3649. Leon Trotsky: The Decisive Hour in France

By Leon Trotsky, Marxism.org, December 14, 1938

The French protesters at barridas, 1934. 

Each day, whether we wish it or not, we convince ourselves anew that the earth continues to revolve upon its axis. Likewise, the laws of the class struggle act independently of the fact that we recognize them or not. They continue to operate despite the politics of the Popular Front. The class struggle makes the Popular Front its instrument. After the experience of Czechoslovakia it is now the turn of France: the most hidebound and the most backward have a new occasion to teach themselves.

The Popular Front is a coalition of parties. Every coalition, that is, every durable political alliance, has by necessity as its program of action the program of the more moderate of the coalesced parties. The French Popular Front has signified, since its debut, that the Socialists and Communists placed their political activity under the control of the Radicals. The French Radicals represent the left flank of the imperialist bourgeoisie. On the banner of the Radical party are inscribed “patriotism” and “democracy.” Patriotism signifies defense of the colonial empire of France; “democracy” signifies nothing real, but serves solely to enchain the petty bourgeois classes to the chariot of imperialism. It is precisely because the Radicals unite plundering imperialism with verbal democratism that more than any other party they are constrained to lie and to betray the masses.

One can say without exaggeration that the party of Herriot-Daladier is the most corrupt of all the French parties, representing a sort of culture for careerists, venal individuals, stock manipulators of the Bourse, and in general adventurers of all kinds. Since the parties of the Popular Front could not reach beyond the program of the Radicals, this signified in reality the submission of the workers and the peasants to the imperialist program of the most corrupt wing of the bourgeoisie.

In order to justify the politics of the Popular Front they invoked the necessity for an alliance between the proletariat and the petty- bourgeoisie. It is impossible to imagine a more scurrilous lie! The Radical party expresses the interests of the big bourgeoisie, and not of the petty. By its very essence it represents the political machinery of the exploitation of the petty bourgeoisie by imperialism. The alliance with the Radical party is, consequently, an alliance not with the petty bourgeoisie, but with their exploiters. To realize a genuine alliance between the workers and the peasants is not possible except by teaching the petty bourgeoisie how to emancipate themselves from the Radical party, how to cast off once and for all its yoke from their necks. Meanwhile the Popular Front acts in a directly opposite manner; entering into this “front,” Socialists and Communists take upon themselves the responsibility for the Radical party and thus help it in this way to exploit and to betray the masses.

In 1936, Socialists, Communists, and Anarcho-syndicalists aided the Radical party in slowing down, and in crumbling the powerful revolutionary movement. Big capital has succeeded during the last two years and a half in recovering a little from its fright. The Popular Front, having fufilled its role as brake, now represents nothing more for the bourgeoisie than a useless hindrance. French imperialism has also changed its international orientation. The alliance with the U.S.S.R. was recognized as of little value and of great risk – the accord with Germany, necessary. The Radicals received from finance capital this order: break with your allies, the Socialists and the Communists. As always, they carried out the order without hesitation.

The absence of opposition among the Radicals at the time of the change in course demonstrated once more that this party is imperialist in essence and “democratic” in words only. The Radical government, rejecting all the lessons of the Comintern on the “united front of the democracies,” reconciled itself with fascist Germany and, in passing, took back naturally all the “social laws” which had been the by-product of the workers’ movement in 1936. All this was accomplished in accordance with the strict laws of the class struggle, and that is why this could be predicted, and was in fact predicted.

But the Socialists and the Communists, petty bourgeois blind men, found themselves caught unawares and covered their confusion with a hollow declamation: What? They, patriots and democrats, who helped reestablish order, curbed the labor movement, rendered inestimable service to the “republic,” that is, the imperialist bourgeoisie, are now booted out the door” without ceremony! In fact, if they have been booted outside, it is precisely for having rendered to the bourgeoisie all the services enumerated above. Gratitude has never yet been a factor in the class struggle.

