Among other things, Thiers was widely despised for his role in the brutal suppression of workers’ rebellions in 1848.

But contrary to Thiers’ expectation of a swift exercise, the affair spun out of control. The incompetent army had forgotten to bring horses to drag the cannon, which gave the Guardsmen time to fraternise with soldiers. Expecting a treasonous crowd, the soldiers began turning their rifles up as the streets rang with declarations of Vive la République!

The London Times correspondent describes the scene as women came out to buy bread and prepare for the day: “Small savage groups of blouses [were] making cynical remarks upon everybody’s cowardice… ‘If they had only left them to us to guard they would not have been captured so easily’.” This militancy and self-assurance of the working women of Paris, convinced that they could fight better than the men, will reverberate through the whole revolution. Our witness, moving along to the suburb of Belleville, recorded soldiers and Guardsmen finding they had much in common. Let’s pause to witness a typical scene:

There was something intensely exciting in the scene. The uncertainty for a moment whether the men were meeting as friends or enemies, the wild enthusiasm of the shouts of fraternization, the waving of the upturned musket, the bold reckless women laughing and exciting the men against their officers, all combined to produce a sensation of perplexity not unmingled with alarm at the strange and unexpected turn things were taking.6

Fraternisation, courageous defiance by the masses of Paris and mutiny were the hallmark of the day. When troops blocked the entrance to the church of Saint-Pierre to stop anyone ringing the tocsin in order to alert the National Guard and citizens to the danger, workers got into other churches, climbing into the steeples. The tolling of the tocsins brought increasing numbers crowding into the streets.7

The correspondent described these areas as “rugged open spaces where the lawless crowds of these parts love to hold their meetings and park their cannon”. Belleville, side by side with Montmartre on the right bank, is described as “[t]he most solidly working-class district in all of Paris, and the most revolutionary”.8 These cannon were regarded as their cannon, financed by workers’ subscriptions to the National Guard since the revolution of 1848. And they were the only means of defence against the Prussian army shelling the city since Thiers had moved his troops to Versailles. When the Times correspondent queried a National Guardsman about possible fighting, he was rebuked: “Sacrebleu, do you suppose we are going to allow these Canaille to take our cannon without firing a shot?”9 After all, the National Guard had deliberately positioned their cannon to defend these key suburbs.

Hostile crowds quickly gathered to block the soldiers trying to move the cannon. Eyewitness accounts all draw our attention to the large numbers of women and children. Louise Michel, one of the most flamboyant and radical figures of the Commune, later recalled the events at Montmartre:

Montmartre was waking up; the drum was beating. I went with others to launch what amounted to an assault on the hilltop. The sun was rising and we heard the alarm bell. Our ascent was at the speed of a charge, and we knew that at the top was an army poised for battle. We expected to die for liberty.

It was as if we were risen from the dead. Yes, Paris was rising from the dead. Crowds like this are sometimes the vanguard of the ocean of humanity… But it was not death that awaited us… No, it was the surprise of a popular victory.

Between us and the army were women who threw themselves on the cannons and on the machine guns while the soldiers stood immobile.10

General Lecomte three times ordered the soldiers to fire on the crowd. “A woman challenged the soldiers: ‘Are you going to fire on us? On our brothers? On our husbands? On our children?’” Lecomte threatened to shoot any soldier who refused to do just that. As they hesitated, he demanded to know if they “were going to surrender to that scum”. Michel recalled:

[A] non-commissioned officer came out from the ranks and…called out in a voice louder than Lecomte’s. “Turn your guns around and put your rifle butts up in the air!” The soldiers obeyed. It was Verdaguerre who, for this action, was shot by Versailles some months later. But the revolution was made.11

Later, Lecomte and another General, Clément Thomas, were taken prisoner before being shot. This incident would become the centre of controversy for years to come, trotted out by enemies of the Communards to demonstrate their barbarism. Of course, the two men’s role in perpetrating mass violence to crush the revolution of 1848 and Lecomte’s repeated orders to kill women and children are rarely mentioned.

Hostile witnesses viewed events through the jaundiced eyes of those accustomed to wielding unchallenged authority, but the narrative is the same. A Versailles army officer recorded that where he was in charge they were

stopped by a crowd of several hundred local inhabitants, principally children and women. The infantry detachment which was there to escort the cannon completely forgot their duty and dispersed into the crowd, succumbing to its perfidious seductions, and ending by turning up their rifle butts.12

A proclamation by Thiers was posted around the city: the taking of the cannon was “indispensable to the maintenance of order”, the intention of the government was to rid the city of the “insurrectionary committee” propagating “communist” doctrines, threatening Paris with pillage. This slur that the rebels wanted to destroy Paris, issued by the reactionary who had abandoned Paris to be shelled and occupied by the Prussians, was the source of even more determined resistance.

Once the horses arrived, some soldiers succeeded in beginning to move some of the cannon in Belleville. Guardsmen and residents responded by building barricades to physically prevent their removal. The crowd swelled, transforming itself from a mass of spectators to increasingly angry and active participants. One observer wrote that they saw

women and children swarming up the hillside in a compact mass; the artillery tried in vain to fight their way through the crowd, but the waves of people engulfed everything, surging over the cannon-mounts, over the ammunition wagons, under the wheels, under the horses’ feet, paralysing the advance of the riders who spurred on their mounts in vain. The horses reared and lunged forward, their sudden movement clearing the crowd, but the space was filled at once by a back-wash created by the surging multitude.

In response to a call by a National Guardsman, women cut through the horses’ harnesses. The soldiers began dismounting, accepting the offers of food and wine from the women. As they broke ranks they became “the object of frenetic ovations”.13

Some time later the Times correspondent returned to Montmartre and visited the barricade, the first stone of which he had seen laid. It had now

grown to considerable dimensions by reason of the rule which is enforced that every passer must place a stone, a pile of which is placed for the purpose on each side of the street… New barricades were springing up in every direction… It was now midday, and the whole affair wore a most strange and incomprehensible aspect to one not brought up to making barricades… Instead of a government blocking every street as was the case in the morning, a hostile cannon was now looking down every street.14

The barricades would develop their own centres of activity, drama and tragedy which would become a focus for historians. Eric Hazan, in his book The Invention of Paris, a History in Footsteps, includes a history of barricades and their “theatrical role” with reference to the Commune’s use of them.15

Cordons of soldiers had been replaced by National Guards supervising barricade-building. The streets, so quiet first thing in the morning, were now “swarming with [Guardsmen], drums were beating, bugles blowing, and all the din of victory”.16

By midday, General Vinoy, assigned to capture the cannon, was fleeing Paris. A Commune sympathiser wrote in his diary:

Legally we had no more government; no police force or policemen; no magistrate or trials; no top officials or prefects; the landlords had run away in a panic abandoning their buildings to the tenants, no soldiers or generals; no letters or telegrams; no customs officials, tax collectors or teachers. No more Academy or Institute: the great professors, doctors and surgeons had left… Paris, immense Paris was abandoned to the “orgies of the vile multitude”.17

How to explain this seemingly spontaneous mass mobilisation over a few hundred cannon? Paris had been under siege by the Prussians since 19 September 1870 and shelled relentlessly since 5 January. Anger with Thiers was intense. He had gone to war with Germany the previous July for the glory of the French empire. Confronted with defeat by Bismarck’s army, he baulked at the idea of arming the population of Paris. And the bourgeoisie refused to support any defence of Paris while the National Guard, with its working-class membership, remained in control of armaments. It was clear that to win the war with Bismarck, all cities, especially Paris, needed to be mobilised under arms. But the history of France since the revolution of 1789 had been one of recurring social upheavals which terrified the bourgeoisie. An army general later summed up the problem: “the diplomacy of the government and almost all of the defence revolved around one thing: the fear of revolt”.18 So Thiers had conspired with Prussia’s Bismarck to crush radical Paris as a condition of a treaty to end the war. Removing the cannon was part of that process.

“Paris armed is the revolution armed”, remarks Marx. And so Thiers, “by surrendering to Prussia not only Paris, but all France…initiated the civil war they were now to wage, with the assistance of Prussia, against the republic and Paris”.19

Attempting to seize the cannon was in reality simply the trigger which unleashed a well of bitterness fed by poverty and squalor in the overcrowded working-class districts. The restructuring of Paris by Georges-Eugène Haussmann,20 appointed by Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, who ruled from his coup d’état in 1852 until September 1870, had been devastating. New, wide boulevards cut swathes through workers’ districts, destroying 100,000 apartments in 20,000 buildings. This displaced thousands from central Paris, with the poor crowding into Montmartre and Belleville. In the midst of a booming economy, it is estimated that a majority of the working class required government assistance.21 Alongside growing misery, the wealthy enjoyed glitzy arcades packed with elegant stores and cafés within walking distance of their magnificent private residences. As Merriman says, “the bourgeoisie’s day had truly arrived”.22 The rebuilding of Paris, which was meant to stave off social unrest, had instead stoked it for decades.

The victorious movement of March 1871 had brought to life what became known as the Paris Commune. Its task was now to reorganise life in the city, based on principles of justice, equality and freedom from tyranny.

The Commune – a new power

As we follow events over the next 72 days we will witness truly awe-inspiring achievements. Innovative democratic institutions were established. And the experience of taking control over their society inspired mass involvement in debates about all aspects of their lives. They replaced the state with one under their control. They vigorously attempted radical reforms in the family, the conditions of women, in the workplace, and education, well ahead of the times, as they debated the role of science, religion and the arts in society.

Edmond de Goncourt – co-founder of the naturalist school of literature in France and whose will established the Goncourt Academy which annually awards the prestigious French literary prize – left this testimony to the Commune’s proletarian character:

The triumphant revolution seems to be taking possession of Paris…barricades are being put up everywhere, naughty children scramble on top of them… You are overcome with disgust to see their stupid and abject faces, which triumph and drunkenness have imbued with a kind of radiant swinishness…for the moment France and Paris are under the control of workmen… How long will it last?… The unbelievable rules…the cohorts of Belleville throng our conquered boulevard.

He is disgusted by their “mocking astonishment” at their achievement, noting that they wear their shoes without socks! He admits that the “government is leaving the hands of those who have, to go into the hands of those who have not”.23

By midday on 18 March, the population had established a situation of dual power: radical Paris in a standoff with the government in Versailles. On one side was Adolph Thiers, a reactionary through and through. His government, elected as recently as February, had already fled to the decadent safety of Versailles, accompanied by the army and a stream of bourgeois and respectable middle-class figures. Now it operated from the Grand Château of the Bourbon monarchy in Versailles, the reactionary centre of the centuries-old alliance between the Catholic church and the Bourbons. Thiers, determined to crush the Commune, would be backed by all of respectable opinion, both in France and across Europe.

On the other side of the barricades, workers created the most democratic institutions known to humanity at that time. Marx would write of their achievements: “[t]he great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence. Its special measures could but betoken the tendency of a government of the people by the people”.24 Such a state of affairs was a direct threat to the repressive rule of Thiers, the monarchy and the church.

Whenever the oppressed rise up and fight for their rights, a sense of revelry inevitably follows. This is what inspires sympathetic witnesses of revolutions to describe such moments as festivals of the oppressed. Paris in 1871 was no different. Even bitter enemies of the Commune could not but convey the joyous atmosphere in the wake of the victory of 18 March. One recorded the experience of standing in front of the Hôtel de Ville, the Paris town hall now occupied by the Communards, while the names of those elected to form a Commune Committee were read out:

I write these lines still full of emotion… One hundred thousand perhaps, where did they come from? From every corner of the city. Armed men spilled out of every nearby street, and the sharp points of the bayonets, glittering in the sun, made the place seem like a field of lightning. The music playing was the Marseillaise, a song taken up in fifty thousand resolute voices: this thunder shook all the people, and the great song, out of fashion from defeats, recovered for a moment its former energy.

…An immense sea of banners, bayonets, and caps, surging forward, drifting back, undulating, breaking against the stage. The cannons still thundered, but they were heard only in intervals between the singing. Then all the sounds merged into a single cheer, the universal voice of the countless multitude, and all these people had but one heart just as they had but one voice.25

The elected Commune Committee was entrusted with the momentous responsibility of defending the city against Versailles, organising food supplies, care for the wounded; indeed, of reorganising the entire life of the city.

The state

The old state power had been demolished, a significant move Marx emphasised:

[F]or the first time since the days of February 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, and that without any police of any kind. “We,” said a member of the Commune, “hear no longer of assassination, theft, and personal assault; it seems indeed as if the police had dragged along with it to Versailles all its Conservative friends”.

To emphasise the significance of this, Marx puts it in a broader context:

The direct antithesis to the empire was the Commune. The cry of “social republic” [the popular slogan of the mass movement]…did but express a vague aspiration after a republic that was not only to supersede the monarchical form of class rule, but class rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that republic.

Paris, the central seat of the old governmental power, and, at the same time, the social stronghold of the French working class, had risen in arms against the attempt of Thiers…to restore and perpetuate that old governmental power bequeathed to them by the empire. Paris could resist only because, in consequence of the siege, it had got rid of the army, and replaced it by a National Guard, the bulk of which consisted of working men. This fact was now to be transformed into an institution. The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people.26

This revolutionary move was the basis on which the new democracy that Marx celebrates could be built.

The majority of [the Commune Committee’s] 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. 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.

This was a key point Marx emphasised: how elected delegates and government officials can be made accountable. But not just elected delegates. “Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsible, and revocable.”27

Work

Marx concluded that these innovative democratic structures were “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour” and explained:

The political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundation upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labour emancipated…productive labour ceases to be a class attribute.28

The Commune Committee was not just left to get on with decreeing reforms while everything went back to the old normal. Historians have documented the incredible flowering of organisation, debate and social experimentation that took place, adding a tapestry of rich detail which illuminates Marx’s theoretical generalisations. Many of the organisations and their proposals were based on demands which had been discussed by socialists and worker militants for decades. The difference now was that they were not just topics for debate and protest. Now they became the expression of the poor and oppressed as they began to take control of their lives.

The Committee set up a range of Commissions to deal with specific areas. The Jewish-Hungarian worker, Léo Frankel, a member of the International and collaborator of Marx, was appointed minister of labour to deal with workers’ rights and working conditions. Night work by bakers was abolished; employers were banned from reducing wages by levying their employees with fines under any pretext, “a process in which the employer combines in his own person the parts of legislator, judge, and executor, and filches the money to boot”.29

Some issues were complicated due to conflicting priorities. Military supplies were obviously of paramount importance. But the Commune’s purchase of the cheapest equipment did not sit easily beside workers’ demands for decent wages. The commissioner for finance, Proudhonist François Jourde, baulked at rewriting contracts with employers, hardly surprising given the Proudhonists supported private property. But as Frankel pointed out, “the revolution was made exclusively by the working class. I don’t see what the point of the Commune is if we…do nothing for that class”. In response to the workers themselves, new contracts specifying a satisfactory minimum wage were agreed. The employers were not consulted.

An additional clause decreed by the Labour Commission stated that where possible contracts be awarded “directly to the workers’ own corporations”. Workers’ corporations can be understood here to refer to co-operatives, associations and trade unions. They were strongly backed by Frankel’s Commission as a vehicle for socialism. The Commission also decreed that the enterprises of any employers who fled to Versailles were to be taken over by its workers.30

Another of Marx’s collaborators in the International played a key role in influencing the Labour Commission.31 The Russian socialist Elisabeth Dmitrieff was central to establishing the Union des Femmes, or Women’s Union. It was the women’s section of the First International. A mariage blanc32 had provided Dmitrieff with an escape route out of Russia. She had spent the last three months in London, where she met with Marx almost daily, discussing theories of revolution. Prior to that she had joined the International in Geneva, where she had met the future Communards Eugène Varlin and Benoît Malon. According to historian Kristin Ross, the Union des Femmes became the largest and most effective organisation in the Commune.33 It met daily in almost every one of the twenty arrondissements. The membership was dominated by workers in the garment trades: seamstresses, laundresses, dressmakers and so on.34

The Union des Femmes’ discussions included theoretical questions about ending private property and the issues of gender-based inequality, as well as solving the day to day struggle to provide fuel and food to families. At the same time they participated in the defence of the Commune, maintenance of barricades, tending to the sick and wounded. Ross sums up: “In some ways, the Women’s Union can be seen as the practical response to many of the questions and problems regarding women’s labour that had been the discussion topic [for years]”.35

Another historian, Donny Gluckstein, argues: “[t]he Labour Commission’s work was shaped by, and depended absolutely on, the Women’s Union and the trade unions’ workers’ corporations, which in turn were empowered by the commission.”36 Spelling out their mission, the Union des Femmes declared: “We want work, but in order to keep the product. No more exploiters, no more masters. Work and well-being for all”. At their urging, the Commune set up cooperatives to make Guardsmen’s uniforms, which provided well-paid work under the women workers’ control.37

While women suffered special oppression, their working lives were also shaped by the broader conditions facing the working class. They made remarkable moves in the direction towards workers’ control, in spite of limited time and conditions of war: “There were a dozen confiscated workshops, above all those linked to military defence… Five corporations had begun searching out the available workshops, ready for their confiscation”. And state-owned establishments such as the mint and the national print shop were put under workers’ management. Even the café workers, given these leads, began to set up a trade union.38

The radical clubs

The tradition of radical political clubs, inspired by the 1789-92 revolution and revived in 1848, had emerged from the underground in the year leading up to the Commune. They discussed a wide range of issues: political strategy, which reforms to prioritise, women’s rights, attitudes to the church and science, how to better organise defence and strengthen the barricades and more. Previously these issues were confined to radical circles, but now the clubs attracted a wider audience and enthusiastic support for their proposals. Workers were the great majority of participants, but middle-class radicals also joined in. Between 36 and 50 clubs met daily, mostly in the working-class districts. Some were huge, involving thousands, with women playing a prominent role both in their own clubs and in mixed ones with men.39 Many discussions resulted in sending resolutions to the Commune Committee, and there was an ongoing debate regarding its relationship to the clubs.

An anti-Communard gave a sense of the spirit which made the clubs such a vibrant part of the new democracy:

From Rue Druout right up to the Montmartre district the boulevards had become a permanent public meeting or club where the crowd, divided into groups, had filled not only the pavements but also the road to the point of blocking…traffic. They formed a myriad of public assemblies where war and peace were hotly debated.40

Élie Reclus, an ethnographer given responsibility for the management and preservation of the Bibliothèque Nationale, called them “schools for the people”, where constructive debate flourished and a heightened sense of community was created. Ross describes the clubs as “a quasi-Brechtian merging of pedagogy and entertainment”.41

A week after the declaration of the elected Commune Committee, on the initiative of the club in the third arrondissement that was endorsed by the Commune Committee, churches across the city were commandeered as meeting places and organising centres. These venues, unlike street meetings, created a sense of seriousness and permanence in the clubs, even of high drama. Lissagaray, member of the International and author of one of the first books published about the Commune, penned a colourful description of one such meeting:

The Revolution mounts the pulpits…almost hidden by the shadow of the vaults, hangs the figure of Christ draped in the popular oriflamme. The only luminous centre is the reading desk, facing the pulpit, hung with red. The organ and the people chant the Marseillaise. The orator, over-excited by these fantastic surroundings, launches forth into ecstatic declamations which the echo repeats like a menace. The people discuss the events of the day, the means of defence; the members of the Commune are severely censured, and vigorous resolutions are voted to be presented to the Hôtel de Ville the next day.42

It is wonderful to imagine such revolutionary proceedings taking place beneath soaring ceilings and beautiful stained glass windows. Occupying these odes to privilege and power was a constant reminder of the momentous challenge the Commune had thrown down before the bourgeoisie, the monarchy and their ally, the church.

Separating church and state

Marx noted that once the state force was dismantled, the Commune

was anxious to break the spiritual force of repression…by the disestablishment and disendowment of all churches as proprietary bodies… The whole of the educational institutions were opened to the people gratuitously, and at the same time cleared of all interference of church and state. Thus, not only was education made accessible to all, but science itself freed from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had imposed upon it.43

Anti-church sentiment was not just the preserve of small numbers of radicals. The Catholic church had thrown its wealth and power behind Bonaparte’s dictatorship, never concealing its bitter hostility to republicanism. So the growing opposition to Bonaparte was organically anti-clerical, among both middle-class radicals and the urban poor. In the large cities, attendance at religious ceremonies had sharply declined before the revolution, especially among workers. It’s not difficult to see why. The church taught that the poor would be rewarded for their suffering by passing from this vale of tears to the glories of heaven. But to enter that heaven you had to silently endure endless misery. As well, the church, in this time of the Enlightenment and a rapidly changing world, was seen as a bastion of ignorance, summed up by the Syllabus of Errors in 1864 which denounced modern society.44 As Merriman writes: “[t]he church’s close association with people of means had long drawn popular ire; the birth of the Commune merely unleashed it”.45

State laws were strongly influenced by the church’s teachings about the family, women’s role and morality. So the programs for reforms raised in the clubs around such issues were more often than not entwined with anti-religious bitterness.

There were no bounds to the irreverence displayed once the churches were commandeered. Mock masses, holy water replaced with a pile of tobacco, statues of the Virgin Mary dressed in the uniform of women supplying provisions to the National Guard, sometimes with a pipe in her mouth. At the same time the Communards in many cases allowed ceremonies for the devout to go ahead in the mornings before the clubs met. As such the meetings would often take place amidst flowers, crucifixes and other religious paraphernalia left behind from morning mass and other religious events.

