The Paris Commune and Alterglobalism

Gustave Massiah
28 March 2021

1.

The Paris Commune is a moment of universal truth

It is a moment we return to, which gives meaning and which we rediscover. It is a moment that creates the unexpected and reveals new possibilities, a turning point in history. To understand it, we have to look back at its history and its immediate implications. With each look, we rediscover its significance in relation to the new questions that arise in building our future.

Obviously, we must take into account the particular situation of France and Paris in 1870. And we must remember the history of this event and its specific density. To understand it, we have to put the Paris Commune into the context of the revolutions post 1789 and 1793, and then those of 1830 and 1848. It must also be seen in relation to the Soviet revolution of 1917, the Chinese revolution, decolonisation, the 1968 movements, and the occupy and related movements since 2011.  The Commune highlights them, and the later revolutions deepen its meaning and its contribution.

The lessons of the Commune are still very relevant. We revisit them in the light of the questions that arise in the present situation, from the point of view of the renewal of alterglobalism. The Paris Commune confirmed the entry into history and the centrality of the working class. The working class is by nature internationalist, in an extension of the 1st International. It was revolutionary, creative and festive despite the violence of the battles and the repression. It renewed the debate on revolutionary strategy, the State and repression. It highlighted the essential question of power and democracy. The Paris Commune contributes to the new chain of revolutions, those of social, ecological, democratic and geopolitical emancipation, those of human rights and the rights and liberation of peoples.

The achievements of the Commune contradicts the assertion of all the powers that be, that there is no alternative. There are alternatives! Another world is possible and necessary! History can be read as a series of rather linear periods interrupted by crises, or as a series of crises, of revolutions, alternating with more controlled periods. The Commune is part of a chain of revolutions that gives a sense to History. Revolutionary periods are terrible periods, during which moments of enthusiasm, of feast alternate with one another, and with massacres, as took place shown by the Bloody Week (21 to 28 May 1871, when the Commune was crushed and its members were executed). A revolution takes its meaning from the chain of revolutions and the ability to recover from defeats. The Paris Commune was destroyed; in relation to all that it revealed, can we say that it was a failure?

2.

A specific event of extraordinary density

Obviously, one must take into account the particular situation of France and Paris in 1870. And to recall the history of this event and its particular specific gravity. The Paris Commune was an extraordinary insurrection of the people of Paris. It lasted only 72 days, from March 18 to May 21, 1871, and was ferociously repressed during the bloody week of May 21 to 28, 1871. The causes of the Commune were both social and political. The Parisian working classes, workers, craftsmen and small shopkeepers lived in very difficult conditions. Poverty was often extreme and people generally worked eleven hours a day. The political situation was dramatic. The Second Empire of Napoleon III collapsed following the defeat in the war against Prussia. The German Empire was proclaimed in Versailles on January 18, 1871. The Parisian population, which had suffered a very hard siege since September 1870, did not accept the capitulation. It enrolled massively in the National Guard and elected its officers. The newly elected French National Assembly, with a monarchist majority, as well as the government led by Thiers, fled Paris, which for them was "the capital of the revolutionary idea"; they settled in Versailles and made an agreement with Bismarck to crush the insurrection.

On March 17, 1871, Thiers sent troops to Paris to take back 227 cannons that had been stored in Montmartre and Belleville. The Parisians opposed them and fraternized with the soldiers. The working-class neighborhoods were covered with barricades. The Central Committee of the National Guard called for vigilance. The municipal elections took place on March 26, 1871. The Council of the Commune was supposed to have 92 members. Of the 78 elected members who actually sat after the resignation of the moderates, 33 were workers, especially in the metal and construction industries, and craftsmen in traditional trades. Together with the intellectual petty bourgeoisie, they formed a majority social bloc.