Jouhaux Guarantees Betrayal

The discontent of the betrayed masses is immense. Jouhaux, Blum, and Thorez are constrained to do something in order not to lose their credit definitively. In response to the spontaneous movement of the workers, Jouhaux proclaims a “general strike,” a protest of “crossed arms.” Legal, peaceful, completely inoffensive protest! For twenty-four hours only, he explains with a deferential smile in the direction of the bourgeoisie. Order will not be disturbed, the workers will conserve a “dignified” calm, not a hair will tumble from the head of the ruling class. He gives a guarantee, he, Jouhaux. “Don’t you know me, Messrs. Bankers, Industrialists, and Generals? Have you forgotten that I saved you at the time of the war of 1914-1918?” Blum and Thorez second from their side the general secretary of the C.G.T.: “Only a peaceful protest, a little protest, sympathetic, patriotic!”

Meanwhile, Daladier militarizes the important categories of workers and prepares the troops. In the face of a proletariat with crossed arms, the bourgeoisie, recovering from its panic thanks to the Popular Front, prepares not at all to cross its arms; it intends to utilize the demoralization engendered by the Popular Front in the workers’ ranks in order to carry out a decisive coup. Under these conditions the strike could not end except by defeat.

What Means This Strike?

The French workers have recently passed through a tumultuous strike wave including the occupation of the factories. The subsequent stage for them could not be anything but a genuine revolutionary general strike which poses on the order of the day the conquest of power. No one indicates nor is able to indicate to the masses any other way out of the internal crisis, any other means of struggle against growing fascism and the war which draws near. Every French worker who reflects understands that the day following a theatrical strike of twenty-four hours with “arms crossed” the situation will not be better, but worse. Nevertheless the important categories of workers risk paying for it cruelly by loss of jobs, by fines, by punishment in prison. In the name of what? Order will in no case be disturbed, swears Jouhaux. Everything will remain in place: property, democracy, colonies, and with them misery, high cost of living, reaction and the danger of war. The masses are capable of enduring great sacrifices, but they wish to have before them a great political perspective. They must know clearly what is the goal, what are the methods, who is the friend, who is the enemy. Yet the leaders of the workers’ organizations have done everything in order to mislead and disorient the proletariat.

Yesterday the Radical party was still glorified as the most important element of the Popular Front, as the representative of progress, of democracy, of peace, etc. The confidence of the workers in the Radicals was not, certainly, very great. But they tolerated the Radicals to the extent to which they grant confidence to the Socialist, and Communist parties and the trade union organizations. The rupture in the top circles (with the Radicals) came about as always in such cases unexpectedly. The masses were kept in ignorance until the last moment. Worse yet, the masses were given information designed to permit the bourgeoisie to take the workers unawares. And still the workers made ready to enter into struggle. Entangled in their own nets, the “leaders” called the masses – don’t laugh! – to a “general strike.” Against whom? Against the “friends” of yesterday. In the name of what? No one knows. Opportunism is always accompanied by the contortions of adventurism.

Bureaucrats Prepare Defeat

The general strike is, by its very essence, a revolutionary means of struggle. In a general strike the proletariat assembles itself as a class against its class enemy. The use of the general strike is absolutely incompatible with the politics of the Popular Front which signifies alliance with the bourgeoisie, that is to say, the submission of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie. The miserable bureaucrats of the Socialist and Communist parties as well as of the trade unions consider the proletariat as a simple auxiliary instrument in their combinations behind the scenes with the bourgeoisie. They propose that the workers pay for a simple demonstration with sacrifices which cannot have any meaning in the workers’ eyes unless it is a question of a decisive struggle. As if the masses of millions of workers could make turns to the right and to the left at will, according to parliamentary combinations!