Church properties provided much needed venues, a practical issue which just happened to intersect with the anti-church sentiment. Notre-Dame-de-Lorette became a barracks at one stage, then a jail for those arrested for refusing to fight. The Women’s Union’s cooperative was housed in Saint-Pierre in Montmartre, also used as a storage place for munitions and a school for girls. Another became a medical facility.46 In a reversal of the old order, speakers in the clubs insisted that the clergy pay rent to the Commune for use of ecclesiastical spaces for “their comedies”. Proceeds were to go to the widows and orphans of the fighting. The club of Faubourg Saint-Antoine suggested that church bells be melted to make cannon.47

The hostility to the church is a theme in many records of the time. For instance, when the archbishop, who had been arrested, called the head of police and court officials “my children”, the sharp response was: “We are not children – we are the magistrates of the people!” Merriman cites a document in which the archbishop is described as “Prisoner A who says he is a servant of somebody called God”.48

While one third of all students attended religious schools, the church exercised a virtual monopoly over the education of girls, a fact directly related to the lower rates of literacy among women.49 In general, religious education was backward and stifling. A commission headed by a range of artists, teachers and songwriters instigated closing down the church schools and removing religious symbols.50 Where necessary, crowds took direct action to shut schools taught by religious figures, who had never been required to have the qualifications demanded of regular teachers. Many of them resigned, asking for lay teachers to replace them. By May religious teaching was banned in all schools.

Education

Members of the First International were prominent in debating and proposing innovations on a number of intersecting questions around education. The official journal of the Commune records that they were active in organising public educational meetings and reorganising education “on the largest of possible bases”. Ross puts well how central was the issue:

A lived experience of “equality in action”, the Commune was primarily a set of dismantling acts directed at the state bureaucracy and performed by ordinary men and women. Many of these dismantling acts were focused, not surprisingly, on that central bureaucracy: the schools.51

Discussions about education went well beyond secularisation. A third of children had no access to education at all, and the Commune would try to implement compulsory and equal education for both boys and girls. Teachers’ wages were raised, with women and men on equal pay. A school of industrial arts was established with a woman as director. Students would receive scientific and literary instruction, then use some of the day for the application of art and drawing to industry. One of the most enthusiastic supporters of the polytechnic schools was Eugène Pottier, member of the International and a supporter of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier’s concept of “attractive work”. A son of a box-maker, Pottier was a fabric designer and a poet. Unlike today, theoretical and practical debates about education were not carried out in the rarefied circles of academia, but in the clubs around the city. Declarations reflecting those debates were printed as posters and pasted on walls in the streets. One which bore Pottier’s name read in part:

That each child of either sex, having completed the cycle of primary studies, may leave school possessing the serious elements of one or two manual professions: this is our goal…the last word in human progress is entirely summed up by the simple phrase: Work by everyone, for everyone.52

“Secular nurseries” were also set up near workplaces employing women. They were guided by principles laid down by the utopian socialist Charles Fourier: caregivers were not to wear black or dark-coloured clothing, and were rotated to avoid boredom or tiredness setting in, “it being important that children should be looked after only by cheerful and young women, whenever possible”. Religious representations were replaced with pictures and sculptures of real objects such as animals and trees, including aviaries full of birds. Boredom was thought to be “the greatest malady” of children.53 We get a glimpse of some of what those children were taught in this anecdote from a gentleman who witnessed a “band” of 200 “toddlers” marching behind a drum and a small red flag. “They sing at the top of their lungs ‘La Marseillaise’. This grotesque parade celebrated the opening of a lay school organised by the Commune.”54

Marx’s collaborator, Benoît Malon, helped set up an asylum for orphans and runaways, where they could be offered basic instruction. Paule Mincke opened one of the first schools for girls. They requisitioned a Jesuit school, because it was endowed with the most advanced equipment and laboratories. Édouard Vaillant set up a professional school of industrial art for girls, occupying the École des Beaux Arts. This school introduced a new approach to teaching. Any skilled worker over the age of 40 could apply to become a professor.55

The emphasis on science as fundamental to the advance of society was a powerful theme. A young scientist from the US, Mary Putnam Jacobi, happened to be in Paris. Her experience in that spring “led to a political awakening” and inspired her to spend the next three decades campaigning against sexist assumptions about women’s biology. She became a powerful advocate for the equal contribution of women to medicine and developed the philosophy that the advance of science and the advance of women were one and the same objective. She depathologised menstruation by disproving the then widely held notion that rest was necessary in order to prevent infertility, one of the reactionary ideas of the Proudhonists.

Women’s rights and the family

Marx mocks “the absconding men of family, religion, and, above all, of property”, and writes:

In their stead, the real women of Paris showed again at the surface – heroic, noble, and devoted, like the women of antiquity. Working, thinking, fighting, bleeding Paris – almost forgetful, in its incubation of a new society, of the Cannibals at its gates – radiant in the enthusiasm of its historic initiative!56

As already discussed, women were involved in pushing many of the Commune’s most radical proposals. This is not surprising. Women – due to the specific nature of their oppression – can be the bearers of more conservative ideas in stable times, especially when trapped in the home. But when they challenge their chains of oppression, they often become the most dynamic element of mass movements, with less to lose and more to gain from a fundamental transformation of the status quo.

The Commune immediately made farsighted and fundamental improvements to women’s lives. The remission of rents and the ban on sales of goods deposited at the pawn shops lifted a huge burden from workers’ families. A decree on 10 April granted wives – legal or defacto – of Guardsmen who were killed defending the Commune a pension of 600 francs. Each of her children, legitimate or not, could collect 365 francs until they turned 18. And orphans would receive the education necessary “to make their own way in society”.57 As Edith Thomas, in her social history of women in the Commune, remarks: “This was an implicit recognition of the structure of the working-class family, as it really existed, outside the context of religious and bourgeois laws”. Unions libres were common among workers but not recognised by the church or the state, denying women their dignity, to say nothing of economic discrimination given that unmarried women were not eligible for any widow’s allowance. And “[i]n a city where about a quarter of all couples were unmarried, the church, which normally charged 2 francs to register a birth, demanded 7.50 francs [about two days’ wages for many] for an ‘illegitimate’ child”.58

Thomas comments that the widows’ pension was “one of the most revolutionary steps of its brief reign. That this measure outraged the bourgeoisie, and that it was received with jubilation by members of the Commune are indications of its significance”. 59

But women weren’t passive recipients of reforms. It was mostly women who dragged the guillotine into Rue Voltaire and burned it on 10 April. Women were some of the most militant in both women’s and mixed clubs. They were particularly strident in their denunciation of marriage. In a club in Les Halles, a militant woman warned that marriage “is the greatest error of ancient humanity. To be married is to be a slave. In the club of Saint-Ambroise a woman declared that she would not permit her sixteen-year-old daughter to marry, that she was perfectly happy living with a man “without the blessing of the Church”.60 At least one other club also voted in favour of divorce, a policy which was implemented by the Commune Committee. These kinds of discussions in the clubs were the catalyst for the kinds of reforms we have seen. They didn’t just come from the Commune Committee on high. And marriage ceased to be a formal contract, it was simply a written agreement between couples, easily dissolved.61

Michel’s Club de la Révolution, along with others, raised the right to abortion, which was endorsed by the Committee. At the Club of the Free Thinkers Nathalie Lemel – a book binder, and member of Marx’s group in the International who worked with that other comrade of Marx, Elisabeth Dmitrieff and her Union des Femmes – along with Lodoyska Kawecka, who dressed in trousers and wore two revolvers hanging from her sash, argued for divorce and the liberation of women.62

Many of the ideas about women’s liberation, just as those about education, did not originate in the Commune. Marx’s grouping in the International, along with feminists such as André Léo, had created a tradition of support for these attitudes among the most militant workers and socialists. But the revolutionary movement opened up a whole new opportunity for their ideas to win popular support.

The role of art

The anti-capitalist, anti-elitist orientation of the International naturally attracted artists, writers and other intelligentsia whose dependence on patronage and state subsidies curtailed their artistic and political expression.

Eugène Pottier has become famous for his authorship of The Internationale, a song imbued with all the internationalism and irreverence of the Commune. Before that he also wrote the founding manifesto of the Artists’ Federation in which he penned the term “Communal luxury”, adopted by Kristin Ross as the title of her book.63 The founder and president of the Federation was Gustave Courbet, later persecuted because he was accused of ordering the demolition of the Vendôme column.64 The Federation held debates about the role of art and the artist in society, the integration of art into everyday life and how to overcome the counterposition between beauty and utility. It attracted well-known artists such as Corot, Manet and Daumier, who scorned those who fled Paris for Versailles such as Cézanne, Pissarro and Degas. Émile Zola, who associated with the reactionaries in Versailles, disgraced himself with mocking attacks on Courbet for his participation in politics, a sphere considered foreign to artists.65

The Federation refused to deal with any artistic creations which were not signed by their creator. This was a response to the previous practice of artists having to sell their works unsigned so that a dealer could pocket the profits. The personal history of Napoléon Gaillard, another member of the International, demonstrates their theories. A shoemaker, Gaillard was appointed commissioner for barricades. But how to sign a creation as immense as a barricade? An enemy of the Commune explained how Gaillard solved this problem:

[He] appeared so proud of his creation that on the morning of May 20, we saw him in full commandant’s uniform, four gold braids on the sleeve and cap, red lapels on his tunic, great riding boots, long, flowing hair, a steady gaze…and with his hand on his hip, had himself photographed.66

In harmony with the theories developed in the Federation, Gaillard would write philosophical treatises on the foot and the boot, and invent rubber galoshes. There were people who would not wear any other shoe than those he designed, years after his death. From exile he wrote “[t]he Art of the Shoe is, no matter what one says, of all the arts the most difficult, the most useful, and above all the least understood”. He insisted that he be known as both a worker and an “artist shoemaker”. His stance and writings summed up the Artists’ Federation’s arguments for overcoming the counterposition of the useful to the beautiful, calling for the public to demand shoes made for the foot as it is, rather than as it is assumed it should be.67

The attempt to overcome the separation of art from industry and life in general became a subject of much debate and experimentation, strongly influencing the British socialist novelist and fabric designer William Morris.

The Commune’s internationalism

Marx and Engels had argued in The German Ideology decades earlier that workers could only become fit to create a new society through struggle against the old. Paris in March 1871 illustrated their point dramatically. France had been at war with Prussia since July 1870, yet the Commune was determinedly internationalist in spirit: “Within sight of that Prussian army, that had annexed to Germany two French provinces, the Commune annexed to France the working people all over the world”. A Jewish-Hungarian worker was appointed to the key position of minister of labour. They “honoured the heroic sons of Poland [J Dabrowski and W Wróblewski] by placing them at the head of the defenders of Paris”. And “to broadly mark the new era of history it was conscious of initiating, under the eyes of the conquering Prussians on one side, and the Bonapartist army…on the other, the Commune pulled down that colossal symbol of martial glory, the Vendôme Column”.68

This was not just a militant, spur of the moment act. Great thought and planning went into the removal of the statue that was on top of the column. There is a photograph of a pile of rubble in the Place Vendôme, all that remains of Bonaparte’s statue, surrounded by undamaged buildings: the Communards had employed their most skilled engineers and workers to bring it down. Indeed, their original goal was to move the monument to a museum, but it proved too fragile to survive the toppling. The Place Vendôme was renamed Place Internationale.69

Like many of the reforms being proposed, the ideas of internationalism had been developing among radical workers before March 1871. Lissagaray outlines the development of a combative working class, independent of the increasingly conservative liberal bourgeoisie. In 1870, as rumours circulated about the coming war with Prussia:

[T]he revolutionary socialists crowd the boulevards crying, Vive la paix! And singing the pacific refrain – “The people are our brothers/And the tyrants are our enemies”… Unable to influence the bourgeoisie, they turn to the working men of Germany… “Brothers, we protest against the war, we who wish for peace, labour and liberty. Brothers, do not listen to the hirelings who seek to deceive you as to the real wishes of France”.70

The Commune’s embrace of foreign militants in their midst and the demolition of the symbol of imperial might demonstrated that their internationalism was more than rhetorical.

Reorganising society democratically

Contemporary observers, both hostile and sympathetic, commented that the Commune’s elected leaders were unknown. That was not as true as it might seem; many of them had already made their name in debates in the popular clubs. To respectable society, then as now, such mass leaders were invisible. The other comment which recurs throughout the observations then and through all the histories is their inexperience. And how could it be otherwise? As Marx stresses, this was the first time workers had been sufficiently formed as a class to lead a movement for change. So even experienced activists were tackling new questions.

Donny Gluckstein looks at the way the democracy worked in some detail. He correctly puts it in the context of having to defend the Commune against Versailles with its trained army against the much smaller numbers of the rag-tag forces of the National Guard. Prisoners of war were released by Bismarck to help crush Paris. They were bombarded with lies and horror stories about the intentions of the Parisians, whipped into a frenzy of hatred that would be unleashed in the last week of May. But that murderous final stanza was merely the conclusion of growing bombardments and incursions into Paris by the army. These attacks killed scores of Guardsmen, with many others arrested.

Given these conditions, the humanitarian principles the Commune sought to live by often conflicted with the need for defence. For instance, the abolition of the death penalty distanced the idea of revolution from such cruelty. But in the face of massacres and hostages disappearing into the Versailles jails, it was reinstated. Only three were ever executed, but as we subsequently saw following the October Revolution in Russia, there is an unavoidable tension between honourable long-term goals and the immediate question of survival.

Gluckstein shows how the Commune Committee – headquartered in the Hôtel de Ville – related to the network of committees in the arrondissements, the clubs, and myriad other organisations which flourished. He argues that “the main living link between the mass movement and the Communal Council was the clubs”. 71

We cannot understand how democracy functioned in the Commune without grasping the vibrant life of those clubs. They argued for the creation of a stronger leadership in the form of a Committee of Public Safety, which provoked widespread debates. The name invoked the terror of the Great Revolution, which contradicted the image of remaining lawful and pacific which the leaders at the Hôtel de Ville had insisted on. Some women formed their own vigilance committees in spite of reluctance from the Commune Committee. The club Saint-Séverin, possibly where supporters of the International had some sway, asked the Commune to “finish off the bourgeoisie in one blow [and] take over the Banque de France”, a point Marx had made on multiple occasions.

A meeting of 3,000 at Louise Michel’s Club de la Révolution on 13 May, just a week before the final bloody week, unanimously called for the abolition of magistrates, the immediate arrest of priests and the execution of a hostage every 24 hours until the release of political prisoners by Versailles.72 These are the demands of some of the most radical Communards, which shows both the level of debate and how arguments made by organised militants could get a mass audience. This was partly helped by the indecision in the Hôtel de Ville, which inflamed popular impatience.

Clubs insisted they should oversee the actions of the Commune Committee. Eleven of them formed a federation to produce a bulletin, some summoned the Council members to attend their meetings so there was more of an exchange of views. These chaotic events reflected both the dynamism which had been unleashed, but also much confusion about how to win against the increasingly threatening Versailles troops. Gluckstein concludes that it was the “sections” which included organisations such as the Union des Femmes that most effectively worked with the Hôtel de Ville, establishing a “strong and reciprocal” relationship: “In education, for example, much of the momentum came not from the Commune’s commission but from the pre-existing bodies of educators”. And we have already seen the reciprocal role of the Union des Femmes in relation to the Commission of Labour and the Commune Committee.73

This issue of how the clubs pressured the Commune Committee, took initiatives and demanded that the Committee inform them of their decisions is important in understanding the role of women in the revolutionary process. Judy Cox correctly challenges Gay Gullickson who, like most historians, downplays the advances for women because they weren’t members of the elected Commune Committee. This is doubly mistaken. Firstly, like many feminists, Gullickson assumes that men can’t represent women’s interests. But support for women’s rights is not simply a question of gender, but of politics. As Cox points out, “The Marxist wing of the First International was the only political organisation in France which supported the female franchise. At least four socialist male members of the Commune – Eugène Varlin, Benoît Malon, Édouard Vaillant and Leó Frankel – took initiatives that promoted women’s equality in their areas of responsibility”.74

But it was not simply a matter of principled men standing up against oppression. As already indicated, women’s voices were loud and clear in the clubs, on the barricades and in every activity of the Commune. To modern supporters of women’s liberation, the fact that women weren’t granted the right to vote in the elections seems shocking. But there is no evidence that women demanded it. As Ross says:

The [Women’s] Union showed no trace of interest in parliamentary or rights-based demands. In this its members were, like Louise Michel, Paule Mincke and other women in the Commune, indifferent to the vote (a major goal in 1848) and to traditional forms of republican politics… Participation in public life, in other words, was for them in no way tied to the franchise.75

This is true, but the National Committee of the New Guard assumed, when they found themselves at the head of a successful insurrection, that they should operate legally. So the elections for which they got agreement from the mayors were held under the government’s existing law, which only allowed for male suffrage. We don’t know what the outcome would have been if prominent women had led a fight for female suffrage, but it is clear that many would have backed them.

Gullickson takes the positions of the right-wing Proudhonists – against whom Marx campaigned relentlessly – as evidence of a general chauvinist male culture which sidelined women. But even the left of the Proudhonists, such as Lefrançais, supported women’s rights. And in spite of her feminism, Gullickson does not respect the voice of André Léo,76 a prominent feminist from well before the Commune and editor of the magazine La Sociale. To bolster her case Gullickson quotes an account Léo published of New Guard officers and a physician who acted disrespectfully towards women volunteers. Yet Léo concluded that very article with: “we noticed the very different attitudes present. Without exception the [middle-class] officers and surgeons showed a lack of sympathy that varied from coldness to insults; but from the National Guards came respect and fraternity”. And, because she aired the grievance against the officers, Louis Rossel, the Commune’s war delegate, asked her for advice about involving more women in the military campaign.77

Of course not everyone was immediately convinced of the most radical points described here. The point is that women were challenging backward views, agitating for the reforms they needed, and the Commune endorsed their demands. The majority of Léo’s articles in La Sociale dealt with issues not specifically about women. But when she did, she emphasised the need and the potential for solidarity between the sexes. One of her articles was titled “Toutes avec Tous” (all women and men together).78

We can add a further point. Gullickson can’t recognise the immense advances that women made, and the tradition they left for the working class to learn from because she, like other liberal feminists, focuses on elected leaders. While what happens at that level is not irrelevant, socialists should focus on the changes taking place below the surface, where workers were busy establishing democratic structures, raising new ideas and taking incredible initiatives. In the tumultuous events that characterise any revolution, the democratic character of the process cannot be fully understood simply by analysing constitutions or formal structures. It is about the dynamic of that process, and the incipient tendencies that emerge spontaneously through the struggle which can be developed further by conscious political intervention.

Much of the retrospective critiques of the Commune identify their failure to seize the wealth stored in the National Bank as a key mistake. Yet this itself was partly a product of the rigorous democracy that was the norm throughout the Commune. Raoul Rigault, a Blanquist and member of the International, was in charge of the “ex-Prefecture of police”. He was a colourful figure with a history of political agitation and organising, dubbed the “professor of barricades” by a magistrate in one of his many trials.79 He ordered some guards to seize the Bank of France to nationalise the wealth stored there. But prone to the elitism typical of the Blanquists, he did not consult with the rest of the Communal Council, and so the proposal was blocked by the Proudhonists. One of them insisted that the bank “should be respected as private property belonging to the shareholders”! By the time the Communal Council considered Rigault’s instruction, the opportunity had been missed.80

Engels maintained that “[t]he bank in the hands of the Commune – this would have been worth more than 10,000 hostages”. It is debatable whether this would have pushed Versailles to settle for peace as Engels asserted, but it is clear that the money within could have been used to deepen the Commune’s achievements. For instance, the Commune had to spend 21 million francs on defence, leaving just 1,000 francs for education, an issue dear to the heart of virtually all who participated. More to the point, such reluctance to take on a bastion of governmental power and the bourgeoisie reflected the constant desire to operate within the bounds of bourgeois legality and to avoid being cast as responsible for the civil war raging around them.81 While there are examples of a lack of accountability from some leaders, the weaknesses historians identify have to be seen in the context of the siege, the civil war, and social and economic breakdown. The significant achievement is that which Marx emphasised: the embryo of a workers’ democracy, with elected and recallable representatives, plus judges and officials at every level. This historical breakthrough warrants our main emphasis, rather than the understandable shortcomings.

A final point. The structures established by the Commune cannot be taken as a direct model for revolutionaries today. The working class in Paris was the largest group, numbering 900,000, surrounded by 400,000 petty bourgeois running 4,000 greengrocers’ shops, 1,900 butchers, 1,300 bakeries. However, Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris had discouraged the establishment of large workplaces. Those that were established were mostly in the outer rim of Paris. The Cail plant in north-east Paris, employing 2,800 to produce steam engines and locomotives, was the exception rather than the norm. Workplaces of over 10 workers were only seven percent of the total, with 31 percent employing between two and ten. Gluckstein concludes:

The nature of production…had an influence on the organisational structure of the 1871 movement… Trade union action was difficult to mount and broad activities could not easily be built from tiny workplaces. Such units of production could not provide a collective focus for the working class. Instead that came from the National Guard and the clubs which offered a framework for collective expression and organisation.82

In the Russian revolution of 1905 workers would take another leap forward and create soviets, reflecting the huge growth of the industrial working class, brought together in workplaces massively larger than anything in Paris in 1871. This meant that the focus of organisation shifted to the workplace, even as the streets remained an important focal point for large and united protests that brought workers from across different industries together. This is profoundly important. As Rosa Luxemburg argued, “where the chains of oppression are forged, there they must be broken”. Nevertheless the principles of the Commune lived on in the soviets: all delegates and people in places of responsibility to be recallable at any time, accountable to the electors, paid workers’ wages and remaining at work where they experienced the conditions about which they made decisions. The Paris Commune is therefore best understood as a premonition, or a harbinger, of a future society. In Marx’s words:

The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par décret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation…they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society.83

Some aspects of the Commune have been superseded by subsequent developments, and we do not know precisely how the working-class revolution of this century might look. However the basic principles of collectivity and democracy it established remain vitally important to the modern working class.

