Rev Left Radio - The Paris Commune: A Brief Blossoming of Proletarian Power

Episode Date: November 6, 2017

Mitchell Abidor is a leftist writer and translator. He is the principal French translator for the Marxist Internet Archive; Abidor has translated hundreds of texts, in multiple different languages, and published numerous collections from a myriad of radical political writers, from 17th Century France to Revolutionary Russia. His books include anthologies of the anarchist writings of Victor Serge, on the propagandists of the deed, the Paris Commune, the left of the French Revolution, and French anarchist individualists. He is also the author of, among other works, "Voices of the Paris Commune".  Find his profile on the Marxist Internet Archive here: https://www.marxists.org/admin/volunteers/biographies/mabidor.htm Topics Include: The Paris Commune, French Napoleonic Imperialism, Marx and Engels, Anarchism, The Communards, Factions within the Commune, the role of Women in the Commune, The French Revolution, and much more!  Our Intro Music is by The String-Bo String Duo, which you can find here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/releases Our Outro Song is "This is Class War" by The String-Bo String Duo, you can find that here: https://www.facebook.com/thestringbostringduo/?hc_ref=ARQA71ZejnRbSyy-vgEA-UpvPdZZyJtgYVEPAak6ZbfvcUJ0P9qLvLempRW0_u5DQPI Please follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio and donate to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio   This podcast is officially affiliated with the Nebraska Left Coalition and the Omaha GDC. 

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Revolutionary Left Radio starts now Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I am your host, Anne Comrade, Brett O'Shea, and today we have Mitch Abadour on to talk about the Paris Commune. I'm really excited about this episode. Before we start, though, I do want to give a shout out really quick to all of our Patreon contributors. It means the world to us.

Lately, we've had an uptick in the amount of people donating to our podcast. and keeping us going, you know. We're two working-class stiffs doing this in our spare time, so even a couple dollars really helps. So thanks to everybody that donated to our Patreon and we'll continue to do so. We really appreciate it. But let's go ahead and get into it.

I'm really excited for this episode, Mitch. So why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and say a little bit about your background? Okay, I'm Mitch Abadour, and I'm very widely known in very small circles as translator of stuff mainly from the French, revolutionary tradition, but I've also done Portuguese, Spanish stuff, mainly from Argentina, Esperanto, Italian, and after doing over a thousand translations for the Marxist

Internet Archive, I've also done a number of books on the French Revolution, on French anarchism, some novels, some poetry, so that's me. Yeah, you say you did a lot of translations for the Marxist Internet Archive? Right, that's where I started probably about 15 years ago. Nobody had ever translated Blonkey, and I just got in touch with them about, say, if you want somebody to translate, they asked me to translate Blonkey, and that was how I started, and everything just grew from there. And so I've translated, if you go to the Marxist Internet Archive and go to the French history page, pretty much everything that's there was translated by me, stuff about the Enlightenment, about the French Revolution, about the commune, about the war in Algeria, about the resistance, May 68, which I have a book coming out in April and the U.S., February in the UK, an oral history of May 68 called

May Made Me. Cool. It's a terrific book. I'll do some buzz marketing here. It comes out in February, 2018 in Europe, April 2018, published by AK in the U.S. everybody should go out and buy it yeah cool and I will definitely link to you in your website in the show notes so people can go ahead and find you easier how many languages do you read and write in I pretty much everything that I've

translated in are the languages that I read so five languages and I but I only speak French I see that's that's that's that's the you know when you're reading the text is there for you so you could work out context and you can work out stuff. Speaking is quite another matter, but I have a much better accent in French than I do in English. Nobody, when I'm in France, nobody thinks that I'm American.

Interesting. Something I'm quite proud of these days. Yeah, right. And before we started recording, you actually mentioned that you grew up in the same neighborhood as Larry David and Bernie Sanders. You want to touch on that a little bit? Because I think that's pretty interesting. Sure. Now or...

I mean, yeah, just right now, I mean, you said you went to the same high school. Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I graduated from James Madison High School in 1969, and at one point, three percent of the U.S. Senate graduated from James Madison High School. It was Bernie Sanders went, Chuck Schumer went, and Norm Coleman, who L. Frankenbeat, went there, as did Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and as did that other great female jurist Judge Judy. interesting Larry David grew up not far from me though he went to a different

high school so that's why when you hear and also Woody Allen grew up not far from me well much older than me but he also went to a high school just about a mile from the one

that I went to so if you hear the same speech rhythms and stuff accent it's all easily explained to a small part of Brooklyn is that what that is this neighborhood

well right it's the it's the southern end of Brooklyn it's pretty dull desolate when you think of Brooklyn and all the hipsters, it's not this part, Brooklyn. Cool. All right, well, before we get into the questions about the Paris commune,

and why don't you quickly touch on how you identify politically? Well, my politics usually upset and anger people around because it's a ridiculous hodgepodge of depending on the period and the country. But it's really the French individualist anarchist tradition of the late 19th, early 20th century is really the one that I feel the closest to. Okay, interesting. All right, well, let's go ahead and dive into the Paris Commune

because we have a lot of ground to cover here, and I know this is one of your big interests. Right. So can you briefly summarize the conflicts and events that led up to the Paris Commune a little background before we actually get into the event itself? Sure. And so the Paris Commune, now I have to say that