At bottom, Jouhaux. Blum and Thorez have done everything possible in order to assure the defeat of the strike: they themselves fear the struggle not less than the bourgeoisie; at the same time they are forced to create an alibi for themselves in the eyes of the proletariat. That is the habitual war strategem of reformists: to prepare the defeat of action by the masses and then accuse the masses of the defeat or, no better, praise themselves with a non-existent success. Can one be astonished that this opportunism, supplemented with homeopathic doses of adventurism, brings nothing else to the workers but defeat and humiliation?

Has the Revolution Begun?

On June 9, 1936, we wrote: “The French revolution has begun.” It must seem that events have refuted this diagnosis. The question is in reality more complicated. That the objective situation in France has been and still is revolutionary, there cannot be the least doubt. The crisis in the international situation of French imperialism; linked with it, the internal crisis of French capitalism; the financial crisis of the state; the political crisis of democracy; the extreme confusion of the bourgeoisie; the manifest absence of escape through the old traditional channels.

Nevertheless, as Lenin already indicated in 1913:

“It is not from every revolutionary situation that revolution surges but only from a situation such that, to the objective change is joined a subjective change – that is, the capacity of the revolutionary class to carry out revolutionary mass actions sufficiently powerful to crush ... the old government, which never, not even in the period of crisis, ‘fails’ if one does not ‘make’ it fail.”

Recent history has furnished a series of tragic confirmations of the fact that it is not from every revolutionary situation that a revolution surges, but that a revolutionary situation becomes counter-revolutionary if the subjective factor, that is, revolutionary offensive of the revolutionary class, does not come in time to aid the objective factor.

Popular Front Stems Revolutionary Tide

The vast torrent of strikes in 1936 demonstrated that the French proletariat was ready for revolutionary struggle and that it had already entered on the road of struggle. In this sense we had the full right to write that “the revolution has begun.” But “if it is not from every revolutionary situation that revolution surges,” neither is every beginning revolution assured a subsequent uninterrupted development. The beginning of a revolution, which hurls the young generation into the arena, is always colored with illusions, with naive hopes and with credulity. The revolution needs usually a harsh blow from the side of reaction in order to take a more decisive step forward.

If the French bourgeoisie had responded to the demonstrations and to the sit-down strikes, with police and military measures – and this would inevitably have been done if it had not had in its service Blum, Jouhaux, Thorez and Co, – the movement at an accelerated tempo would have reached a more elevated level; the struggle for power would have posed itself indubitably as the order of the day. But the bourgeoisie, utilizing the services of the Popular Front, responded by an apparent retreat and by temporary concessions; to the offensive of the strikers they opposed the ministry of Blum which appeared to the workers as their own, or almost their own, government. The C.G.T. and the Comintern supported this betrayal with all their strength.

In order to lead the revolutionary struggle for power, it is necessary to see clearly the class from whom the power must be wrested. The workers did not recognize the enemy because he, was disguised as a friend. In order to struggle for power, it is necessary moreover to have the instruments of struggle, the party, the trade unions, the Soviets. The workers found these instruments rubbed out, because the leaders of the workers’ organizations formed an enclosure around the bourgeois power in order to mask it, to render it unrecognizable and invulnerable. Thus the revolution that began found itself braked, arrested, demoralized.

The past two and a half years since then have revealed step by step the impotence, the falsity, and the hollowness of the Popular Front. What appeared to the laboring masses as a “popular” government is revealed to be simply a temporary mask of the imperialist bourgeoisie. This mask is now discarded. The bourgeoisie apparently think that the workers are sufficiently deluded and weakened; that the immediate danger of a revolution has passed. The ministry of Daladier is only, in accordance with the design of the bourgeoisie, an unavoidable stage in passing over to a stronger and more substantial government of the imperialist dictatorship.

Has the Revolutionary ‘Danger’ Passed?

