 On the 18th of March 1871 the workers of Paris took control of their city and in a brief period of only about 10 weeks they gave to the world the heroic example of the first worker state in history, the Paris Commune. I'll amplify my voice a bit. Now writing at the time in one of his letters Marx described the Paris Commune as the Paris workers storming heaven which is where we've taken the title for this talk today. Now writing later on he summed up the significance of the Commune in these words. He said the 18th of March gave the workers the awareness of their strength. The 18th of March has emancipated them. For the first time in history they've been able to take their destiny into their own hands. This movement is thus a revolution that is why it has separated the water from the earth. That is why the slavers think of it only with rage that is why all the workers of the earth welcome it as a date of liberation. 150 years later we celebrate the inspiring achievements of the Commune. We don't just mark it as a kind of religious holiday although I think we should mark 18th of March kind of like you know like a communist christmas to be honest maybe not in a religious sense as I'm saying. We must study the Commune and absorb its lessons because in both its triumphs and its mistakes and also in its eventual defeat the Commune is still an invaluable guide for how the workers can overthrow capitalism and begin the socialist transformation of society. So I'm a bit scared I'm going to go over time and even then I'm not actually going to be able to cover all of the lessons that we can draw from the Commune. There are so many and it's so applicable to the class struggle today but I will try my best to cover why I think of the main ones. But before I get even to 1871 and the events of the Commune I want to take us back a little over 20 years to provide a little bit of context. I'm gone much time but talk about the regime the Commune overthrew. The second empire. So France didn't actually live under just one Napoleon. The French ended up living in the two Napoleons, Napoleon I and Napoleon III is Nephew, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Now in 1848 there was another revolution. France has seen a lot of revolutions. Engels commented it's the country in which the class struggle is always fought to the finish and what he was referring to there is in 1848 like the great revolution before it like the 1830 revolution the working masses of Paris that is the proletarians and the poor petty bourgeoisie you know the artisans small business owners they rose up in arms and overthrew the last monarchy of France the July monarchy of Louis Philippe that was in February of 1848. Later on the workers themselves the working class in a Marx and Engels opinion for the first time in history about 300,000 workers rose up again in arms you know mounting barricades in the street to try and overthrow the very bourgeois democratic republic the second republic they themselves had given birth to because they were not satisfied that it was going to provide them the social transformation that they had dreamt of and that they fought for that uprising not unlike the Commune was crushed in blood using artillery and grape shot and rifles by the defenders of the bourgeoisie following which the nephew of Napoleon the first Louis Napoleon was elected as the first president of France elected by universal male suffrage by by majority of millions of votes but in this period we see a tumult of ferocious class struggle even though the workers have been put down we see a massive shift to the left in society not only amongst the working class but even amongst the peasantry and the bourgeoisie openly saying writing in their publications in their newspapers what good is this legality in this constitution if all it gives us is disorder and revolution that it's time for order with a capital O and order was granted in France at that time by the saver of what who would become Napoleon the third who took power in a military coup on 2nd of december 1851 we're going to mark not so much celebrate mark the 170th anniversary of that this year on december and we're going to hopefully time that with the publication of a new edition of marx's 18th room air which is a pamphlet written about those events so want to keep an eye out as well um after that period um we have a a period of relative stability in french and world capitalism and actually a rapid upswing in french capitalism gdp double in the period of the uh second empire but the reason i'm bringing this up the reason this is interesting from our point of view and not kind of dry economic point of view is because it led to the strengthening both quantitatively and qualitatively of the working class in grants there's a comment that ted grant has made and also allen woods in his book about the spanish revolution the great betrayal he talks about he compares the working class in any country to the giant anteus in hercules fights with his labors every time hercules would throw anteus to the ground thinking he broke his back in his you know their wrestling contest the giant would get back up even stronger than before because he was drawing strength from his mother the earth and the working class is a bit like that that no matter how many times the capitalists and the ruling class and the reactionaries throw us down the working class always comes back stronger because capitalism in order for it to develop in order for capital to exist it needs the working class it grows the working class it concentrates them in large enterprises and actually provide it it provides its own grave diggers to use martin's expression and so in the same time that gdp doubled the size of the working class in paris went from being about 300 000 of a total population of a million so about third to being over a million in a population of two million so they became the absolute majority of the population of paris which has a very important bearing on what was to come later on um but just it wasn't just the working class got bigger after after being after having been crushed violently then over the next couple of decades we again start to see resurgence in the the militancy in the industrial and political movement of the working class as we always do so the 60s the late 1860s i mean was a period of rising strikes in france at that time in january of eight you have elections in 1869 where this is a bonapartist government you know this is a dictatorship but they hold an election with a tame opposition and the government in a bonapartist regime only received 55 percent of the vote i know that is a majority still but this was a partly rigged election that started to cause concern in january of 1870 you had a mass demonstration of 200 000 people on the streets of paris because a famous journalist victim was assassinated murdered by the cousin of the emperor 200 000 people in a city of two million is 10 percent of the population that's about the proportion of the american population that was out in the streets during the black lives matter movement so this was a serious threat a huge movement that actually started to scare the ruling establishment and not for the first time certainly not for the last time in history bonapart and the second empire decided to use chauvinism national chauvinism and war as a means of hopefully scoring successes abroad but also diverting and cutting across the class struggle at home not unlike really the hopes of the russians are you know there was a rising class struggle prior to 1914 and he hoped that if they scored some victories abroad that that would cut across you know mobilise people for the army and very interestingly dialectically that can turn into its opposite very very quickly because war is often closely connected with revolution often what does war force the masses to do it for it throws them out of their you know kind of daily routine and it forced them to examine very very closely as a matter of life and death the decisions being taken by their leaders and that applies even more in a case of defeat again like the czar in in First World War the franco prussian war as it became known so bonapart used the pretext of a dynastic dispute over the succession