For the first time in history, one can speak of a workers' government. It included all the republican, socialist and anarchist political tendencies: the Jacobin centralists; the Radicals who supported municipal autonomy; the Blanquists, avant-gardists; the Collectivists, members of the IWA (International Workers' Association); the Proudhonians; the Independents. A majority prioritised the political over the social: a minority defended social and anti-authoritarian measures. They all voted for the social measures that lead the common fight against the Versaillais. As in all revolutionary periods, there was an extraordinary political effervescence, rythemed by numerous elections. Passionate clubs listened to the speakers, discussed and put pressure on the elected officials. More than 70 new newspapers were created during the 72 days of the Commune. In parallel with the Paris Commune, uprisings and insurrections took place in more than fifteen cities in France, with brief attempts to form Communes, notably those of Lyon and Marseille which preceded Paris.

Beginning on March 29, 1871, the Council of the Commune governed Paris, until May 20, through ten commissions: executive, military, subsistence, finance, justice, general security, labor, industry and trade, public services and education. The first decree of the Commune decided to abolish the army and the police, the main agents of repression in the service of bourgeois order. They were replaced by the people in arms. The Commune took a number of symbolic measures (destruction of the Vendôme column, adoption of the red flag and the republican calendar). The measures adopted were mainly social and dealt with the emergency (remission of unpaid rents, suspension of lawsuits for unpaid debts, postponement of the payment of debts and deadlines, etc.). Vacant housing was requisitioned, pensions were paid to the wounded and widows, and orphanages were created. Municipal canteens distributed bread and meals.

The emergency measures reflected new orientations. Abandoned workshops were requisitioned and handed over to workers' cooperatives after compensation of the owners; the management was elected by the employees. Night work in bakeries was prohibited. Employer fines and wage deductions were forbidden. Management councils were to be elected every two weeks in the workshops.

Elected officials were surveilled, their decisions discussed, their mandate was imperative. Citizenship was opened to foreigners. One of the first mass women's movements was created. It demanded the right to work and equal pay. The Commune recognized the common-law civil union. Women fought against the Versaillais on the barricades. Freedom of the press was affirmed and total freedom allowed for the foundation of a newspaper. The Commune decreed the separation of the Catholic Church and the State and the secularization of the property of religious congregations.

The Commune provided for the election of civil servants by universal suffrage (including judges and teachers). the introduction of a maximum salary and the prohibition of holding two public service jobs. It abolished the political and professional oath. Free marriage by mutual consent was recognized. Searches and requisitions without a warrant were prohibited. Education was secularized and religious education prohibited. A commission composed exclusively of women was formed to reflect on the education of girls. Some district municipalities made school free and secular. Equal wages for men and women teachers was decided.

The very intense legislative activity of the Paris Commune was followed by the beginning of its implementation. As soon as it won, Thiers' government abolished all the measures. Some of them often reappeared long afterwards. Their mere Statement demonstrated the coherence and innovation of a workers' government program that broke with the dominant bourgeois order. This considerable activity of the Commune was all the more remarkable because the constant preoccupation was to resist the offensive led by the "versaillais", by the troops of Thiers' government. Bismarck freed prisoners to reinforce this army. From March 21, the Versaillais organized the second siege of Paris. The fighting was extremely violent. Some hostages were executed and a lot of destruction was caused. Despite a heroic resistance, the Commune was defeated. The ‘Semaine Sanglante’ (Bloody Week) began with the entry of Versailles troops into Paris on May 21 and ended with the final fighting at the Père Lachaise cemetery on May 28. The repression against the supporters of the Commune was merciless and ferocious. Paris had several mass graves with thousands of dead and shot.

This repression continued. From the first days of June 1871, the war councils, which would sit for four years, continued to order executions. Communards who did not manage to escape or go into exile were sentenced to hard labor and deported to the prison colony in New Caledonia. It was not before 1880 that Gambetta had the National Assembly vote for an amnesty. And it was only in 2016 that the National Assembly "proclaimed the rehabilitation of the victims of the Paris Commune of 1871".

3.

The Commune is part of a chain of revolutions

The Commune is part of a chain of revolutions. It prolongs some of them, those of 1789, 1793, 1830 and 1848. It heralds others, those of 1905 and 1917 in Russia, the Chinese revolution from 1917 to 1967, the 1968 revolution, alterglobalism and the occupy movements starting in 2011. Each of these revolutions opens up new possibilities and unforeseen directions. In return, each of these revolutions renews and allows for new understandings of what the Commune continues to mean for us.