Is the bourgeoisie correct in its diagnosis? Has the immediate danger to it really passed? In other words, has the revoution really been deferred to an indefinite, that is to say, remote future? Nothing demonstrates this. Assertions of this type are, at the least, hasty and premature. The last word in the present crisis has not yet been said. In any case to be optimistic over the accounts of the bourgeoisie is not at all the way of the revolutionary party, which is the first to sally forth on the field of battle and the last to leave it.

Bourgeois “democracy” has now become the privilege of the most powerful and the wealthiest exploiting and slave-holding nations. France belongs to this category, but among them she is the weakest link. Her specific economic weight has not corresponded for a long time with her world position inherited from the past. That is why imperialist France now falls under blows of history that she will not escape. The fundamental elements of the revolutionary situation not only have not disappeared in the last two or three years but have been, on the contrary, greatly strengthened. The international and internal situation of the country has grown worse. The war danger draws near. If the fear of the bourgeoisie before the revolution has been lessened, the general consciousness of an impasse has increased.

Nevertheless, how shall we present matters concerning the “subjective factors,” that is, concerning the will of the proletariat to struggle? This question – precisely because it concerns the subjective sphere and not the objective – cannot be resolved by a precise a priori investigation. What decides in the final score is living action, that is, the real movement of the struggle. But there do exist certain criteria, not without importance, for the evaluation of the “subjective factors”; even from a great distance one can deduce them from the experience of the last “general strike.”

The Workers Wanted to Fight

Unfortunately we cannot give here a detailed analysis of the struggle of the French workers in the second half of November and the first days of December. But even the most general data are sufficient for the question which interests us. The participation in the demonstration strike of close to two million workers, with five million members in the C.G.T. (at least on paper), is a defeat. But upon taking into account the political conditions already indicated and, above all, the fact that the principal “organizers” of the strike were at the same time the principal strike-breakers, the figure of two millions testifies to the spirit of struggle evinced by the French proletariat. This conclusion becomes even more evident and more clear in the light of previous events – the tumultuous meetings and demonstrations, the encounters with the police and the army, the strikes, the occupation of factories commencing November 17 and tending to increase with the active participation of the rank and file Communists, Socialists and syndicalists. The C.G.T. manifestly commences to lose footing in the events. On November 25 the trade union bureaucrats called a “non-political” peaceful strike for November 30. That is, five days later.

In other words, instead of developing, extending, and generalizing the genuine movement which took on more and more combative aspects, Jouhaux and Co. countered to this revolutionary movement with the hollow idea of a platonic protest. The delay of five days, at a moment when each day is a month, was necessary to the bureaucrats in order to paralyze, wipe out, in tacit collaboration with the authorities, the movement which was developing spontaneously and which they feared no less than did the bourgeoisie. The police and military measures of Daladier could not have had serious effect unless Jouhaux and Co. had driven the movement into an impasse.

The non-participation (or weak participation) in the “general strike” by the railway workers, workers in the war industries, metal workers. and other advanced layers of the proletariat was in no case due to indifference on their part: during the previous two weeks the workers of these categories had taken an active part in the struggle. But precisely the advanced layers understood better than the others, above all after Daladier’s measures, that now it is not a question of demonstrations nor of platonic protests but of the struggle for power. The participation of the most backward or, from a social point of view, less important layers of workers, in the demonstration-strike testifies on the other hand to the profound crisis of the country and to the fact that in the toiling masses revolutionary energy still exists despite the years of disintegrating Popular Front politics.

Find Road to Workers!

