The Misfortune of "Great Memories": Remarks on the Paris Commune
Harrington, Michael
The misfortune of the French, even of the workers, is that they have great memories. It is necessary that events once and for all put an end to this reactionary cult of the past.' —MARX, to...
...and jewellers and dressmakers into bakers and builders, by merely singing the "Marseillaise...
...In the months prior to the Commune, Marx was first of all concerned about the low level of leadership in the French movement...
...His criticism of the decisive failure of the Commune— that it did not seize the Bank of Paris—was repeated by Engels in 1891 in his introduction to a new German edition of The Civil War in France...
...Whatever the immediate outcome, a new point of departure of world historical importance has been achieved...
...The French branch," Marx wrote to Engels in September 1870, "is committing all kinds of stupidities in the name of the International...
...The misfortune of the French, even of the workers, is that they have great memories...
...222-23...
...16 Ibid., p. 104...
...In praising Auguste Serraillier, the International's envoy in Paris, Engels remarked that "his ideas about the situation are clear and correct: use the freedoms guaranteed by the Republic for the organization of the party in France, act when the opportunity offers itself after effective organization, and restrain the International in France until peace is achieved...
...Such speeches are encouraged by the hasty opposition they evoke from thoughtless persons, who begin by tacitly admitting that a sudden change is feasible, and go on to protest that it would be wicked...
...That was a serious political error," Engels wrote...
...p. 7. THE MISFORTUNE OF "GREAT MEMORIES" state apparatus and to proceed to create new and lasting revolutionary forms...
...4 Ibid., p. 117...
...demolishing one with 14 million prisoners is quite another...
...And then, in the very next line, he reversed the position he had taken in the Second Address, using almost the same words to come to an opposite conclusion: "After six months of hunger and ruination, caused at least as much by internal betrayal as by the foreign enemy, they rose up under Prussian bayonets as if there never had been 5 MEW, vol...
...516-17...
...a supposed archetype of the most conscious society human history would ever know...
...The bravery of the Parisians in 1871 will be no less magnificent if one is truthful about it...
...22, p. 196...
...In part, this speaks to a genuine identification with the brave Communards massacred by the bourgeois terror...
...Marx was also defending himself against critics on his Left...
...They had to do it or else they would be repulsed and left behind by everyone, so powerful were the passions this event had excited in the whole world.lb Karl Korsch would later develop this point from a Marxist perspective...
...36, p. 79...
...on the other hand, the Commune consumed itself in fruitless argument between the two parties that split it, the Blanquists (the majoriy) and the Prouhdonists (the minority), neither of which knew what to do...
...It is the old presumption of superiority, the attitude that the land is sanctified by 1793 and that no later French L Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, here• after cited as MEW (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1957 ), vol...
...It did not even appropriate the bank of Paris and was not "socialistic" or even very conscious of itself, for neither its majority nor minority, as Engels pointed out, knew "what to do...
...17, p. 278...
...but everybody is convinced already that you cannot convert first- and third-class carriages into second class...
...The decisive, unfavorable "accident" in this case is not in any way to be found in the general circumstances of French society but rather in the presence of the Prussians in France and their position right before Paris...
...The myth of the Commune has been used, from Lenin on, to propagate the notion that there is some simple way to smash the bourgeois 20 MEW, vol...
...We have reached the 100th anniversary of the Commune, and throughout the world the Left has celebrated it with appropriate piety...
...16 His problem, Korsch writes, was to take a federalist, anticentralist reality and give it a centralist interpretation...
...under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor...
...That was not true in Paris in 1871—and it was not true in Petrograd in 1917 or Peking in 1949...
...Moreover, Marx and Engels knew—and said—that it was a myth...
...This, however, the bourgeois canaille of Versailles understands just as well...
...There is no "day" of the revolution on which history makes its leap from past to future...
...Until her new place is ready, it is better that her patrons should find dressmaking for her hands to do, than that Satan should find mischief...
...H.] This theme of utilizing the new civil liberties in order to carry out basic organizational work runs through their correspondence of the period...
...You cannot convince any man that it is impossible to tear down a government in a day...
...In a letter to Kugelman he wrote enthusiastically, "What resiliency, what historic initiative, what capacity for sacrifice in these Parisians...
...7 Ibid., p. 54...
...17 14 Ibid., p. 81...
...MICHAEL HARRINGTON was in no way socialistic, and also could not have been...
...it is now the "mere rising of a city under exceptional circumstances...
...Marx's attitude changed, and changed radically for a number of reasons...
...This was particularly difficult since there were only 25 workers among the 70 revolutionaries elected in the Commune on March 26, 1871, and, in any case, Proudhonists, Blanquists, and Jacobins were far more numerous than Marxists...