I have my own interpretation of the event, and it's what I'll be giving. And, you know, there are people who've written on the commune who have different points of view on it, but, so I just want to put that caveat out there. Okay. So the French, the Paris Commune actually grew out of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, which began in August 1870. by September the French were pretty much defeated by the Prussians and Paris is besieged they haven't yet surrendered Napoleon III has been overthrown Paris is under siege and the siege goes on forever people are

literally eating eating rats and there was even a dish called rat salami that people were eating It was a delicacy during the period. Finally, the French surrender, and the Prussians, they give up the siege of Paris, and they march into Paris. And also they demand huge indemnities, which they get. So the French, and in particular, the French working class, is mortally offended by the arrival of the Prussians into the city and the indemnities. and then the working class is everybody's told to turn over their cannons now the National Guard was a more or less popular army that fought alongside the regular army and some generals go up into momap which at the time was a real working class neighborhood to grab two cannons that the people were refusing to turn over the people instead of turning over the cannons kill the general who had come to take the canons.

This is the beginning of what would lead to the French, to the declaring of the Paris Commune. This is the signal for revolt all over Paris. And so it starts really as a case of offended working class national pride in Paris. And so that was on March 18, 1871. immediately, the organization goes on all over the place. The official government flees Paris for Versailles, and a week later, they have elections to the Paris Commune.

So that gets us into the Paris Commune. But it's really important that it be kept in mind that what set it off was not working class demands. What set it off was the working class being forced to turn over the cannons that they had paid for to fight the Prussian invader. And so it was in the context of a war in which they lost and all the resources of Paris and the surrounding areas were extracted away from the people and towards the war effort, a war that would you say that many of the working class in Paris did not support? I mean, I don't know that we could exactly say that, you know, that even though the international had said, I had said that, you know, German workers and French workers have everything in common, I can't, I don't really, I can't really. say whether or not they opposed the war after all they did pay for the cannons right and they did

staff the the national guard but what it can be said a hundred percent certainty is they absolutely opposed uh napoleon the third and so they were glad to see the end of uh that empire and that after uh napoleon the third had left there had been a government of national defense that was declared and a republic was declared. So at this point, France is a republic and fighting against the German monarchy. So it's a much more complicated situation than people like to think of it as just,

you know, the working class with the red flags get up. That comes much, that comes almost very quickly. But at the very start, that really wasn't what set it off. So then after the workers kind of rose up, refused to hand over their cannons, the state, the government in Paris fled, along with the bourgeoisie, the rich people, the upper class. Is that correct? No. The situation is really interesting because although some of the bourgeoisie left, most of them didn't. And that's why we have the accounts that we have of the Paris commune. we have many accounts from from bourgeois

from just from petty bourgeois from opponents of the commune who stayed Paris was their city and they stayed and they hated everything that was going on but they documented it they documented it there are actually I have translations of some of that stuff you could find on the Marxist internet archive

I translated some of the anti stuff also and because they considered, they hated the working class and considered them subhuman. So when the working class is now more or less assumed power in Paris, you know, they just hate it to death. And in fact, they go so far as when the elections are held on March 25th, the elections are held in every single arrondissement, every district of Paris. However, some people who are elected in, the bourgeois neighborhoods refused to sit on the commune and in fact leave for versailles so you know the commune did not what it started did not look to exclude uh the bourgeoisie they were

invited to vote they when they voted their candidates chose not to sit and they didn't sit so the that was why the commune ended up being pretty much strictly a working class uh government oh i see interesting all right so yeah let's go ahead and flesh out what the paris commune was exactly how was it built what did it look like okay so and this also is like really an important uh it's in no place where we're an important misconception has to be straightened out because the paris commune immediately this was very impressive set itself up as the government and so when you know i've had discussions in the past with anarchist interviewers who thought that the Paris commune was a perfect example of anarchism in action but it wasn't it was a government it was modeled on the

Paris commune of the French Revolution so there was no president there was a rotating somebody who presided over the commune I don't know if it changed every day or every week but there was somebody a presiding officer and it had departments with people who are heads of the departments. And it had a, the commune was a seating parliament, we could call it, that voted on measures and voted down measures, and voted them, voted up. They had an army of a source.

They only had the National Guard. They dissolved the regular army. And they had the National Guard, so it had its army. And so it really was a government. that functioned or attempted to function as a government that passed laws and measures most of which they never had the time to put into effect because it only lasted 71 days

and the whole time it was fighting the war so that was what the commune was and I've heard other I've heard some people who studied it and talked about the Paris commune talk about it as if you're right it has elements of state building of a worker's state and it also does have elements of sort of the anti-authoritarianism that runs through anarchist thought and so it has it borrows little elements from from different leftist tendencies i mean this is all in retrospect of course at the time they didn't have the

full knowledge of the leftist canon like we have today but it's just interesting to think that what and correct me if i'm wrong here but what they thought they were trying to do was sort of build up a a localized commune that would ideally if it were to exist and and spread, be able to link up to other kind of decentralized local communes. They'd all kind of run their own local communities the way they wanted to. Is that a fair way of analyzing what they thought they were doing? Right. That's exactly right.

And in fact, there were other communes that didn't last very long. In Marseille, there was a commune that was crushed pretty quickly. In Lyon, there was one that was formed very briefly. in the fall of 1870, which Bakunin took part in. Interesting. But the Paris Commune, it was the rebirth of an idea from the French Revolution. And for example, so when you look up on the website of the French National Library, if you want to look up documents from the Paris Commune, you have to make sure to put in Paris Commune 1871.