History has shown certainly that even after a decisive and definitive defeat of the revolution the most backward layers of the workers have undertaken the offensive, the railway workers, the metal workers, etc., remaining passive. This, for example, happened in Russia after the crushing of the insurrection of December 1905. But that situation was the result of the fact that the advanced layers had already consumed their strength in the long previous battles: strikes, lockouts, demonstrations, encounters with the police and the army, insurrections. One cannot say this for the French proletariat. The movement of 1936 has not in any way consumed the forces of the vanguard. The deception invoked by the Popular Front has been able, certainly, to bring about a temporary demoralization in certain layers; but this is balanced by the exacerbation of revolt and impatience in other layers. At the same time the movements of 1936 as well as 1938 have enriched the entire proletariat with an invaluable experience and developed thousands of local workers’ leaders independent of the official bureaucracy. It is necessary to understand how to find access to these leaders, to link them with one another, to arm them with a revolutionary program.We have not the least intention of offering from afar counsel on tactics to our French friends who find themselves on the scene of action and who can feel much better than we the pulse of the masses. Nevertheless, for all revolutionary Marxists it is now more than ever evident that the only serious and definitive measure for drawing a balance of the forces, among them the willingness of the masses to struggle, is action. Pitiless criticism of the Second and of the Third Internationals has no revolutionary value except to the extent that it aids in mobilizing the advance guard for direct intervention in the events. The fundamental slogans for the mobilization are given in the program of the Fourth International, which has in the present period a more timely character In France than in any other country. On our French comrades there rests an immense political responsibility. To aid the French section of the Fourth International with all our forces and with all our means, moral and material, is the most important and most imperious duty of the international revolutionary vanguard.

1949. How the Paris Communards Made Their Lives "Luxurious"

By Gabriel Levy, People and Nature, July 28, 2015

In her new book Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, Kristin Ross argues that a rich legacy of ideas and practices developed during the Commune – the workers’ democracy that ruled Paris for two-and-a-half months in 1871 before being violently suppressed –needs to be recovered for the twenty-first century. Here she discusses the book with Gabriel Levy.

Gabriel Levy: You urge the readers of Communal Luxury to look at the Paris Commune not as a precursor to the Soviet Union, and not as a precursor to the Third Republic in France. If it was not those things, what was it?  

Kristin Ross: Extricating the Commune from those two stories is an enormous challenge, in part because those two histories were the principal ways we had of understanding the Commune. They were the histories that claimed it. In each of these narratives the Commune was made to play an essentially edifying role, as though the Communards were martyrs to state socialism or martyrs to the French Republic. If you stop seeing what the insurgents did in this way – if you stop seeing them as martyrs, sacrificing themselves to the future – then suddenly a whole new vista becomes available and you can begin to see their self-emancipation at a daily level. You are radically in their present. If you dislodge the event from those two historiographies, you are back in the day-to-day of the Communards, and it becomes possible to see, perhaps for the first time, the kinds of political inventions and experimentations that they performed.

GL: When you spoke at the recent Planetary Natures conference at Binghamton University in the USA, you reacted very sharply to the suggestion that our relationship to the Commune is one in which we “learn from its defeat”. And you complained about the widespread habit of political back-seat driving practised on the Commune (all of it back-seat driving after the event, and therefore especially useless). Where does that false critique come from and how can it be countered?

KR: The false critique is associated particularly with these historiographies that I have mentioned. The Bolsheviks [who took power in Russia in 1917] needed a very strong myth of the Commune as the anticipation of their own revolution. They needed to have some sort of historical precedent to reassure their own people about their own transformations. So even what they considered to be the failure of the Commune – the aura of the martyrs – was supposed to, in their view,  generate its contrary. So right away you have the idea of errors serving as lessons, this notion of the pedagogical role that the past is supposed to play, as though there were some sort of progressive, linear temporality: that we, by coming after, are obliged to do it better, or we will do it better—despite the fact that our circumstances are not at all the same!

What this shows is the unshakeable desire we seem to have that the past teach us a lesson, or that we have to teach the past a lesson … it doesn’t matter which, it comes to the same thing! It shows the extent to which progressive thinking about emancipation still operates as though there were some sort of blueprint of ends to be attained; and as though those ends could be precisely determined and then we could measure objectively whether they have been achieved, or not achieved, according either to time-worn and timeless standards, or to criteria that we have drawn up on the fly in 2015.  It’s obviously very pleasurable to put yourself in the position of being the one who can establish what’s possible or what’s impossible, or decide when people acted too soon, when they acted too late, when they were being passé or outmoded or unrealistic.  But when you adopt that position you lose any sense of the experimental dimension of politics, or of art for that matter.