Ruling class savagery – la semaine sanglante

Marx had argued that we make our own history, but not in circumstances of our choosing.84 The uprising which erupted on 18 March forced the Communards to reorganise society amidst a Prussian siege and a bitter civil war. These factors strongly contributed to the defeat of this heroic uprising.

On Sunday 21 May, troops from Versailles stormed Paris. New barricades went up in street after street, as the population mobilised for a final heroic attempt to maintain their Commune. An eyewitness described how one of the barricades was constructed and defended by “a women’s battalion of around a hundred and twenty. At the time that I arrived, a dark form detached itself from a carriage gate. It was a girl with a Phrygian bonnet over her ear, a musket in her hand, and a cartridge-belt at her waist. ‘Halt, citizen, you don’t pass here!’”85 We see how women have developed from pleading with soldiers not to shoot in March, to now playing a role as proud, fighting combatants in May, prepared to die with dignity and honour.

Just one week later, 30,000 or more people had been murdered by the counter-revolutionaries. The chapter headings used by Lissagaray in his book sum up the experience: “The Versailles fury”, “The balance sheet of bourgeois vengeance”. The essence of the events is captured in the title of John Merriman’s book, Massacre.86 Though there are debates about the death toll, I see no point in quibbling about the precise figures. Many casualties were never recorded, their bodies thrown into mass graves and later incinerated. Countless others disappeared into jails or colonial transportation, where who knows how many died. Others fled to seek sanctuary, and there are few records of who survived wounds inflicted in the fighting. This barbarity was at first cheered on in the respectable bourgeois papers of Europe, whose journalists had followed the army around “like jackals”. One journalist had called for “an end to this international democratic vermin” of Red Paris. But faced with “the smell of carnage”, swarms of flies on corpses, trees stripped of leaves, the streets full of dead birds, even some of these bourgeois commentators were repulsed. “Let us not kill any more”, pleaded the Paris Journal, “Enough executions, enough blood, enough victims” lamented the Nationale.87

But the upper classes who lived off the labour of those being massacred expressed no such limits to their savagery.88 Respectable women took tours of the dungeons where the arrested were incarcerated, holding their lace-edged handkerchiefs – made by the women at whom they gawked – to their noses against the stench of filth and dying Communards. In particular, they took delight in poking the women with their parasols. Many public figures, including judges and other respectable bourgeois and middle-class types, continued to bay for blood. To justify this frenzy, they invented lies which appealed to the prejudices of this scum. An anonymous Englishman described the Communards as “lashed up to a frenzy which has converted them into a set of wild beasts caught in a trap”. This, in his opinion, “render[ed] their extermination a necessity”.89 The ruling class especially hated the women Communards, whom they depicted as “vile”, “wild” and sexually depraved.

Their fury was stoked by hysterical stories of the infamous pétroleuses, supposedly prepared to burn down the whole of Paris. So the legend of the pétroleuses demands our attention. Edith Thomas titled her book on the women of the Commune Les Pétroleuses, translated as The Women Incendiaries. She examines the evidence and concludes that it’s not clear whether there were any pétroleuses in the way reactionaries used the term. At the same time, the Communards clearly did use fire as a weapon of war to destroy buildings from which the Versaillese could gun people down. Fire was also used as a form of barricade, a wall of flames to keep the soldiers back, set by the fighters who must have included women and possibly even children.90 Merriman documents orders given by the war delegate with the National Guard, Charles Delescluze, the ageing Jacobin, and others, including men in the Commune Committee, to blow up or set fire to houses. Delescluze, aware that it had become impossible to muster the kind of military response necessary to repel the soldiers, “adopted a strategy of mass popular resistance”. Generals of the National Guard specifically ordered “the burning of a number of monumental Parisian buildings, all in the fancy parts of town”, as well as official buildings. One of the Communard generals ordered the Tuileries Palace to be set ablaze. Gustave Lefrançais, the most left-wing Proudhonist, admitted that he was one of those “who had shutters of joy seeing that sinister palace go up in flames”. When a woman asked Nathalie Lemel what it was she could see burning in Montmartre, Lemel replied simply, “it’s nothing at all, only the Palais-Royal and the Tuileries, because we do not want a king anymore”.91

Marx was right to defend the burning of the city:

The working men’s Paris, in the act of its heroic self-holocaust, involved in its flames buildings and monuments. While tearing to pieces the living body of the proletariat, its rulers must no longer expect to return triumphantly into the intact architecture of their abodes. The government of Versailles cries, “Incendiarism!” and whispers this cue to all its agents…to hunt up its enemies everywhere as suspect of professional incendiarism. The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar!

…The Commune used fire strictly as a means of defence. They used it to stop up to the Versailles troops those long, straight avenues which Haussmann had expressly opened to artillery-fire; they used it to cover their retreat, in the same way as the Versaillese, in their advance, used their shells which destroyed at least as many buildings as the fire of the Commune. It is a matter of dispute, even now, which buildings were set fire to by the defence, and which by the attack. And the defence resorted to fire only then when the Versailles troops had already commenced their wholesale murdering of prisoners.92

The heroism of children, women and men as they fought to defend their “Communal luxury” would live on in the memory of the socialist movement and workers. Fighting and dying became a sign of revolutionary honour. Memoirs often recall scenes like this one from Lissagaray about the barricade of the Faubourg du Temple:

[T]he most indefatigable gunner was a child. The barricade taken, all its defenders were shot, and the child’s turn also came. He asked for three minutes’ respite; “so that he could take his mother, who lived opposite, his silver watch in order that she might at least not lose everything”. The officer, involuntarily moved, let him go. Not thinking to see him again; but three minutes after the child cried, “Here I am!” jumped onto the pavement, and nimbly leant against the wall near the corpses of his comrades.

Lissagaray concluded, “Paris will never die as long as she brings forth such people”.93 And Victor Hugo, who did not originally support the Commune, but responded in solidarity in the face of the massacre, wrote a poem about this incident. He ends with the wishful thought that the officer pardoned the child.94

Gustave Courbet recalled:

The drunkenness of carnage and destruction had taken over this people ordinarily so mild, but so fearsome when pushed to the brink… We will die if we must, shouted men, women and children, but we will not be sent to Cayenne.95

Louise Michel became famous for her confrontational stance at her trial:

Since it seems that every heart which beats for liberty has only right to a little lead, I too demand my part. If you let me live, I shall not cease to cry vengeance… If you are not cowards, kill me.96

Out of fear that she would become a martyr around which workers could mobilise, she was condemned to transportation to New Caledonia, where she met Nathalie Lemel. During the defence of Paris, Lemel had taken command of a contingent of the Union des Femmes. They marched, red flag in the lead, from a meeting in the mairie97 of the fourth arrondissement to defend Les Batignolles. There, the 120 women held back government troops for several hours. Those who were taken were shot on the spot, one of whom was the dressmaker Blanche Lefebvre, an organiser of the Union des Femmes and another member of Marx’s circle. Some held a barricade on Place Pigalle for a further three hours, but all were killed on what Lissagaray called “this legendary barricade”. Lemel cared for the wounded for hours. Her comrade Elisabeth Dmitrieff was at Montmartre with Louise Michel and Léo Frankel in the last hours.98

The mass of the poor had few options but to die bravely, which they did with pride. The more educated, if fortunate, found their way into exile. Frankel was smuggled out by a coach driver and escaped to Germany with Dmitrieff. They could be disguised as a Prussian couple because they spoke German fluently. Dmitrieff would return to Russia, only to go into exile in Siberia with a revolutionary with whom she had a genuine marriage. Because of her isolation, she never heard of the amnesty and so lived out the rest of her life in the tundra where so many revolutionaries perished. Michel kept her word and eventually returned to France under the amnesty, was arrested on a demonstration of unemployed workers in 1883 and sentenced to six years of solitary confinement, arrested again in 1890. She returned to France from England, to where she had escaped, and died of pneumonia in January 1905.99

A doctor commented on the bravery of the Communards:

I cannot desire the triumph of your cause; but I have never seen wounded men preserve more calm and sang-froid during operations. I attribute this courage to the energy of their convictions.100

And this is how the Commune’s supporters interpreted the courageous resistance. It inspired generations, illustrating why the sentiment “it is better to die fighting than to live on your knees” is the most principled response to ruling-class barbarism. If they had meekly surrendered in the name of avoiding violence, there is no evidence that lives would have been saved, and the revolution would surely not have inspired generations of working-class and socialist activists.

Political assessments

“We’ll change henceforth the old conditions” runs a line of Pottier’s Internationale. But how is it to be done? Which politics and theory related best to the needs of the Commune? When remembering workers’ struggles, assessing the political ideas tested in battle is an important part of honouring their memory. If the suffering of the masses in defeat is to be worth the blood spilled, it is the responsibility of those inspired by them to try to learn the lessons, lest their sacrifices be endlessly repeated. In the last article Rosa Luxemburg wrote before being murdered in January 1919, she made reference to the Paris Commune as a metaphor for the fate of the revolution unravelling around her. But, from the perspective of the historic mission of the working class, such defeats served a purpose:

Where would we be today without those “defeats”, from which we draw historical experience, understanding, power and idealism?… [W]e stand on the foundation of those very defeats; and we cannot do without any of them, because each one contributes to our strength and understanding.101

Again and again, in the intervening 150 years, workers have shown that if only they can take control, they would build a humane society, a socialist world. In every struggle we can celebrate the signs of this, and that inspiration unites those of many different politics on the left. Just think. One hundred and fifty years ago, when the fight for women’s rights was in its infancy, the more radical clubs in Paris demanded and got support for the right to abortion.

However, the question which has eluded workers so far is how to win control and hold it, how to defeat the powerful forces of capitalism arrayed against them. Proudhonists, Jacobins and Blanquists were the most influential political groups in the Commune Committee. Marx’s International had thousands of members, but was far from cohered around his theory and politics. None of these groups could offer the lead required.

The National Guard had elected a Central Committee only a couple of weeks before the uprising. Though inexperienced, they gathered to consider what to do in light of the spontaneous insurrection. By the end of the day the Hôtel de Ville was occupied as the headquarters of the insurgents. But they lacked the confidence to assert their authority and organise the necessary defence and reorganisation of the city. In their political confusion, they turned for leadership to the only constitutional body left in Paris, the mayors, who were appointed by the hated central government! The Central Committee of the National Guard insisted that only a newly elected body could take on all the urgent tasks the city confronted. It was eight days before negotiations with the mayors enabled the election of an authoritative body, in which valuable time was lost to the advantage of the Versailles soldiers threatening Paris. Élie Reclus asked on voting day: “What does legality mean at a time of revolution?”102

Virtually every historian who has written about it comments on the shambolic nature of the National Guard, which ensured that the Versailles government’s victory was easier than it should have been. Similarly, most make a point of discussing the Commune’s flat-footed response to the mass uprising. Few, however, draw any political conclusions or seriously explain what went wrong. Edwards sums up the reasons for the disaster: the main concern of the majority of the Committee “was to ‘legalize’ its situation by divesting itself of the power that had so unexpectedly fallen into its hands”. The Blanquists urged a march on Versailles, “a plan which might well have succeeded” following the fraternisation between the army and the Guardsmen.103 Gluckstein argues that Thiers and Co. would never be weaker than in those first hours and days after 18 March 1871. Military discipline had evaporated, and the French army was yet to be buoyed up by prisoners of war released by Bismarck. Supporting this view is the fact that Thiers rejected a request for troops to set up an anti-Commune outfit inside Paris: “Neither 5,000, nor 500, nor five; I need the few troops still available – and in whom I don’t yet have full confidence – to defend the government”. A Commune supporter reported that in Versailles the regular troops were not even trusted to patrol the streets.104

Auguste Blanqui shared with Marx the expectation that the war would create a situation ripe for revolution. But unlike Marx he did not see the working class as the agent to make that revolution, only as supporters for a coup. As a result, his supporters had not built roots in working-class organisations or communities, and he languished in jail throughout the revolution due to his involvement in an attempted insurrection just months before. “Blanqui’s own account of the debacle [of August 1870] is painfully honest”, Gluckstein explains. Blanqui wrote of the response of the workers of Belleville to these gun-toting strangers calling for them to rise up: “[t]he population appeared dumbstruck…held back by fear”. And he concluded “We can do nothing without the people!” In spite of their history of organising conspiratorial coups by tiny numbers, the Blanquists participated with great enthusiasm in the mass uprising and the institutions it threw up. Their strength was their preparedness to organise and respond with the necessary violence to defeat the murderous forces arrayed against the Commune.105 However, lacking their most authoritative leader, the Blanquists were defeated in the debate about marching on Versailles, and a critical moment was missed.

Despite their hostility to organisation, the Proudhonists took many of the leading positions in the Commune Committee. Their tradition had long cultivated a hostility to political organisation of all kinds, which manifested in a reluctance to give elected bodies of the Commune real authority. This then undermined the confidence of those bodies to act decisively, providing Versailles time to get on the offensive. The Proudhonists’ respect for private property was also responsible for the decision to leave the enormous wealth of the bourgeoisie safe in the National Bank, and informed a general reticence to take decisive measures in the field of economic and military policy.

Proudhonism today is dead as a political current; however, Proudhon’s disciple, Bakunin, still influences some activists. In a typical formulation, Bakunin wrote in his critique of the Commune: “the cause of [humanity’s] troubles does not lie in any particular form of government but in the fundamental principles and the very existence in government, whatever form it takes”.106 But this radical-sounding generality obscures the fact that the Commune’s troubles came not from an abstract category, but from the very real power of Thiers’ counter-revolutionary army. Only an equally organised power based on working-class democracy could have defended the Commune from the massacre that was to come. Bakunin’s abstract slogans – which live on in anarchist milieus today – provide absolutely no guide for what to do in the face of the threat posed by the brutal machine that is the bourgeois state. Workers could not – and still cannot – ignore politics and organisation.

But it wasn’t just the question of defence. The demand of the bakers to end night work raised a lot of debate because Commune Committee members, influenced by such ideas as Bakunin articulates, refused to issue a decree to abolish night work, even though they supported it. Bakers had been campaigning for two years, hampered by the tiny size of the bakeries which mitigated against effective organisation. The Committee’s response was ludicrous. They opposed any state action on principle, and argued that the workers should “themselves safeguard their interests in relation to the owners”. Benoît Malon represented the views of the bakers, 3,000 of whom marched to the Hôtel de Ville demanding a decree: “until now the state has intervened against the interests of workers. It is at least fair that today the state intervene for the workers”.107

Abstract shibboleths against all organisation are no guide to how the left should have related to the radical organisations such as the Union des Femmes, the Artists’ Federation, and the clubs. If you took these principles seriously you would boycott them, a completely sectarian and destructive attitude which would make you irrelevant, unable to contribute to developing people’s consciousness and winning arguments for strategies to win.

It was Marx and Engels who best generalised the lessons of the Commune. Marx had been committed to a view of working-class self-emancipation well before the Commune showed a glimpse of how it could be done. He had witnessed the radical workers’ societies and, critically, the Silesian weavers’ revolt of 1844, and had subsequently never doubted the creativity and organisational genius of the organised proletariat. His Theses on Feuerbach answered the question of how workers could be “educated” for a new society: they educate themselves through their own conscious activity. Marx and Engels developed this idea further in their German Ideology, where they argued that to build a socialist society, “the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution”.108

Now the Parisian masses had revealed the answer to the question of what to do about the repressive state. Marx had been grappling with this since he concluded in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that the problem had been until then that “[a]ll revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it”.109 But what could take its place? Two days after la semaine sanglante, Marx gave his address to the International, emphasising the achievements of the Commune and its importance to the future of the workers’ movement. He had warned against such an uprising in the weeks previous, fearing it was premature, yet did not hesitate to leap to its defence. As with so much of his political work, his writings on the Commune emphasise its fundamental aspects. Unlike the bourgeois revolutions which primarily benefited a minority of capitalist exploiters, the potential of a workers’ revolution to liberate the whole of humanity was now shown in practice. He explains how the democratic structures, with the army and police disbanded and the population armed, were the foundation on which workers can be emancipated from the exploitation of their labour. In this way, the practice of the workers of Paris actually broke new ground; their heroism created the conditions for Marx and Engels to clarify and concretise their previous ideas regarding the self-emancipation of the working class. Overall, Marx’s writings on the Commune stand in sharp contrast to the abstract shibboleths in Bakunin’s work.

But it would be Lenin who brought all these elements together, transcending what is usually assumed to be a contradiction between spontaneous revolts and organisation.110 The counterposition between spontaneity and organisation abounds in Bakunin’s critique, and is taken for granted by many activists today. The issue is particularly fraught when women are involved. Women’s activities in rebellions like this are often portrayed as elemental, unplanned and not very political. This emphasis on spontaneity is often sexist and downplays the role of leadership, foresight and planning by the women themselves. The Commune perfectly illustrates Lenin’s arguments. To begin with, there can be no revolution without spontaneity. The radicalisation sufficient to generate the Paris Commune did not develop incrementally, it exploded and shocked the world. It’s true that the uprising that seized the cannon in Montmartre emerged in a context of rising discontent and bitterness, but the rebellion in turn radicalised and transformed the situation decisively.

The Commune shows how there is not some barrier between a revolutionary upsurge itself and the activities and politics that exist beforehand. For instance Eugène Varlin and Nathalie Lemel were involved in workers’ campaigns for women’s rights and equal pay in the 1860s. In the growing number of strikes before 1871, some workers had learnt from their experiences. A strike by 5,000 bronze workers in 1867 won with support from the International, which organised funds from workers in other countries. The lesson of international solidarity was not forgotten. And other workers – significantly in textiles from where women participated in Dmitrieff’s Union des Femmes – began to see the value of organisation and strikes in a number of cities. In a strike by miners in the Loire region workers’ wives had fought bravely against the gendarmes during a strike at Le Creusot in 1870. Ideas promoted by the Proudhonists, who argued that “women should stay indoors and avoid the physical and moral dangers of workshops”, were now rejected by working-class men. They declared that women should exercise their independence and “will march alongside us in the exercise of democratic and social cooperation”. Those ideas could most effectively be kept alive and popularised if taken up by organisations, rather than being left to the whimsy of individual happenstance.111

Lenin’s most significant theoretical breakthrough was to see that the task for revolutionaries is to prepare for the spontaneous outbursts before they happen. This preparation is not a purely intellectual exercise, but entails participating in every struggle, raising ideas which challenge participants to reject the ideas of capitalism. Not all workers will develop class consciousness at the same time; consciousness will always be uneven, as it was in the Commune. This means revolutionaries need to build a party which organises the most class-conscious and militant workers, the “vanguard” as Lenin called them. Such a revolutionary party needs to raise the level of class consciousness generally, by which Lenin meant the degree to which workers understand the role of their own class, and that of all other social layers, and how much they understand their class power. They need to understand that their class can and must lead other classes in a revolution if capitalism is to be overthrown. The party needs a history of participating in and leading struggles so they gain a wide understanding of the momentum of struggle, how to judge different strategies and the arguments of different political organisations. Only this offers the best chance that the arguments of those who always support compromise and moderation will be defeated.

The vanguard must have burned into their consciousness that if our side seriously challenges the ruling class and their state, there is no limit to their “undisguised savagery and lawless revenge”, in Marx’s words. Revolutions have time and again crashed against the seemingly timeless existence of the state, and the mistake of seeking to remain within the “rule of law”. Lenin’s solution was to organise the vanguard to be prepared to repeat the first acts of the Commune: to disband the police and army, and to arm the working class and poor. It must not shrink from responding to ruling-class violence in order to defend the revolution.

The Commune’s legacy

In the Paris Commune, the ruling class saw the shape of a new society. They understood that such a world of equality and justice could only be built on the ruins of capitalism. So they sought to systematically obliterate its memory.

In the Louvre today, images of the royal family overthrown in the Great Revolution are sympathetically portrayed. But a small collection from the Commune is hidden away in the basement. A collection of artefacts, documents and the like is included in the museum dedicated to the art of Paul Éluard in Saint-Denis. Ironically it is housed in an old Carmelite convent. It was originally set up by the Communist council of Saint-Denis.

In the 1870s the bourgeoisie set out to refashion Paris with monuments to the Republic. The last quarter of the nineteenth century has been referred to as “a golden age of monument building” as part of the effort at “self-definition” following the trauma of 1870-71. Restoring the Vendôme column was, of course, a huge priority. Sometimes the purpose of new monuments or buildings was made explicit. The church of Sacré-Coeur was built on Montmartre. When laying the foundation stone, architect Charles Rohault de Fleury declared that Sacré-Coeur reclaimed for the nation “the place chosen by Satan and where was accomplished the first act of that horrible Saturnalia”.112

It is easy to see the negation of the Commune in the grotesque splendour of the Sacré-Coeur. But a lot of the reconstruction was not so explicit. Much of the art which was promoted and the spaces reorganised were merely presented as celebrations of the Republic. But try as they may, the memory often reverberated in what was not said or built. One space allowed to socialists was the Mur des Fédérés (Wall of the Federals),113 located in the Père Lachaise cemetery where the blood of unknown numbers was spilled in the last days of the Commune. Presumably authorities thought this the most fitting memorial: calculated to sear our souls and to signal that attempts at anti-capitalist rebellions will always be drowned in unimaginable savagery. But they were mistaken. Visitors leave a constant sea of red roses, and leave with a renewed hatred of the bourgeoisie and a desire to fight for the promise of the Commune. In 1907, the Parisian municipal council planned to install Paul Vautier-Moreau’s Monument to the Victims of Revolutions, sculpted from the stones of the barricades, on which was engraved Victor Hugo’s clarion call to end the “vengeance”. There was such an outcry from supporters of the Commune, who preferred to keep that space simply for the Communards, that it had to be placed outside the wall of the cemetery.114

William Morris paid homage to the destruction of the Vendôme column in his novel News from Nowhere, published in 1890. The apricot orchard which replaces Trafalgar Square, dominated by the statue of Admiral Nelson is, as Ross says, a “symbolic revisioning [of] both the Place Vendôme and Trafalgar Square…their aesthetic of nationalistic and timeless monumentality become supra-national space”.115

In spite of the efforts of the descendants of the butchers who saturated Paris in blood, the memory of this first workers’ revolution cannot be completely suppressed. So a social history of Paris, published in English in 2010, revisits some of the accounts by its participants and supporters. Eric Hazan, the author, reminds us how modern day charlatans, rather than obscure the history completely, cynically attempt to co-opt the inspiration of the Commune for their own opportunistic reasons. A plaque in Paris has inscribed on it: “The last barricade of the Commune resisted in the Rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi. A hundred and twenty years later, the Socialist party and its first secretary Pierre Mauroy render homage to the people of Paris who sought to change their lives, and to the 30,000 dead of the Time of the Cherries”. Hazan, who documents the truth of those days, reminds us: “This trumpery makes short work of history, for Louis Blanc, the Mauroy of his day, maintained that ‘this insurrection is completely to be condemned, and must be condemned by any true republican’.”116 Le temps des cerises to which the inscription refers is a song written in 1866. It became popular during the Commune, with verses added as it was sung on the barricades and in the clubs. The title is a metaphor for the hope for a new life after a revolution, making the hypocritical inscription by the reformist party even more galling.