Otherwise, you get the Paris Commune of the 1790s, which, as I said, they modeled themselves on. Now, something that's, you know, a little thing that I think is a neat little fun fact about the Paris Commune is, in France, even to this day, elected officials, when they're performing their functions, anyway, they wear a blue, white, and red sash. under the commune they didn't they only wore a red sash that's interesting so I always kind of like that fact so yeah that's really cool and so that leads nicely and we're going to touch

on the connections between the Paris commune and the French Revolution a little bit later but for right now let's get into what were the main ideas of the communards and more specifically what were the policies that they started enacting right when they took over okay so the

the commune was really a mix a mixed bay was an outgrowth of the opposition to Napoleon the 3rd. Most of them or many of them had been exiled before either Belgium or England that came back

or earlier in 1871 people had started already started coming back. There had been a huge anti-Napolian demonstration in January 1871 when one of the Napoleon III's relatives killed an opposition journalist in a duel. But the – so it was a mixed bag of what everybody wanted.

And that's why it's important also to know is there were almost no Marxists in France at the time. That even though there was an outpost, there was a – the First International had a section there. It was not Marxist. and in fact the other thing there wasn't was anarchists unless you include Prudone who is kind of like

an ambiguous figure anarchism did not really exist in France until after the Paris Commune so their ideas were kind of diffuse and this Marx talks about it in the Civil War in France and actually let me see I think I have

marked off a great passage from Marx okay he said that the great social measure of the commune was its own working existence its special measures could but be token the tendency of a government of the people by the people such were the abolition of the nightwork of journeyman bakers the prohibition on the penalty of employers practice to reduce wages by levying fines but he says the financial measures of the commune remarkable for the sagacity and moderation could only be such as compatible

with the state of a besieged town so there was nothing about taking over the means of production unoccupied workshops were to be taken over the rents rent payments was suspended during the commune

so it was really day-to-day issues they released everything in the national pawn shop These were the measures that they advocated for, that they, that they passed. They also took religion, they cut off the budget for any religious education or for religion in general. So those were the kind of measures that was a secular, left Republican on its way to socialist government that never got much beyond the things that I just said. If they were allowed to, I mean, if somehow they survived and they were allowed to continue, what kind of policies or what was the long-term outlook?

Did they have time to develop that? Is there anything there that we can kind of examine what they wanted to do if they had the chance? Well, no, because it only lasted 71 days, and, you know, so immediately, the issue, the measure that always gets talked about is, the ending of night work for for bakers this is this was issue number one and it's always uh what always comes up in histories of the commune as uh their their first and most prominent positive measure and in fact in john merriweather's book massacre about the commune he doesn't talk very much about any of the measures because nothing was able to be implemented because it was so short-lived. They were so short-lived. And also, you know, there's the question of what the different

groups that were within the commune and what did they want. And that segues perfectly into our next question. So what were the different factions that composed the commune and what role did they play and what were some of the disagreements there? Right. So there's the biggest group were the followers of Blanky. And they were there without a leader because Blanke had been arrested in January of 1871, I think it was. There had been a rebellion against the government of national defense, and Blonkey was arrested and was shipped out to prison.

And so the event that he had lived this entire life for, he missed. So he was imprisoned all throughout it. So the Blancists were the largest group, and they, depending on how you want to look at it or define it, they could be considered the most radical of the groups, the most uncompromising of all of the groups within the commune. But it meant that they were the most repressive of all the groups. Because they had the biggest majority? They had the biggest majority, and they were the ones who were the least interested in democracy, and towards the end anyway, when things got rough. When there was finally execution of hostages, it was the Blancists who were behind that.

the next group were neo-jacobans and you know the French Revolution you can't understand anything in French revolutionary history French working class history without the French Revolution at least until the Popular Front in 1936 where it's not quite as strong but Jacobinism held a real stronghold on the the French working class and the French working class movement. So the Jacobins were the second largest group. And these were people who really took their love for Robes Pierre very seriously. In really, in my opinion, the best firsthand account of the communist, the second best, rather,

by a book called My Red Notebooks, which I've translated bits of. the author who was the editor of a newspaper under the commune talks about how he went to the office of another newspaper editor and he heard screaming and yelling and stuff being thrown around in an office that he was waiting outside of and when the door opened the people the guys who were inside came out and the hair was mus and the glasses were broken it was because one of them had said something bad about robespierre and the other one couldn't accept it. So the French Revolution was really important to neo-jackabets and also I have to say to the Blancist.

Then the next group of any significance, really the last one of any significance, were the people from the First International, who were up till the very end, the most vocal and adamant defenders of the broadest, possible democracy and free speech. And in fact, towards the end of the commune, when the other factions wanted to install a committee of public safety, just like under the French Revolution and restrict the press and restrict freedom of speech, the people from the international said they could no longer sit on the commune. And, you know, they issued a manifesto saying we can't be part of it.

this they led they ended up showing up the you know they reneged on that they did sit on the commune at that point anyway but so there was you know this wide divergence of opinions but all of them i have to say focus primarily on the working class grew out of the working class and just had us nuances you know the blancists were very conspiratorial and you know marks talks about it in the civil war in France, it was unclear what they wanted other than the people in power. You know, for the Jacobins, they were just reliving 1793 and, you know, the heyday of the revolution. And while the, from the international, they had a little bit clearer idea, but like I said,

they were mainly Prudonian ideas about association, and that was as far as they went. So those were the different factions. Would you say the first internationalists, they had the biggest influence from, like, Marx and Bakunin and, like, what we would call anarchism and Marxism today? Would you say that was the primary faction there that had those influences? That influenced those factions today, or they were influenced by that? That were influenced by that? No. No, they were really, like I said, there were almost no Marxists in France yet.