The reference to the revolution of 1789 remains a widely claimed reference. The actors of the Commune consider themselves as the successors of the people of Paris who rose up in 1789. The majority of Jacobins and Blanquists felt closer to the Montagnards of 1793 and among the symbolic measures they adopted was the republican calendar. They considered that with Thermidor and the Directory, it was the victory of the bourgeoisie and with the Consulate in 1799 and the Empire, it was a monarchist regime.

The July Revolution, the Three Glorious Ones, from 27 to 29 July 1830, renewed the French Revolution of 1789. The Parisians set up barricades in the streets and confronted the armed troops. The insurrection turned into a popular revolution and the Parisian people occupied the Hôtel de Ville. But on 30 and 31 July, the bourgeoisie regained control of the popular revolution, eliminating Charles X but setting up a more bourgeois monarchy with Louis Philippe. The Three Glorious Years led to the foundation of a new regime in France, the July Monarchy, which consolidated the association of the industrial and financial bourgeoisie with public affairs; financial capital prevailed over land capital. For the first time since the 1790s, a wave of popular revolutions, heralding the People's Spring of 1848, swept across Europe.

The French Revolution of 1848 followed the Revolution of 1789 and the Three Glorious Years of 1830. A new Parisian insurrection took place from 22 to 25 February 1848. Insurrectional movements of liberal or democratic inspiration attempted to put an end to absolutist regimes in Europe: in France, but also in Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy. At first, the main reformist demands were the recognition of fundamental freedoms, freedom of meeting and freedom of the press. National and unitary demands emerged, calling for respect for minorities oppressed by central power and emphasising the right of peoples to self-determination as a foundation of the democratic ideal. A second wave of more radical demands put forward democratic and social reforms.

The social aspect in the revolutions of 1848 was present everywhere. The insurrection was mainly popular and urban, involving the petty bourgeoisie and even part of the bourgeoisie. In Paris in 1848, living conditions (misery and hunger, duration and harshness of work, hygiene and health conditions) were very difficult. Large-scale industry had been pushed to the urban periphery. Contradictions were sharpened by the cholera epidemic, financial and moral crises and the multiplication of scandals. Workers' associations, bringing together workers of different statuses, multiplied. In February 1848, Marx and Engels published the Manifesto of the Communist Party.

The year 1848 marks the culmination and the end of the Spring of the People. The Second Republic was proclaimed by the Parisian revolutionaries. The situation turned in favour of the forces of reaction from September 1848 to May 1849. This revolution was followed by the June Days, which were repressed in blood with thousands of deaths. On 2 December 1851, a coup d'état inaugurated the Second Empire of Napoleon III. The popular revolution was defeated and a new monarchic regime was imposed.

In 1870 the people of Paris defended the Republic of 4 September, which had overthrown the Second Empire; they refused to recognise the government of Thiers, that was supported by the Prussians, with an assembly led by monarchists. The workers and the people of Paris refused to let their victory be stolen once again, as happened in 1830 and 1848. Thus, the Paris Commune revolution inherits from the previous revolutions and extends them. Particularly in this case, some of the Paris Commune revolutionaries had participated in the 1848 revolution and had learned from it.

The Paris Commune had a considerable impact on the revolutions that followed, as evidenced in the visions the people and of revolutionaries. The link with the revolutions that claimed to be socialist would be considerable. The link continued through the internationals and first of all through the International Workers' Association, the 1st International, which had been created in 1864 and which supported and participated in the Commune. Marx glorified the Parisian workers who had "climbed to the sky"; he would write that "History doesn't know such a great example! "

Lenin, like Marx and Engels, draws on the experience of the workers' movement, particularly the June 1848 revolution and the Paris Commune. The link with the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 is very strong. Lenin and the Russian revolutionaries took up Marx's thoughts on the Civil War in France; the Paris Commune is an essential reference. "It is in this sense that the Commune is immortal!" wrote Lenin. It served as a reference in the debate that divided revolutionary currents between 1905 and 1917.