of the spanish throne with bismarck the the chancellor prussia which is the most important powerful german state at that time he used this pretext in order to launch an invasion of germany and that invasion turned into a completely debacle and a disaster from the standpoint of the french armies they were surrounded outmaneuvered and quite rapidly defeated on the 2nd of september 1870 bonapart himself at the head of his army becomes totally surrounded by prussians tries to shoot himself his way out loses about 17 000 lives with his pointless charade and then hands himself over as a president as a prisoner of bismarck and the war is brought to an end and this is when events really start getting interesting because in two days after that surrender the empire is dead and the third republic comes into being now i don't have a huge amount of time to talk about how the third republic itself came into being but what i can say is not unlike the second republic it was bought and paid for by the struggle of the working class actually even the most left-wing radical nps deputies nps and the bonapartist part of the parliament people like leon gone better actually said to the workers when the workers heard the news of the defeat on the 3rd of december at september sorry they started coming out into the streets and demonstrating and this you know leader of the people this radical republican said to them in fact i'll quote you are wrong they were calling for the republic he said to them you are wrong we must remain united united with who united with the bonapartist and the monarchists make no revolution luckily i would say for humanity in the work of the working class the workers ignored it luckily for the third republic at least the workers ignored his sage advice and on the fourth of september they came out en masse they stormed into i suppose the equivalent of the house of commons called the quarrel issues that if they cleared out the deputies and they forced the same guy leon gone better to announce the abolition of the empire i think he probably did some under certain duress but he did it he did it but they weren't satisfied with that they then carried him over the over to the hotel revealed the city hall which has great historic importance in france many of the revolutionary announcements and new governments have taken place there is a key location so they carried him over there and basically forced him to announce the proclamation of the third republic there and then the reason i bring this up the reason i think this is relevant is how many times in history especially the history of the last century have we seen democratic revolutions overthrowing dictatorships or the absolutist monarchies carried out by the workers or led by the workers only to give rise to a you know a more democratic but ultimately a bourgeois government marks described the government as a cabal place hunting barristers i think we know more than a few more than a few place hunting barristers in their own politics today but how is it then that the workers had so valiantly risen up but given birth to this government of you know this cabal of place hunting barristers well let's face it in ordinary times the workers are quite used to being governed by their their superiors you know the experts the people who hang around the corridors of power these people who announced what became there was a provisional government that was given the name the government of national defense these people were able to appoint themselves the government people likely on gambetta people like junfei and other famous bourgeois republicans on the so-called left they were able to announce their own names for the government and the workers even shared because at that point there was no alternative and caught they draped themselves in defense in order to win the support of the workers because the defeat to prussia had meant that this imperialist war of aggression had turned actually into an invasion of france by prussia and the parisian workers were actually extremely determined to prosecute the war and and defend paris and the rest of france from the prussians you might think well why why were the paris workers suddenly so interested in carrying out this war the reason is it's not simply as a result of national chauvinism i've heard a lot in relations to british politics today that i'll will never have a revolution in england because in england the workers are too patriotic and too lulled by kind of conservative mythology let's not be too impressionistic and too kind of empirical in our view of the changes and moods and the mood that exists within the working class the kind of veneer of chauvinism that existed in in paris at this time actually it was then wanting to defend the republic they had no interest in deciding defending the second empire but at this vis mark had no interest in allowing a democratic republic to exist on the other side of the rye he wasn't at the head of the democratic republic and the majority of the bourgeoisie in france in fact were monarchists at this time unfortunately i don't have time to go into the history of monarchism in france but in fact there were two monarchist factions and all the honest faction which supported the more recent july monarchy and a legitimate faction which supported the old dynasty of the bourbons who've been overthrown in the great french revolution and again in 1830 but they just couldn't have enough they wanted them back and so these two quarreling bourgeois factions actually represented the majority of the ruling class so for the french working class in paris in particular this government of national defense was to them a defense of the republic but crucially how many times have we seen the bourgeois leadership of this new you know democratic revolution are utterly incapable of carrying out even the most basic tasks that they have been assigned the most basic tasks assigned to the government of national defense i think you could probably tell me what that was it was defending the country defending the nation and yet they completely failed marks referred to them as a government of national defection now why again i'm a bit hard pressed for time but there's an important class reason and this is a great vindication of the class view the marxist view of history because i think without a class outlook it just doesn't make sense for the government of a country to deliberately or or negligently just allow a powerful pushing army to besiege their capital and yet it happens and the the majority of the french troops had been captured or were already tied up in the war itself so that might be an excuse okay they didn't have an army to fight but they did actually have a fighting force of 250 000 armed men within paris itself that was called the paris national guard the national guard has actually been created back in the great french revolution his purpose was basically just as a militia in the various cities back in the time of the french revolution back in the time of 1848 the the national guard was largely bourgeois in composition they bought their own outfits they they were really proud of their skin hats likely like like the palace garden booking and palace uh they weren't necessarily revolutionary and actually they they shot out and put down the workers in 1848 but remember what i said about the growth of the working class in the meantime by 1870 the majority of the national overwhelming majority of the national guard were working class in composition but that poses an interesting problem for the government of national defence your best fighting force which has cannon it has rifle and they're really keen to fight are nothing other than the armed working class and march points out 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 and this fact that this this was not just marx commenting shortly after the event the leader the head of the government of national defence a man called plush who acknowledged this himself he actually said when zhulfev wrote to him calling on him you know actually go out there fight the prussians he said any serious offensive measures would give the upper hand to parisian demagogue in other words if the prussian workers were actually mobilized and sent