Interesting, okay. And Bakunin had very little influence. in France. I mean, he wrote a letter, you know, an open letter to the French working class at the time of the Lyonle commune. But, you know, there was really no significant anarchist movement outside of Prudon until after the commune. I mean, somebody like Louise Michel, who was the great symbol of French anarchism, she only became an anarchist after she was sent into exile after the commune. It was when she was in New Caledonia

that she developed her anarchism. So it's not exactly what people tend to think the commune as. It was the first attempt by one of the first big attempts in Europe of working people to take over and run

their society along egalitarian lines and their own interests. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean whatever the If it doesn't fit like the Marxist schema or it doesn't fit any later anarchist schema, it doesn't really matter. It was the first instance of the working class seizing power. Absolutely. I mean, the people who made up the commune, if many of them were like journalists and writers and propagandists before, they're all from a working class background.

you know this was not you know intellectuals this was that really was the the working class seizing power in the city and setting itself up against backward rural France because that's what it ended up being it was France essentially seceded from sorry Paris seceded from France yeah that conflict between the the city and the in the rural areas exactly right and that was even what they were called, the opposition, both the Versailles and the Rurals. So again, if you read the Civil War in France,

Marx never refers to the opponents, mainly as the Rurals. So it was Rural backwards Catholic France against progressive Paris. Interesting. What role did, because I know you've talked about this in previous interviews, what role did women specifically play in the commune?

How were they treated? and what did they stand to gain from the revolution? Right. So, you know, again, it's not quite what, you know, people would like. It was great for 1871. Women didn't have the right to vote for the commune. There was not a single woman that sat on the commune. That said, women had a tremendous role both backstage and a little bit on the barricade,

Certainly towards the end, you know, the women are on the barricades with the men. The commune recognized that couples, common law, marriages, they recognized that widows who weren't married to a comrade who was killed at the barricades had the same rights as a legal wife or called that. And it was the beginning of like the glimmering of hope for women. There were women, there were women's organizations that were set up to defend the commune. Women worked as nurses, women worked as teachers. So it was the women's first chance to really assume their role in society without being able to vote. That didn't come for women until after World War II. And, you know, women couldn't even have their own bank accounts.

I figured what the year is in France, until way. into the 20th century. Wow. So, you know, the commune was not this women entering power, entering the halls of power. But had this is an area where we could be pretty confident that had it survived, it would have made tremendous, women would have made tremendous progress, you know, under the commune. Certainly faster than they would have, and they ultimately did under the front state. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Go ahead. Yeah, because France, and it's what I learned in what I did my oral history of May 68, and I traveled around France interviewing people who participated in May 68, and they were all between the youngest, the youngest was 15 and 68, the oldest was like 70 in 68 or not about 50 in 68. But when I spoke to the women, they all talked about how backwards and repressive sexually, just in all regards having to do with gender issues, France was.

You know, we think of, you know, Bridget Bardot in the, you know, French films and all this. But it was a horribly backward reactionary society when it came to women. So the commune was a brief moment where women, had hope and maybe laid the ground great numbers too yeah they did and we're going to touch on that later and perhaps you know the commune as a as a beautiful blossoming kind of before its time was sort of foreshadowing of some of the liberatory movements that were to come you know the women's liberation movement this was some of the first little hints that we saw of that appearing in the west so i was just going to move on because you touched on this a little bit and i kind of want to dive a little

deeper into this idea. So what similarities do you see between the Paris Commune and the French Revolution? They occurred roughly 80 years apart, but what were some of the connections and similarities there? Right. Well, you know, the connections are this, there are so many of them, and it's so many different levels that, you know, the French Revolution, you know, as I said a couple minutes ago, was so present in the minds of French radicals and revolutionaries. You know, Robespierre, Marat, all these people were really the ever-present for them. Babuff and his conspiracy of equals, you know, there's Babuf, you know, led it in a couple years after Robespierre was

the 9th Thermador in the execution of Robes Pierre and the Committee of Public Safety in San Jose. There was an uprising led by Gracchus Babouf and his one of the members of his conspiracy

which was the conspiracy for equality which wanted an absolute total leveling of society. You know the working class would be on top. Everybody would have the same thing. One of his the survivors of his conspiracy would go on a new Blanke and Blankeler from him. So there's like a direct line in Blanke's father sat on the National Convention.

So the revolution, the French Revolution, was part of everybody's mindset, everyone in all parts of the left. And it even went so far as even the names of newspapers. so there was this famous newspaper during the revolution called the per du chen which was this famously profane newspaper written in popular french aimed at the the working people and it used the word fuck every other word you know so there's you know it's like fuck the pope and this fucking ass aristocrat we have to fucking kill all the fucking aristocrats well Well, under the Paris Commune, there was a continuation of the Per du Chene, which spoke and acted in the same exact way as the Per du Chene of the French Revolution.