As early as 1919, Chinese communists referred to the experience of the Paris Commune to advance the Chinese revolution. In 1937, Mao Zedong wrote in "On the contradiction", "Why [...] in 1871 did the Paris Commune end in failure? [...] This can only be explained by the concrete conditions of that time." He would later add: the Paris Commune "was the first power established by the proletariat in the world... Lacking maturity, the French proletariat did not unite with the peasant masses, its allies...". In 1967, during the Cultural Revolution, the Shanghai People's Commune, for twenty days, claimed as its model the Paris Commune.

The reference to the Commune was extremely strong in May 1968 in Paris. The Parisian people rose up once again and the city was covered with barricades. But it was a much larger movement in the world. Between 1965 and 1973, a wave of revolutions put forward social and political democracy. Etienne Balibar quotes Immanuel Wallerstein, who sees 1848 and 1968 as two key moments in the history of the "capitalist world-system", which profoundly transformed the political culture of the whole of society. For him, this revolution changed the trajectory of the century and represented a mutation. In the first place, 1968 represented a mutation in the form and objectives of the "anti-systemic movements". It would be an event with a global character from the outset in the form of an insurrectionary chain that crossed borders. It stretched from the United States to Mexico, from Japan to Germany, from France and Italy to Prague and Warsaw, from Dakar to Cairo, to Palestine, etc. There are also references to China's cultural revolution and Chile's popular unity.

Through alterglobalism and the movements of 2011, the Arab springs, the Indignados, the Occupy movements, the red squares, the taksims, the Hirak; a new generation is building a new political culture through its demands and its inventiveness. It is experimenting with new forms of organisation through the use of digital and social networks, the affirmation of self-organisation and horizontality. It tries to redefine, in different situations, forms of autonomy between movements and political bodies. It seeks ways to link the individual and the collective. In the wake of the Commune and passing through the movements of 1968, involvement in a movement links practices and theories and redefines the collective. The relationship between movements is based on equality and respect for diversity. Commitment naturally leads to a reflection on radicalism.

A revolution is an event in the strongest sense of the word: a break. It sheds light on deep-seated trends, it opens up new possibilities. In the succession of revolutions, there are continuities, evolutions, ruptures, references to previous revolutions. A revolution is part of a chain of revolutions that build the road to emancipation. Each revolution creates the unexpected, which extends, renews and re-invents; from radicalities that make visible unexplored roads.

This is why we cannot talk about the failure of a revolution without placing it in a process. Can we talk about the failure of the Commune? Can we imagine a single event resulting in a complete change, able to conclude history? It is true that the Commune ended with a ferocious and bloody repression. But with all that it revealed, invented and projected, it showed the new possibilities on the road to emancipation.

The road to emancipation is not linear and each stage reveals new potentials. The Paris Commune did not fail to do so. From one revolution to another in this chain of revolutions, there are profound changes. It's no longer the same social classes, the same class alliances and the class struggles are taking new forms. In the case of the successive and repeated Parisian insurrections, the unity of location highlights even more the evolution of social classes and the mutations of class alliances and class struggles.

The dominant classes pursue their domination and renew it. Contradictions evolve. The popular classes resist and struggle against exploitation and oppression. The nature of the popular classes and the social blocs are changing. And the social and political project must be renewed beyond refusal and resistance

4. The relevance of the lessons of the Paris Commune

Any major event, and the Paris Commune was a considerable one, allows us to question new situations. The Commune, from the moment of its emergence, disrupted conceptions and representations. We use the Commune and the lessons of the Commune to question the current situation, its contradictions and its perspectives. Based on the Commune and its consequences, we present some thoughts on the evolution and the necessary renewal of alterglobalism.

We will address the question of social classes and the social bloc; the question of the international; revolutionary radicality; revolutionary strategy and the question of the State; democracy; the new stages of emancipation.

The Commune confirms the entry into history and the centrality of the working class

The Commune affirms the centrality of the working class and of a social bloc antagonistic to capitalism and the bourgeoisie. The social decantation continued from 1789, and was confirmed in 1830 and 1848. Awareness, determination and forms of organisation developed from the International Working Association (IWA), the First International. The IWA put forward a new approach, an entirely new conception. It was based on a class analysis and aimed at building the proletariat as a conscious and organised political actor. The IWA was able to surpass itself, to rise to the level of a history in the making. It allowed the working class to define itself as an actor in this history and to contribute to its change.