For decades workers remembered the Communards’ courageous defiance. On May Day 1901, thousands of mourners joined the funeral procession for Paule Mincke through the streets of Paris. They chanted “Vive la Commune!” and “Vive l’Internationale!” as more than 600 police, 500 soldiers and 100 cavalry guarded the streets against any possibility of a repeat of 1871.117 More than 100,000 attended Louise Michel’s funeral in Paris in 1905. Socialists and anarchists celebrated the Commune every March. The ghastly images of tortured women beamed around the world by the bourgeois press could not undercut the sense of pride and solidarity that their courage inspired. In the NSW outback mining city of Broken Hill, for at least a decade into the twentieth century, the Socialist Sunday School organised the annual anniversary commemoration of the Commune. In another piece I concluded that “[it] certainly was not portrayed as a celebration of male achievements, as is often claimed by feminist historians: ‘What greater and grander sublimity can be depicted than that of men and women who are prepared to sacrifice their lives for even a dream?’” An article in the socialist paper in the town “emphasised female bravery”, telling the story of when soldiers tried to force Communards to kneel before their guns: “one woman with a child in her arms refused to do so, shouting to her companions: ‘Show these wretches that you know how to die upright’.”118

An historian of the annual events which continued for decades writes:

They drew on the Commune as an example of international cooperation, drawing on their shared class identity. The Commune was rewritten annually, creating a palimpsest. Speakers drew on the Commune as a symbol of working-class government, or of revolution, a symbol of warning and hope, of past, present and future, something to learn from, and revere.119

In spite of so many efforts to obscure its history, the Commune is still invoked as a reference point for the idea of revolution, or challenges to authority to this very day. As I write, a post by Buzzfeed, “Stormings of History Ranked from Best to Worst”, appeared in response to the invasion of the Capitol by far-right Trump supporters. The Commune is their second-best example, second only to the October Revolution.120 Even the prestigious Lancet in the year of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary pays homage to the Commune with an article about Mary Putnam Jacobi. The conclusion is a tribute to the power of the Commune to inspire hope for a better world: “The origins of her philosophy, a philosophy that provides the seed for an American renaissance today, lay in the blood spilt on the streets of Paris 150 years ago”.121

Conclusion

We began with the image of the “sphinx” conjured by Marx to convey how the Commune terrified the bourgeoisie and their hangers-on. We leave it as the world descends into ever more horrifying chaos which creates catastrophes one after the other. The World Bank warns governments around the globe to avoid making premature cuts to measures taken to prevent the economy from completely collapsing. This advice is not driven by humanitarian concern for those who would suffer from the cuts, but by fear of revolt. The sphinx haunts them still.

The Paris Commune reminds us of what Walter Benjamin said, that the fine and spiritual aspects of life we hunger for can only be won by the struggle for the rough, material things which make them possible. And that “they are present as confidence, as courage, as humour, as cunning, as steadfastness in this struggle”. That is why the Paris Commune still commands our attention, and is worthy of serious study. And why it still has the power to inspire our confidence in the working class to create a “Communal luxury” for humanity to this day.

References

Benjamin, Walter 1968, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, Essays and Reflections, Schocken Books.

Bloodworth, Sandra 2005, “Militant spirits: the rebel women of Broken Hill”. https://sa.org.au/interventions/rebelwomen/militant.htm

Bloodworth, Sandra 2013, “Lenin vs ‘Leninism’”, Marxist Left Review, 5, Summer. https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/lenin-vs-leninism/

Buzzfeed 2021, “Stormings of History Ranked from Best to Worst”, January. https://www.buzzfeed.com/tessred/stormings-of-history-ranked-from-best-to-worst-dogxsiwtv3?utm_source=dynamic&utm_campaign=bfsharefacebook&fbclid=IwAR0Bm0V61HcfuBZsc6jth8J51i6z-enf8-N_WefnVp1pITFqvlRQoAa9_kI

Cox, Judy 2021, “Genderquake: socialist women and the Paris Commune”, International Socialism, 169, 5 January. http://isj.org.uk/genderquake-paris-commune/

Edwards, Stewart (ed.) 1973, The Communards of Paris, 1871 (Documents of Revolution series, Heinz Lubasz, general editor), Thames and Hudson.

Eschelbacher, Andrew 2009, “Environment of Memory: Paris and Post-Commune Angst”, Nineteenth Century Art World, 8 (2), Autumn. https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn09/environment-of-memory

Gluckstein, Donny 2006, The Paris Commune. A Revolution in Democracy, Bookmarks.

Hazan, Eric 2011, The Invention of Paris. A History in Footsteps, translator David Fernbach, Verso.

Horton, Richard 2021, “The Paris Commune and the birth of American medicine”, The Lancet, 397, (102070), 16 January. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00086-6/fulltext

Landrigan, Aloysius Judas 2017, Remembering the Commune: Texts and Celebrations in Britain and the United States, MA thesis, University of Melbourne. https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/handle/11343/198112

Lissagaray 1976 [1876], History of the Paris Commune of 1871, translator Eleanor Marx, New Park Publications.

Luxemburg, Rosa 1919, “Order Prevails in Berlin”, Die Rote Fahne, 14 January. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1919/01/14.htm

Marx, Karl 1845, Theses on Feuerbach. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm

Marx, Karl 1852, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/

Marx, Karl 1871, The Civil War in France. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/index.htm

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1932 [1846], The German Ideology. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/index.htm

Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin 2008, Writings on the Paris Commune, Red and Black Publishers.

Merriman, John 2016, Massacre. The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871, Yale University Press.

Ross, Kristin 2016, Communal Luxury. The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, Verso.

Thomas, Edith 1966 [1963 as Les Pétroleuses], The Women Incendiaries, Secker and Warburg.

Tod, MK 2020, Poetry about the Paris Commune, blog, 10 September. https://awriterofhistory.com/tag/poetry-about-the-paris-commune/

* The phrase “glorious harbinger of a new society” is from Marx 1871. Thanks to the sharp eyes and insights of Omar Hassan and Mick Armstrong, the final result is vastly improved on the original draft.

1 Lissagaray 1976, introduction, p3.

2 This address would be published as part of the pamphlet, The Civil War in France.

3 Marx 1871.

4 Benjamin 1968, pp254-255.

5 An arrondissement is similar to a suburb in Australian cities.

6 Edwards 1973, pp58-59.

7 Merriman 2016, p41.

8 Edwards 1973, p15.

9 Edwards 1973, pp59-60.

10 Gluckstein 2006, p13.

11 Merriman 2016, p44. The government is often referred to as Versailles because it was ensconced there.

12 Gluckstein 2006, p13.

13 Merriman 2016, p43.

14 Edwards 1973, pp60-61.

15 Hazan 2010, pp236-245.

16 Edwards 1973, pp61-62.

17 Gluckstein 2006, p14.

18 Edwards 1973, p22. Italics in Edwards.

19 Marx 1871.

20 Usually known as Baron Haussmann.

21 Gluckstein 2006, pp68-69.

22 Merriman 2016, pp7-8.

23 Merriman 2014, pp46-7.

24 Marx 1871.

25 Gluckstein 2006, p53. Bold in Gluckstein.

26 Marx 1871.

27 Marx 1871.

28 Marx 1871.

29 Marx 1871.

30 All the examples and quotes about the Labour Commission from Gluckstein 2006, pp28-31.

31 The International included this grouping, but also Proudhonists, who dominated the French section, Blanquists and others.

32 Many revolutionary women escaped the stifling pressure from their families by entering a “white marriage” in which the man expected no sexual relationship.

33 Ross 2016, pp27-29.

34 Thomas 1967, pp62-63.

35 Ross 2016, p27.

36 Gluckstein 2006, p50.

37 Ross 2016, pp26-28.

38 Gluckstein 2006, p31.

39 Gluckstein 2006, pp48-49.

40 Gluckstein 2006, pp45-46.

41 Ross 2016, p17.

42 Quoted in Gluckstein 2006, p49. Lissagaray uses oriflamme for scarlet banner which, in its literary meaning, denotes a principle or ideal that serves as a rallying point in a struggle.

43 Marx 1871.

44 Merriman 2016, pp10-11.

45 Merriman 2016, p104.

46 Merriman 2016, pp107-109; Gluckstein 2006, p49.

47 Merriman 2016, p105.

48 Merriman 2016, p101.

49 Merriman 2016, p11.

50 Ross 2016, pp39-40.

51 Ross 2016, p40.

52 Ross 2016, p44.

53 Ross 2016, pp41-42.

54 Merriman 2016, p104.

55 Ross 2016, pp40-41.

56 Marx 1871.

57 Thomas 1967, p53.

58 Merriman 2016, p105.

59 Thomas 1967, p54.

60 Merriman 2016, pp105-106.

61 Gluckstein 2006, pp32-33.

62 Cox 2021.

63 Ross 2016.

64 See below for an explanation of this demolition.

65 See Ross 2016, pp42-65 for an account of the debates in the Artists’ Federation and the artists involved.

66 Ross 2016, pp55-56.

67 Ross 2016, pp55-56.

68 Marx 1871.

69 Ross 2016, p23.

70 Lissagaray 1976, pp10-12.

71 Gluckstein 2006, pp46-53.

72 Gluckstein 2006, p49.

73 Gluckstein 2006, p50.

74 Cox 2021.

75 Ross 2016, p28.

76 This was the pseudonym of Victoire Léodile Béra, under which she wrote several novels, and the name she is known by in the records of the Commune.

77 Gluckstein 2006, pp188-190.

78 Gluckstein 2006, pp185-191.

79 Merriman 2016, p16.

80 Gluckstein 2006 pp156-157. For an analysis of why Proudhonists were on the right of the Communards, see Gluckstein, pp71-76.

81 Marx et al 2008, p71.

82 Gluckstein 2006, pp69-71.

83 Marx 1871.

84 Marx 1852.

85 Hazan 2010, p238.

86 Lissagaray 1976; Merriman 2016.

87 Lissagaray 1976, pp307-11.

88 Lissagaray 1976, pp146-174; Merriman 2016, chapters 9 and 10. Their accounts give more detail than belongs in an article of this length.

89 Merriman 2016, p226.

90 Thomas 1966, pp140-159.

91 Merriman 2016, pp156-159.

92 Marx 1871.

93 Lissagaray 1976, p287.

94 Tod 2020.

95 The notorious penal colony in French Guiana. Merriman 2016, p147.

96 Lissagaray 1971, pp343-344.

97 Local town hall.

98 Thomas 1966, p132.

99 Merriman 2016, p245.

100 Lissagaray 1976, p238.

101 Luxemburg 1919.

102 Edwards 1973, p26.

103 Edwards 1973, p26.

104 Gluckstein 2006, p130.

105 Gluckstein 2006, pp76-80.

106 Bakunin, “The Paris Commune and the idea of the state”, in Marx et al 2008, p78.

107 Gluckstein 2006, pp28-29.

108 Marx and Engels 1932, p60.

109 Marx 1845.

110 For my assessment of Lenin, see Bloodworth 2013.

111 Gluckstein 2006, pp68-71 for details of strikes and the maturing of working-class activists.

112 Eschelbacher 2009.

113 As the Guardsmen were often referred to.

114 Eschelbacher 2009.

115 Ross 2016, p60.

116 Hazan 2010, p291.

117 Cox 2021.

118 Bloodworth 2005.

119 Landrigan 2017, p78.

120 Buzzfeed 2021

121 Horton 2021.

Thomas Piketty and Karl Marx: Two Totally Different Visions of Capital

By Eric Toussaint

Republished from CADTM (Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt).

In his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century,(1) Thomas Piketty has gathered his data meticulously and provided a useful analysis of the unequal distribution of wealth and income, yet some of his definitions are somewhat confusing and even questionable. Consider, for instance, his definition of capital: “In all civilisations, capital has served two great economic functions: on the one hand to provide dwellings (that is to say, to produce “housing services,” the value of which is measured in terms of the rental value of the dwellings: this is the value of well-being of having a roof over one’s head as opposed to being outside); and, on the other hand, as a factor of production for producing other goods and services.” He continues: “Historically, the early forms of capitalistic accumulation seem to concern tools (from flint, etc.), agricultural infrastructure (fences, irrigation, draining, etc.), and rudimentary dwellings, before evolving into more sophisticated forms, such as industrial and professional capital and increasingly elaborate dwellings.(2) Piketty proposes a scenario that suggests capital has been present from the origins of humanity and that revenue from a savings account held by a limited-income retired person is the same as revenue derived from capital.

Capital according to Thomas Piketty

This major confusion is present in the heart of his analysis he develops in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. For Piketty, an apartment worth €80,000 or €2,000 on a savings account(3) may be defined as capital, in the same way as a factory or commercial premises worth €125 million. The ordinary citizen who owns an apartment, has some reserves in a savings account and a life insurance policy worth, say, €10,000 will readily agree with Piketty’s definition, which corresponds with those found in standard economic textbooks and repeated by their bank manager. However, they are wrong, because capital in our capitalist society is much more complex than these simple definitions. Capital is a social relationship that enables a minority (the richest 1%), to get richer by exploiting the labour of others (see below).

Yet when Piketty talks of a progressive tax on capital, he makes no distinction between the kind of “wealth” represented by a €1,000 savings account and the fortune of a Jeff Bezos, a Bill Gates or an Elon Musk.

The same confusion is to be found in his analysis of income: Piketty considers that the income from renting out an €80,000 apartment is a capital gain of the same kind as the income Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook, derives from his empire.

As far as wages are concerned, Piketty considers that all income declared as wages is wages, whether this means the €3 million salary package of the CEO of a banking group (an amount that is in fact revenue from capital and not a wage or salary(4)) or the €30,000 salary of a bank employee.

Capital according to Karl Marx

We should question the meaning Piketty gives to words like “capital” and define revenue from capital and revenue from labour differently. Piketty presents capital as something that exists in all civilisations and that has necessarily always existed. In this he is in tune with the political economy of the 18th and early 19th century, as found in the writings of Adam Smith in particular, before Karl Marx threw light on what Capital (and wages) really are and developed his critique of the political economy of his time.

Karl Marx has ironical comments on contemporary writers who, like Piketty does, considered the first silex tools to be the original form of capital or just capital: “By a wonderful feat of logical acumen, Colonel Torrens has discovered, in this stone of the savage the origin of capital. “In the first stone which he [the savage] flings at the wild animal he pursues, in the first stick that he seizes to strike down the fruit which hangs above his reach, we see the appropriation of one article for the purpose of aiding in the acquisition of another, and thus discover the origin of capital.” (R. Torrens: “An Essay on the Production of Wealth” &c., pp. 70-71.)»(5)

In his Capital, he states: “We know that the means of production and subsistence, while they remain the property of the immediate producer, are not capital. They become capital only under circumstances in which they serve at the same time as means of exploitation and subjection of the labourer.”(6) Marx explains that an artisan who owns his/her own tools and works for her/himself does not own capital and does not receive a wage. During the centuries that preceded the victory of the capitalist class over the old order, the overwhelming majority of producers worked for themselves, both in towns and in the country. Artisans organised into corporations and peasant families made up the majority of producers, who owned their tools of production, and in the countryside the majority of peasant families owned land, and in addition could make use of communal lands to feed their livestock or glean firewood. Between the end of the 15th century and the end of the 18th century in Western Europe, the developing capitalist class needed the support of the State to dispossess this mass of producers of their tools and/or their land(7) and force them to submit to becoming wage-workers in order to survive. The capitalist class needed to take organised action in order to impoverish and dispossess the working classes and thus force them to accept being wage-workers. That process did not take place all by itself. Karl Marx analyzes the methods that enabled the primitive accumulation of capital in a detailed and rigorous way. In Volume One of Capital, he reviews all the methods used to dispossess producers of the means of production, and thus of their means of subsistence.(8)

Marx draws an anecdote from a book by Edward Gibbon Wakefield (20 March 1796–16 May 1862) to illustrate the idea: “Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, ’Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.’”(9) Marx comments ironically: “Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!” This is because in Australia at the time there was a profusion of land available and the workers were able to find a patch of land on which to set themselves up. Marx, through his comment regarding this fiasco experienced by the capitalist Peel, wants to show that as long as producers have access to the means of subsistence–in this case land—, they are not forced to submit to serving a capitalist.(10)

Marx concludes

So long, therefore, as the labourer can accumulate for himself–and this he can do so long as he remains possessor of his means of production–capitalist accumulation and the capitalistic mode of production are impossible. The class of wage labourers, essential to these, is wanting.“(…)”the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production.

He adds:

the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the labourer.

Karl Marx writes:

property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative–the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will.

We should also point out that Marx, in the same section of Capital dedicated to primitive accumulation, vehemently denounced the extermination or forcible subjugation of the indigenous peoples of North America and the other regions that fell victim to colonial domination and the primitive accumulation of capital:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.

Consequences of Thomas Piketty’s definition of capital

To return to Piketty, the definition of capital he gives introduces complete confusion. Let’s look at his definition again:“In all civilisations, capital has served two great economic functions: on the one hand to provide dwellings (…) and, on the other hand, as a factor of production for producing other goods and services.”So, for Piketty, Capital has existed in all civilisations; he goes all the way back to prehistory when he writes:“Historically, the early forms of capitalistic accumulation(11)seem to concern tools (from flint, etc.) (…) and rudimentary dwellings, before evolving into more sophisticated forms, such as industrial and professional capital and increasingly elaborate dwellings.“For Piketty, a prehistoric flint tool, a cave, and a computer assembly plant are all capital. If we believe him, “capitalistic” [sic] accumulation goes back as far as the first assembly of a few pieces of flint that had been chipped and shaped. That definition throws no light on the historic specificity of capital, its genesis, how it is reproduced and accumulated, to which class it belongs, or the social and property relations to which it corresponds. The list of examples of capital Thomas Piketty gives resembles a supermarket catalogue; in a way it’s an inventory like the one in Jacques Prévert’s poem”Inventory“… with only the raccoons missing.(12)

Speaking of capitalist accumulation today, Piketty limits the discussion almost exclusively to the role of inheritance and fiscal policies that are favourable to capitalists; but in reality these factors, though they play a tangible role in transmitting and strengthening capital, are not what create it. Historically, for the capital held by the capitalist to begin a process of enormous accumulation, it was necessary to forcibly dispossess producers of their tools and their means of subsistence and exploit their labour power. The accumulation of capital as it continues today requires the continuing exploitation of working people and of Nature. Capital plays no useful role for society; on the contrary, continuing the accumulation of capital and the activities that generate it is literally deadly. Piketty’s failure to acknowledge that leads him to make a statement such as this:

If capital plays a useful role in the production process it is natural that it earns a return.(13)

Piketty’s confusion is undoubtedly the result of his fundamental convictions:

I am not interested in denouncing inequalities or capitalism as such (…) social inequalities are not a problem in themselves if they may be justified, that is to say for the common good. (…)(14)

My critique of Piketty’s definitions in no way minimises the interest of the monumental portrait his research has drawn of the wealth and income inequalities that have developed over the last two centuries. And, putting aside undeniable fundamental disagreements regarding the notion of capital, it is important, if anti-neoliberal fiscal reform is to be achieved, that we endeavour to bring together a broad spectrum of movements and individuals ranging from Thomas Piketty to movements of the anticapitalist Left. And if it is also possible to come together to demand cancellation of the public debts held by the European Central Bank (for a total amount of over 2,500 billion euros), it must be done. I do not regret having co-signed the call for the cancellation of sovereign debts held by the ECB(15) in February 2021 along with Thomas Piketty. But like the other members of the CADTM who signed that text, I consider that more must be done–beginning, for example, with levying a large Covid tax on wealthy individuals and major corporations. The CADTM feels that cancellation of public debts must be accompanied by a series of anticapitalist measures, and it is not certain that Thomas Piketty would support all of them.

Thanks to Anne-Sophie Bouvy, Christine Pagnoulle, Brigitte Ponet, Claude Quémar and Patrick Saurin for their readings.

Translated by Snake Arbusto

Footnotes

1. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2013

2. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, p. 337.

3. Note that according to Piketty, the amounts held in France in savings accounts, check-book accounts, etc. account for only 5% of (private) assets! p. .

4. It’s very convenient for capitalists to include the very high revenues of a corporation’s executives, which also include dividends and stock options, in calculating total payroll.

5. Source: Note 9 to Capital, Book One: The process of production of capital. Part VII, Part III: The Production of absolute surplus-value, Chapter 7: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value, available on the Internet: www.marxists.org. Also available in audiobook form, see next note. In the German original and the French translation, Marx jokingly adds a note of wild etymology, suggesting that stock as a reference to capital derives from the German word for stick.