As I said, you know, there was the faction, there was neo-Jackabins. The Paris Commune itself, just the very concept of the Paris Commune, was an outgrowth of the Paris Commune that set itself up alongside the National Convention as to push it in a more radical direction. That was what the Paris Commune did in the French Revolution, and that's what the Paris Commune was in 1871. And then, as I said, in the waning days of the commune, when it's on the brink of collapse,

the commune decides or votes to set up a committee of public safety, exactly like what Robespierre and Saint-Jouz were. during the French Revolution and this is what leads to a split within the commune as I said before because this was going to be a dictatorial body that was going to be able to rule

without without any hindrance could pretty much do whatever it wanted and the minority the members of the international refused this you know this was like one step too far in the road along

imitating the French Revolution and one that they wanted to avoid. So the French Revolution was absolutely everything for the Paris Commune. You know, they were, even during the Revolution, it was Paris was the great revolutionary city. If you read Georges' socialist history of the French Revolution, in my translation, published by Pluto books, it's Paris is the great revolutionary city

that's going to carry the revolutionary idea to the rest of France So everything comes back to the French revolution Except for something really important Which is one of the first things that the commune did Was to burn the guillotine Right, and that's one thing that I didn't know And I found fascinating that they yeah

they made a spectacle of burning the guillotine as a symbolic gesture. What meaning were they trying to convey with that act? Well, because the guillotine was the death penalty. You know, the guillotine was, you know, if it had, you know, obviously for people on the Paris Commune, the guillotine as the thing that killed, you know, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and it was used during the terror to kill people, was not something that they would have been opposed to. But since then, it had been used as just for the death penalty. And so they were standing up against that.

And that's why symbolism of other kinds. So, you know, burning the guillotine means you're doing away with the death penalty. But they also symbolically, a really important symbolic act was Napoleon I had set up the von Dome column, which was made out of the, out of, it was a column that was made out of the melted metal from cannons captured by Napoleon's armies in its war of conquest across Europe. Now, for the commune, this was a symbol of militarism. They had no attachment at all to Napoleon I first or the third.

Yeah, it was like a symbol of French imperialism, right? exactly you know it was it was it was militarism was what they were aimed at you know and was was what they what they hated because Napoleon was the you know the massacre and the death of people all over Europe and most particularly of French people right of French workers who fought in the Grand Army you know they didn't have any kind of sentiment sentimentality about how Napoleon was bringing the ideas of the French Revolution across Europe and so they decided, I think it was in April, early April, to destroy the Von Dome column. And the person who was assigned the task of organizing it was the great artist Cobain.

And there's great pictures of the column after it's been brought down. And there's all the shard the pieces of it, you know, the chunks of it are like laying around the square because they wanted to put it end to everything that was. bad and wrong and horrible and repressive and militaristic in the French past. Interesting. Now, of course, after the defeat of the commune, Corbe is put on trial for having organized the destruction of the Vondom column, and he's held personally responsible and has to pay for the replacement of it.

And had a sell is in all of his art. Everything he'd painted, everything he had, he had to sell to pay for it. Wow. Yeah, that's crazy. And the next question, because it kind of touches on some of what we're talking about as far as the individuals that were actually involved. In your book, Voices of the Paris Commune, you assemble eyewitness accounts of the event of people who were there and who participated in the commune? What aspects of those accounts stood out to you most? Well, you know, what I tried to do because, you know, I've actually done two books on the Paris Commune. There's Voices of the Paris Commune, and there was a book that I did a few years before that called Communards, which I did for the Marxist Internet Archive.

And it's a much longer book. But in both cases, I wanted to give the broad range of opinions within the commune. And that was what I thought was really important, because, you know, as time goes by, the common. the commune an image is built up of the commune and becomes this beautiful unified institution that was an inspiration for revolutionaries for generations even up until today yet when you read eyewitness accounts it was like I said I said a few times already it was riven with with conflict and with differences of opinion all of which I have to say when you read the minutes of the Paris commune were for the most part expressed

really in a civilized fashion respectfully, but I really thought it was important that people see that there was a wide range of opinions of the commune within the commune at the time and a wide range of opinions afterwards because, you know, in the book, Voices, of the Paris Commune. It was about 20 years after the Commune, the great literary magazine, La Revue Blanche, over the court of two issues, asked, I can't even remember

how many veterans of the commune, a series of questions about the commune. And it was really impressive to see how 20 years later, how people viewed the commune, who were key players during its lifetime. Some of them look back on it as like something doomed from the start. Some of them

look back on it as something that had a chance of succeeding. In many ways when I read it, it reminded me of Chileans you know, in the decades after the fall of Ayende. Right. Where again

when there are people who've come to think that maybe Ayende should have resigned. You know, that at the time everybody felt Ayende had had to hold out, you know, he'd been elected, plurality, not a majority, but he'd been elected and he had a hold out even though nothing was going to be passed, even though the army was clearly going to carry out a coup. There were people who later on said, you know, we goofed. And so what I liked about these different voices were people looking back on it and seeing

what did they do right and what did they do wrong. And really being so critical of themselves of their own past actions I thought was really an important thing that needed to be seen and like I said also to see that all these people lived the same event but they all lived

in an entirely different way I think that's something that comes up a lot in that book and also when you retell the accounts of the Paris Commune you add a lot of nuance and I think it's extremely important because there's a tendency for all human beings, regardless of what their beliefs are,