out and scored victories against the prussians that would give the upper hand in other words if they win the war there's a revolution but also if they capitulate and surrender immediately there will be a revolution because the prussian workers were prepared to overthrow any government that didn't actually defend you know against the prussian invasion so how do you get yourself out of such a developed dilemma if you win there's a revolution if you lose as a revolution the way they did it was by allowing paris to be encircled by the prussians and allowing them to continue a siege which cost the lives of 47 000 people obviously overwhelmingly working class people starving today i think you can imagine what a siege is like this is a siege of a city of two million people so rather than just surrendering to end of the end the war which would have risked workers power or actually mobilizing the national god to win they allowed them to be bled and the reason they needed to be bled if they were so tired and exhausted and demoralized then maybe maybe they just could get away with capitulating without a revolution and on the 27th of january so after four months of siege on the 20th of september is when the siege begins on the 27th of january the government and national defense signed an armistice with russia and the terms of that armistice were reparations to be paid by paris specifically in this first instance and and for an election to be called to an election national assembly in two weeks with the country under the occupation of a foreign army for the sole purpose of negotiating peace with vismar now the results of that election which came in in february 1871 were the two thirds of assembly of 630 mps 400 of them were monarchists the olienists and the religious and then a further faction were bonapartist people who wanted to see uh louis bonaparte put back on the throne um only a tiny minority were republicans but paris voted overwhelmingly for republicans including you know so-called radical left republicans 75 percent of the vote in paris were for the republicans and this poses a bit of a problem we start to see emerging in the country a serious class split on the one hand you have the elected assembly elected under the orders of vismar who are meeting in bordeaux because france is in circle and when this assembly first met they started chanting long lived the king this was the first assembly ever elected under the third republic chanting long lived the king an extremely reactionary assembly on the other hand you have the paris which is effectively controlled at this point by the armed working class the national guards who elected overwhelmingly republican deputies and who would fight to the finish to defend the republic already the outlines of a civil war are quite clear to be seen but this split this kind of geographical split if you like between the countryside which tended to elect monarchist deputies and even priests themselves would come and be elected you know representatives of the church the other countryside which was a bit you know more reactionary in its composition we had the cities which were more republican and then paris at the head this geographical demographic split was nothing other than a class split and i add also that it wasn't the peasantry we just completely you know reactionary monarchists the question of peace was skillfully used by the reactionaries they basically said vote vote for us is vote for peace and enter the war your sons won't be drafted and they use that it's not the case of the paris is that the the french or any other peasantry are just permanently reactionary this is the same french peasantry that overthrew feudalism in the great french revolution uh there there are two sides of the french peasantry and i'll come on to that um in a in a little bit of time so you see this class split and this class split was clearly recognized by the ruling class themselves and the head of this new reactionary assembly who was a man called Adolf Thierre who'd been involved in french politics all the way back to the 1820s he'd seen a lot of revolutions he'd even taken part in one in a very cynical and cowardly way which is his way but he was the kind of the main representative of the french bourgeoisie at this time he himself was a monarchist by the way but he set himself the task he realized after giving him his credit he was incredibly cynical a coward uh a dastardly human being but he was also a very cunning representative an intelligent and cunning representative of the ruling class and he realized the war with pressure is one thing the main issue right now is to crush the paris workers he'd seen 1848 he knew what was coming and so already this assembly of monarchist deputies starts provoking and attacking brazilians first there was a moratorium on rents during the siege i guess in a way it's kind of it's in a funny way kind of comparable to the moratorium in rent you saw during the pandemic and the ruling class thought well now's the time to get rid of that so all of a sudden all these kind of ruin small businesses and all these workers uh renting flats they're told that after having almost starved to death you only rents to you in about two weeks good luck and they cut the pay of the national guard i wonder why they might want to do that by 30 about 30 pence of course that was that was about third of their daily wage at that time which was obviously a deliberate act of provocation also symbolic acts they passed a resolution to move the official capital of the country from Paris to Versailles Versailles was the capital during the old regime during the regime prior to the great french revolution it's that palace that you might have seen if you've gone and you know visited as a tourist um very funny smell i've always found there i don't know why all the ghosts um they started suppressing republican newspapers this was how the third republic announced itself to the world um but at the same time there's there's another side to this story within paris itself you actually start to have an embryo organs of workers power development way back even at the beginning of the first revolution in september the arrondissement of paris of the the districts of the city would hold big public assemblies out in the street and they would discuss question what's the way forward what's the way to defeat the enemy what's the way to win against the the siege and you know to defeat the pros and also then i guess more more local practical tasks um and they would elect delegates at these big assemblies to a central committee representing the whole of paris this was a soviet we're talking about paris soviet taking place that the working masses would come together elect democratically elect representatives to discuss the pressing questions of the day that came into existence as far back as september and trotsky who knew a thing or two about soviets and revolution in 1921 wrote an introduction to the civil war in france uh marxist pamphlet or series of addresses about paris commune and he said the following which i find extremely interesting he said if the centralised party of revolutionary action had been found at the head of the proletariat of france in september 1870 the whole history of france and with it the whole history of humanity would have taken another direction why might you thought something like this and one clue to what he's getting at here can be found in i'm stepping back a little bit but 31st of october 1870 there was actually an insurrection a working class insurrection that took place before the birth of the paris commune where at the news that a figure of one of the main french armies had been captured and surrendered to the prussians which suggested that the sea you know the war was not going well and the siege was going to uh continue and get worse actually the what you might describe as the vanguard the most radical determined section of the working class rose up stormed into the assembly there's a long tradition of this in french politics stormed into the assembly that they had just created and called said it was dissolved march to them and the hotel de vile to announce a new government which was much more radical included figures like um uh august