GL: Could I ask you about the chapter in the book devoted to the Communards’ efforts to remake education and to remake cultural production – or rather to break down the division between creative activity and alienated production (i.e. work)?  

KR: It’s significant that a large percentage of the Communards were art workers – they worked in the arts and crafts industries, they were artisans, they had an artisanal formation. There is a primacy of arts-and-crafts labour at the centre of the Commune; that model of a useful production is at the centre of their culture. And that is what [the English socialist writer and activist] William Morris would take up and develop at great length in his own thinking and in his attempt to transmit some of the political ideas of the Commune. This working culture was, incidentally, profoundly internationalist. These were people who, like many young people today, spent most of their time not working, but looking for work … and that meant moving not only from town to town but also from country to country. There were Spaniards, Italians, Poles and other nationalities who participated actively in the Commune.

In the book I use the example of the way they set about overcoming the division between high art and decorative, or industrial, art. Who counts as an artist? Who has the right to that status? Because painters and sculptors could sign their work, they were able to exert a certain amount of economic control over what they produced. This was not at all the case with songwriters, for example, or ceramicists. The Manifesto for an Artists’ Federation, read aloud at a mass meeting for “all artistic intelligences” at the university of the Sorbonne in April 1871 concludes: “We will work cooperatively toward our regeneration, the birth of communal luxury, future splendours and the Universal Republic.” (Communal Luxury, p. 58.) It was written by Eugene Pottier, a decorative artist, who also wrote the song The Internationale. Decorative artists and fine artists assembled together under the same name, the same status, and went about establishing a federation in which to work cooperatively to extend art education. I take my title, Communal Luxury, from their text and use it to refract a number of Communard ideas and practices. In this context it refers to those practices that overcome the division between those who have, and those who do not have, the luxury of playing with words or playing with images.

GL: I had the impression from the book that these issues were not a sideshow or a minority interest; this was central to the Commune’s activity.

KR: Yes, these transformations in the status of the artist were very much part of the means by which the Communards went about emancipating themselves. And this is what Karl Marx meant, by the way, when he said that the Commune’s greatest achievement was “its own working existence.” No great laws, no utopian blueprints—just the step-by-step dismantling of the bureaucratic hierarchies that govern life under capitalism in a centralized state.  When Marx looked at the Commune he saw for the first time in his life an unscripted example of non-capitalist existence – he saw what non-alienated or associative labour actually looked like.

GL: You also write in Communal Luxury about education. When the Communards confronted the issue of transforming the state, some of them tried to get to work right away by transforming school education – breaking down the division between the education of people who work with their brains and of those who work with their hands. In other books I have read about the Commune, these efforts don’t get paid much attention.

KR: Yes. The reason you don’t see much about that in many books about the Commune is because of the obsession of many historians with the street fighting or with the legislative quarrels that were taking place. But in fact there were people out in the neighbourhoods getting to work directly on what they saw as the central question, which was how to transform education in a city where one-third of children didn’t go to school at all, another third were in Catholic school … and of course there was a fierce anti-clericalism in the Commune, so religious schooling came under particular attack. The Communards actually invented the idea of mandatory free public education for all children. But it was different from the way public education looks now. Communard education was based on the idea – and this was the

Paris Communards, photographed by Auguste Braquehais during their action in the spring of 1871

twist – that every child, regardless of gender and regardless of class, would have the same education, and that this education would include both what we would think of as theoretical education (science, maths, history, and so on) and a training in a trade or two trades. The idea was that everyone would have both types of formations—intellectual and manual.

GL: To open up the road to a world where there would not be that division of mental and manual labour that is characteristic of capitalism?

KR: Yes.