to look back on certain events with a rose-tinted lens, to idealize the past and mythologize the past and make things out to be utopian when they really weren't. And I think something that's important for leftists today to realize or anybody to realize with a political project is that building proletarian power, building working class movements, it's not easy, it's not idyllic, it's not utopian, hard work. There's lots of different perspectives, lots of different realities that we have to balance and deal with. And that's, I think, is very valuable in what you have to say because

it kind of takes these things out of a mythologized pass and puts them into like concrete, messy realities, which is something that everybody that takes this stuff seriously needs to wrestle with, I think. Right. And you know, you got it exactly right because it's, you know, the fact is the Paris commune was, you know, I think the most, beautiful event in working class history and certainly in the history of the french working class and it's beautiful enough as it was with all of its flaws with all of its blemishes without having to to gild the lily and pretend that it was that it was all perfect none of them believed it was perfect right and so why should we and you know the wrong less you know um you know something

that's really important is Engels, and I don't know if this, you know, we'd come up later on, but it's something that I really think it has to be remembered, is that Engels, in his preface to civil war in France wrote, do you want to know what the dictatorship of the proletariat was? It was the Paris Commune. And so when later on people, you know, when the Soviets claim to have, you know, to be the heirs and they did claim to be the heirs of the Paris commune, certainly there's nothing about them that's the Paris

commune, that their dictatorship of the proletariat doesn't in the least bit resemble the Paris commune. There weren't, you know, all the different parties and all the different factions and all the different arguments and the different newspapers that were out there. You know, the, and

so the Paris commune has all these beautiful notions that I think sometimes that if I would not say it was the Paris commune that people might think that it was just like you know it sounds like a bourgeois democratic government but the fact was they'd live to come out of a dictatorship right you know the Napoleonic dictatorship and so they really were interested in press freedom and in freedom of speech and they took it really seriously you know until their backs were to the wall and then

things kind of fell apart in the final couple weeks yeah absolutely go ahead but you know I love commune and you know i i was interviewed when this book first came out by by somebody uh anarchist radio show somewhere and for example he talked about how it was anarchist because he loved it because they elected their officers and i said absolutely except it had nothing to do with anarchism and had nothing to do with the paris commune it was part of the national guard and it had been part of the functioning for decades. So to say that, you know, I admire the Paris commune because within the army they elected officers, it's true, except that had nothing to do with the commune.

It was part of the functioning of the National Guard, which predated the commune. So, you know, we have to, we should love it for the things that it really represented and not, you know, as you said, idealize it so that it's no longer what it really was. Yeah, and I think that the angles quote of calling it, you know, an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it lends itself really well to something that I personally take on board in my own worldview, which is reading marks and angles through a non-Leninist democratic framework. Because I think the sort of ideas that they push, that they were pushing through are actually a lot more democratic inherently than they're often caricaturized as. and a lot of anarchists will dismiss marks and angles as authoritarians or whatever,

but I think that you can really take marks and angles and read them through a very democratic, anti-authoritarian, even anti-statist lens often. And there's a lot of good stuff in marks and angles that people all across the left of the spectrum can learn from. And I think angles talking about the Paris commune like that is an example of that. Right. And it's something that just kind of gets, I won't say, swept under the rug, but people don't pay sufficient attention to that. And I also think that, you know, what's another thing that's really interesting,

and it's funny, I thought about this just yesterday, was what became, especially after the Russian Revolution, but 1905 and 1907 and then, 1917, rather, and then in Spain is people started to say that, you know, that workers self-management, you know, the workers spontaneously organizing themselves in their workplaces and Soviets and all that. That what's interesting is when the Parisian workers spontaneously organized themselves, they didn't organize themselves in their workplaces.

They organized the government. And, you know, it only struck me yesterday. I said, wait a second. Because my most recent book is translation of Daniel Guerin's For Libertarian Communism, which is all about workers' self-management. And it's all got to do about how like the workers, you know, when they take power, they spontaneously organize themselves in their workplaces. But that wasn't what the commune did.

You know, it's part of their example that people don't think about that when the March 18th, they killed the two generals. you know they refuse to turn over the canons a week later they have a government they didn't like go to their workplaces and organize there they want to have a government to run the city so it's a huge difference from what came later and also you know if you want to talk about you know things like occupy and you know more contemporary movements they weren't run by consensus you know it was voted up and down majority ruled, you know, so that it really doesn't have much to do with Occupy,

which didn't believe in like state power and political power and kind of stayed off on the margins of that. However, if I can like just jump in, you know, around a little bit here, something else is really important about the commune. and it was something that a contemporary French philosopher named Michel Enfrey, he talked about that, you know, his version of the left that he admires is the communard left. Because the commune, if I would ask you, name me five leaders of the commune, you probably couldn't. Right, yeah, I could not. Right. And I could give you a whole bunch of names, but none of them were really leaders of the commune because there were no leaders.

of the commune. And so it's, so even though it had voices that were better known than others and whose names have come down through history, it was a non-dictatorial, a democratic, but still revolutionary government. And so whereas immediately, you know, Lenin shows up, you know, at Finland Station, you have the April Theses and everybody changes their minds and Oviyev and Kameniov are all wrong because Lenin has decided something else. there was nothing like that in the paris commune part of that was because blanke was still in jail

you know so had he been out he might have been you know the one the leading voice right and you know so there are people who who who who who when i've had arguments about this because believe or not i have arguments about the the paris commune of 1871 you know there's nothing more relevant to argue about today than the Paris commune of 1871 but but but there are people people say, well, the commune would have won had Blanke been released, because what had happened was Blanke was held. The commune had taken a whole bunch of hostages, and they offered to release all the hostages they had just for Blanke.