blanqui was a very famous french revolutionary who was constantly trying to provoke and carry out insurrections to overthrow uh the ruling class in french france he spent most of his life in prison for doing exactly that a determined communist revolutionary i'll speak a little bit more about the limitations of blanquism though um and yet it came to nothing unfortunately um it the despite the fact that one of the heads of the government julferi said at that point no one in paris supported us everybody hated us they actually fled paris at the news of this so why is it that they lost them because once this kind of revolutionary power had installed itself just by decree it had this not been planned this was not a plea pre-planned insurrection it was the masses had spontaneously risen up at the terrible news from the front they stormed into the assembly one member of the central committee of the al-disman that i mentioned earlier so i'm a leading member of the paris sobia if you like climbed on to literally climbed onto a table and said let's overthrow the government and they just did it so that mean that's that's a good sign in terms of the military it's the militancy of the workers there but unfortunately it wasn't enough and when they got to the hotel de vile you had supportive national guard units so you had armed men could act to defend this government but they didn't give them any instructions they basically said they gave the impression that the job had been done so they went home meanwhile national guard units that did still depend depend the government of national defense it's not that the whole population of paris had returned against the government at that stage they actually went and they recaptured the hotel de vile it was a failure so i can't help ask the question that trosky also asked they had a party along similar lines with the same kind of preparation and links to the masses as the bolshevik party why if the bolshevik party or you know the french equivalent at this time why if the blond kiss for example has succeeded in gaining a solid majority in this central committee of the arondissement and then started making real preparations with the most hardline revolutionary national guard units to take strategic points in the city i don't think the national government of national defense would have survived us much longer and bearing in mind that this was on the 31st of october that means that three months of that brutal siege would not take place not let alone the other effects so why did that party not exist i don't have a huge amount of time to go into the history of working class movements in france but i mentioned blond key and i think i should spend a bit more time on it blond key was as i mentioned a determined communist revolutionary he was almost all his his life at the end of his life he started to turn towards chauvinism unfortunately but for the majority of his life he was he believes in what marx would call the dictatorship of the proletariat he said that basically the workers should install a revolutionary dictatorship in the capital suppress all the resistance of the old exploiters and use that to basically to create communism one limitation of blond key was he was extremely vague about what all this meant he kind of was very big into spontaneity basically said well once the masses in power they'll all they'll sort it all out and there's an element of truth in that we as marxists don't believe that the working class basically just follows our direction that we set out a blueprint or a staircase socialism but without a clear revolutionary strategy and a plan for how a recognized party of revolution with a program that people can identify with can actually win over the vanguard win over the most revolutionary section of the working class organize them in order to take power in order to install that classic dictatorship that was what was lacking which was why all of blond key's insurrectionary attempts failed i mentioned 1848 in may of 1848 he did exactly the same thing and wound up getting arrested so in the decisive june insurrection when the workers were crushed he was missing in october again he and his followers launched a failed insurrection which could probably have succeeded if it had been carried out on the kind of lines that trotsky and the bolsheviks have been learned from those lessons to be fair to blond key if they had carried out on those lines instead he ends up in jail so during the most glorious episode one of the most glorious episodes in human history and one of the most glorious episodes in the history of the working class is in jail again this is one of the tragedies of bonkers in many respects they have the right ideas but he lacked that kind of organization part of it was necessary and but what about the forces marxism marxism existed by the 1870s and you had the international working man's association which had been founded in 1867 to get my dates right and actually it had over a thousand subs payers paying members in france so that's more than we have in the it in france or in britain for that matter today still relatively small but they also through their kind of their other organizations like workers support societies that they ran and influenced they they probably influenced historians estimate about 30 000 workers were somehow under the influence of the idea from may that's pretty good i'd take that um so why why was that not good enough in actual fact i know we associate the first international with marx but and angles and that is right they were on the leadership but it wasn't a marxist international the majority of the french section of the idwma was dominated by prudhonism followers of prudhon prudhon actually described himself as an anarchist he might actually be the first person to do so i'm not entirely sure he was certainly one of the founders considered the founding fathers of anarchism and one part of his theory was that actually the working class should not struggle for let alone take political power so he was opposed to the formation of a revolutionary centralized party for the seizure of power because the siege power in his view would be pointless he said if you had a social revolution and the him a social revolution was changing the economic relations with cooperatives and mutual benefit societies and stuff if you change the economic conditions and you don't need to seize power the political power becomes redundant which you know it sounds kind of materialist but all the while you basically tolerate the existence of the bourgeois state and the bourgeois state and the ruling class that it acts for is in no way going to tolerate and accept you transforming the economy under its nose even actually suggested that the state might support some of these cooperatives now we know from the history of the co-op from the history of the spires commune that's not how it goes the ruling class do not tolerate threatens to their threats to their rule so in reality prudhon's anarchism was reduced to a really pale reformism and in moments of revolution you had people who consider themselves revolutionaries but didn't even want to struggle for power let alone not have the guide at least the bronchus wanted to struggle for power and so in reality the idea was more of a collection of individuals setting up you know worker benefit societies and cooperatives than a revolutionary party in that decisive moment and but one thing that's very interesting I would say about the Paris commune is that we still have this you know the successful birth of a working class in spite of the absence of this revolution party many times in history we've seen inspiring revolutions look at the egyptian revolution both of them that were through mubarak and mozzi and then the leadership is completely absent and is handed over spontaneously to people who haven't powered us in the military and yet this time even with this pretty poor leadership I have to say the worker still managed to take power and I want to talk about the circumstances of how that took place the the set that I already mentioned that national guard was the armed working class now in addition to this central committee of the island eastmore the national guard started electing