6. Karl Marx, Capital–Book One: The process of production of capital. Part VIII: Primitive accumulation. Chapter Thirty-Three: The Modern Theory of Colonisation. The text from which the excerpts quoted in this article is available on the Internet: www.marxists.org ; it is available in audiobook form at www.marxists.org

7. Confiscation of land by capitalists began in England in the 15th century with what is known as the “Enclosure Movement,” which consisted in ending the traditional right of use of the land and the commons via the Enclosure Acts and turning them over as private property to wealthy aristocrats and bourgeois. Read Chapter 27 of Volume 1 of Marx’s Capital: Expropriation of the Agricultural Population From the Land: www.marxists.org, available as audio – www.archive.org

8. The section of Capital in which Marx details the various sources of primitive accumulation of capital is Book One: The Process of Production of Capital –Part VIII: Primitive Accumulation (First English edition of 1887, translated: Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels). There is an audiobook version of Part Eight (see link in earlier note).

9. E. G. Wakefield: England and America, vol. Il, p. 33. Cited by Karl Marx.

10. Writing of the specific situation of North American and Australia in the early 19th century, Marx explains that the possibility for colonists from Europe to become owners of land or begin working for themselves enables “The wage-worker of to-day [to become] to-morrow an independent peasant, or artisan, working for himself.” In North America, Australia and other regions colonised by Europe, the situation gradually changed over the course of the 19th century and the early 20th century, and the great mass of independent producers whose ancestors had emigrated from Europe were also dispossessed of their means of production.

11. Author’s bold.

12. Excerpt from the poem ”Inventaire“ (”Inventory”) by Jacques Prévert (published 1946):
    “A stone
    two houses
    three ruins
    four gravediggers
    a garden
    flowers
    a raccoon (…)” coonytanuki.tumblr.com

13. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, p. 674

14. Idem, p. 62

15. See the French version : www.cadtm.org The French version has been published by Le Monde, La Libre Belgique and RTBF

Class, Gender, Race & Colonialism: The ‘Intersectionality’ of Marx

By Kevin B. Anderson

Republished from Monthly Review.

Publisher’s Preface

Marx’s writings have sometimes been misrepresented. Many consider them to be no longer relevant for the 21st century on the mistaken assumption that he was obsessed only with class and had little appreciation of how issues of gender, racism and colonialism inter-related with class and the struggle for human emancipation. But as Kevin Anderson explains in this pamphlet:

It is important to see both [Marx’s] brilliant generalisations about capitalist society and the very concrete ways in which he examined not only class, but also gender, race, and colonialism, and what today would be called the intersectionality of all of these. His underlying revolutionary humanism was the enemy of all forms of abstraction that denied the variety and multiplicity of human experience, especially as his vision extended outward from Western Europe. For these reasons, no thinker speaks to us today with such force and clarity.

The pamphlet is part of a series published by Daraja Press entitled Thinking Freedom. We will be publishing other short, pamphlet-sized publications that address key topics / issues related to current struggles for emancipation, justice, dignity and self-determination targeted at the growing generations of activists, members social movements, and unions. Our aim is to produce short, easy to read, jargon free, pamphlets as print, pdf, ebook and, in some cases, audiobook formats. The pamphlets will aim to stimulate reflection and debate. In some instances, the publications will be accompanied by webinars and podcasts. The  idea is to make popular materials that encourage deeper reflection on the meaning and possibilities for emancipatory politics that does not blindly follow established dogma, but reviews the ‘classics’ and international experiences critically.We have published a series of interviews / podcasts in relation to Organising in the time of Covid-19 that can be accessed at darajapress.com.

If you have suggestions about topics that you think should be included in this series, please get in touch at info [at] darajapress.com.

For a PDF version of this pamphlet, please visit Daraja Press.

—Firoze Manji
Publisher, Daraja Press

Class, Gender, Race & Colonialism: The ‘Intersectionality’ of Marx

It is clear today that the emancipation of labour from capitalist alienation and exploitation is a task that still confronts us. Marx’s concept of the worker is not limited to European white males, but includes Irish and Black super-exploited and therefore doubly revolutionary workers, as well as women of all races and nations. But, his research and his concept of revolution go further, incorporating a wide range of agrarian non-capitalist societies of his time, from India to Russia and from Algeria to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, often emphasising their gender relations. In his last, still partially unpublished writings, he turns his gaze Eastward and Southward. In these regions outside Western Europe, he finds important revolutionary possibilities among peasants and their ancient communistic social structures, even as these are being undermined by their formal subsumption under the rule of capital. In his last published text, he envisions an alliance between these non-working-class strata and the Western European working class.

“Proletarians [Proletarier] of all countries, unite!” It is with these ringing words that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously conclude their Communist Manifesto in 1848.[1] This suggests a broad class struggle involving millions of workers across national and regional boundaries against their collective enemies, capital and landed property. In that same Manifesto, Marx and Engels also write, in another well-known passage, that “the workers have no country,” and further that “national differences and antagonisms between peoples [Völker] are shrinking more and more” with the development of the capitalist world market.[2]

An Abstract, General Theory of Capital and Labour

In the Manifesto, we are presented with large social forces, the proletariat or working class and its opponents, contending with each other on an international scale, where differences of culture, nationality, and geography have been overturned, or are being overturned, as capital is coming to rule the world and the workers are organising their resistance to it. Marx and Engels are writing here at a very high level of generality, abstracting from the specificities of the life experience of Western European and North American workers, and predicting that their lot will soon become that of the world’s working people, at that time mainly peasants labouring in predominantly agrarian societies.

It is in this sense that Marx and Engels also write that capitalism has “through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.” They add: “National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible.”[3] Capital creates a world culture alongside its world market, forcing itself into every corner of the globe. They go so far as to applaud, in terms imbued with Eurocentric condescension, how capitalism “draws even the most barbarian nations into civilisation” as it “batters down all Chinese walls” and forces these “barbarians … to adopt the bourgeois mode of production.”[4]  While pain is produced as old societies are destroyed, capital is carrying out its historic mission, the creation of “more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations put together.”[5]

Two decades later, in the 1867 preface to Capital, Marx writes, with a similar logic emphasising abstraction, that the “value form” that is at the core of capitalist production cannot be studied only empirically with regard to specific commodities produced. He adds: “Why? Because the complete body is easier to study than its cells.” Therefore, to analyse capitalism and its value form properly and fully, one must resort to “the power of abstraction” in order to examine commodity production as a whole.[6]

There is clearly a universalising pull under capitalism, a globalising system whose extension homogenises, regularises, and flattens the world, uprooting and changing it as needed to maximise value production, a quest that forms the soul of a soulless system. That same universalising pull creates a deep contradiction, the revolutionary opposition of the modern working class, “united and organised by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production.”[7]

The experience of the working class is similarly homogenised. Shorn of its means of production (land, tools, etc) and reduced to a group of propertyless wage labourers, prototypically in giant factories, Marx’s working class is both alienated and exploited in ways specific to capitalism. As early as 1844 Manuscripts, he wrote of alienated labour, a concept deepened in Capital in the section of commodity fetishism. In the capitalist production process, human relations are fetishised because the products of labour come to dominate their producers, the workers, in a jarring subject–object reversal. These workers then experience that domination as the impersonal power of capital, which is itself produced by their labour. Capital lords it over them, turning human relations into “relations between things,” with the working class objectified to the extreme.[8]

Raya Dunayevskaya is among the few to emphasise Marx’s additional statement to the effect that these relations “appear [erscheinen] as what they are”.[9] The German verb erscheinen [like the word apparaissent he uses at this point in the French edition] is not a false or “mere” appearance and it differs from scheinen [French: paraissent], which means “appear” in the sense of semblance or even false appearance. Thus, we are not dealing with a false appearance that conceals “true” and humanistic human relations, but a new and unprecedented reality based upon “the necessity of that appearance because, that is, in truth, what relations among people are at the point of production” in a capitalist system.[10] In the long run, of course, such a thing-like human relationship is false in the sense that it will be rejected and uprooted by the working class, which seeks a society controlled not by capital but by free and associated labour. But, it remains utterly real while we are under the sway of the capitalist mode of production.

At the same time, the workers suffer harsh material exploitation, as the surplus value they create in the production process is appropriated by capital, in a system characterised by the greatest gulf in history between the material lot of the dominant classes and those of the working people. This exploitation grows in both absolute and relative terms as capital centralises and develops further technologically, in the process of the greatest quantitative increase in the development of the productive forces in human history.[11]

Marx pulls together these two concepts, exploitation and alienation, in his discussion of capital accumulation, wherein the “capitalist system” turns the labour of the workers into stultifying “torment,” serving to “alienate” from the workers “the intellectual potentialities of the labor process,” while at the same time, the rate of exploitation increases: “the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse” relative to the vertiginous accumulation of surplus value by capital.[12]

Marx’s Concrete Dialectic

The kind of analysis presented above shows Marx as our contemporary, not least his grasp of the limitless quest for surplus value by capital, and the concomitant deep alienation and exploitation that it visits upon the working people, from factories to modern call centres.

At the same time, these kinds of statements, especially when read out of context, have been used for decades by Marx’s critics, both conservative and left-wing, to portray him as a thinker whose abstract model of capital and labour occludes national differences, race, ethnicity, gender, and other crucially important aspects of human society and culture.

On the one hand, these critics are wrong because capitalism is in fact a unique social system that overturns and homogenises all previous social relations, tending towards the reduction of all human relations to that of capital versus labour. Thus, one cannot understand contemporary family and gender relations, ethno-racial and communal conflict, or ecological crisis fully without examining the underlying relationships described above. For the family, the ethnic tableau, and the natural environment are all conditioned by the underlying fact of a capitalist mode of production.

But, on the other hand, these critics pose questions that make us look more carefully at Marx’s theoretical categories. It is very important in this regard to realise, if one truly wants to appreciate Marx’s originality, that his concept of capital and labour was posed not only at a high level of abstraction, but that, at other levels, it encompasses a far wider variety of human experience and culture. As Bertell Ollman[13] has emphasised, Marx operated at varying levels of abstraction.

The present article centres on three related points.

• First, Marx’s working class was not only Western European, white, and male, since from his earliest to his latest writings, he took up the working class in all its human variety.

• Second, Marx was not an economic or class reductionist, for throughout his career, he considered deeply various forms of oppression and resistance to capital and the state that were not based entirely upon class, but also upon nationality, race and ethnicity, and gender.

• Third, by the time of Marx’s later writings, long after the Communist Manifesto, the Western European pathway of industrial capitalist development out of feudalism was no longer a global universal. Alternate pathways of development were indeed possible, and these connected to types of revolutions that did not always fit the model of industrial labour overthrowing capital.

In terms of a concrete dialectic, Marx follows in the wake of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. This is true from his earliest writings to Capital, where he writes of “the Hegelian ‘contradiction,’ which is the source of all dialectics.”[14] One striking feature of Hegel’s dialectical framework, despite its overall universalising thrust, is its rejection of abstract universals, while also avoiding a mere empiricism. No previous philosopher had drawn history and social existence into philosophy in this way, as seen especially in the Phenomenology of Spirit, a book so crucial to our understanding of the present moment that two new translations of it have appeared in 2018. Again and again in this work, Hegel rejects the abstract universal as “the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black.”[15] The concreteness of his universals is also seen in the ascending concrete forms of consciousness that develop along the universal pathway towards the freedom of the human spirit, from ancient Rome to the Reformation and the French Revolution of his own time, each of them limited by their historical, social, and cultural context. Of course, Marx also rejects aspects of Hegel’s idealism, especially his stress on the growth of human consciousness as the most important result of the dialectics of history, as opposed to the actuality of human freedom and healthy development in a society that has been revolutionised from below. In short, Hegel’s dialectic, while social and historical, remains somewhat dehumanised.

Such stress on the concrete universal in no way negates my earlier citation, where Marx writes that one needs the “power of abstraction” to get at what is really crucial about capitalism, its value form and the dehumanised, fetishised existence experienced by those who live under its domination. No, the solution has to be approached from both directions. The abstract rests upon the concrete, but at the same time, the abstract concept has to concretise itself, to become determinate. However, Marx equally rejects what Karel Kosík called the “pseudoconcrete,” a type of concrete that cannot think beyond the immediately given under capitalism. As against such false or distorted forms of consciousness, dialectics “dissolves fetishised artefacts both of the world of things and the world of ideas, in order to penetrate to their reality.”[16]

Thus, Marx is hostile to mere empiricism, embracing a dialectical form of totality. He at the same time castigates, as did Hegel, the abstract universals of traditional idealist philosophy and of modern liberalism, with its human and civil rights that are so often little more than formulaic to those at the bottom of society. Yet, at the same time, he embraces what he and Hegel called the concrete universal, a form of universality that was rooted in social life, and yet pointed beyond the given world of the “pseudoconcrete.”

One example of the concrete universal can be glimpsed in how Marx argues that we cannot adequately measure the world of capitalist exploitation and alienation either in its own terms (the “pseudoconcrete”) or by comparing it to past forms of domination like Western European feudalism, the ancient Greco–Roman world, or the “Asiatic” mode of production. Instead, he measures capitalist society against a different yardstick, the unrealised but potentially realisable horizon of a communist future of free and associated labour, as has been emphasised in two recent studies.[17] But, this is not merely an imagined republic, as Niccolò Machiavelli characterised the abstract and schematic models of the good society found in ancient Greco–Roman thinkers like Socrates. Marx’s vision of the future was based upon the aspirations and struggles of a really existing social class, the proletariat, to which his writings sought to give a more universal and concrete form.

The Working Class in All Its Human Variety

From the outset, Marx saw Britain as the country where the capitalist mode of production was most developed, far ahead of any other country. This can be seen especially in Capital, where British examples of both capital and labour predominate. But the British working class was by no means homogenous. As the industrial revolution surged in Manchester, the cutting-edge city of 19th-century capitalism, it did so by exploiting a working class with deep ethnic divisions between English and Irish workers. Engels discusses this issue at length in his 1845 book, The Condition of the Working Class in England published just after he and Marx began to collaborate. Marx regarded this book as one of Engels’s greatest contributions, citing it more than any other of his friend’s writings in Capital.

Marx himself took up the Irish potato famine of the 1840s as a tragedy rooted in the process of capital accumulation, especially in Capital. He wrote as well about Irish workers in Britain, especially in 1869–70, at a time when the First International was substantially engaged with supporting Irish revolutionaries. While he was able to convince the International to support the Irish, it was a difficult battle. At the same time, this was a battle that needed to be fought and won, because it got to the heart of why, despite its large-scale industrialisation and organised working class, Britain had not seen the level of class struggle predicted in texts written at an abstract level like the Communist Manifesto. He offered an explanation in a “Confidential Communication” of the International issued in early 1870:

[T]he English bourgeoisie has not only exploited Irish poverty to keep down the working class in England by forced immigration of poor Irishmen, but it has also divided the proletariat into two hostile camps … The common English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers wages and the standard of life. He feels national and religious antipathies for him. He views him similarly to how the poor whites of the Southern states of North America viewed black slaves. This antagonism among the proletarians of England is artificially nourished and kept up by the bourgeoisie. It knows that this split is the true secret of the preservation of its power.[18]

Marx also saw this antagonism based upon the double oppression of the Irish workers, as both proletarians and as members of an oppressed minority in dialectical terms. He viewed the Irish as sources of revolutionary ferment that could help spark a British revolution. Thus, we have here the analysis of a really existing working class at a specific point in time, Britain in 1870, as opposed to the more general and abstract manner in which he and Engels conceptualised the working class in the Manifesto.

Marx viewed the racially divided working class of the United States (US) in similar terms. He strongly opposed slavery and advocated abolitionism within the working-class movement, attacking those like Pierre Joseph Proudhon who were more ambiguous on the subject of slavery.

He conceptualised African slavery as central to capitalist development, writing as early as Poverty of Philosophy (1847):

Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry.[19]

During the 1861–65 Civil War in the US, Marx strongly, albeit critically, supported the North against the slave South. He regarded the war as a second American revolution that had created some real possibilities for the working class. He intoned in Capital:

In the US, every independent workers’ movement was paralysed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin. However, a new life immediately arose from the death of slavery. The first fruit of the American Civil War was the eight hours agitation, which ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California, with the seven-league boots of a locomotive.[20]

At this point, he noted that a large national labour congress took place in 1866, one year after the end of the Civil War, where the demand for the eight-hour day was put forward.

Here, the abolition of slavery is seen as the precondition for a real working-class movement in the racialised capitalism of the US.

If Marx’s working class was not exclusively white, nor was it exclusively male. In her study of Marx and gender, Heather Brown concludes that in the parts of Capital devoted to the life experience of the workers, “Marx not only traces out the changing conditions of the male worker, but also gives significant emphasis to the role of women in this process.” While he sometimes lapsed into “echoing paternalistic or patriarchal assumptions” in his descriptions of female workers, it is hard to argue, as some have, that he ignored working women in his most important book.[21]

This can also be seen in his dialectical discussion of changes to the family and gender relations brought about by capitalist industrialisation, which has “dissolved the old family relationships” among the workers, as women and children were forced into horribly exploitative paid employment outside the home:

However terrible and disgusting the dissolution of the old family ties within the capitalist system may appear, large-scale industry, by assigning an important part in socially organised processes of production, outside the sphere of the domestic economy, to women, young persons, and children of both sexes, does nevertheless create a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of relations between the sexes.[22]

Marx returned to gender and the family as a research topic at the end of his life, as seen in his Ethnological Notebooks of 1880–82[23] and other notebooks from that period. In these notebooks, he explored gender relations across a number of societies, from preliterate Native Americans and Homeric Greeks, to precolonial Ireland and contemporary Australian aborigines. Some of these notes became the basis for Engels’s Origin of the Family. Although that work contains many important insights, it treats the rise of gender oppression in an economic and class reductionist manner that was far less subtle than the notes Marx left behind and which Engels used as source material.[24] These notebooks are also concerned deeply with colonialism, an issue discussed below with which Engels did not engage.

Revolutionary Subjectivity Outside the Working Class

It is important to note that Marx’s interest in gender issues was not limited to the study of working class women. From his earliest writings, he pointed to gender oppression as a crucial, foundational form of social hierarchy and domination. In the 1844 Manuscripts, he wrote:

The direct, natural, necessary relationship of human being [Mensch] to human being is the relationship of man [Mann] to woman [Weib]. … Therefore, on the basis of this relationship, we can judge the whole stage of development of the human being. From the character of this relationship it follows to what degree the human being has become and recognised himself or herself as a species being; a human being; the relationship of man to woman is the most natural relationship of human being to human being. Therefore, in it is revealed the degree to which the natural behaviour of the human being has become human.[25]

Here, Marx is concerned not only with working-class women, as discussed above, but with other strata of women as well, and across the full trajectory of human society and culture, not just capitalism. He takes up the oppression of modern women outside the working class in his 1846 text, “Peuchet on Suicide,” where he focuses on middle- and upper-class French women driven to suicide by gender-based oppression from husbands or parents, writing at one point of “social conditions … which permit the jealous husband to fetter his wife in chains, like a miser with his hoard of gold, for she is but part of his inventory.”[26] These concerns did not end with Marx’s youth. In 1858, he wrote movingly in the New York Tribune about Lady Rosina Bulwer Lytton, who had been confined to a mental institution by her politician husband for having attempted to speak out on political issues.[27]

Nor did Marx focus on the industrial working class to the exclusion of the peasantry, which he saw as an oppressed and potentially revolutionary class. Considerable attention has been paid to his characterisation of the French peasantry as somewhat conservative in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). In other contexts, though, he discussed the revolutionary potential of peasants, for example, during the 16th-century Anabaptist uprising in Germany. Concerning his own time, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), he castigated Ferdinand Lassalle for labelling the “peasants” as inherently conservative, since Lassalle’s organisation had written off “all other classes” besides the working class as “one reactionary mass”.[28]

And, while condemning racist and imperialist forms of nationalism, Marx also strongly supported nationalist movements that exhibited a clear emancipatory content. Long before Vladimir Ilich Lenin articulated a concept of national liberation, in an 1848 speech on Poland, Marx drew a distinction between what he termed “narrowly national [étroitement national]” movements and national revolutions that were “reforming and democratic,” that is, ones that put forth issues like land reform even when it targeted the indigenous upper classes rather than just a foreign enemy or occupying power.[29]

Even in the Communist Manifesto, where, as discussed above, he and Engels had written that national differences were disappearing, this was at a general, abstract level. For, when it came down to concretising the principles in terms of a set of immediate goals and slogans in a final section, “Position of the Communists in Relation to the Existing Opposition Parties,” Polish national emancipation from under Russian, Austrian, and Prussian occupation was nonetheless singled out: “In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846”.[30] Marx continued to support a Polish national revolution until the end of his life. He greeted the Polish uprising of 1863 with enthusiasm and in his writings celebrating the Paris Commune of 1871; he singled out the important contribution of Polish exiles in the military defence of revolutionary Paris. Fittingly, in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the graves of the Communards include that of Polish General Walery Wróblewski, only steps away from those of Marx’s French descendants.