...Shortly after these letters, in early September of 1870, Marx wrote the Second Address of the General Council of the IWMA on the Franco–Prussian war...
...rookeries and palaces into comfortable dwellings...
...These people [wrote Engels] who tolerated Badinguet [Napoleon III] for 20 years, who only six months ago could not keep him from getting 6 million votes as against a million and a half opposed, or from provoking Germany without reason or warning, these people, now that the German victory has given them a republic—and what a republic!— insist that the Germans must promptly leave the soil of France or else: guerre a outrance...
...Marx wrote to Kugelman: You can't have an idea of how much my husband, the girls, and all of us have suffered because of the French events...
...12 In other words, the fears Marx and Engels had expressed prior to the Commune about the weakness of the leadership in Paris had been confirmed...
...6 MEW, vol...
...He can prove that the continuance of the present system for a year cost more suffering than could be crammed into any Monday afternoon, however sanguinary...
...This is the phase of conviction in which are delivered those Socialist speeches which make what the newspapers call "good copy," and which are the only ones they as yet report...
...Any attempt to overthrow the new regime while the enemy is at the very door of Paris would unquestionably be a folly...
...33, p. 57...
...In a letter to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis in 1881, Marx made a stunning reassessment of his interpretation—or, more precisely, he surfaced all the criticisms and misgivings he had suppressed in The Civil War...
...In part, it derives from the fact that Lenin made his interpretation of the Commune a crucial precedent for his seizure of power in October 1917, so that every state and party that venerates his memory must also acquiesce in his version of what happened in Paris in 1871...
...Demolishing a Bastille with seven prisoners in it is one thing...
...In a letter to Marx on September 7, 1870, Engels gave a pithy summary of their common, and outraged, view of the French socialists...
...MICHAEL HARRINGTON a war between France and Germany and the enemy was not at the very gates of Paris...
...The Civil War in France, he said, was written at a given historic moment in a spirit of "blood and fire...
...C They were thus concerned with curbing their French comrades because they had little confidence in them...
...They' want to overthrow the provisional government, establish a Paris Commune, name Pyat [a French radical particularly disliked by Marx and Engels] as French ambassador in London, etc...
...In The Civil War, for instance, Marx writes, "The financial measures of the it Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Writing on the Paris Commune, Hal Draper, ed, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 13...
...illness in April 1871 had a psychosomatic component because he knew that the collapse of the Commune was only a matter of time.11 Indeed, in May 1871 Marx's wife wrote a revealing letter to Kugelman which corroborates this psychological assessment of Marx's illness and also shows that, even as he was writing his ardent defense of their revolution, he privately retained all of his earlier criticisms of the Parisians...
...In order to defend the essence of the Paris Commune, Marx had to play down his criticisms of its political form...
...CBS on Revolution and Gradualism WE HAVE THE DISTINCTIVE TERM Social Democrat, indicating the man or woman who desires through Democracy to gather the whole people into the State, so that the State may be trusted with the rent of the country, and finally with the land, the capital, and the organization of the national industry—with all the sources of production, which are now abandoned to the cupidity of irresponsible private individuals...
...It did not establish a "new type of state," even if Marx projected a vision of one on the basis of the "tendencies" of what took place there...
...The benefits of such a change as this are so obvious to all except the existing private proprietors and their parasites, that it is very necessary to insist on the impossibility of effecting it suddenly...
...9 (The problem is, as will be seen, and as Marx was later to admit, that the act was not carried out by Marx's party at all or, in the majority, by socialists of any kind...
...14 Yet, as will be seen in a moment, he really thought that the financial measures of the Commune—above all the failure to move against the Bank of France—constituted a crucial tactical error...
...Yet in The Civil War in France, Marx celebrated the Parisians as the discoverers of "the political form...
...Then he added that a socialist regime could only come to power when the circumstances are so developed that it could take all the crucial measures to intimidate the bourgeoisie so that the first desideratum —time for sustained action—can be won...
...The appropriation of the Bank of France would by itself have put an end with terror to the boasting of Versailles.20 (Marx's reference to "terror" here is ironic...
...21 At the very end of his life, in the 1895 Introduction to The Class Struggles in France, Engels was even more explicit...
...THE MISFORTUNE OF "GREAT MEMORIES" Commune, remarkable for their sagacity and moderation, could only be such as were compatible with the state of a besieged town...
...It was a comic, but forced, travesty...
...19 MEW, vol...
...Mrs...
...3 And Engels wrote to Jenny Marx: "The worst thing is— in case of an actual revolutionary movement in Paris, who will stand at its head...
...George Bernard Shaw, in Fabian Essays in Socialism, London, 1889 q...