its own representatives and its own leadership and he had an organization called the central committee of the national guard who issued the following statement on the 24th of february 2000 delegates from the national guard actually assembled you know gigantic assembly to elect their leadership and one of their leaders who was a member of the iwma and a follow one of the very few followers of limited followers of marks and angles in that international and proposed the following resolutions which were both passed unanimously that the national guard only recognizes leaders elected by itself and that the national guard protests against any attempt at disarmament and declares that in any case of need it will offer armed resistance so you have the armed workers of paris saying we only answer to our own leaders and if you try to take our arms off of us we're going to fight you and then you have an assembly which is doing whatever it can to starve and defeat paris workers from that moment from february in reality the civil war has already begun what we have actually is a situation which trotsky described in his history of the russian revolution as dual power now what is dual power quite some of these two powers doesn't it it means that you effectively have two political powers two state powers representing different classes within the same social formation so within the same country within the same national border of france you have the bourgeois government which has been elected by universal suffrage across the whole country it has possession of the army or was left with it it has the possession of the judges the courts is still very much a power in society and then you have the national guard you've already announced that they're not going to tolerate any impositions by the bourgeois government this cannot last for a very long period of time as trotsky explained either the workers the organs of workers power that are developing will overthrow the old regime or they will be crushed by the old regime they can't live together in harmony workers power and and capitalist rule cannot live together which is something that was confirmed of course in the russian revolutions the german revolutions throughout the history of the working class and eventually this this stalemate this very tense stalemate is resolved not by the workers who lack the leadership to take the initiative and actually plan for the insurrection by the ruling class itself tl when he finally feels himself strong enough he tries to overthrow the commune using a coup a sneaky a very sneaky maneuver about three o'clock in the morning on the 18th of march you probably think you're finding half an hour in we've actually got to the 18th of march um on three at three o'clock in the morning the the army of of versailles marches from versailles to paris occupies several strategic points including the the great hill but the Montmartre where now the sacred cathedral is but before there was some canon that was actually owned bought and paid for by the national guard itself and they go to these strategic locations in order to snatch the canon away in order to deprive the national guard of some means of defense they were going to plaster placards saying order has been reimposed those of you have nothing to fear go home it's only your leaders were after no classic coup language and then you know they were going to reimpose order ordered by the sword just like new Napoleon bone apart back in 1851 the problem is in one of these you know kind of delightful accidents of history which contain so much significance when they finally got there that there was hardly any resistance that the national guard who would basically declared we're not going to follow your rule anymore hadn't posted any guards really it's as if they weren't expecting this which again shows a certain amount of the limitations and dare I say with the benefit of hindsight the naivety of the leadership of the national guard they walk into Paris one person notices them they immediately cut him down he's the first casualty of the commune they get to the canon job done except somebody then realizes that they've forgotten to bring harnesses to strap the cannon to the horses so unless they were going to push them back to the side themselves they were stuck so they had to and they couldn't send text by that at that point either so they had to send a messenger back to get the harnesses back in order to move the cannon so by seven o'clock they had stood there twiddling the thumbs all these strategically you know obtained points and that's when things start getting really interesting because it's at that point the working women of Paris start to wake up for the day and as they do so and as they come out to the street they notice that they have the all these uniformed troops standing around the cannon and they start harassing them start calling out to them they say what are you doing I think I've got a quote it says what what is this is this is shameful what are you doing there and the soldiers stand there in silence their commander general Laconte who's given command over this operation eventually the women sorry I've missed a piece here the women go and wake up their husbands the National Guardsmen with the rifles who were still in bed at this point not exactly on alert for a coup attempt they wake them up drag them into the street and they start fraternizing with the soldiers again we've seen this a number of times in revolutions throughout history that actually the working people of Paris are calling to the soldiers saying what are you doing here all we've done is started electing our own you know our own representatives we're we're not posing a threat to anybody the soldiers are listening to this you can see that that you know the general can see it's going to go one way or another he orders the soldiers to fire on the crowd including men women and children and the soldiers stand still they don't do anything he orders again and again possibly again I'm not sure I was three or four times and then his own soldiers turn around and point their guns at him they mutin and this happens all across the side of the city so without shedding a drop of blood the working class took power in Paris almost backs and of course this accident underlies expresses a much deeper necessity which is what I would say I would say that the working class was already in control of Paris by this point it just required the bayonet of Thierre and the Velsailles to pop that bubble to suddenly realise actually no we're in charge here the only casualty aside from that century armament invention the only casualties of the 18th of March insurrection was the general Laconte and another reactionary general Clemont Thomas who had actually carried out been partly responsible for the massacre in June 1848 hated by the workers he was in disguise he was in civilian clothes trying to see how it was going they caught him and the mutiny soldiers dragged both Clemont Thomas and Laconte to the Hotel de Ville and executed him on the spot the representatives of the National Guard Central Committee actually said they should stand court martial so all of these lies and colonies about the bloodthirst of the masses the bloodthirst of the Bolsheviks and when the working class finally take power they're going to massacre all the bourgeoisie just out of jealousy out of spite it's complete nonsense every time the working class is taken power they've shown immense magnanimity and if anything actually if you don't mind me saying they've been too magnanimous and too soft and an enemy that would much rather see them all executed against the wall in reality Laconte and Clemont Thomas got the treatment that Thierre had been preparing the day had been preparing for the Paris workers while this was all going on so about by about noon the representatives of the government Thierre actually was in Paris at this time he was trying to coordinate the coup and when he started getting bad news he immediately fled the city as he has done when any problem is on the horizon in every single revolution in the 19th century he fled Paris every single one even ones that he supposedly led and meanwhile Jules Fever I think it was he was still in the