Communism

IN 1870, Napoleon III had led his nation into the disastrous Franco-Prussian War against the expansionist Prussian state. In spite of his pretensions to be a conqueror like his uncle, the first Napoleon, Napoleon III's army was woefully unprepared for modern warfare and Napoleon III himself was taken as a prisoner of war.

In the face of the Prussian Army, the people of Paris rose up against the invaders. Marx wrote in The Civil War in France, “But Paris armed was the revolution armed. A victory of Paris over the Prussian aggressor would have been a victory of the French workmen over the French capitalist and his state parasites.” A republic had been proclaimed in September 1870 in Paris, under Leon Gambetta.

Adolphe Thiers and his middle-class supporters organized a counter-government at Versailles for France and—with German support—declared war on the workers in Paris, who declared their regime the Paris Commune. The Paris Commune was the first true [Page 96]workers’ republic in history. Thiers surrendered to Prussia in February 1871 in order to declare war against Paris. On March 18, the Commune was declared: “The proletarians of Paris, amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs.”

Marx observed that “The communal regime, once established in Paris and the secondary centers, with the old centralized government in the provinces, has to give way to the self-government of the producers.” The commune was a model for the soviets, or councils of workers, soldiers, and sailors that would later arise during the Russian Revolution of 1905. With brute force, Thiers's Versailles army attacked Paris. On May 21, the shooting began and after seven days (la semaine sanglante, the “bloody week”), Paris had become again the capital of a bourgeois France.

From then on, the communist movement was hounded by the police forces of the European monarchies, which either imprisoned or forced into hiding their opponents. For a generation, the working class was exploited ruthlessly in Europe, as the same governments exported their exploitation to the rest of the world in imperialist expeditions. Marx wrote, “Imperialism is the ultimate form of the state power which nascent middle class society had finally transformed into a means for the enslavement of labor by capital.”

Imperialism only exacerbated the rivalry of the Great Powers of Europe. In 1905, Revolution broke out in Russia after a series of defeats in the war against Japan in 1904 and 1905. By June 1905, rebellion was widespread in Russia, symbolized by the mutiny aboard the Potemkin, of the Black Sea Fleet of Tzar Nicholas II, of the Romanov Dynasty. By September, Russian workers had gained their first broad experience in the arena of political action, and they had been aided by a number of revolutionary groups sworn to work for the overthrow of the Romanovs.

Chief of these were the two branches of the Marxist Social Revolutionary Party: the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. It was the Bolsheviks, under Vladimir I. Lenin, who would make the greatest mark. Swiftly, Lenin and his comrade Leon Trotsky moved to bring the soviets and their delegates of workers, peasants, and sailors, under their sway. Although Marx had considered Russia too backward for a revolution, Lenin and Trotsky would prove him wrong. Russia was ripe for revolution.

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