Reflecting on Socialism Through the Lens of the Paris Commune |
CounterPunch Exclusives
CounterPunch Exclusives
Reflecting on Socialism Through the Lens of the Paris Commune
A barricade thrown up by the Communard National Guard on 18 March 1871 – Public Domain
May 28, 2026, marks the 155th anniversary of the Communards’ last stand at Père-Lachaise Cemetery and the end of the Paris Commune. A few days ago, the Tricontinental Institute published an article by our friend and comrade Vijay Prashad who seeks to draw lessons from past socialist experiences. On this occasion, he notes that “All socialist revolutions in the modern world have taken place in the poorer nations, where the peasantry predominates and where wealth has been systematically leached from their territory into distant lands.”
The Paris Commune reminds us of an important fact: here was one revolution that did not take place in a poorer country, but in one of the world’s leading capitalist nations. One need only read Émile Zola, the famous chronicler of nineteenth-century France, to remember how profoundly Second Empire society had already been transformed by capitalism. By 1871, when the Commune broke out, France was already well on the way to transitioning from competitive capitalism to imperialist capitalism, even though the latter would truly take off only after the Commune with the scramble for Africa.
In a sense, Vijay Prashad’s exclusion of the Commune from the revolutionary experiences he analyses is justified. The Commune was exceptionally short-lived (72 days!), and it lacked both a clear revolutionary programme and a revolutionary organisation. Indeed, the Commune can easily be seen as the first socialist revolution, but also as the last of the pre-modern revolutions in which craftsmen and the petty bourgeoisie indisputably played a key role alongside a working class that already represented half of Paris’ population. But this revolution was so brief that the revolutionary moment did not develop into a revolutionary experience capable of transforming society in a deep and lasting way.
Nevertheless, in New Times and Old Mistakes in a New Guise—Lenin’s text that Vijay Prashad quotes, the Russian revolutionary reflects on the construction of socialism and explicitly refers to the government of the Commune as a precursor to the Soviet government.
But is there really nothing to be learnt from the Paris Commune, apart from a legend and a few magnificent revolutionary songs, such as “The Internationale”? Admittedly, it would be a mistake to celebrate the Commune. It lasted only 72 days, and the Commune—besieged, starved, poorly armed, and divided—was ultimately crushed with a brutality that shook the whole of Europe. But it would be an even greater mistake to bury it after ceremonially paying our respects to our heroic fallen comrades. Because the Commune is the only revolutionary experiment at the heart of capitalism, we must ask ourselves, without fetishism or discouragement, what can be learnt from it. The Commune must not become a dusty museum. It must be a laboratory—a place of concrete possibilities, fatal errors, and lessons that never grow old.
I. The State is Not Neutral: A Truth That The Republic Has Written in Blood
One of the most persistent myths of French republicanism that haunts the French left is the idea of an impartial state, acting as an arbiter above the classes. The Commune shattered that myth.
In 1871, the Third Republic—Adolphe Thiers’s Republic, the one that claimed to champion ‘freedom’—reached an explicit agreement with Bismarck, the national enemy, so that Prussian troops would release tens of thousands of French soldiers in order to crush the workers of Paris. The “national defence” government, led first by Jules Favre and then by Adolphe Thiers, was in reality a class alliance against the working class.
French communists, socialists and anarchists are commemorating the Bloody Week this Sunday. What we are commemorating remains a matter of historical assessment. French bourgeois media, from Le Monde to France Culture, eagerly circulate the fanciful figures of the British historian Robert Tombs (aptly named!). In an attempt to downplay the number of casualties, he puts the death toll at between 6,000 and 7,000, hoping to show that the Bloody Week claimed fewer lives than the so-called “Reign of Terror” during France’s 1789 revolution. The message is revolutionaries are more bloodthirsty than the bourgeoisie, who hold back when it is, alas, necessary to restore order to avert an even greater bloodbath.
The Paris City Council itself circulated these figures, reducing them even further. In an article marking the 150th anniversary of the Commune, it evoked the death toll of 3,000 to 5,000 souls – even though, elsewhere, it admits 20,000 deaths — as does the French Senate. To repeat this figure of........