office of the Hotel de Ville he wasn't quite as cunning as Thierre he hadn't got the bad news yet and so when he realized the National Guard were coming he had to jump out of the window and escape from Paris now what was the leadership of the insurrection doing what was the equivalent of Trotsky and you know the Revolutionary Military Committee planning the insurrectional night they were still in bed they didn't realize that the insurrection had happened until they they came out and they met at the Hotel de Ville and they realized they were in power again I asked the question would it have gone would things have gone differently if they've been you know if they've been prepared for this if they put guards for example but we can speculate I you know we can move on from that the point is the working class found itself in power and what did start doing with that power this is the really you know the the most important lesson of all from the commune Marx makes a very interesting statement he says that the if I can actually find it that's yeah he says the working class did not expect miracles from the commune they had no ready-made utopias to introduce by decree of the people they have no ideals to realize but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society is itself pregnant in other words the social transformation of society is not something that is you know you some genius writes for blueprint and then we tell the work of what to do in actual fact the trans socialist transformation of society is a practical question that when you put power in the hands of the working class and they themselves start to democratically and rationally confront the problems facing society at this time they will achieve miracles they will perform miracles and that's what exactly what the Paris commune was despite all these limitations and problems you know all the limitations I talked about some of the political measures of the commune immediately one of the first measures of the commune was to abolish the standing army now in reality the standard standing army barely existed at this point and what they did was they made the national guard the army effectively but this was a militia which democratically elected its own leaders it was it was the armed working class became the armed force of society that makes the Paris commune different to any other state that's ever existed in history it makes it much more democratic and it makes it a truly proletarian state abolition of the bureaucracy that actually if you perform the function so what the way the commune was built up it was it was not that dissimilar to a council to be honest like a local authority but we obviously had a lot more power and a lot more democratic but the the workers would elect delegates so from their local assemblies they will elect delegates to the central council of the commune but there was only one chamber it wasn't like a legislative and you know two chambers legislature or or a separation of powers between the legislative and executive mass describes it as a working body and actually is an important function of workers democracy because basically if you were appointed to perform a job if you were going to represent the workers on that council or if you were appointed to be an official in charge of a certain department like the department of labor or even the post office you were accountable to the workers you could be recalled you're not only elected you could be recalled at any time if you weren't doing your job this is this is how universal suffrage should really work in a genuine democracy a workers democracy mark said that for the workers universal suffrage would serve them in the same way that individual suffrage serves the bosses so what that means is when the boss thinks the worker isn't doing his or her job properly or isn't making enough money he'll sack them that's individual suffrage when the workers don't think you were doing your job properly they'll sack you and i think that's perfectly fair enough if only we could do that under bourgeois democracy if only we could sack the representatives and the unelected officials i'd love to sack the queen maybe one day we will i don't know how much longer we've got to be honest maybe we should hurry up but you know we i'd happen to sack charles or william or any of them to be honest i don't i don't discriminate but the upper echelons of the british civil service they're not elected although in a way actually i'll that's a mistake they are elected they're elected by the city of london they are themselves from the city of london they're representatives of the ruling class helping to manage the affairs of the state which the government i think marx himself said that the present day executive is just a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie well this was a committee a council for managing the common affairs of the proletariat and that made it fundamentally different from any state that's ever existed in history and if you were elected to one of these posts if you were elected to the council or you appointed uh you know elected to one of these official positions you didn't earn a salary more than just an average workers wage salaries were capped at 6 000 francs which at that time was kind of you know a decent workers wage well workers wage nonetheless so they weren't on the bread line but they didn't have the privilege of the bureaucracy they weren't they're drawing the equivalent of a hundred you know six figure salary that you have many many people at the tops of these various state bureaucracies drawing whose job is not really to carry out these services but rather just to to make sure they're being carried out in a way that's amenable to the capitalist system you also have democratic demands being carried out the separation from church to the state in france at that time the church actually controlled education at pretty much all levels and still the catholic church had a big role to play in the state i mentioned that sections of the mp's were themselves you know priests and representatives of the church that was done away with they didn't abolish religion or the church they didn't go on a you know rampage of sacking churches or anything in fact some churches were voluntarily converted into meeting halls and assembly halls and they draped a red flag over the altar and then debate questions of the day um you know again this is what we see in scenes of revolution the masses really entering onto the stage of history they instead they they carried out what I would say is a basic democratic demand which is the separation of the church and state something that has yet to be carried out here to this day they introduced free education for everybody now that's something that has been sort of won under under capitalism and is now being rolled back in many respects but this was immediately as soon as the work has come to power these really important democratic demands which have been held back by the ruling class were immediately granted those are the political elements of the economy which in and of themselves if that is all they'd achieved then that would you know by far justify us having a much longer discussion than this about the economy however that's not all they achieve mark's made an interesting point that actually these political reforms in this work estate was the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour and it was to serve as a lever for uprooting the economic foundation on rest which rests the existence of classes so not even just capitalism and therefore class ruled itself that big talk so what did they how how did they manage that how did they use this political form to you know as a lever to completely transform society again they did it in practice they were confronted with such problems as all of the you know the main bureaucrats the post office the uh the street lamps even the cemeteries everything to do with the running of the city had been deliberately sabotaged so the old management had fled but while they fled they took all the cash from the register and they smashed all the stamps and they made it impossible basically to run the city so what did the workers do they didn't give up hope what they did was they