In the 1870 Confidential Communication on Ireland, the peasantry and the national movement were also intertwined as revolutionary elements. An equally prominent point in this text is Marx’s defence of the International’s public support of Irish national emancipation, including appeals to the Queen to stop the execution of Irish militants. On this issue, Marx and the International’s General Council in London had come under attack by the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin’s faction, which took a class-reductionist position, rejecting “any political action that does not have as its immediate and direct aim the triumph of the workers’ cause against capital”.[31] In response, Marx wrote in the Communication:

In the first place, Ireland is the bulwark of English landlordism. If it fell in Ireland, it would fall in England. In Ireland this is a hundred times easier because the economic struggle there is concentrated exclusively on landed property, because this struggle is at the same time national, and because the people there are more revolutionary and angrier than in England. Landlordism in Ireland is maintained solely by the English army. The moment the forced Union between the two countries ends, a social revolution will immediately break out in Ireland.[32]

Moreover, he hinted that such a process could also break the impasse in which British workers were stuck:

Although revolutionary initiative will probably come from France, England alone can serve as the lever for a serious economic Revolution … It is the only country where the vast majority of the population consists of wage laborers … The English have all the material conditions [matière nécessaire] for social revolution. What they lack is a sense of generalisation and revolutionary passion. It is only the General Council that can provide them with this, that can thus accelerate the truly revolutionary movement in this country, and consequently everywhere … If England is the bulwark of landlordism and European capitalism, the only point where official England can be struck a great blow is Ireland.[33]

He conceptualised more explicitly this notion of the Irish struggle for independence as a detonator for a wider British and European working-class revolution in a letter to Engels of 10 December 1869:

For a long time I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working-class ascendancy. I always expressed this point of view in the New York Tribune. Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. That is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.[34]

Here, Marx also acknowledges explicitly a change of position, from an earlier one, where he saw proletarian revolution spreading from the core industrial nations to the periphery. At this point, he is beginning to develop the notion of a transnational communist revolution beginning in the more agrarian, colonised peripheries of capitalism, and then spreading into the core nations. During the last years before his death in 1883, this was to become a major concern with respect to societies outside Western Europe and North America.

Late Marx: India, Russia, and Beyond

In The German Ideology of 1846, Marx and Engels conceptualised several successive stages of historical development in Eurocentric terms, later called modes of production: (i) clan or tribal, (ii) slave-based ancient Greco–Roman, (iii) serf-based feudal, (iv) formally free wage-labour-based bourgeois or capitalist, and, it was implied, (v) freely-associated-labour-based socialist. A decade later, in the Grundrisse of 1857–58, Marx discussed modes of production originating in Asia, especially India (the “Asiatic” mode of production) as a type of pre-capitalist system that did not fall easily under either (ii) or (iii). It represented something qualitatively different, without as much formal slavery, and with communal or collective property and social relations continuing in the villages for a very long time.

For Marx, this constituted a more global and multilinear theory of history, with premodern Asian societies on a somewhat different pathway of development than Western Europe, especially ancient Rome. In Capital, Vol I, he referred to “the ancient Asiatic, Classical-antique, and other such modes of production,” where commodity production “plays a subordinate role” as compared to the modern capitalist mode of production.[35] Marx’s distinction between Asian and European pre-capitalist societies was banned in Stalinist ideology, which clung to the slavery–feudal–bourgeois model of successive modes of production, something that required mental gymnastics to fit societies like Mughal India or Confucian China into the “feudal” or “slave” modes of production. Even as late as the 1970s, the noted anthropologist and Marx scholar Norair Ter-Akopian was dismissed from the Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute in Moscow for having published a book on the Asiatic mode of production.

In notes from his last years not published until after Stalin’s death, Marx summarised and commented upon his young anthropologist friend Maxim Kovalevsky’s Communal Property (1879), especially its treatment of precolonial India. Although appreciative of much of Kovalevsky’s analysis, Marx inveighed against his attempts to treat Mughal India, with its highly centralised state system, as feudal: “Kovalevsky here finds feudalism in the Western European sense. Kovalevsky forgets, among other things, serfdom, which is not in India, and which is an essential moment.” Marx concludes that concerning “feudalism,” “as little is found in India as in Rome”.[36]  These notes, available in English since 1975, did not find their way into the Collected Works of Marx and Engels. Nor can any of the notes on Kovalevsky or other late texts on India be found in the most recent collection of Marx’s India writings.[37] However, Irfan Habib’s comprehensive introduction to this volume does mention briefly the late Marx’s notebooks on India his “objection to any designation of the Indian communities as ‘feudal’.”[38]

All this would be only an academic topic had Marx not tied these issues to the contemporary issues of colonialism and world revolution. In the years 1848–53, Marx tended toward an implicit support of colonialism, whether in forcing a traditionalist China into the world market, as quoted above from the Communist Manifesto, or in his 1853 articles on India, which celebrated what he saw as modernising and progressive aspects of British rule. In 1853, he portrays India as backward in socio-economic terms, incapable of real change from within, and unable to mount serious resistance to foreign invasion due to its social divisions. Therefore, he could write that year in his Tribune article, “British Rule in India,” that British colonialism was carrying in its wake “the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.”[39]To be sure, Edward Said and others have caricatured his 1853 India articles as completely pro-colonialist, ignoring another major one a few weeks later, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” which attacks the “barbarism” of British colonialism and applauds the possibility of India being able one day “to throw off the English yoke altogether”.[40] Nonetheless, some of Said’s criticisms are on target with regard to the Eurocentrism and ethnocentrism of the 1853 writings.

By the time of the Grundrisse of 1857–58, with its discussion of precolonial India being on a different historical trajectory than ancient Rome, Marx was also coming out publicly, again in the Tribune, in support of both the anti-British sepoy uprising in India and Chinese resistance to the British in the Second Opium War. But, his support for this anti-colonial resistance remained at a rather general level. Marx did not embrace the overall political aims or perspectives of the Chinese or Indians resisting imperialism, which seemed to be neither democratic nor communist.[41] This differs from his late writings on Russia, which saw emancipatory communist movements emerging from that country’s communal villages. Thus, Marx’s thinking on these issues seems to have evolved further after 1858.

Multilinear Pathways of Development and Revolution

During his last years, Marx never finished Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, although he reworked Vol I painstakingly for the French edition of 1872–75, altering several passages that were seen to imply that societies outside the narrow band of industrialising capitalism would inevitably have to modernise in the Western industrial sense. In the original 1867 edition, he had written: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future”.[42] Even the usually careful scholar Teodor Shanin viewed this passage as an example of “unilinear determinism”.[43] He, therefore, drew a sharp distinction between Capital (determinist) and Marx’s late writings on Russia (open-ended and multilinear). But, Shanin and other scholars who taxed Marx for this passage did not notice that in the subsequent 1872–75 French edition, the last version of the book he himself saw to publication, he recast this passage: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to those that follow it up the industrial ladder [le suivent sur l’échelle industrielle], the image of its own future.”[44] In this way, he removed any hint of unilinear determinism and, more importantly, suggested that the future of societies outside Western Europe might follow a different pathway.

Marx made a much more explicit statement concerning his multilinear approach to the historical possibilities of agrarian societies outside Western Europe in the draft of an 1877 letter, where he criticised strongly any idea of “transforming my historical sketch [in the “Primitive Accumulation” section of Capital—KA] of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of the general course fatally imposed on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves placed,” a letter in which he also quoted the French edition of Capital.[45]

Marx also returned at length to the subject of India in his above-cited 1879 notes on Kovalevsky[46], his Notes on Indian History[47], and his 1880–82 Ethnological Notebooks.[48] During these last years, he wrote of Russian peasant “primitive communism” as a locus of resistance to capital and of possible linkages to the revolutionary working-class communist movement in the West. This is seen in a famous passage from his last published text, the 1882 preface he and Engels contributed to a new Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto:

If the Russian revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, then the present Russian common ownership [Gemeineigentum] may serve as the point of departure [Ausgungspunkt] for a communist development.[49]

In his late writings on Russia and notebooks on South Asia, North Africa, Latin America, and a number of other agrarian, pastoral, or hunter-gatherer societies, Marx is deeply concerned with the rise of gender and social hierarchy during the decline of communal social formations.[50] It is also very likely that he was interested in South Asian, North African, Latin American villages, like the Russian ones, as possible loci of resistance to capital and therefore potential allies of the working classes of Western Europe and North America.

For example, in Marx’s notes on Kovalevsky’s lengthy discussion of India, he traces in great detail the shift from kin-based communal village organisation to one grounded more in mere residency. At this stage, he has clearly rejected his earlier notion of an unchanging India until the arrival of capitalism via the British. However, as against his writings on Ireland, he never acknowledges this change explicitly, as in his 1869 letter to Engels on Ireland cited above. (Of course, we have less information on Marx’s thinking in his last years. By 1879, Engels, his most regular intellectual interlocutor, was no longer in faraway Manchester receiving Marx’s letters, but a neighbour who visited almost daily but without leaving much of paper trail of their conversations. Marx’s letters to Kovalevsky were also burned by his friends in Russia, who went to his house to do so, out of fear of them falling into the hands the police, which could have endangered the young anthropologist.)

As seen above, as early as the 1857 sepoy uprising, Marx seems to have moved away from his earlier notion of India as a passive civilisation that did not offer much resistance to foreign conquest. He recorded detailed data on Indian resistance in another set of notes taken around 1879, on British colonial official Robert Sewell’s Analytical History of India (1870), published in Moscow as Marx’s Notes on Indian History[51] without awareness that this volume consisted mainly of passages excerpted from Sewell’s book. In these notes, Marx records dozens of examples of Indian resistance to foreign invaders and domestic rulers, from the earliest historical records right up through the sepoy uprising. Moreover, Marx’s notes now view Mughal, British, and other conquests of India as contingent rather than the product of ineluctable social forces.

But, Marx’s main focus in these late notebooks on South Asia, North Africa, and Latin America is the structure and history of communal social relations and property in these regions, and on how colonialism uprooted these earlier social relations. At the same time, as a dialectical thinker, Marx also notes the persistence of remnants of these communal social forms even after they had been greatly undermined by colonialism. Did he come to believe that the Indian, Algerian, or Latin American village could become a locus of resistance to capital, as he had theorised in 1882 concerning the Russian village? That is what I have concluded after years of study of these notebooks.

To be sure, he never said such a thing explicitly. Moreover, in his late writings on Russia, in the drafts of his 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich, he even noted a key difference with India, that Russia had not “fallen prey, like the East Indies, to a conquering foreign power”. [52]

Still, I find it hard to believe that Marx engaged in such a deep and extended study of the communal social formations in precolonial and even colonial South Asia, North Africa, and Latin America without an aim beyond purely historical research. As the Italian Marx scholar Luca Basso notes, Marx was in his late writings on Russia and other non-Western societies, operating on “two planes,” that of “historical-theoretical interpretation” and that of “the feasibility or otherwise of a revolutionary movement” in the context of what he was studying.[53] The fact that he undertook this research in the years just before his clarion call in the 1882 preface to the Manifesto about an uprising in Russia’s communal villages that would link up with the Western proletariat as the “starting point for a communist revolution” suggests the connectedness of all of this research on primitive communism. As Dunayevskaya argued in the first work that linked these notebooks to modern concerns with revolution and women’s liberation: “Marx returns to probe the origin of humanity, not for purposes of discovering new origins, but for perceiving new revolutionary forces, their reason.”[54]

It is important to see both his brilliant generalisations about capitalist society and the very concrete ways in which he examined not only class, but also gender, race, and colonialism, and what today would be called the intersectionality of all of these. His underlying revolutionary humanism was the enemy of all forms of abstraction that denied the variety and multiplicity of human experience, especially as his vision extended outward from Western Europe. For these reasons, no thinker speaks to us today with such force and clarity.

Kevin B. Anderson’s authored books include Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies and Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism. Among his edited books are The Power of Negativity by Raya Dunayevskaya (with Peter Hudis), Karl Marx (with Bertell Ollman), The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (with P. Hudis), and The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence (with Russell Rockwell).

Notes

See Bibliography below.

1. MECW 6: 519; MEW 4: 493, sometimes my translation) ↵

   1. MECW 6: 502–03; MEW 4: 479 ↵

   2. MECW 6: 488 ↵

   3. MECW 6: 488 ↵

   4. MECW 6: 489 ↵

   5. Marx 1976: 90 ↵

   6. Marx 1976: 929 ↵

   7. Marx 1976: 166 ↵

   8. Marx 1976: 166; MEW 23: 86; Marx 1994: 607 ↵

   9. (Dunayevskaya 1958: 100, emphasis in the original) ↵

   10. Marx 1976: 929 ↵

   11. Marx 1976: 799 ↵

   12. Ollman 1993 ↵

   13. Marx 1976: 744 ↵

   14. Hegel 2018: 10 ↵

   15. Kosík 1976: 7 ↵

   16. Hudis 2012; Chattopadhyay 2016 ↵

   17. MECW 21: 120, emphasis in original ↵

   18. MECW 6: 167 ↵

   19. Marx 1976: 414, emphasis added ↵

   20. Brown 2012: 91 ↵

   21. Marx 1976: 620–21 ↵

   22. Krader 1974 ↵

   23. Dunayevskaya 1982; Anderson 2014; Brown 2012 ↵

   24. Quoted in Plaut and Anderson 1999: 6, emphasis in original; see also MECW 3: 295–96 for an earlier translation) ↵

   25. Plaut and Anderson 1999: 58 ↵

   26. Dunayevskaya 1982; Brown 2012 ↵

   27. MECW 24: 88–89 ↵

   28. Marx 1994: 1001, my translation from the French original; see also MECW 6: 549 ↵

   29. MECW 6: 518 ↵

   30. Quoted in MECW 21: 208 ↵

   31. MECW 21: 119–120, translation slightly altered on basis of French original in Marx 1966: 358–59 ↵

   32. MECW 21: 118–19, translation slightly altered on basis of French original in Marx 1966: 356–57 ↵

   33. MECW 43: 398, emphasis in original ↵

   34. Marx 1976: 172 ↵

   35. Krader 1975: 383 ↵

   36. Husain 2006 ↵

   37. Husain 2006: xxxv ↵

   38. MECW 12: 132 ↵

   39. (MECW 12: 221). ↵

   40. Benner 2018 ↵

   41. Marx 1976: 91 ↵

   42. Shanin 1983: 4 ↵

   43. Marx 1976: 91, my translation, see also Anderson 2014 ↵

   44. Shanin 1983: 136. ↵

   45. Krader 1975 ↵

   46. Marx 1960 ↵

   47. Krader 1974 ↵

   48. Shanin 1983: 139, see also MECW 24: 426 and MEW 19: 296, translation slightly altered ↵

   49. Some of these notebooks are still unpublished and will appear in the Marx–Engels Gesamtausgabe or MEGA, but their aspects have been discussed in Brown 2012; Pradella 2015 and Anderson 2016. ↵

   50. Marx 1960 ↵

   51. Shanin 1983: 106 ↵

   52. Basso 2015: 90 ↵

   53. Dunayevskaya 1982: 187 ↵

Bibliography

• Anderson, Kevin B (2014): Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, New Delhi: Pinnacle Learning.

• — (2016): Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, Expanded edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• Basso, Luca (2015): Marx and the Common: From Capital to the Late Writings, Trans David Broder, Leiden: Brill.

• Benner, Erica (2018): Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels, Reprint edition, New York: Oxford University Press.

• Brown, Heather (2012): Marx on Gender and the Family, Leiden: Brill.

• Chattopadhyay, Paresh (2016): Marx’s Associated Mode of Production, New York: Palgrave.

• Dunayevskaya, Raya (1958): Marxism and Freedom, New York: Bookman Associates.

• — (1982): Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, Sussex: Harvester Press.

• Hegel, G W F (2018): Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans Michael Inwood, New York: Oxford University Press.

• Hudis, Peter (2012): Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, Leiden: Brill.

• Husain, Iqbal (ed) (2006): Karl Marx on India, New Delhi: Tulika Books.

• Kosík, Karel (1976): Dialectics of the Concrete, Trans Karel Kovanda and James Schmidt, Boston: D Reidel.

• Krader, Lawrence (ed) (1974): The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, Second Edition, Assen: Van Gorcum.

• — (1975): The Asiatic Mode of Production, Assen: Van Gorcum.

• Marx, Karl (1960): Notes on Indian History (664–1858), Moscow: Progress Publishers.

• — (1966): “Le conseil générale au conseil fédérale de la Suisse romande,” General Council of the First International 1868–1870, Minutes, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

• — (1976): Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol 1, Trans Ben Fowkes, New York: Penguin.

• — (1994): Oeuvres IV, Edited by Maximilien Rubel, Paris: Éditions Gallimard.

• [MECW] Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels (1975–2004): Collected Works, Fifty Volumes, New York: International Publishers.

• [MEW] Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1968): Werke, Berlin: Dietz Verlag.

• Ollman, Bertell (1993): Dialectical Investigations, New York: Routledge.

• Plaut, Eric A and Kevin B Anderson (1999): Marx on Suicide, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

• Pradella, Lucia (2015): Globalisation and the Critique of Political Economy: New Insights from Marx’s Writings, Milton Park: Routledge.

• Shanin, Teodor (1983): Late Marx and the Russian Road, New York: Monthly Review Press.

Ecosocialism Versus Degrowth: A False Dilemma

By Giacomo D’Alisa

Republished from Undisciplined Environments.

In a recent article Michael Lowy ponders if the ecological left has to embrace the ecosocialist or the degrowth ‘flag’; a concern that is not totally new. Lowy is a French-Brazilian Marxist scholar and a prominent ecosocialist. Together with Joel Kovel, an American social scientist and psychiatrist, in 2001 he wrote An ecosocialist manifesto, a foundational document for several political organizations worldwide. Thus, entering into a discussion with Lowy is not a simple academic whim, but a demand that many politically-engaged people of the ecological left are wondering about.

Recently, members of an ecosocialist group within Catalonia en Comù, part of Unida Podemos (itself part of the centre-left coalition governing Spain), invited me to debate about the end of the economic growth paradigm. This hints that ecosocialists are interested in degrowth vision and proposals. On the other hand, during talks, speeches and discussions I have participated in, I also have noted that ecosocialist projects intrigue and inspire many degrowthers. Indeed, people on both sides feel they are sister movements. The following reflection is a first and humble contribution to making the two come closer.

In the above-quoted article, Lowy supports an alliance between ecosocialists and degrowthers, and I cannot but agree with this conclusion. However, before justifying this strategic endeavour, he feels the necessity to argue why degrowth falls short as a political vision. He narrows down his critical assessment to three issues. First, Lowy maintains, degrowth as a concept is inadequate to express clearly an alternative programme. Second, degrowthers and their discourses are not explicitly anti-capitalist. Finally, for him, degrowthers are not able to distinguish between those activities that need to be reduced and those that can keep flourishing.

Concerning the first critique, Lowy maintains that the word: “degrowth” is not convincing; it does not convey the progressive and emancipatory project of societal transformation that it is needed; this remark echoes with an old and unsolved debate for many. A discussion that Lowy should know, as well as those that have followed the last decade of degrowth debate. Sophisticated criticism has mobilized the American cognitive linguist and philosopher George Lakoff’s study about framing. Kate Rowarth, for example, suggested to degrowthers to learn from Lakoff that no one can win a political struggle or election if they keep using their opponent’s frame; and degrowth has in itself its antagonic vision: growth. Ecological economists supported the same argument in a more articulated way, suggesting that for this reason, degrowth backfires.

On the contrary, my intellectual companion Giorgos Kallis, back in 2015, gave nine clear reasons why degrowth is a compelling word. I want to complement them with one more. Looking at the search trends in Google, after ten years, degrowth keeps drawing higher levels of attention worldwide than ecosocialism. Perhaps ecosocialism can result clearer at a glance. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the populace will be immediately convinced. Indeed, the ecosocialist concept also has similar and possibly worse problems of framing, given the post-Soviet aversion to “socialism”, but this cannot mean we should abandon the term. The recent upsurge of popularity in the U.S. of “democratic socialism” suggests that the negative association of a term can be overcome.

Ecosocialists, as degrowthers, must keep explaining the actual content of their political dream, the label is not sufficient to explain it all. Our mission is un-accomplished; granted, in some contexts, ecosocialism will result in a more straightforward message, but in other degrowth could result more convincing. For the ecological left, more frames could be more effective than just one; and, using the most appropriate in different contexts and geographies is very probably the best strategy.

Noteworthy is that these different frames share core arguments and strategies. So let me move to Lowy’s second criticism, the supposed discrepancy between ecosocialists and degrowthers about capitalism. According to Lowy, degrowthers are not sufficiently or explicitly anti-capitalist. I cannot deny that not all degrowthers self-define as anti-capitalists and that for some of them stating it is not a priority. However, as Kallis already clarified, degrowth scholars are increasingly grounding their research and policies in a critique of capital forces and relations. Furthermore, Dennis and Schmelzer have shown that degrowthers widely share the belief that a degrowth society is incompatible with capitalism. And Stefania Barca has delineated how articulating ‘degrowth and labour politics toward an ecological class consciousness’ is the way forward for an ecosocialist degrowth society.

To these arguments, I want to add an observation. In their 2001 ecosocialist manifesto, Lowy and Kovel affirmed that in order to solve the ecological problem, it is necessary to set limits upon accumulation. They go on clarifying that this is not possible while capitalism keeps ruling the world. Indeed, as they and other prominent ecosocialists affirm, capitalism needs to grow or die. This effective slogan is probably the most explicit anti-capitalist sentence written in the ecosocialist manifesto, and I can maintain that most of the degrowthers would undersign this statement without hesitation –even more in pandemic times, when the existing capitalist system seems to be predicated upon the slogan: we (the capitalists) grow and you die! Indeed, it is ever-more evident that inequality is increasing dramatically during this period. If these observations are accurate, then degrowthers and ecosocialists agree more than disagree, and together with many others in the ecological left camp, share the same common sense: a healthy ecological and social system beyond the pandemic is not compatible with capitalism.

Lowy’s last criticism is that degrowthers cannot differentiate between the quantitative and the qualitative characteristics of growth. At first sight, it seems a step back to the lively discussion in the 1980s about the difference between growth and development. However, I am sure that Lowy and other ecosocialists are well aware of the critical assessment many Latin America thinkers have done of development and its colonial legacy (see here and here, for example). So, I will interpret this criticism in a more general term: it is essential to be selective about growth, and clarify what sectors need to grow and which need to degrow or even disappear. Nothing new under the sun, I could say. Peter Victor in 2012, when he was developing no-growth scenarios for facing the threat of climate change, discussed the selective growth scenario showing its modest and short-term effects for mitigating climate change. Serge Latouche, in his 2009 book Farewell to growth, argued that the decision about selective degrowth cannot be left to market forces. And Kallis explained that growth is a complex and integrated process, and thus it is mistaken to think in terms of what has to increase and what has to decrease.