According to the IWA, it is the proletariat which can and must lead the struggle against capital and it is around this class that alliances must be built. Of course, the IWA did not ignore the complexity of societies and the existence of other classes and social groups. To build the class alliance, the IWA, and especially Marx and Engels, put forward the idea that the proletariat, in its struggle for emancipation, is the bearer of the emancipation of the whole society. The Commune demonstrated the ability of the working class to resist and to build a social bloc that would carry a new project for society.

The working class transforms itself, in relation with the evolution of capitalism and its ability to define itself as a historical actor and to assume its class consciousness. We must insist on the speed of this evolution in comparison with the bourgeoisie, which took several centuries to impose itself in relation to feudalism. The working class has changed, starting with the craftsmen and trades, and it will not stop changing with the revolution of assembly line workers and automation in the 20th century. The social bloc is not a simple addition of classes and social groups, it builds the evolution of the working class with the integration of workers and craftsmen. During the Commune, there were small entrepreneurs who participated in the alliance. It is the antagonism with dominant capital and the dominant bourgeoisie which builds the alliance and the unity of the social bloc.

The class alliance is social and political. The Commune inherited the diversity of political currents. The IWA, through vigorous and sometimes violent debates, tried to generalise and unify the spontaneous movements of the working class, but not to prescribe or impose any doctrinal system on them. The IWA highlighted the diversity of political debates and was built on their debates and confrontations. From the start, alongside the supporters of Marx and Engels, we find Blanquists, Proudhonians, Bakuninists, Lassallians and Mazzinians. In the Commune they were to be found alongside Jacobins. The doctrinal diversity did not prevent unity of action and common resistance against the versaillais. The IWA was also a melting pot for the unification of the different forms of movements. It brought together various movements, associations, guilds, mutual societies, trade unions and primitive forms of parties. The IWA was the melting pot for the unification of these various movements.

Alterglobalism has inherited much from the Commune, and still has much to learn from it. How can we define the centrality of the workers' movement, the new forms of the working class and the new social bloc? Alterglobalism affirms the centrality of social movements. The debate on the social bases of alterglobalism refers to the analysis of the class structure in current societies and on a global scale. The class struggle cannot be reduced to the confrontation between the working class and the bourgeoisie. Proletarianisation today affects all social strata that are not dominant. It is therefore a question, to some extent, of defining a way of building an alliance of the different dominated strata that would agree to fight together for another world. The alterglobalist movement will inherit the diversity of opinions and forms of movements. Its unity results from the antagonism to capitalist globalisation in its neoliberal phase. One finds the debate on the forms of organisation and the definition of orientations. The will to build an open, diversified space, facilitating the broadest alliances and the need for a space for action, stronger forms of organisation and a more affirmed political voice. The choice is not between open space and space for action. Both are necessary, we just need to know how to articulate them.

The Commune is naturally internationalist

The 1st International, the International Workers' Association (IWA), contributed in making the Commune possible and was challenged and shaken by the Commune. The IWA participated actively in the Commune; of the 78 elected members of the Commune Council, there were 32 internationals, members of the IWA.  They did not form a bloc and referred to the different currents of the IWA. 

The Paris Commune inherited the formulations of the IWA which, based on the analyses of Marx and Engels, characterised capitalism as a world system generating a permanent structural crisis. Consequently, they felt, the anti-capitalist movement had to be international from the beginning.

The Commune welcomed foreigners who played a very active role and recognised their rights. The Commune recognised the principle of access to citizenship for foreigners. The IWA was an association established in several countries; it made it possible to take into account the specificities of situations and to take into account the international movement of capital which was less apparent. Through the First International, revolutionaries in several countries experienced the Commune and its terrible repression with passion. From the beginning, the Paris Commune was recognised as one of the major episodes of world revolutions.

Internationalism has often been confused with internationals. The first, the IWA, was officially created in 1864. The second international, created in 1889, was marked by the debate on the 1917 revolution and confronted by the First World War. The third international, created in 1919, became an extension of the Soviet State after Stalin's rise to power in 1924. The Fourth International, created in 1938, remained an oppositional statement. The first and second internationals were marked by the publication of the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels in 1848. Today the internationals are perceived on the basis of questions of organisation between parties. The Commune made Marx and Engels reconsider several aspects of the Manifesto.