started electing their own managers and they they got to work because the thing is the workers that worked in the post office knew much better how to run the post office and the managers and I think anyone who's worked in any job and those that's the case but the people who work doing the job have a better idea about how to do the job than the people who tell them to do the job and whose job is basically to manage how they make profit so they appointed managers democratically under the terms in which I explained earlier and if sometimes administrators from the old administrators from the old regime were still in place and if they put up obstacles then the workers would use their own initiative to basically get the job done anyway and so in the post office they reconstituted the post office and even started successfully smuggling posts out of the city despite a blockade in the space of two days even more inspiring I got a bit more detail about the print workers so the print industry was very vital for producing information for the workers and their leaflets pamphlets papers the bourgeois tried to destroy that but when the workers took charge they increased the worker salaries by 25 but at the same time they saved the prince's printing office 200 francs a day so they increased the workers wages but lowered the budget by cutting the enormous salaries of the highest officials I can't help the thing that sounds like quite a good idea you know that that's one form of austerity that I can get but actually it was even more efficient than that it wasn't just kind of more fair it worked better that the budget of the printing office up to the 18th of March was 120,000 francs a month under the commune it was never more than 20,000 francs a month in other words the work was being done more efficiently because the purpose of the work was to meet the needs of the inhabitants of Paris it made things so much simpler and therefore cheaper Marx makes a kind of remark he says that it made the fantasy of the liberals a cheap government a reality and I can't like I mean I'm already running out of time but I can't help but think of the crisis in the NHS today the people say oh we can't just perpetually pump money into this gigantic bureaucracy people are getting older the population is getting larger surely it's a fantasy I believe that if the worker who actually the NHS workers themselves however many there are like hundreds of thousands of skilled workers who know what they're doing and are passionate about what they're doing if they were given democratic control of how to run the health service in the context of a country where profiteering pharmaceutical companies had also been put under the control of society as a whole and the working class not only would everybody be guaranteed decent healthcare and not long waiting times at any time and not dying for lack of a ventilator or things like that but only would be able to face up to covid more effectively but I bet it would cost less as well because this whole you know parasitic layer of management designed basically to carry out cuts ironically whilst drawing new salaries themselves wouldn't be there anyway I better hurry up the last one in way in which they started transforming the bedrock of society itself they also again what you might call kind of I guess minimal demands for the working class banning night work you know many industries had long night shifts which were very detrimental to healthy banda they banned fines on workers wages they registered all the abandoned factories when the bourgeois had left they registered them and put them under the control of workers associations under basically workers cooperatives in other words just out of practical necessity the workers were creating the basis for socialism this is what we mean by the socialist transformation of society they halted for closures of mortgages so the unprotected property owners and they deferred payments of rent so they overturned that policy of forcing people to pay rents that they clearly couldn't afford and within this there are other there are other important points to be raised that within this you also have the role of women now because i'm already running out of time I can't well i'm sure people will come in on this question that on the discussion now one of the mistakes of the commune is that they didn't give the votes to the women it was universal male suffrage that was a mistake based on i get you know prejudices exist in that society but i am absolutely convinced that if the commune had been given more than 10 weeks to live then women would have been given a vote would have won the vote not simply been passively given the vote because at every single stage in the life of the commune the women were on the front line literally as well as metaphorically they were the ones that effectively began the commune on the morning of 18th march they're the ones who actually fought on the barricades alongside the men some were you know ambulance carriers some were nurses but some actually you know were there with rifles getting shot down in the commune and then when the commune was eventually crushed they were there being shot shot up against the wall just like everybody else it got to the times as in the times the english times not a bolshevik publication it it commented in one of his articles that if the french nation were composed only of french women what a terrible nation it would be and by terrible they meant terrifying but they showed that you know the courage the ferocity of the working women defending their class and defending their own interests along with it despite the fact that they've been i would say mistakenly wrongly deprived of the vote and we see this you know many times in the minor strike we see actually how the class struggle and struggle for the emancipation of women on it's not even that they you know intersect or coalesce they are the same struggle ultimately and the class it is the class struggle opens the way for the true ultimate liberation of of women and all the press groups in society but and also this was an internationalist body you know i mentioned earlier about the chauvinism you know this defences in this mood of defense that dissipated you had poles you had hungarians you had russians playing an active part even being elected to the leadership of the commune even leading armies of the commune you had people from all sorts of countries and the commune itself announced our flag the red flag is the flag of the world republic that is the internationalism that we stand on to this day that is our heritage but i to to kind of close up the the commune did make mistakes i mean it was always hard pressed it was always in difficult circumstances i can't stand here that it would oh it would definitely one if it hadn't made these mistakes but it would have a lot better chance the first mistake which marx cried you know he you can see in his letters pulling his beard out about this was when the versailles had been defeated on the 18th march and they were trickling out of the city demoralized defeated in disorder on the point of mutiny the commune the the national guard did not follow them if the com if the national guard had marched on versailles i'm sure that they would have probably won over some of those units dispersed what remained of the army even more maybe even captured the government who knows maybe even captured tl that and in and of itself wouldn't have suddenly ended the civil war but the crucial thing is it would have bought them time it would have broken the isolation bought them time to try and reach out more to the country and who knows maybe we'll be having a different kind of discussion about the commune today another mistake they made is that the bank of france as you probably imagined was sat in paris and lissa gary who wrote a very interesting fantastic history of the commune he was there participating he said that every single revolutionary history when they have had the chance to take and hold the treasury in the bank and the bank julia seiza did it i don't know if he's a regular revolutionary but in the in this roman civil war he took hold of the treasury because he could use the gold to pay his troops and what did the