File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/97-04-04.105, message 68


Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 10:35:23 -0800 (PST)
From: Scott McLemee <mclemee-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: M-TH: C.L.R. James on the Paris Commune


The following article by C.L.R. James appeared under a pseudonym in
the 18 March 1946 issue of LABOR ACTION, newspaper of the Workers
Party of the United States.




           They Showed the Way to Labor Emancipation:
   On Karl Marx and the 75th Anniversary of the Paris Commune


     The American working class is not yet as familiar as the
European working class with the history and traditions of the
revolutionary socialist movement.  March 14, anniversary of the
death of Karl Marx, and March 18, anniversary of the Paris Commune
will be celebrated by only a small minority.

                U.S. Workers and Marx's Heritage
     As the international crisis deepens, the American proletariat
will rapidly increase its interest in the great thinker whose whole
work was based upon the proletariat as the most progressive force
in modern society and the irreconcilable enemy of capitalist
barbarism.  As the class struggle sharpens in the U.S. Marxism will
come into its own as a great popular study.  The American
proletariat will then learn to celebrate in its own vigorous style
the anniversary of those workers in Paris who in 1871, to use
Marx's phrase, stormed the heavens.  They gave to the world, for
the first time, the "political form at last discovered under which
to work out the economic emancipation of labor."
     Karl Marx's life was all of a piece.  He devoted himself to a
scientific demonstration of the inevitable decline of capitalist
society.  But side by side with this decline there emerged the
socialist proletariat, the class destined to overthrow capitalism,
establish the socialist society, and wipe away for good and all the
exploitation of man by man.
     In Marx there was not the slightest trace of mysticism.  He
was a master of English political economy, German philosophy, and
French political science.  These he used in his monumental labors
to establish that the social movement had the inevitability of a
process of natural history, that it was "governed by laws not only
independent of human will, consciousness, and intelligence, but
rather on the contrary determining that will, consciousness., and
intelligence."  By this he did not mean to say that the future of
human society was predestined in all its events and occurances.  He
knew that men made their own history.  He knew that social life
proceeded by the conflict of interests and passions, complicated by
all the bewildering phenomena which attend the daily activity of
hundreds of millions of human beings.  But he, more than any other
thinker, established the fact that all these multitudinous actions
took place according to certain laws.  For him the most important
law was the organic movement of the proletariat to overthrow
bourgeois society.
     Perhaps today it would be as well to recall an aspect of his
doctrine too often forgotten.  No man had a more elevated
conception of the destiny of the human race.  This for him was the
greatest crime of capitalism, that while, on the one hand, it
created the possibility of a truly human existence for all mankind,
by the very nature of the process of capitalist production, it
degraded the individual worker to the level of being merely an
appendage to a machine.

               A New Vision for the Working People
     In his great work, CAPITAL, over and over again, he pointed
out that as capitalist production became more scientific, the
actual labor of the worker was more and more deprived of
intellectual content and educational potentiality.  So far was Marx
>from being a vulgar materialist that in his denuciation of the
evils of capitalist production, he did not hesitate (for the
moment) to brush aside the wages of the worker.  "In proportion as
capital accumulates," he insisted, "the lot of the laborer, *be his
payment high or low*, must grow worse."  On the basis of economic
analysis he drew the conclusion that modern society would perish if
it did not replace the worker of today, condemned to automatic
repetition of mechanical movement, by the highly developed
individual.  Such a man, according to Marx, would be fit for a
variety of labors, ready to face any change of production, a man to
whom the different social functions he performed were but so many
means of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers. 
This for him would be a workers in a civilized society but that
could come only by the destruction of capital.
     Such was his vision that this student of political economy and
the labor process has unfolded perhaps the most poetic and far-
seeing perspective for human society ever propounded by any
philosopher or poet.  According to him it was only with the
creation of the socialist society that the real history of humanity
would begin.  Thus at a single stroke, he thrust into
insignificance the painfully acquired knowledge and culture of
thousands of years of civilization, which he, more than most other
men, had studied and understood.  All this, he said, would be as
nothing in comparison with the perspective which would be opened to
human society by the abolition of the exploitation of classes on
the basis of a world-wide cooperation.
     Yet scientist and philosopher as he was, with the unquenchable
faith in the inevitability of socialism, Marx was no mere man of
the study.  He took part in the German revolution of 1848, was
active in the preperation of the revolution of that year, and to
the end of his days participated, whenever possible, in the workers
struggles against capitalism which he always knew as preperation
for social revolution.
     In 1871, when the workers of Paris established the Commune,
Marx hailed it as one of the greatest events in human history.  Let
us briefly recall the circumstances.