...task—the emancipation of the proletariat-5 [Emphasis added—M...
...And once again it was shown how impossible even then, 20 years after the time described in this work, the rule of the working class was...
...The Commune was not primarily led by workers and, in Marx's opinion, it was badly led in any case...
...22 Ibid., pp...
...13 In part, this was because he was clearly determined to defend the Commune against its detractors and therefore to put the most optimistic interpretation on everything that took place during its brief existence...
...In contradiction to all logic and to their own feelings they made the program and aim of the Commune their own...
...12 1bid., pp...
...The French workers must perform their duty as citizens, but they must not let themselves be dominated by the national memories of 1792, as the French peasants allowed themselves to be deluded by the national memories of the First Empire...
...23 This thesis is not, I believe, supported by a careful reading of the very documents which Draper himself has quite usefully assembled...
...One cannot hide from the fact that the 20 years of Bonapartist farce have been enormously demoralizing...
...He argued that the events of 1870-71 proved that In Paris no revolution is possible except a proletarian revolution...
...For though she is to all intents and purposes quartered on them at present, yet she at least escapes the demoralization of idleness...
...One is hardly entitled to rely on revolutionary heroism...
...Here the Commune is no longer the discovery of "the form of proletarian rule...
...19 Finally, Marx and Engels were considerably more candid about the Commune once the attacks upon their position, from both Left and Right, had receded into the distance...
...cit., p. 81...
...17 Karl Kautsky, Terrorisme et Communisme (Paris: Povolozky, n.d...
...This, he ended, "is the most glorious act of our party since the Paris June insurrection...
...102-103...
...The lack of military leadership, the entirely natural distrust of everything "military," the insistent interference of the journalists and of knights of the phrase like Felix Pyat, the quarrels, irresolution, and contradictory actions which necessarily result—all these evils, inevitable in a movement so audacious and so youthful, would certainly have been overcome by the core of the sound, selfsacrificing and self-confident workers...
...That will create a new, herculean force for the rebirth of France and for our common 8 Ibid., p. 32...
...In order to do this Marx had to adopt a strange device in describing this precursor of the socialist regime, i.e...
...The Bank in the hands of the Commune—that would have been worth more than ten thousand hostages...
...A man who believes that such a happy despatch is possible, will naturally think it absurd and even inhuman to stick at bloodshed in bringing it about...
...Nieuwenhuis, a Dutch socialist, had asked Marx what measures a victorious socialist movement would take, a question that was to be discussed at an international meeting in Zurich in October 1881...
...10 l'X SHORT, EVEN WHEN HE RALLIED to the Commune, Marx regarded it as an experience imposed in considerable measure upon the workers by their enemies, and he did not predict victory ("whatever the immediate outcome" would imply a pessimistic assessment of the future) . Hal Draper, in his Introduction to a new collection of Marx's and Engels's writings on the Commune, points out that Marx's s Ibid., p. 205...
...swinishness can desanctify it, the superiority of the holy phrase, Republic.2 I recall these remarks of Marx and Engels on the reactionary cult of the French revolutionary past for a purpose...
...original German edition, 19191), p. 84...
...The experienced Social Democrat converts his too ardent follower by first admitting that if the change could be made catastrophically it would be well worth making, and then proceeding to point out that as it would involve a readjustment of productive industry to meet the demand created by an entirely new distribution of purchasing power, it would also involve, in the application of labor and industrial machinery, alterations which no afternoon's work could effect...
...7 And Marx was personally outraged when the French Internationalists telegraphed him instructions on how he should carry on the agitation in Germanys In the spring, however, the Commune became a fact...
...His purpose, Korsch writes, "was not only to annex Marxism to the Commune but thereby also to annex the Commune to Marxism...
...After the victory, power fell undisputed into the hands of the working class...
...Its special measures could only betoken the tendency of a government of the people by the people" [emphasis added...
...The French working class [he said] finds itself in an extremely difficult situation...
...It is necessary that events once and for all put an end to this reactionary cult of the past.' —MARX, to Cesar de Paepe, September 14, 1870 MARX'S BITTER COMMENT to de Paepe just before the Paris Commune was typical of his mood in those days...
...In a letter to Eduard Bernstein in 1884, Engels was quite specific on this count: "That in the Civil War the unconscious tendencies of the Commune were credited to it on a more or less conscious plane was under the circumstances correct and even necessary...
...The Commune was courageous and revolutionary, and is hallowed by its sacrifice of blood...
...But both before and after the Commune they expressed their real—and historically much more defensible— attitude: that the courageous Parisians had sacrificed themselves in a badly led, tactically botched movement, which set back the socialist cause in their country for at least a decade...