commune do the commune sent a guy called bezley who was himself capitalist but was all in favor of the reconciliation reconciliation of the classes he stood for the commune he went over to the bank of france and the governor of the bank of france had already fled because he thought that he was going to get the guillotine and the assist the deputy government basically said don't touch the bank if you touch the bank then all of the currency in france the paper currency will become worthless don't destroy the national wealth in other words don't destroy french capitalism by doing this and so bezley came back and said we can't do it we can't touch the bank and so the first worker state in history allowed the bank of france to continue paying the wages of the same troops that shot them down in april and may it's a tragedy now taking the bank wouldn't have immediately resulted in the creation of socialism but i think it probably would have disrupted the plans of the reactionary armies a little bit longer again it would have bought them time and they would have you know there were jewels goals in the vaults of the the treasury that they could have used finally when they took over the city hall there were secret records going back all the way to the days of napoli in the first there that they took hold of and they didn't do anything with them they didn't make copies they didn't send them out from other country to be published they didn't even take them hostage mark says if they if they had basically started publishing these things you know the dirty dealings of the ruling class for about 100 years then that itself could have been a hostage in the hands of the revolutionaries that could have also bought them time it also could have opened the eyes of the working masses of the world so like i said the dirty dealings of the ruling class they didn't and the reason they did it didn't because they worried that they did that it would exacerbate the civil war that it would be a provocation that would make matters worse in other words the leadership of the commune didn't realize that their very existence was the worst insult and the worst crime they could have possibly committed against the ruling class and that whatever was going to happen tear out on the verse ii we're going to come in and they were going to massacre them indiscriminately regardless of what they did um and you know these these mistakes we must celebrate the glory of the commune but we also need to learn from these mistakes and so the commune was as you as you know defeated they started fighting on the 2nd of april on the 21st of may they they'll say a troops managed to enter into the city and then you have what's called bloody week seven days you had relentless brutal barricade fighting where the workers basically set up barricades in their neighborhoods and the valse ii basically swept but went from barricade to barricade bombed indiscriminately into the city using artillery artillery cannon from the fortresses ti even boasted how oh we've crushed an entire district of paris so they weren't coming to save paris they were coming to destroy it in their eyes it had to be destroyed when a barricade was captured and uh and the national guardsmen were captured they're immediately put up against the wall and shot but the drunken soldiers would even shoot anyone for wearing a watch and then would loot their body any woman wearing ragged clothes or carrying like a you know a pale you know a container a vessel would be shot as a suspected arsonist they they spread this myth of the petrolers they were basically the poor women in the city were deliberately burning down buildings and stuff like that the whole city was converted into a vision of hell 20 000 people were killed during that fighting including many innocent people after that 2000 people died in prisons they were thrown in effectively dungeons children a child of seven pregnant women were thrown in there and then miscarried or gave birth to stillborn children it was like a vision of hell why did they commit such atrocities what this what another lesson that we have to learn is it doesn't matter how democratic it is it doesn't matter how civilized it is or how liberal it is the ruling class will stop at nothing to destroy any possibility of classroom rule and the reason they were so ferocious and they committed atrocities far beyond what they'd ever committed was because they realized that the the workers who've risen up in the Paris commune represented the living memory of the working class struggle in France they'd remembered 1848 they'd learned lessons from this so if they were allowed to live then you're basically guaranteeing another successful commune further down the line so they had to be exterminated and they were a total of 30 000 people were killed in the courts of those events and then thousands more were deported to new caledonia later on a hundred thousand people were missing from the electoral role in Paris those not all those people were killed but that's the impact on the prison population capitalists businesses were complaining they didn't have enough workers because they shot them all that shows actually the interests of the work the ruling class are not entirely economic they're not they're not like this crude kind of economism but they also have political interest and prepare to do whatever it takes to to safeguard them so anyway i better i better finish up because i've gone on too long already um but i'm sure we're going to have a very interesting discussion today if you go to paris as a tourist and but i'm sure many of you already have if you travel to monmartre or watch the you know the enchanting film amelie you'll feel see the the basilica of the sac à coeur at the top of that hill that was the hill where the canon was sat where um le compt tried to seize the canon and was um overthrown by his mutants trees there was no cathedral there that is the birthplace of the commune after the commune was crushed and massacred they put that cathedral there not to not to appeal to god for forgiveness for their massacring and deporting workers it was to appeal you know to to ask forgiveness for the murder of le compt's and plements and on the the reactionary generals who were planning and massacring workers i think it's very apt that they chose for the architecture a roman style basilica because it was a revolt of the slave owners against the democratic working class future of humanity that's their money that's the monument to the third republic so the commune if you go to the quiet pair of shares cemetery in an isolated corner you can find a dignified mural to the commune odds of some of the commune odds were shot by that very wall and you can see a just a plan commemorating their sacrifice in their movement but to be honest the commune doesn't need a mural it doesn't need a monument it certainly doesn't need a cathedral it doesn't need any monument of bronze or stone what it what it needs is a living monument we must build a living monument to the commune the revolutionary forces of marxism the marxism itself was actually it was the marxist program was itself contributed to by the experience and the lessons of the commune marx said he'd actually hypothesize the dictatorship of the proletariat way back in in the 1850s but he said this was it he said the work french workers have shown the way Lenin in 1905 uh you know in the midst of the 1905 revolution said that um the cause of the commune is the social revolution and the future struggles the present movement we all stand on the shoulders of the commune and i i would point to if those of you who've studied the russian revolution study with the paris commune in mind because i would say that every single mistake i pointed out about the mistakes the commune Lenin and Trotsky deliberately i believe consciously they would have read this deliberately sought to overcome and i think that's one of the reasons why the bolsheviks were so successful that is the tradition that is the heritage that we stand on the successes as well as the lessons of the commune is our own priceless heritage we ignore it at our peril the paris workers have already shown the way let's finish the job forward to socialism thank you