Alterglobalism is by definition an internationalism confirmed by the increasingly dominant character of the struggle against globalization. The World Social Forums are a search for new forms of internationalism, closer to the First International in the diversity of forms it brings together than to the internationals that followed it, characterised by a monopoly of the avant-garde parties. The debate is open today in the alterglobalist movement on the forms of the movement: is it necessary to have an open, diverse and multiple space or is it necessary to have a more organized, political space of action. We probably need both, an open forum on the one hand, and a more organised international on the other. Here again, how to build both and what articulation between the two?

The Commune is revolutionary and naturally radical

The Commune is an extraordinary revolutionary moment. A revolution is a moment of surpassing, of invention, the moment when one climbs to the sky. "The greatest social measure of the Commune was its own existence in action" wrote Karl Marx. It was a moment of liberation, of emancipation. Everything seemed and became possible. Legitimacy prevailed over legality. The State and its institutions, bureaucracy and technocracy no longer dominated everyday life. Of course, one knows that confrontation with the forces of order is inevitable and repression will be there opening a space for violence. In the case of the Commune it was terrible. Revolutions are creative and festive. All those who have experienced revolutionary moments, during the liberation struggles, the years 1968, the movements in the squares, remember them. They do not forget the repression and the defeats, but they remember the overcoming, the festive moments, the illuminations. Artists will express this moment; the Commune was an intense moment of cultural and artistic creation.

The opening up of the possible leads to radical proposals, in the sense of a return to the root of the questions. It is no longer a matter of theory, but of a concrete situation. It is no longer the prohibitions that prevail, but practice that imposes its demands. The responses and proposals of the Commune men and women were naturally radical. Their first decree decided to abolish the police and the army and replace them with the people in arms. Education became free. The closed workshops were handed over to workers' associations... This radicalism was not an excess, it functioned as a natural consequence. Without having been able to find itself in a position of power, alterglobalism shares this search with the Commune through forums with festive and creative moments of liberation. It affirms that another world is possible and necessary.

The Commune renews the debate on revolutionary strategy, on the State and on transition

The Commune overturned all the ways of thinking about the Revolution. The irruption of the working class as an autonomous and central actor directly challenged the labor movement. Karl Marx overcame his surprise and demonstrated his ability to think directly about history in motion. He wrote The Civil War in France which was published in May 1871. On the State and power, the divergence continues with the anarchists and Bakunin who thinks that "the State must be systematically demolished". After the Commune, Marx went back on his conception of revolutionary strategy by affirming that it will not be enough to seize the State to transform society, but that it will be necessary to transform it deeply. He proposed the decline of the State. This debate is central today after the evolution and collapse of what Samir Amin called sovietism and the bankruptcy of State capitalisms. The discussion is very well explained by Immanuel Wallerstein who explains: Cromwell formalized the strategy of the bourgeoisie from the formula "it is necessary to create a party, to conquer the State, to change society". After much discussion, the internationals reproduced this equation. Today we see that a party created to conquer the State becomes a party-state even before it has conquered the State and that the State is not the only way to change society. 

The debate is also about the nature of the transition. The Grand Soir model has been abandoned. Transition is a long and contradictory process. The status of alternative approaches has been upgraded. They are not sufficient to change society, but they can prepare it, just as the bourgeoisie was able to experiment with and bring about capitalist social relations under feudalism. Revolutions accelerate evolutions, they are not alternatives to the long term.

Alterglobalism is confronted with these questions. On the question of revolutionary strategy and the relationship to the State, the offensive of neoliberalism against the social intervention of the States, seeking to reduce them to their regalian functions of police and repression, has shown its limits. The pandemic crisis has highlighted the importance of institutions, the need for public action and the role of public services. The new question concerns the hypothesis of the exhaustion of neo-liberalism and perhaps even of capitalism and the nature of the possible new, perhaps unequal, modes of production that are candidates to succeed capitalism. This hypothesis is reinforced by an important new element, that of the ecological crisis and particularly climate urgency.