GL: You write about the Commune as a revolt in a city surrounded by the countryside, and more broadly as a project to remake human society that is surrounded by the natural environment. You draw attention to the very rich discussions of the issues of city-country and humanity-nature, that took place in the decades after the Commune, in large part inspired by it.

KR: Yes, I spend a lot of time in the book on the prolongation of Communard thought when the Communards who survived the massacre and who avoided imprisonment met up [in exile, in the 1880s and 1890s] with people like [the Russian anarchist and geographer] Petr Kropotkin, Morris and Marx, who were all enormously supportive of the Commune but who were all—just as importantly– transformed by its example. When these people met up with each other in London and Switzerland, the central theoretical problem that they were trying to think through was that city-country divide, which was, of course, an important factor in the demise of the Commune. [Many Communards saw the lack of a movement in rural France alongside the action in Paris as one of the factors that contributed to its eventual defeat.] How do you think the realisation of non-alienated labour in a major metropolitan centre like Paris together with the remnants of agrarian communist forms in the countryside? How do you think an urban insurrection like the one that occurred in Paris with those residual formations like the obshina in the Russian countryside?

William Morris posed the problem by considering the impossibility under capitalism of that kind of solidarity that existed among crafts workers engaged in useful production. In the case of Kropotkin and [the French geographer and anarchist] Elisée Reclus … these were geographers, people who had what was considered then a very scientific formation. Following a different path, they arrived at the same kind of uncompromising anti-capitalist and ecological (though they didn’t call it that)  analysis as Morris. They all believed that the principle factors in the degradation of nature were the centralized state and the capitalist system. And they believed that a systemic problem demanded a systemic solution.

GL: You refer to them as anti-Malthusians, and for example you describe Kropotkin’s critique of [the biologist] T.H. Huxley’s Malthusian reading of Darwin.

KR: Yes, they were fiercely anti-Malthusian. They believed, on the basis of empirical fact, that the earth contained riches enough for all and that all that was needed to enhance nature and humanity simultaneously was to dismantle commerce and private property.

GL: Could you say more about the 19th century socialists’ view of the city-country divide. You quote Morris, writing about pre-capitalist rural social forms: “a vision of non-alienated labour and pre-class society is placed to contemporary times – ‘the artificial poverty of covilisation’ – as a way of recruiting past hopes to serve present needs” (Communal Luxury, p. 75). Then there was the discussion between Marx, the Russian socialist writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and others, about what could be learned from the rural communes in Russia.

KR: One of the things I find so exciting about these thinkers is their ability to work with, and treasure, forms of uneven temporality. The Russian rural communes were not models for the future in some simplistic way. They were, for example, patriarchal, and oppressive in other ways. But what fascinated Kropotkin, Reclus and others was their sheer persistence: the fact that they had endured in the midst of modern industrialization, and as such constituted an alternative path at a moment that was already narrowing itself down to the single temporality of capitalism. These thinkers, influenced by the Commune, were able to see the value of the outmoded – what Walter Benjamin calls the “revolutionary potential of the outmoded” – and to use it as a resource. They could see these [rural, non-capitalist] forms [of social organisation] as anchored in the past and yet as possible prefigurations of another route.

GL: You refer to Marx’s contention that “what Thiers and company [i.e. the reactionary government that fought the Commune] fear most, even more than the emancipation of the urban proletariat, is the emancipation of the peasants” (Communal Luxury, p. 88). I think this is a thought that has been largely lost in the 20th century reworking of this history: that, for the other side too, this is not just about the industrial proletariat.

KR: I think that thought disappeared because of the way that Marx was read during the Second International and beyond, a reading that held sway for so long: a stagist Marx , a Marx who was focused on the centrality of the state, who gave primacy to the industrial worker. I think there is a new reading of Marx that has become available, beginning in the 1980s, perhaps, with books like Teodor Shanin’s Late Marx and the Russian Road. This is a Marx who, precisely because of the Paris Commune, becomes far more interested in the world outside of Europe, and far more interested in tribal and peasant societies, both ancient and contemporary—this is what preoccupied him during the last ten years of his life.