It is an error to use degrowth as synonymous of decrease (as Timothée Parrique discussed extensively), and to think that what is considered ‘good’ things (hospitals, renewable energy, bicycles, etc.) need to increase without limits as the growth imaginary commands. Those that perpetuate this logic, as Lowy seems to do, stay in the growth camp. Doing so, Lowy did not follow his suggestion of paying more attention to a qualitative transformation.

In an ecosocialist society, orienting production towards more hospitals and public transport, as Lowy suggests, does not imply overcoming the growth logic and its predicaments. A degrowth society, with a healthier lifestyle and more ecological care, probably would not need so many more hospitals. Indeed, as Luzzati and colleagues found, the increase in per-capita income correlates significantly with the increase in cancer morbidity and mortality. In a degrowth society, people would fly very much less, and this could help to diminish the speed of pandemic contagions. Agro-ecological systems will encroach fewer habitats; both these qualitative changes in societal arrangement could imply less necessity to increase the number of intensive care units.

On the other hand, increasing more and more of a ‘good thing’ such as bikes in a city is not entirely positive: as in the case of Amsterdam, where walkers felt lack of space because of the enormous number of bikes in public spaces; or China , where tens of thousands of bike have been dumped because the growth-led prospect of the shared bike in cities resulted socially and ecologically problematic, the city counsellor decided to cap bike growth and regulate the share sectors. In sum, the idea of selective (de)growth does not help to unlearn the growth logic that still persists amongst many in the ecological left camp. What is needed is, indeed, a qualitative change in our mind, in our logic and our performative acts.

Ecosocialists and degrowthers are less far apart than Lowy’s article hints. Both visions are moving forward along the same path, learning from each other in the process. Discussing some thesis or policies that one or the other is proposing will help to improve and clarify their visions, and make them less questionable at the eyes of the sceptics and indifferent people. A meaningful dialogue will help us to make our arguments and practices widely commonsensical. Ecological leftists have not to decide which is the best and the most comprehensive discourse between ecosocialism and degrowth. These visions, I tried to argue above, indeed share core arguments, and both contribute to building persuasive discourse and performative actions.

On the contrary, creating a false dilemma is not very useful for our everyday struggles. In 2015, with some colleagues, we suggested exploring the redundancy of six different frameworks (Degrowth, Sustainable Community Movement Organizations, Territorialism, Commons, Social Resilience and Direct Social Actions) for relaunching more robust and comprehensive initiatives against the continuous expansion of capitalism and environmental injustices. We concluded that fostering redundancy more than nuance should motivate the promoters of these approaches if the general aim is to effectively relaunch robust and less aleatory alternatives to capitalism. In other words, we call for focusing on the consolidation of what all these approaches have in common, not just what they diverge on. This suggestion is also valid for ecosocialists and degrowthers.

It is undoubtedly crucial that both ecosocialists and degrowthers continue refining their discourses, practices and policies for advancing toward an ecologically-sound and socially-fair world free from patriarchal, racial and colonial legacy. Nevertheless, it is equally important that they map the redundancies of their views to improve the effectiveness of their shared struggle at various scales.

Giacomo D’Alisa is a FCT postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, Portugal, where is part of the Ecology and Society Working Group. D’Alisa is founding member of the Research & Degrowth collective in Barcelona, Spain.

Notes on Revolutionary Hope

By Yanis Iqbal

Humanity stands at a dangerous crossroads: a conflict between making profits and saving human life is clearly emerging, with the latter being sacrificed by the ruling class for the former. Even during a pandemic, the cogs of capitalism have not stopped working in their ruthless rhythm; hunger, wretched poverty, wealth concentration and vaccine imperialism have all moved in a frighteningly unified way, ripping apart the remaining semblances of a dignified existence. While earlier the political architecture carved by capitalists functioned as a democratic fig-leaf, it has become completely unresponsive today. The exigencies of an extremely monopolistic form of capitalism have corresponded to a centralized mode of authoritarian control aimed at containing class struggle. The political structures we currently have are aimed at invisibilizing the empty bellies of countless children and repressing the turmoil in the tin-shack settlements of the global poor.

Capitalism’s progressive putrefaction into a nakedly brutal system of pure oppression demands the discovery of new theoretical tools. Theory can’t maintain a sense of immunity from the cadences of changing conjunctures; it needs to be firmly tied to the specific concreteness of the existing period. Today’s situation calls for a powerful resurrection of revolutionary hope. One of the many functions of the bourgeoisie’s established order is to douse the dialectical fire of hope. Revolutionary hope threatens the fatalism and deterministic thinking so prevalent today. It foregrounds the inherent ability of the working class to vehemently destroy the zones of sheer exploitation built by capitalism. By showing to the subjugated subalterns the possibilities available to them, revolutionary hope binds them to the slogan raised by the Italian socialist weekly The New Order: “Educate yourselves because we will need all your intelligence. Rouse yourselves because we will need all your enthusiasm. Organize yourselves because we will need all your strength”.

Discarding Determinism

For revolutionary hope to come into being, we need to discard determinism. Instead of dialectically locating an individual in the interconnected economic, political and cultural systems, institutions and structures, determinism considers him/her to be unilaterally influenced by it. A determinist conception is based on the dichotomous division of existence into an “external world” and “human consciousness”. In this conception, the external world and consciousness are two different components of human existence. They come in contact with each other only through causal and mechanical means. Both of them are individually isolated from one another, having been transformed into object in the technical sense G.W.F Hegel depicted as “rounded in itself as a formal totality and indifferent to determination by another.”

In response to the parcelized and static interpretation of existence offered by determinism, historical materialism offers us a framework where neither consciousness, nor the “exterior” world, has priority; we have no way of describing either of them prior to the moment of their encounter. The world is not “external” and distinct from human beings; the individual understood as “being-there” (to use Martin Heidegger’s terminology) belongs in the world by the very nature of its existence. Insofar as the world is integral to human existence, human beings can’t be understood apart from as a “being-in-the-world”. They are ensembles of social relations, closely intermeshed in their environment. Antonio Gramsci puts the point in the following way: “all hitherto existing philosophies [before Marxism]…conceive of man as an individual…It is on this point that it is necessary to reform the concept of man. It means that one must conceive of man as a series of active relationships (a process) in which individuality…is not…the only element to be taken into account. The humanity which is reflected in each individual is composed of…1. the individual; 2. other men; 3. the natural world.”

The composite constitution of an individual implies the interiorization of social determinations: interiorization of the relations of production, family background, the historical past, and the contemporary institutions. All these internalizations are then exteriorized in acts and options which necessarily refer us back to them. This means that economic structures do not cause human actions but become interiorized by humans as they act. Social relations are both the medium and the outcome of human interaction. Humans produce and reproduce social structures through their actions and these structures condition, enable and constrain human behavior and social action in society. Thus, abstract societal relations are instantiated, lived, enacted, reproduced and potentially challenged through processes of communication in everyday life.

The dynamic of interiorization-exteriorization highlights the fundamental fact that although human beings are affected by their circumstances, they are also the propelling force of history. As Jean Paul Sartre said, “Men make their history on the basis of real, prior conditions (among which we would include acquired characteristics, distortions imposed by the mode of work and of life, alienation, etc.), but it is the men who make it and not the prior conditions. Otherwise men would be merely the vehicles of inhuman forces which through them would govern the social world.” Since history has a subject (human beings), there always exists the possibility of breaking free from the shackles of contradictory forces. While structures do exist, EP Thompson states that their impact upon us can’t be understood “as pre-determined programming or the implantation of necessity, but as the ‘setting of limits’ and the 'exerting of pressures.’”

The tangible manifestations of the complex interaction between structure and agency are reflected in the base-superstructure metaphor deployed by Karl Marx in his book “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”. Widely misinterpreted as an instance of deterministic thinking, it is in fact a sophisticated conception of history, sensitive to the manifold movements of a societal totality. In a nuanced analysis of Marx’s topographical metaphor, Alasdair MacIntyre writes that the economic base of a society provides “a framework within which superstructures arise, a set of relations around which the human relations can entwine themselves, a kernel of human relationships from which all else grows…[in]creating the basis, you create the superstructure. These are not two activities but one.” In Marx’s view “the crucial character of the transition to socialism is not that it is a change in the economic base but that it is a revolutionary change in the relation of base to superstructure”.

A New Aim

Sartre defined a human being as “the totality of that he does not yet have, of all that he could have.” This definition emphasizes the centrality of the goal-directed life-activity of living individuals. A human being exists in the future, in the sense that it relates to itself in terms of the possibilities that it projects for itself. Sartre understands this to mean that human reality is limited by the aim it sets itself. It is by freely projecting the possibilities of one's existence that one determines how one sees things, what function they have, and their place in the world. This means that consciousness towards objects is made possible by consciousness’ transcendence, its power to see objects in the light of its own possibilities that it projects into the future. In other words, consciousness sees things in a particular light because of its project which surpasses current reality and, in so doing, approaches it through negation. I see the world in terms of what it could be because I see it not in terms of what I am but in terms of what I could be.

 In the current conjuncture, Marxism needs to intensively engage with the human being’s ability to engage in a conscious alteration (negation) and projection of that which is not yet real. Neoliberal capitalism has seeped into these spaces of an individual’s future-orientedness, ossifying it with its logic of fatalistic thinking. However, this does not signify a permanent closure of a radical future - in the words of Gramsci, “fatalism is nothing other than the clothing worn by real and active will when in a weak position.” Socialism needs to remove every iota of fatalism from the spaces of future so that a new aim can be constructed. This can happen only if the reality of revolutionary hope is fully recognized.

The Secular Prosperity Gospel of the Texas Energy Crisis

By Peter Fousek

The situation currently facing millions of people across the South Central United States is surreal. Caught in an unexpected onslaught of vehemently wintery weather, many have found themselves without power, and as a result without heat, while temperatures continue to plummet. Even more shocking than these circumstances themselves is the fact that a significant number of the power outages were caused not by the storm, but were instead implemented by utility managers in response to fluctuating natural gas prices. In Texas, when power was restored, it was accompanied by exorbitant surge pricing. This situation represents the latest in a long and devastating history of the free market failing to protect working class people from the effects of disaster while at the same time allowing those with financial means to turn a profit off of catastrophic circumstance. Both of those outcomes are necessary products of our socioeconomic system, the suffering of the many demanded to ensure the satisfaction of the few.

The basic premise of market fundamentalism, as a system of belief, is that greed is good. The official, normative morality of market-based society exists to rationalize that singularly hypocritical notion. In the same way that Joel Osteen and his fellow grifters preach that their ill-begotten wealth is a reward for their righteousness, that official morality strives to justify excessive affluence.  It works to convince us that both the billionaire and the homeless person have somehow earned their lot in life; that they deserve their respective state of decadence or deprivation. If not for a moral system that considers gluttony a virtue, the two could not coexist. How could we endure a social structure in which the wealthiest 1% of our nation hoards 30.4% ($34.2 trillion) of all private wealth ($10,426,829 per person, on average) while the bottom 50% collectively have only 1.9% ($2.1 trillion, or $12,805 per person)? How could we sleep at night knowing that nearly 1 in 4 households have experienced food insecurity this year, that 40 million face potential eviction, that unemployment and poverty rates have skyrocketed, all while the wealth of U.S. billionaires has increased more than 40% ($1.1 trillion) since March? In short, how could we manage to utterly debase the very essence of human life while viewing wealth itself as sacred, with the power to sanctify its possessors? Examples of opulence juxtaposed against a backdrop of despair are all too common in the United States today, and provide copious evidence of the tragically influential power possessed by the secular prosperity gospel.

Two articles published in the past week illustrate the consequences inflicted by that corrupt morality. On the 11th, CNBC contributor Sam Dogen wrote a piece entitled “Millionaire who bought a home at 26 regrets paying off his mortgage early”. This article recounts, with a shocking lack of self-awareness, the author’s experience of life as a young freelance consultant with a multi-million-dollar net worth, six-figure passive income, and fully paid-off home. Most strikingly out of touch in this humble brag of an editorial is the author’s assertion that, in retrospect, he deeply regrets not only having paid off his mortgage, but also his subsequent trip to Yosemite and Angkor Wat with his wife. His regret has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he spent his “hard-earned” wealth on self-serving pursuits instead of using it to assist the countless people suffering around the world—people, for instance, with entirely curable diseases that will nonetheless kill them since they cannot afford treatment. No, our friend Mr. Dogen is unwilling to engage in such humanitarian remorse, incapable of repenting for actions that he does not perceive as wrong. Rather, he regrets only the fact that his spending was not self-serving enough!

The author laments the fact that, by securing the freedom of home ownership, he lost the motivation to continue improving his finances as aggressively as before. He started working 20-hour weeks rather than 60, thereby “loosing out on $20,000 of monthly income”. That he considers it a loss to spend time with his wife while they can still enjoy their youth; that the experience of culture and natural beauty is, to him, something wasteful and burdensome, is emblematic of the secular prosperity gospel’s most insidious effects. In the author’s psychology we witness the conceptual commodification of human life itself. In his view, people, not the least of them himself, are no more than instruments of production. By his logic, that is good which compels the individual to a greater degree of productivity. In producing more, the individual benefits by elevating her moral standing, understood to correlate directly with her productive output. Her moral standing is elevated because her increased productive output is seen as beneficial to society, in a conceptual framework where social good is defined as capital accumulation. Moreover, the capitalist market system provides a quantitative measure of the individual’s productivity (and thus, of her moral worth). That metric, of course, is the dollar.

In this manner, injustice and inequity find excuse and validation. Fear of the suffering that accompanies poverty under a capitalist mode of production provides an important social “good” in the same way that fear of eternal hellfire did in eras past: it coerces the individual to embrace their role within an unjust social order, that they might tread its exploitative waters and keep their head above its deadly waves. However, capitalism and divine right are fundamentally different ideologies; the former evolved to hold a far more tangible grasp over its subjects than the latter ever did. The power of the “divinely endowed” ruling order stemmed from its subjects’ belief in the official morality and the otherworldly consequences thereof, and so the subjects had to be cajoled into that belief to imbue the ruling order with authority. Under the rule of capital, material conditions force the individual to subscribe to the official morality under threat of homelessness and starvation, whether they believe in its righteousness or not. Viewed as nothing more than a productive commodity, the individual must produce for the sake of the “social good”. If she does so with sufficient vigor and skill, her moral righteousness will be rewarded with wealth and correspondingly with freedom. Conversely, if she lacks the freedom to enjoy even the basic necessities of life, her failure to produce enough is at fault.

This leads us to the second illustrative headline: “Record cold brings a windfall for small U.S. natural gas producers”. This article, published on the 14th, describes how natural gas prices “have surged more than 4,000% in two days,” a trend which has provided suppliers “$600,000 to $700,000 a day” in revenue, “up from just a few thousand dollars a day normally”. The author, Rachel Adams-Heard, describes this surge as a positive, a well-deserved return on investment for the industrious businesspeople who, having taken the risk of acquiring an asset, secured both legal and moral right to reap its gains. She makes no mention of the appalling extortion required to make those profits possible. But we understand that the firms in question make their money, whether $5,000 or $500,000 per day, by providing a commodity (natural gas) to their customers in exchange for a fee. The most significant of these customers are the utility companies, who pay for the privilege to make use of that commodity and internalize its cost into the price at which they sell their utility (electricity, heat) to customers of their own. Due to the extraordinary weather currently gripping the nation, the initial commodity and corresponding utilities have become crucial to the health and safety of those second-degree customers, who are presented with the cruel choice between paying exorbitant rates or being left to face the cold. But that choice is only available to those with both the means to pay the surge prices, and homes in areas where service has not been cut. Many do not even have those scant prerequisites: millions are without power, thousands are sleeping in their cars, others have died from exposure.

All this because the market, despite the near-perfect efficiency alleged by its staunch supporters, is unable to allocate for and address this unexpected disaster. Rather, the market is unwilling to allocate appropriately, since doing so would require the natural gas suppliers to take a loss. This is clearly the case in Texas: utility companies cut massive swaths of customers off from the grid expressly to avoid paying the inflated gas prices driven up by demand in response to the storm. Under normal circumstances, the fees that these firms charge their customers are capped to limit the degree of their exploitation—electricity is a public utility, after all.  Given those price caps and the increased cost of gas, the utility firms would have had to pay more for the gas required to run their powerplants than they would be able to make up by charging their customers for power usage. In response to this dilemma, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT, a nonprofit tasked by the Public Utility Commission with managing “90% of the state’s electric load”) issued an emergency order allowing electricity suppliers to charge consumers enough to internalize their elevated costs, price cap be damned, forcing the public to bear the entire burden imposed by increased market demand. This is blatant extortion: the people are made to pay obscene amounts for a public utility under threat of the bitter cold. It is only via this shakedown, this racket, this criminal abuse, that those diligent oilmen celebrated by Ms. Adams-Heard are able to make their sudden gains.

The examples illustrated in these articles are just a few recent symptoms of a longstanding, institutional, ideologically mediated system of injustice. We have seen countless others over the past year. The U.S. has left its pandemic response in the hands of the market, a practice which has resulted in the wealthiest nation in the world facing the highest death count of any country. The Lancet Commission reports that about 40% of those U.S. COVID deaths could have been avoided, if not for the right-wing conspiratorial politicization of the virus and the implementation of policies foregrounding the protection of the economy (read: stock market) at the direct expense of public health. The rich have become astronomically richer thanks to trillion-dollar tax-cuts and deadly re-openings, the former funded by the liquidation of social welfare programs and the latter funded by the liquidation of working-class lives. Already limited social safety nets have been cut despite the unprecedented difficulties now facing us, for the benefit of those who possess more than they could ever dream of spending, their fortunes built over years of exploitation.

This social order, which pursues the ends of a small minority at the expense of the working majority, could not possibly maintain its existence through force alone. It requires the power of official morality, of the secular prosperity gospel which preaches that wealth, as productivity incarnate, is the manifestation of social value. That logic, which implicitly declares that the poor are worthy of their disenfranchisement and destitution, is responsible for the terrible repercussions that we now see. Such despicable “morality,” and the consequences that follow, are inevitable in a system that considers the individual not as a person, but as a totality of needs. Under such a system, the other is not a fellow member of the community to be treated with compassion, not a neighbor to be loved, but rather a commodity, a tool to be used in the satisfaction of one’s own selfish desire. As long as human life is treated as an object to be bought and sold, the principle of the “sacredness of human life” remains a hypocritical lie, intended only to trick the oppressed into consenting to their subjugation.

Miguel Cardona: More of the Same Neoliberal Education?

Picture © Devin Leith-Yessian

By Brandon Edwards-Schuth and Brad J. Porfilio

A collective sigh of relief and hope has been commonplace on Facebook from fellow educators and P-20 school leaders recently who have, rightly so, been disgusted with the Trump administration and then education secretary, Betsy DeVos. It has been a tumultuous four years filled with white supremacy, a neglected pandemic which the wealthy got richer from, multiple supreme court nominations of conservative judges who will impact generations to come, and so much else. On top of that, DeVos dedicated her tenure to “advance God’s Kingdom” through school reforms in favor of school choice vouchers for “greater Kingdom gain,” largely doing more to destroy public education with an intensifying of neoliberalism, i.e. privatize everything because ‘the free market’ is better than the state at providing social entitlements, such as education, to its citizens.

While a new administration and education secretary (especially someone that’s actually a teacher) is far better than Trump and DeVos, it’s actually a really low bar that’s been set. In doing so, we fear that many are too easy to welcome in Cardona without really considering his educational policies and who is involved, which we feel is largely a continuation of the neoliberal capitalist status quo in the U.S educational system that predates (though continued through) DeVos. To really understand the very likely trajectory of a future Cardona tenure as Secretary of Education under President Biden, we have to briefly go back and see the historical context building up to today.

The Obama Administration under the leadership of the 9th and 10th Secretary of  Education, Arnie Duncan (2009-2016) and John B. King (2016-2017), changed the direction of educational policy formation in the United States, as the Obama Administration “for the first time pressured states in a sustained way to undertake systemic change in their education systems and held them accountable for the academic performance of their students” (1). To the dismay of some teachers, parents, school administrators, and scholars, the Obama Administration’s agenda for education was designed to promote the corporate ascendancy over the United States educational system, instead of providing the vision and resources necessary to eliminate social inequalities and institutional forms of oppression, such as racism, ableism, classism, and cis-heteronormativity, which are truly responsible for educational disparities in the United States. For instance, in securing Arnie Duncan for the position of Secretary of Education, Obama secured a corporate cheerleader who supported market-based educational policies during his over seven-year tenure as CEO of Chicago Public Schools, such as increasing standardized testing, opening for-profit charter schools, and eliminating an elected school board in favor of Chicago Board of Education, which consisted of Chicago’s wealthy and powerful. One of the Obama Administration’s quintessential mandates that ceded corporate control over the US education system was Race to the Top (RTTP) a $4.35 billion dollar “competitive incentive program” launched in June of  2009. With many U.S. states grappling from a lack of resources for schools from the so-called “Great Recession,” 46 state governments applied for needed resources in exchange for supporting corporate-driven educational mandates, “including charter schools, college and career-ready standards and evaluations of teachers using student test scores.” Numerous CEOs and philanthropists used RTTP to increase revenue, to gain notoriety for allegedly providing additional opportunities for the most vulnerable students, and to control teaching and learning within K-12 educational institutions. For instance, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation became involved in educating leaders to support the charter school industry across the county, the Walton Foundation spent millions of dollars to expand charter schools; and Pearson incorporated created textbooks, test-prep materials and high-stakes tests to reap an economic windfall for arbitrating whether teachers and school officials are effectively educating children.