The Commune highlighted the question of democracy

The Commune reinvented the relationship between the social and the political. It completely transformed the conceptions of democracy and proposed paths that are very relevant today. The Commune put forward a primary demand, that of democracy in the work sphere. It affirmed its political orientation for the liberation of labour and the abolition of monopolies, privileges and bureaucracy. It supported the struggles for the reduction of working hours and against child labour. Marx defined the Commune as "a government of the working class, the result of the struggle of the appropriating class, the political form finally found which made it possible to achieve the economic emancipation of labour." Inspired by the practices in the IWA, the Commune prefigures self-management with the abandoned workshops handed over to workers' cooperatives after compensation of the owners. A management council was elected every fortnight in the workshops. The social democracy accompanied the economic democracy with the requisition of vacant housing and the lowering of rents, the prohibition of penalties and deductions from wages, the indication of a minimum wage in calls for tenders, etc. The Commune was to put forward political democracy. It defined direct democracy and self-government with respect for universal suffrage, the control of elected officials through revocability, the imperative mandate and joint deliberation. Civil servants, judges and magistrates are responsible and can be dismissed.

The Commune played a very important role in the advancement of democracy through the emancipation of women. Women imposed the right to fight and many women, like Louise Michel, played a fundamental and recognized role in the events. This was a step in the long struggle of women for equal rights. The Commune established equal pay for female and male teachers. It decreed access to education. It recognised common-law unions and facilitated divorce, and banned prostitution. The question of the right to vote was not raised. After the Commune, the IWA created women's sections. After the Commune, Engels clarified  the origin of patriarchy in the Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State published in 1884.

Democracy also plays a role in class alliances. As early as September 1871, the IWA raised the question of the alliance with the peasants and adopted a resolution on the ways to ensure the adhesion of agricultural producers to the movement of the industrial proletariat. The Bourses du travail (similar to union hiring halls) were created from 1887 onwards to deal with the ban on trade unions; in the wake of the Commune, the Fédération des bourses du travail created by Fernand Pelloutier in 1892 served as a support for the emerging CGT and the trend of revolutionary unionists.

The Commune set up a territorial democracy that strongly linked the population, the territory and the institutions. The debate was very sharp in the First International. The radical currents of municipalism have their roots in revolutionary history. The transformation of a capital city into a "Commune", the liberated territories to contest and reinvent the powers in relation to the State. The reference starts from the Paris Commune but is not restricted to it. This was the case in Petrograd in 1917, Hamburg in 1923, Barcelona in 1937. It is opposed to another, "possibilist" approach, that of municipal socialism, which combines a local conception of socialism with the communal tradition illustrated by the local charters of the Medieval period and community property.

In the 1980s, practices of self-government at the communal level were to emerge. They were made explicit by Murray Bookchin's "libertarian municipalism", the Zapatista experience in Chiapas, the experience of participatory budgets in Porto Alegre, .... Ecological and democratic issues were highlighted. It is in this context that the "square movement" has emerged since 2011 in several cities around the world. This movement revives the occupations of the 1960-1975 period, the "May 68s of the world". By occupying squares, the movements are reinvesting the centre of cities. They seek to reclaim the squares and to settle in the public space. This movement of squares opened a new phase of municipalism.

Alterglobalism proposes to build a strategic alliance between local institutions and social and citizen movements to renew political action.  The possible alliance with economic actors can include the different forms of cooperative or socially oriented enterprises, city enterprises, public enterprises, local enterprises. The alliance should be based on the refusal to accept the dominant rationality of "commodification, privatisation and financialisation" and on the promotion of an approach based on respect for fundamental rights.

The democratic imperative requires a reinvention of politics. The mistrust of citizens is considerable; it calls into question representative and delegative forms. The democratic question concerns all societies, at all levels, local, national and global. It also concerns movements and the World Social Forum. This question can be found in the assessment of attempts at progressive governments. How to conciliate a radical social and ecological transformation with real democracy? How can a democratic relationship between movements, parties and governments be constructed in difficult transitional periods? In the current situation, the forms of politics are being challenged.