And Thierre, the Versailles government refused to release him because they just thought he was too potent a symbol. Right. But the fact was the commune couldn't win. You know, it was, you know, if in the selections in my book from the Revue Blanche from the questionnaire, well, everybody forgets is it wasn't just Paris against the rest of France. The Prussians were still in France. So had, you know, the Versailles government not crushed the commune, Bismarck would have. so it was kind of a quixotic and noble endeavor that maybe precisely because it didn't succeed is able to have this aura

right i think so it certainly lends itself to it right so let's go ahead and get into to how the paris commune was was ultimately crushed after only 72 days right who crushed it how brutal was it and what was the death count when all was said and done okay so so what happens is right from the beginning you know the versa government they're bombarding uh parisians the communes is debating whether or not they should try and assorti to you know send out troops outside of paris to carry the revolutionary idea or to take the fight directly to the enemy because you know it's part of French military thought in French life is that

the three of Fonche's you go out and you take the fight you don't like sit back and take it they do do one sortie it gets they're demolished the war goes very badly there's finally there's openings in the walls

of Paris the Versailles troops come in street by street barricade by barricade there was really no unified strategy strategy yes strategy to stop them. There were barricades that were set up

inappropriately. People fought up until the last to the last drop of their blood. There was in Perlach's Cemetery is where it's usually

said was the last stand of the Paris Commune although there's other areas in like the 11th Theron di Smote now where there's plaques saying the last barricade

of the commune was there. But in the end they come through Paris they kill the 20,000 people are killed over the course of the mopping up operation. Men, women, and children? Anybody.

Yeah. Anybody. And, you know, they ask people to show their hands or to show their shoulders. Because if you had bruises on your shoulder, you would be firing a gun. And so they killed 20,000 people. Now, you know, we were talking before

about the bourgeois who were in Paris. And this is something that in the book Massacre, mentioned before, John Meriwether really has great sections on it about once the commune is defeated and the people are like, the workers are like crushed and they're laying along the streets, how women would go out with their umbrellas or their parasols because it's May now and would poke people's eyes out with their parasols. So, you know, the bourgeoisie was getting its revenge at the last moment. So 20,000 people are killed.

Others are survivors either fled or was shipped to New Caledonia for deportation. Among them, Louise Michel. And pretty much it kills anything there was of the French working class movement for the next 10 years. The amnesty comes nine years later in 18. that the people sent to New Caledonia or elsewhere, Algeria, were allowed to come back. So during that period, there is no working-class movement. The socialist movement is pretty much on hold because there's nobody there. So it was pretty brutal.

Yeah, it was extremely brutal, and it's tragic how it ended, and it's tragic how many people lost their lives and how brutal the crack down from the French state was when they finally got back into power. right one of the biggest you know most famous analysis of the paris commune came from carl marks um afterwards he defended the paris commune and he and he had one of you know the most famous analysis of it what did marks have to say about the commune that you think is important and what lessons did he ultimately take away from it well you know like you know his his analysis was pretty much actually what i've been been talking about and the really the most you know that

it was the first instance of working class power he also he criticized it for not and this is something that many people criticized it both at the time and later he criticized it for not seizing the money from the bank of France you know because you know in the passage I read before that I kind of stumbled through he talked about the moderation of its measures and it's one thing that even many communards realized should have been done that they didn't go all the way. So they replaced the bourgeois state, but they didn't take all the prerogatives that went with it. So they were afraid to touch the money in the Bank of France, which they could have used. And they didn't. And as I said, you know, that it's Engels and that introduction

that as many times as I've read the Civil War in France, it's really the notion that that was what Marx and Engels had in mind with, you know, like I said, a little bit more boldness in pursuing things like the money in the Bank of France.

But they absolutely supported it from the first day, even though like I said, there were almost no Marxists who were involved in it. And if I remember correctly, he got heat because I think At that time, Marx was an editor at newspaper publishing sites in Germany at the time, I think. And he got a little hot water because he would defend it so vociferously.

And the mainstream opinion throughout the rest of bourgeois Europe was that it was horrible and it got what it deserved. And Marx was one of the loudest voices defending it. And I always thought that was really interesting. Right. And even during the war, it was really all to the credit of the international. that they were the ones who were the most loudly saying that the German and the French workers had, were not enemies, that they had common interests. And so they opposed the war.

You know, it wasn't Napoleon III who started it. And he was, you know, the international was adamant that the workers had no part to play in this war and they should oppose it, you know, as firmly as that. as they is a humanly good yeah and for for whatever your thoughts on on the bolsheviks later down the line when when you know world war one was popping off those same arguments were being made it's like the working class solidarity is more important than inciting with your national governments and part of the big failure of that time was that so many working class folks did side with their governments um in world war one and that was something that that marks this notion of you know don't ally with your government ally with other working people that still rings true today and it's

something that we should all think about well and you know what though you know again i have to be the contrarian here go ahead okay you know it's in my nature i'm like the scorpion i'm like the scorpion you know jean jose who was the great leader of uh the french socialist party who was assassinated on the day war was declared on August 1st, 1914, he had a very nuanced position on this. He wasn't much when it came to Marxism as Marxist, but he was the great socialist leader in Europe. And he, for him, there was that France, if attacked, had to be defended if it was attacked by a monarchy. because you couldn't risk having one whatever it's failings a republic was better than a monarchy right and you know whenever i've had and i've had if this is another topic that strangely i've had

many debates about because i'm a big defender and an admirer of jures who i've translated his portrait is staring at me right now across the table and they also had to do with the french revolution because you were defending the the heritage of the French revolution. So for French socialists, it wasn't so much defending the bourgeoisie or the bourgeois state. It was defending what was left of the French Revolution. I see. I see. Okay. Yeah. That makes great sense. Yeah. So it's, it's, you know, whereas right, the standard Marxist, you know, position would be, You know, the working class has no part to play in the war, and it's one that I, you know, support.