The Obama Administration also increased the likelihood that specific states would receive support under RTTP if they adopted a “common set of K-12 standards,” which were internationally benchmarked and that prepared students for colleges and careers. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) became situated within the high-stakes testing climate, as specific assessments that were linked to CCSS became the chief barometer of whether teachers, schools, and districts were effectively educating children. CCSS in a test-polluted educational context had a debilitating impact on schools. They were responsible for teachers and leaders losing jobs, narrowing the curriculum to merely content on examinations, and educators losing the autonomy to create learning experiences designed to spark students’ creativity and intellectual curiosity. During Obama’s last year in office, John B. King Jr., did little to squelch market-driven educational approach to improving teaching and learning in the U.S. educational system. Instead, he just followed the same neoliberal path when he was New York State’s education commissioner from 2011-2014, King continued to support testing and accountability policies as a panacea for improving education as well as dismissing parents, students, schools and community organizers who believed opting-out of taking high-stakes test was vital to supporting their children’s intellectual and social development and to support teachers’ professional judgement to evaluate student learning and development. Near the end of Obama’s end in the Whitehouse, King attempted to appease those who criticized Obama’s top-down, corporate agenda for education by offering states grants to offer students “a well-rounded education and to provide additional social support to support mental care for students.” In the end, however, market-driven educational policy formations based on the ideals of accountability, competition, profit-motive and rugged individualism came to dominate how schools function in the United States.

Under the Trump Administration, Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, had rolled back the federal government from playing a dominant role in the US educational system. However, she utilized an already strong corporate-base within educational agencies at the state and local levels to strongly pushed her libertarian “school choice” agenda through hundreds of millions of financial aid to various charter schools (including organizations aimed at opening new ones) and unaccredited for-profit schools, while at the same time attempting to cut $17.6 million in federal funding for the Special Olympics. DeVos has also capitalized on the COVID-19 pandemic to hasten the privatization of public education; even ending her tenure with giving more than a million dollars to a soccer club with no prior educational experience to startup a charter school. DeVos’s tenure was largely dominated by diverting enormous quantities of financial aid away from public schools and into private hands, which although not new, was done with such explicit intensity and excess that it was seen as repulsive.

This brings us to today, where Joe Biden’s candidate for Education Secretary, Miguel Cardona, is set to be heard by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on February 3rd, 2021. Son of parents who moved from Puerto Rico and whose father, Cardona Sr., was a police officer, Cardona is a former teacher, the youngest principal in the state’s history, and assistant superintendent for teaching and learning (2015-2019), and commissioner of education since 2019 in Meriden, Connecticut. While his teaching experience gives important merit, Cardona’s positions on educational policies have been largely a mystery to those in Washington D.C., though that is part of why he was chosen.

Historian of education and educational policy analyst, Diane Ravitch, in a Democracy Now! interview suggested that he was chosen by the Biden Administration for particularly “being non-controversial,” a particularly strategic move. Unlike Biden’s runner up choice, Leslie Fenwick, who has been a vocal opponent of charter schools and more, Cardona is seen as a non-controversial, safe pick who also hasn’t been clear on being for or against charter schools. This puts Cardona in a space where he can more fluidly appeal to most people across the political spectrum, so long as he does not support initiatives that challenge the hegemony of corporate practices, policies, and  social imaginary over the United States’ educational system. We see this when, during his educational administrative positions in Connecticut, Cardona “renewed every charter that was due and has not approved any additional schools for the legislature to consider opening.”  Furthermore, as an educator and Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning, Cardona supported educational initiatives afforded minoritized learners additional access to educational opportunities, such as the ability to attend advanced-level courses, to attend “full-day kindergarten and offer more vulnerable children access to high-quality preschool,” without challenging the common-state standards and standardized tests, let alone unjust social formations, including racism and poverty, which are inhibiting the educational performance of BIPOC and other minoritized learners. It’s not hard to imagine the Biden Administration guide by Cordona’s leadership might not further the DeVos agenda, but at the same time probably won’t reverse course on the privatization of public education.

Cardona also gave a recent interview on Connecticut Public Radio’s Where We Live Podcast where he was open about some of his stances on education policies. Cardona’s comments make it clear he believes providing access to education is the chief lever for improving the quality of life of minoritized groups in U.S. society. For instance, he feels providing students additional opportunities to attend college and provide them “other career pathways'' will allow students to attain the “American Dream.” Clearly, Cordona is correct providing additional access to educational opportunities for BIPOC and other minoritized students may allow some to transcend their class status; yet, his belief in education access as a societal equalizer is misguided as it does not acknowledge how structures impediments, including unemployment, the dominance of low-paid service jobs, poverty, and lack of affordable housing, leave most citizens, even those who hold advanced degrees, from achieving the “American Dream.” Cardona also holds a similar perspective related to reopening schools in the midst of the global pandemic. He believes reopening schools is vital for the academic success of Black, Latino, and low-income children; but he overlooks larger structural conditions that inhibit students from low-income and racialized communities to succeed in schools, irrespective if they are physically open, including having to bear the brunt of more of their family members die and suffer from COVID. Another important consideration for reopening schools in the midst of the pandemic is if the schools that are reopened will continue to put the health and safety of children and communities at risk only to ensure the United States’ educational system will continue to support the interest of the political and economic elite over the well-being of working-class people. Perhaps, schools should only reopen if they are firmly committed to support the goals of border dissent movements, such as Black Lives Matter and Indigenous and environmental rights movements, which are committed to overturning systems of knowledge, structures, and institutions responsible for human suffering and environmental degradation. We also echo what Associate Professor of Urban and Multicultural Education in the Educational Studies Department at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, Brian Lozenski had said: “Otherwise, the reward of ‘safety’ is not worth the risk of perpetuating injustice.”

As educators ourselves, we hope that Cardona surprises us all by foregoing the neoliberal status quo and instead genuinely enact critical and progressive educational policies and emancipator pedagogies. Cardona ought to lift the mandate on standardized testing at least during this pandemic, but ideally indefinitely to combat the dominance of corporatism over the US educational system. Things like canceling student debt/free education at the very least, is long overdue in the fight for equity. Even further, implementing critical education rooted in decolonizing, abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and defunding the police (just to name a few) are some of the necessary components of an education aimed at genuine social justice that we ought to be demanding. For all the educators, scholars and leaders out there who are quick to accept Cardona as a beacon of hope and change, we urge skepticism and honesty. Cardona is certainly far more preferable to DeVos, but he was strategically chosen by the Biden Administration to not shake up the corporate ascendency over education and society too much. 

Notes

1. McGuinn, P. (2016). From no child left behind to the every student succeeds act: Federalism and the education legacy of the Obama administration. Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 46(3), 392-415.

Brandon Edwards-Schuth (He/They) is an educator, activist, and doctoral candidate in the Cultural Studies and Social Thought in Education program at Washington State University. b.edwards-schuth@wsu.edu

Brad J. Porfilio (He/Him) is the Director of the Ed.D. Leadership Program and Professor at San Jose State University. Porfilio16@aol.com

How the Media Legitimizes Gentrification

By Noah Streng

Republished from Michigan Specter.

If you’ve ever seen an episode of HGTV’s Good Bones or any other “house-flipping” show, you’ll know that like all reality TV shows they depict dramatized situations as a way of increasing the stakes and encouraging viewers to keep watching. However, when watching these types of shows, it is important to recognize what narratives they are promoting. Whose voices and stories do they center? What underlying assumptions are left unchallenged?

In the strange world of reality TV, there’s an entire genre dedicated to “home improvement” where wealthy individuals will buy homes in “rundown neighborhoods’’ and “make them beautiful again” (all while making a significant profit for themselves, of course). These shows like to promote the idea that the house-flippers are courageous underdogs venturing into an uncharted and dangerous land to save target homes from the scary, filthy people who live in them. Euphemisms like “up and coming” and “transitional” are often used to describe low-income, minority neighborhoods starved for investment.

In a dramatic scene from an episode of HGTV’s Good Bones, the gentrifiers are seen “scouting” a house that they bought and breaking through a window because the doors of the house are locked — a sign that people have been staying there. The scene depicts the gentrifiers as being frightened by the possibility of encountering a squatter and being disgusted by the house’s “filth.” However, what’s never asked or included in these shows is questioning why the person living in that house needed to squat in the first place.

Did the state fail to provide them affordable housing? Are they suffering from a mental health issue and lack insurance? Did they get evicted from their former home? Instead of analyzing the root causes of this person’s housing insecurity and seeking to address it, the squatter is demonized as singularly responsible for their failures. Not only that, but the content of these characterizations is highly racialized, contributing to the white supremacist and colonial themes of the show.

These shows almost never consider the perspective of the tenants evicted by gentrifiers who rip their apartments out from under them. In some cases, there will be depictions of scary, drugged-up squatters who are illegally occupying the gentrifiers’ new passion project. In an article titled ‘We Bought a Crack House,’ house-flippers Catherine Jheon and Julian Humphreys detail their “brave” story of buying a house for $560,000 and encountering the tenants — whose home had just been sold by their landlord without consent — still living in the house when they arrive. Some of the home’s residents are experiencing problems with drug addiction, and are even caught by the gentrifiers using crack in an upstairs room.

What’s not mentioned here is how poverty, and these people’s recent condemnation to homelessness by their landlord, may have influenced their decision to use drugs to cope with the immense hardships they face. When Jheon and Humphreys ask the former tenants to leave the home so that they can start renovating, the tenants refuse, citing that they have nowhere else to go and that this is their rightful home. Jheon writes about her frustration with this, as every day she can’t renovate the home is money lost. In the end, she and Humphreys bribe one of the tenants to leave the house and call the police to forcibly remove the rest of them.

This is a classic example of how law and the media intersect to legitimize the violence of colonization and gentrification which continues in our cities today. The poor are demonized and gentrifiers are portrayed as innocent white saviors who are just trying to make a living — but they are doing so by displacing poor, housing insecure black and brown people. The police advance these projects of colonization by using their monopoly on violence to aid gentrifiers in their mission of displacing community residents so that their house can be fixed up and eventually sold to a rich white family.

While seeming innocent on their face, these shows can have devastating effects on the lives of the millions of people in the United States who experience housing insecurity. Not only do these television networks make money off of stories of tragic displacement of poor people, but they frame these stories in a way that valorizes gentrifiers and legitimizes a landlord’s right to hoard property and force destitute people into homelessness. Oftentimes, the excuse that gentrifiers will use when evicting tenants is “it’s our house now.” However, this statement is highly ideological and reinforces the social dynamic between property owners and the property-less in our capitalist society.

Who controls housing is not something that is natural or written in the stars. It is a power arrangement forged by the deliberate decisions of actors within an economic system that prioritizes profit over human life. House-flipping shows are just one part of the larger media trend of legitimizing societal oppression.

TV companies make political decisions when they choose to only highlight the voices of landlords, realtors, and house-flippers over tenants and the housing insecure. The depiction of low-income, predominately black people as filthy, dangerous, and lazy — rather than victims of a violent, exploitative, and racist economic system — feeds into the narrative that gentrification is good for society at large. How the media depicts people’s interactions with the law and frames which laws are just has real consequences. When the media chooses to center the story of the colonizer over the colonized, it legitimizes the displacement, land theft, and systemic impoverishment that millions of people face every day.

No, We Are Not Going to Beat Capitalism on the Stock Market

By Nathaniel Flakin

Republished from Left Voice.

Given the news over the past week, you would be forgiven for thinking that Occupy Wall Street had come back with a vengeance. Back in 2011, activists occupied a small park in front of a Lower Manhattan bank — now they seem to be “occupying the stock market” itself. Ten years ago, the bankers and brokers could just get their cops to arrest the pesky occupiers — but now, with the loss of billions of dollars at stake, armed thugs in blue are not going to do the trick.

The stock surge for GameStop has rattled financial markets. A motley horde of Internet users have been giving hedge fund managers a run for their money. Those who bet that shares of the retail chain GameStop would lose value (short sellers) have been thrashed as the stock price surged higher and higher, thanks to the targeted actions of thousands of small investors.

The bankers, who for more than a generation have been praising deregulation and the “invisible hand of the market,” are now calling on the government to protect them from losses. So have “little guys” taken over the stock market? Will the revolution be organized on Reddit?

Of course not. This was never going to take down the hedge fund system. At best, its greatest “hope” was to do some short-term mischief and maybe kill one small fund. Melvin Capital Investment is losing billions and might collapse — but Reuters has reported that Blackrock, the biggest asset management in the world, stands to earn $2.4 billion from the rising stock price. As Derek Thompson has explained in The Atlantic, Melvin Capital Investment was betting on GameStop’s stock to fall — and that was always a risky bet:

[GameStop’s] stock had already fallen from $56 a share in 2013 to about $5 in 2019. GameStop’s short sellers were essentially betting that a company publicly valued as “horrendous” should really be valued at a level commensurate with the notion of “truly horrendous.” They risked billions of dollars on the financial equivalent of a qualifying adverb. It’s really risky to aggressively short a company whose stock, having fallen 95 percent, is floating around $5; there just aren’t a lot of numbers under five.

A Rigged System

The discussion around GameStop has shown that the system is hopelessly rigged: even when small investors manage to exploit the rules to their advantage, those rules are simply changed to prop up the big capitalists.

But that’s only the beginning of how it is rigged. Virtually all stocks are controlled by a tiny minority of capitalists. How are all the working people in the world, even if they invested all their savings into the stock market, supposed to compete with the gargantuan sums owned by the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and their wealthy corporate cronies?

The rumblings have led Democratic Party “progressives” such as Elizabeth Warren to call for new regulations. She wants action to “ensure that markets reflect real value, rather than the highly leveraged bets of wealthy traders or those who seek to inflict financial damage on those traders.” Those “highly leveraged” traders,” by the way, are the hedge funds. Warren is worried about someone inflicting damage on them. 

How Capitalism Works

The entire episode is making lots of people wonder: Is this any way to organize an economic system? After all, as the back-and-forth trading has unfolded through these rather absurd machinations, who has been thinking about the effect on the livelihoods of tens of thousands of GameStop employees?

But this casino is how all decisions are made in the capitalist system. Where is housing built, and who gets to live in it? Which medical breakthroughs get funding? Which wars are waged? The same rules deciding the future of GameStop decide all these questions as well.

The stock market and its fictitious capital which condenses all the absurdities of the capitalist system into one small space. So much of the market is about “fictitious capital” — money lacking any material basis in actual commodities or productive activity. As the Marxist economist Rudolf Hilferding explained:

On the stock exchange, capitalist property appears in its pure form, as a title to the yield, and the relation of exploitation, the appropriation of surplus labour, upon which it rests, becomes conceptually lost. Property ceases to express any specific relation of production and becomes a claim to the yield, apparently unconnected with any particular activity. Property is divorced from any connection with production, with use value. The value of any property seems to be determined by its yield, a purely quantitative relationship. Number is everything; the thing itself is nothing! The number alone is real, and since what is real is not a number, the relationship is more mystical than the doctrine of the Pythagoreans.

A Way Forward

Within this absurd system, thousands of working-class people, investing their stimulus checks, might be able to steal a little something back from Wall Street — with the help of an app cynically named Robinhood. 

Yes, the ruling class is pissed that normal people are disrupting their casino. But the market remains their casino. The experience of this kind of “activism” will lead people to draw the wrong conclusions. We’re already seeing calls for more “democratic” and “fair” rules for the stock market, rather than for toppling the stock market itself.

And what happens if small investors are successful? Then some of them might become big investors. So, this kind of activism may create some new capitalists — but it’s no way to beat the capitalist class. In a fight over stocks, the rulers will always have an advantage.

But you’re in luck: Marxism is a 150-year-old science of how to eliminate the bourgeoisie and its exploitation and oppression. If we pool our money, we shouldn’t invest it in stocks; — we should use it to build up organizations that will fight for our interests —, not by trading stocks, but by organizing our strength in terms of material force.

A Problematic Ally

If you’re not convinced, consider one troubling figure who has been cheering on the small investors against the short sellers: pandemic profiteer and Internet troll Elon Musk. He understands the giant casino that passes for a global economy. After all, he has leveraged a small, almost completely unprofitable car company into a personal fortune of $180 billion. Musk is obviously not trying to bring down the system that is rewarding him with such vast wealth, nor does he have some personal vendetta against short sellers. Instead, Musk understands that this is capitalism at work.

Musk might have several hundreds of billions of dollars, but he’s a small part of the global capitalist system. We don’t need to buy him out, or beat his ilk at the stock market game. We can use our strength to take power and expropriate them. A workers’ government can put all those riches at the service of all humanity. Now that’s a project worth “investing” in.

GameStop and Revolution

By Peter Fousek

It seems that nearly everyone, from major media outlets and economic analysts to folks hopping on Twitter while bored at home or work, has something to say about the recent market activity surrounding a surprising selection of stocks. The securities in question, namely GameStop ($GME), AMC Theatres ($AMC), and BlackBerry ($BB), are unlikely candidates for financial news headlines at a point in time where their respective products and markets have been all but outmoded. Nonetheless, and in fact on account of their perceived antiquation, these companies (and other similarly “obsolete” brands) have become the focus of widespread popular attention.

And yet, only a marginal few of the countless commentaries currently filling up our newsfeeds make note of the most remarkable conclusions to be drawn from these events. This is not to say that the present analyses and examinations are anything short of illuminating: he reaction of regulatory leaders and financial institutions, while largely predictable, are very important for the public to see and process. As in 1987, 2002, 2008, 2020, and any number of other instances of financial distress, we see the powers that be scrambling for means of self-protection while the system that they have constructed for their own benefit temporarily runs the risk of transforming them into its victims.

Of course, market volatility and the resultant risk of financial devastation is an inherent attribute of capitalist economics. But, when the fundamentalist free market works as it is designed, the brunt of that necessary burden is borne almost entirely by the working masses. Whether through exploitative, unjust labor practices during even the best of times, or through the funneling of massive federal funding in the form of bailouts and subsidies to the wealthy while the already minimal safety nets for the workers are further cut during periods of turmoil, we are not hard pressed to find examples of the inequity of capitalism. For proof of the intentional, systemic nature of this injustice, we need only to notice which class it is that takes the risks resulting in frequent crises: the beneficiaries of the system are simultaneously its guarantors, and from their position of power they are able to keep themselves all but invincible to their own carelessness and greed.

While that inherent impenetrability of the capitalist class has not come close to being displaced by the recent events in the market, it has certainly been shaken. Stock market speculators, betting on the failure of a business and doing everything in their power to see it to that end (without concern for the 50,000+ employees who would resultantly lose their jobs) were forced, if only for a moment, to face financial consequences for their profit-seeking irresponsibility. And they were forced to do so not by competitors, peers among the elite, but by members of the working class.

The sad but almost certain outcome of this moment of resistance to the norms of market trends will be the propping up of the hedge funds at risk, and perhaps increased regulation preventing such unprecedented collective action from readily occurring again. We’ve already seen the popular trading platform (ironically named Robinhood) prohibit its users from buying any more of the securities in question—an effort intended to pressure them into selling before the hedge funder’s short positions expire and the elite are forced to pay their dues. And while there is talk of a class action lawsuit against the platform, with reports that Citadel reloaded their short position before instructing Robinhood to block the relevant trades, we cannot expect real justice from a system designed to protect and perpetuate the existing order.

Despite these obstacles, despite these odds, and despite the unfortunate likelihood of an unsatisfactory short-term outcome, these events that we are currently witnessing should be a major cause for hope. One prevalent stance on social media right now is the position that the working-class day traders should sell. On one hand, doing so would benefit the hedge funds that shorted the stocks, as they would be given the chance to buy back at a lower price than when their contract fulfilment deadlines expire. On another, many of the people who have taken part in this mass movement run the risk of losing their money in a world that has refused them any safety net. The greatest cause for optimism comes from a common response to this stance, paraphrased here has it has been stated by many of the working-class day traders in question: we will not sell, because we have nothing to lose.

Many of us who have bought into this moment of collective action against the status quo have done so with the full knowledge that we might not win. Nonetheless, we have taken our position and chosen to hold it, to demonstrate our dissatisfaction with a system designed to subjugate us while empowering and enriching its elite. Because the system is designed as such, we are not afraid to make sacrifices to challenge the present order. The possibility of change is easily worth the risk of losing what we have, because what we have now is worth very little. But the power of our collective action is valuable beyond belief.

The calamity of the COVID crisis has made it blatantly clear that the capitalist class is more than happy to grow its wealth at the direct expense of our most basic rights and safety. The recognition of this flawed reality is reflected, in its early stages, in the collective action taken against those hedge funds who got too sloppy for their own good. This day trader rebellion is not some singular event, and it will certainly not break the current system. What makes it such an incredible historical moment is that it demonstrates the initial awakening of working-class consciousness. The willingness to sacrifice for the sake of a greater good requires us to recognize the injustice of the present order; the events of the past few days have demonstrated that we are beginning to adopt a mindset of that recognition.

To effectively challenge the status quo in a substantial way (such as that achieved by a general strike) the people cannot act out of short-term self-interest. Therefore, successful collective action and resultant progressive change is only possible once our reality under the status quo is so blatantly insufferable that we become willing to sacrifice it for the sake of disrupting the extant order. This is only possible once we realize that the existing system is exploiting us unequivocally, and therefore that we have essentially no chance of “making it” within said system. That realization then compels us to take the only other option: of trying to make it without. The popular resistance demonstrated by the GameStop situation should inspire us to action because in it, we’re witnessing the working-class organically arrive at a trade-unionist consciousness. This indicates that the historical conditions of the present moment are becoming ripe for the working class to achieve class consciousness, from which systemic change can come.