               The First Working-Class Government
     France had been defeated by the armies of Germany which stood
at Versailles, a few miles away from Paris.  The leaders of French
capitalism, statesmen, and soldier, were on their knees before the
German conquerers, anxious to save their hides and the plunder that
they had accumulated during the war.  They were ready to sell out
France to the conquerer.  The French people had proclaimed the
French republic, and these capitalist politicians knew that one
great obstacle stood in the way of their conspiracy with Bismarck. 
This obstacle was the armed republicans of Paris.
     Working in the closest association with the German invader,
the French ruling class attempted to disarm the Parisians but the
workers of Paris, emaciated by a five month's famine, did not
hesitate for a single moment.   They seized the power in Paris and
established the Paris Commune.
     What exactly was this Commune?  There have been many
interpretations.  The interpretation of Karl Marx remains
unchallenged in its simpliciity and its penetration.
     "It was essentially a working class government, the product of
the producing against the appropriating class, the political form
at last discovered under which to work out the economic
emancipation of man."

                What the Paris Commune Symbolized
     The Paris Commune was first and formost a democracy.  The
government was a body elected by universal suffrage.  None of its
functionaries was paid more than the wages of a skilled worker.  It
did not expropriate the property of the bourgeoisie, but it handed
to associations of workingmen all closed workshops and factories,
whether the capitalist owners had run away or simply had decided to
stop work.
     It lasted for 71 days.  It was destroyed by a combination of
its own weaknesses, chiefly a lack of decision, and the treacheries
of the French bourgeoisie in shameless alliance with the German
army.  The murderous brutality with which the fighters of the
Commune were shot, tortured, and deported, remained a landmark in
European civilization, until the days of Hitler and Stalin.
     Today, to the American proletariat, there are many lessons to
be drawn for the history of the Commune.  Perhaps the most
important for the advanced workers are the methods by which Marx
approached its study and conclusions which he drew.  For him, the
Commune, despite its failure, was a *symbol* of inestimable value.
     It was a symbol in that it showed the real women of Paris --
heroic, noble, and devoted like the women of antiquity.  It was a
symbol in that it showed to the world:  "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 historical initiative."
     It was a symbol in that it admitted all foreigners to the
honor of dying for the immortal cause.
     It was a symbol because even before peace had been signed with
Germany, the Commune made a German working man the Minister of
Labor.
     It was a symbol because under the eyes of the conquering
Prussians on the one hand, and the Bonapartist army on the other,
it pulled down the great Vendome column which stood as a monument
to the martial glory of the first Napolean.  Marx saw in these
actions not accidental gestures but organic responses of the
revolutionary proletariat to the barbarous practices and ideology
of bourgeois society.

                    The Important Conclusion
     Most important, however, Marx drew a great theoretical
conclusions from the experience of the Commune.  He showed that the
capitalist army, the capitalist state, the capitalist bureaucracy,
cannot be seized by the revolutionary proletariat and used for its
own purposes.  It had to be smashed completely and a new state
organized, based upon the organization of the working class.  In
1871, he drew this as a theoretical conclusion.  In 1905, and later
in 1917, the Russian working class, by the formation of Soviets, or
workers councils, laid the basis of a new type of social
organization.  It was by his studies of Marx's analysis of the
Commune that Lenin able to recognize so quickly the significance of
the Soviets and to establish them as the basis of the new workers'
state.
     Today the advanced American worker needs to know the history
of the international struggles of the proletariat.  From these he
will most quickly learn to understand his own.  Marx's pamphlet on
the Commune, THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE, is a profound and moving
piece of writing.  The worker who has not yet begun the study of
Marxism will never forget this double anniversary if he celebrates
it by reading what Karl Marx had to say about the great revolution
of the Paris working-class.



	



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