Immanuel Wallerstein said at the World Social Forum in Detroit: "It's true that there is 1% and 99%; but 99% is not enough to make a majority!". It is urgent to find modes of coordination between "movement forms" and "party forms". Movements must define the political role they can play. The parties must abandon their pretense of being avant-garde organisations, intended to lead the movements. They must also revise their strategy that establishes the State as the only actor of change. Under these conditions, parties, as movements, can find their place in the World Social Forums.

5.

The Paris Commune and the new chain of revolutions

The first chain of revolutions brought together the social and the political. The Paris Commune renewed the social with the centrality of the working class and the social bloc antagonistic to capitalism; it renewed the political around the question of the role of the State and the fundamental question of democracy. The 2nd International, with Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, developed a new dimension with the consideration of imperialism. The IWA had taken into account colonisation and the struggles of peoples, Marx and Engels had intervened on the situation in Ireland and had followed the situation in India and other countries. The Commune had not tackled the question of decolonization, apart from the attention given by Louise Michel to the situation of the Kanak people at the time of her stay in the New Caledonia penal colony.  

The new chain of revolutions associated national liberation struggles with the recognised forms of the social and political. From 1848 onwards, the strategic focus on human rights was to be extended to the rights of peoples; decolonization still had to be taken into account. The Mexican revolution of 1905 took place in the same year as the Russian revolution that prepared 1917. The Baku congress in 1920 launched the new alliance between workers' movements and the national liberation movements. This new revolutionary strategy will progress and determine decolonization. In Bandung in 1955, at the meeting of the first independent States, Chou en Lai declared: "the States want their independence, the Nations their liberation, the Peoples the revolution". After the Second World War, decolonization became an essential issue.

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From 1980 onwards, a new phase of capitalism was imposed with neoliberal globalisation. It was imposed through the debt crisis and structural adjustment programs. The alterglobalization movement is the anti-systemic movement of neoliberalism. The financial crisis of 2008 showed the limits of neoliberalism. The dominant bourgeoisie, financial capital and multinational corporations, are imposing an austeritarism (austerity and authoritarianism) and repression.  The movements are confronted with the violence of capitalist social relations; the violence of the confrontations and the awareness of the radicality necessary to overcome capitalism give new relevance to the Paris Commune. At the Belém World Social Forum in 2009, the proposals put forward were the socialization of finance and forms of self-government. The notions put forward were: the commons, buen vivir and the democratization of democracy. The peasant movement, La Via Campesina, defining itself as a peasant worker, proposes peasant agriculture, the refusal of GMOs, and food sovereignty. In 1973, on the Larzac Plateau, Bernard Lambert, founder of the peasant workers' movement, declared in the name of the 103 peasants of the Larzac Plateau, "there are 103,000 of us, never again will peasants be versaillais (ie antirevolutionary)". At the World Social Forum in Belém, the women's, ecological and indigenous peoples' movements highlighted the fight against discrimination and the need to reinvent the relationship between the Human and Nature.

Capitalism in crisis is increasingly offensive. It seeks to subordinate work even more through the use of new technologies, especially digital technology. It increases inequalities, with the incredible incomes of the richest on the one hand and poverty and misery on the other. It refuses to take into account the ecological crisis, particularly the climate emergency, reinforced by the pandemic crisis. It resists the demand for equality made by women's rights. After the first phase of decolonization, that of the independence of States, it resists the second phase, that of the liberation of nations and peoples. It refuses to see that discrimination and racism are, today, the deadly consequences of unfinished decolonization.

The new chain of revolutions defines the necessary social transformation, against inequalities, ecological, for a new relationship between the Human and the Nature, democratic, for the respect of individual and collective liberties and geopolitical against the forms of domination. The new social bloc antagonistic to neoliberalism and capitalism is formed by the alliance of movements: the workers' movement, still central, the peasant movement of agricultural producers as defined by the IWA after the Commune, the ecologist movement, the women's movement in struggle against millennial social relations, the movement against discrimination and racism and for dignity, the indigenous peoples' movement.

Bibliography

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• Wikipédia, articles sur La Commune de Paris

Translated with the help of Deepl ; thanks to Edgar Blaustein for his proofreading

28 March 2021