...Hal Draper begins the Introduction to his collection of writings on the Commune with the conventional Leftist statement: "One hundred years ago, on March 18, 1871, a working-class-led revolution took power and established a new type of state for the first time in the history of the world—temporarily, in one city...
...Since Marx once helped make the myth that there was, one should pay some attention to his more considered opinions when he helped to unmake it...
...Let them calmly and patiently utilize the means which republican liberties grant to them in order to carry out the basic organization of their own class...
...The Commune has become, in short, a great memory in precisely the sense that Marx used the phrase: a mythic moment in the past that confuses our understanding of the present...
...Moreover, Marx's comments are not isolated and casual...
...is Ibid., p. 76...
...But now I think that all hope is lost, now that Bismarck, getting paid by German gold, is handing over not only all prisoners but all fortifications to the French canaille . . ., every one of whom represents some infamous crime...
...21 MEW, vol...
...Precisely for that reason they presented the Parisians with the alternatives of either taking up the fight or else surrendering without a struggle...
...There is good reason to be clear about this glorious, and inaccurate, memory...
...The struggle of the working class with the capitalist class has entered upon a new phase...
...With a little common sense it could have reached a compromise with Versailles useful to all the people—which was all that could have been gained...
...On the one hand, France left Paris in a lurch, looked on while it was bloodied by the bullets of MacMahon...
...During and immediately after the event they defended it out of honorable motives of solidar 2 Ibid., p. 56...
...The Commune executed the archbishop of Paris and 64 hostages...
...Marx felt that Versailles would have been much more terrorized if the insurrection had seized their treasure...
...Bakunin, quoted in Schriften zur Sozialisierung (Frankfurt am Main: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1969), pp...
...33, p. 147...
...The young Socialist is apt to be catastrophic in his views—to plan the revolutionary program as an affair of 24 lively hours, with Individualism in full swing on Monday morning, a tidal wave of the insurgent proletariat on Monday afternoon, and Socialism in complete working order on Tuesday...
...No judicious person, however deeply persuaded that the work of the court dressmaker has no true social utility, would greatly care to quarter her idly on the genuinely productive workers pending the preparation of a place for her in their ranks...
...10 Ibid., p. 209...
...The great social measure of the Commune," he wrote in The Civil War, "was its own working existence...
...Given my Irish background, I am particularly sensitive to the idea of heroic defeat...
...It would be quite mystical if "accidents" played no role...
...In other words, it was not so much what the Commune did but the fact that it existed at all that was crucial in Marx's most enthusiastic interpretation...
...But it was not the model of the socialist revolution to come, as Marx and Engels themselves understood and said, once they were no longer under political pressures, from Left as well as Right, to defend the courage of the Parisians...
...22 G G IVEN THIS HISTORY of Marx's and Engels's attitude toward the Commune, it is time to disabuse ourselves of some "glorious memories...
...I need not enlarge on the point: the necessity for cautious and gradual change must be obvious to everyone here, and could be made obvious to everyone elsewhere if only the catastrophists were courageously and sensibly dealt with in discussion...
...Perhaps you will refer me to the Commune: but, abstracting from the fact that this was a mere rising of a city under exceptional circumstances, the majority of the Commune 18 Draper, op...
...Another June massacre lies before us...
...8 Ibid., p. 60...
...They must not repeat the past but build the future...
...In a second letter to Kugelman, Marx attempted to give a more developed rationale for his new position: World history would be quite accommodating if the struggle would only break out under unerringly favorable conditions...
...It was with some justice that Bakunin wrote, The impression made by the communist insurrection [the Commune] was so powerful that even the Marxists, all of whose ideas had been tossed overboard by the insurrection, saw themselves forced to take off their hats in its presence: they did even more...
...Ireland had nothing else for more than a century...
...The French section of the International Workingmen's Association had, in the midst of the war between France and Prussia, turned back to the rhetoric of 1793 and called for a revolutionary war against the invader...
...35, p. 160...
...Marx replied that what could be done would depend upon the circumstances...
...The demoralization of the working class in the latter case would have been a far greater misfortune than the succumbing of any number of "leaders...
...To begin with, a struggle was underway, and Marx had no doubt as to his side of the barricades...
...If a revolution breaks out in Paris," he wrote to Engels, "one must ask oneself, do they have the means and the leaders for serious resistance against the Prussians...
...The Parisians know this quite well...
...THE MISFORTUNE OF "GREAT MEMORIES" ity with the victims of a terror imposed in the name of law and order—and they also had factional reasons for playing down its extremely un-Marxist character...
...23 Draper, op...
Vol. 18 • October 1971 • No. 5