I nevertheless can see what Georges was talking about. Absolutely, yeah. You know, Lenin, why would you defend the Tsar? Right. But if you're going to defend, if the Republic is being attacked, and, you know, once you've established, you had all these caveats, you have to establish who was the offending party. But, anyway, we don't want to wander too far off here. But in some sense, it's the lesser of two evils in defending. whatever gains have been made.

So in the context... Exactly. Exactly right. Exactly right. That you lose all the gains, that the French Revolution, everything that the French Revolution would have given France

would have been lost. I see. So... Yeah, that makes total sense. Yeah, that's a great point. And I'm glad that you made it. Okay, so we're past 60 minutes here. So let's go ahead and just finish it up

with this question. What lessons, in your opinion, can leftists of all stripes learn from the commune today? situated as we are in a very precarious and uncertain time and you know people ask me that question all the time and you know and i i knew you were going to ask me that and i and it's really hard to say because you know the the the circumstances you know as i said to to start this off you know the working class is not you know the class that it was in france in 1871 but i think you know

the really the most important lesson is that in the middle of the commune insofar as it was possible to respect it to the respect for democracy and for opposing opinions was maintained and and i think that's something really important that needs to be taken that liberties are not formal liberties they really matter and to discount them is really foolheartedly it will do nothing but alienate people and I think that you know that that's you know the list now it could be that just like Iyende they died because of from from democracy but I don't think so because you know they were attacked from without but like I said even under attack from without they still held firm to allowing other opinions to be expressed, different opinions to be expressed.

So, you know, I think that taking that as what a revolutionary, you know, despite what I said at the start, a revolutionary government doesn't necessarily mean a repressive government. Right. Absolutely. And I always think that the point of leftism broadly is the liberation of all people. Precisely. That's what we have to constantly keep in mind. And we can't sacrifice that on the altar of a means justifies the end sort of scenario. Some conditions in a state under siege, like the Paris Commune being attacked

by the French state or other societies trying to build proletarian power but being ruthlessly attacked by the United States or what have you. Things can differ. Things can get more difficult. And that's also a lesson of the Paris Commune is that things don't go smoothly. Things aren't idyllic.

Things do get messy. And you have to kind of fly by the city of your pants in a lot of these situations. Building revolutionary power is extremely difficult and all odds are stacked against you. And so that's something that I think comes out just through talking to you throughout this entire interview. You do what you can with the means you can

in the situation you're in. You know, so, you know, when you started by asking, you know, what measures they implemented, they implemented what they could, you know, within the framework of a besieged city. and you know even you know they took hostages at the very beginning and they said for every the versa we're not taking prisoners if there was any soldier for the commune all through the battles they just shot them and so the commune passed the decree saying we will will kill i think

it was 10 hostages for every one of ours killed whatever the number was they never killed anybody up until the final couple of weeks when they finally did kill 64 or something hostages. And it still remains, you know, controversial, you know, whether they should have done it. And in fact, that's the only ones they killed, you know, out of hand, unlike the Versailles. So they were being held to a standard that the Versailles, their enemy wasn't being held to. But, you know, you still, you hold to your decency, you know, up until as long as you can, or up until the end. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Mitch, for coming on. I appreciated this. This was fascinating and enlightening. Before we let you go, though,

can you let listeners know where they can find your work and then maybe offer a recommendation or two to anyone who wants to learn more about the Paris Commune? Sure. Well, you know, my books on, you know, I have three short books, Voices of the Paris Commune. Another one that kind of makes me nervous when I talk about it is Death to Bourgeois Society, a collection of writings by the propaganda. us of the deed. And then I have the one that just came out for libertarian communism. I have a collection of Victor Serger's writings on anarchism called Anarchists Never Surrender. They can all be found, hopefully, at your finest left-wing bookstore or at the website of

PM books. My Socialist History of the French Revolution could be found published by Pluto books. And like I said, in April, is the... May made me an oral history of May 68 in France. All right. Well, awesome. Thank you so much for coming on again. It was really a pleasure to talk to you. Same here.

All right. You have a good one. You too. Take it easy. Brothers and sisters, wake up this is class war. Fuck asking nicely. It's time to take back what we worked for. It kept us divided.

They knew that we were crushed. And if we ever united, now's it's time to make us stand. The best things in life are free, and the best thing for the left is unity. If there's one thing that we can all agree, the best thing is debt to the bourgeoisie. Debt to the bourgeoisie. sisters and brothers wake up and discover there's no way to victory without one another united we conquer divided we suffer we turn fire we got the numbers now the time to make us stand the best things in life fall free and the best thing for

The left is unity If there's one thing that we can all agree The best thing is Dead to the bourgeoisie Dead to the bourgeoisie Dead to the bourgeoisie Dead to the bourgeoisie Dead to the bourgeoisie