Marx makes the remark about Thiers and company fearing the emancipation of the peasants in the context of Algeria. One of the tangents that I was unable to follow in the book because of not knowing Arabic or Berber, is that, at precisely the same moment as the Commune, there was an enormous uprising in eastern Algeria, France’s foremost colony. Thiers and company were essentially fighting two battles at the same time – against the workers in the capital and against the revolt in Algeria. And the prisoners from both actions ended up in New Caledonia together.

GL: Could we talk about the group of people, that included former Communards, who you refer to in the book as “anarchist communists”. You are suggesting not that the polemic between Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin is not worth following, but that there were many others, this group among them, who also deserve our attention.

KR: There has been too much focus on the rivalry between Marx and Bakunin. People say that their dispute is what brought down the First International. Perhaps. But there was also the continental-wide counter-revolution that set in after the crushing of the Commune. If you broaden your focus a little beyond the tedious “political theory” discourse, you can see – especially in the people that I studied – a group of thinkers and militants who are slavishly beholden neither to Marx or to Bakunin, but who are

The head of the toppled Vendome column. A contemporary photo by Bruno Braquehais

busy performing a bricolage of anarchist and marxist ideas—a creative mixture that resonates very strongly with militant culture today. They were not locked into a battle about establishing the primacy of analyses based on economic exploitation over those based on political domination or vice versa. So they were able to move freely in both contexts and use both intellectual and political camps as a resource.

I sense that we’re in a similar period now, one that is not obsessed with political purity or theoretical purity of some kind.

GL: You are not trying to deliver “a message” to activists in 2015, but you do direct our attention to the way that a wide range of people in the movement at that time shared “a vision of social transformation predicated on a large federation of voluntary associations at the local level” (Communal Luxury, p. 111), notwithstanding their different approaches to theory or to history or to the analysis of capitalism.

KR: Right. And that included people who might have called themselves Marxists or called themselves anarchists: it didn’t matter. What the free commune meant to these thinkers, no matter what they called themselves, was the simultaneous dissolution of capital, state and nation. 28 July 2015.

■ Kristin Ross is a professor of comparative literature at New York University. Her other books include Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture and May ’68 and its Afterlives. The publisher’s information about Communal Luxury is here, and an extract here.

■ Some 19th-century archive material, on line:

Contemporary observers of the Paris Commune, in the Marxists Internet Archive

The Civil War in France, by Karl Marx (1871)

William Morris and E. Belfort Bax on the Paris Commune

Elisee Reclus page at the Anarchist Archives

The Paris Commune by Petr Kropotkin (1880)

and some more recent commentary …

The Paris Commune by Manuel Casteels (1983)

Kropotkin was no crackpot, by Stephen Jay Gould (1987)

Marx at the Margins by Kevin Anderson (2010)

1709. Documentary: Mexico: The Frozen Revolution

Directed by Raymundo Gleyzer, 1971

Mexican revolution, November 20, 1910, Emiliano Zapata (with the large hat) and Pancho Villia to his right on the first row. 

The documentary Mexico: The Frozen Revolution was directed by Raymundo Gleyzer in 1971. The Argentinian Gleyzer was a documentary filmmaker who was involved with Cine de la Base, committed to bring revolutionary films to the people. In 1976 Gleyzer was kidnapped and killed by the military regime in the Argentina's Dirty War. 

Waged by the Argentina's military and fascists the Dirty War claimed the lives of 30,000. However,  Mexico: The Frozen Revolution survived.  The film looks at the history of the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910, and how it failed to achieve its goals. The film documents how the failure of the 1910 revolution gave rise to the Mexican bourgeoise represented by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that has been in power for 71 years supported by the Stalinist Partido Socialista Popular (PSP). 

--KN