Endless World War or Commune?
The 4th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, undertaken for control of the oil fields as well as the geography of the strategic regions of the Middle East and the Caspian Sea, is not just a benchmark of a tragedy, but could be the turning point of a wider invasion, of Iran, and thus World War Three. Russia, China, and other imperial powers must have that oil too. But in the last two centuries, major wars produced revolutions, people’s uprisings. That was true of another anniversary: The 136th Anniversary of the Paris Commune. The Commune remains proof that the choice is community or barbarism, equality and democracy or capital’s perpetual wars.
On March 18th, 1871, the people of Paris revolted against Napoleon III’s corrupt government which had led France to a losing war with Prussia. When the Prussian army neared Paris, Parisian working people realized they had fought a bloody war in the name of the nation but in fact they were fighting like slaves, on the side of their masters. Parisians rebelled. Armed in the name of France, they fought in the name of the working class and beat back both the Prussians and Napoleon. They abolished the standing army, established a peoples’ militia, turned their guns on elites who had misled them into imperial war.
Paris’ workers established a commune, a government on the side of poor and working people, the vast majority. The rich fled to Versailles and began to plot to retake Paris.
The Paris Commune forged a beacon for what could be done if students, workers, and the poor took charge: Commune officials and judges were directly elected with universal suffrage and subject to immediate recall; no commune official would be paid more than the average worker, trade associations were rolled into one big union of all workers; police were abolished and crime evaporated in the face of the armed people; workers from all over the world were welcomed into the internationalist commune; church and state were split and churches turned into schools while state subsidies to mystics were abolished; rent was suspended and factories closed by employers reopened as cooperatives; the Commune revised taxation to compel the rich to pay for the wars only they profited from. The idea of the Commune spread, to Lyon and Marseilles.
But the Commune’s workers underestimated their ruthless wealthy enemies. Communards believed they could hold Paris without attacking Versailles, without seizing the banks. Napoleon III and French ruling elites paid once arch-enemy Prussians to help them retake Paris–deadly proof of the nature of class war. Paris was taken, brutally. After 72 days, in May 1871 the Paris Commune was crushed. Perhaps 100,000 died. But the lessons of the heroic struggle of the Paris Commune serve as life and death lessons today. As we stand in the midst of what appears to be, the Commune shows another way to live.
Today’s deadly imperial rivalries are part of a much broader war, an international war of the rich on the poor, in which each nation’s rich ruling class seeks to use poor and working people to fight and die, not battling their real enemies, but the enemies of their enemies: a class war disguised as national wars. Students, poor, and working people in the US have much more in common with the students, poor, and working people of any nation than we have with Bush/Clinton/Haliburton.
As in 1871, in every nation governments operate not as democratic representatives of the people, but weapons of violence of the rich, executive committees of the ruling classes. In every case, the government, its courts, troops, police, legislative and executive branches, are not neutrals, but enemies of the mass of people who, at best, choose which millionaire will oppress them less in counterfeit elections.
The world is more united than ever before, by systems of production, exchange, communications, and transportation, yet we are falsely divided by nation, race, sex/gender and superstition. But the real division in the world is class, those who own and inherit, the rich, versus the vast majority of people: students, workers, even soldiers. We need to unite across all the false division that divide us, or those divisions will be used to demolish us. We can stand on the shoulders of the workers of the Paris Commune and do more than mourn our current situation, but organize to change it.
The Rouge Forum is an international organization of school workers, students, parents, and community people engaged in education and direct action for equality and democracy. You are welcome to join us.
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