>Different anarchists have different positions but most nowadays (including
>myself) would argue that the commune did not go far enough.
Didn't go far enough to do/achieve a state of what? BTW, I got the dates wrong. I indicated the Commune lasted for a year. Now I find out it lasted for about two months (March 26 to May 30, 1871) (from MIA's Encyclopedia Marxiana). So what should the Communards should have achieved in those two months? Given the situation they were in, it seems like they went pretty far in the time they had.
>There are clear anarchist influences on the communes: the use of recallable
>delegates, the transformation of France into a federation >of Free
>Communes, the formation of worker cooperatives and arming the people were
>all advocated by anarchists before Marx even became a socialist. This is
>quite different from the state centralization advocated previously by Marx
>in the Communist Manifesto & elsewhere.
Yes, it is. But I'm not sure if Marx would have approved of, or even thought of, a "one size fits all" solution. He seems quite jubilant about Paris here:
"Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priest will not avail to redeem them. "
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch06.htm
The impression I've made of what I've read of Marx's so far is that one uses what one can at the moment to achieve the ends of freedom from capital.
>Lenin's claim that the Commune was a "proletarian state" is >absurd >since
>most participants were what Lenin would consider "petty >bourgeoise"
>(artisans).
Engels makes that claim here:
"Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Frederick Engels
London, on the 20th anniversary of the Paris Commune, March 18, 1891."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm
Since he and Marx, who must have drawn on first-hand sources, were the ones closest to the event, don't their observations hold even more weight than Lenin's? Is that where Lenin got his information on the character of the Commune? I haven't read enough Lenin yet.
And were the Communards engaging in economic relationships during the Commune that could legitimately be given that designation of "petty bourgeoise"? Or did they have something different in mind? Marx seems to think they did:
"The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favor, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all the previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret was this:
It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.
Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a delusion. The political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundation upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labor emancipated, every man becomes a working man, and productive labor ceases to be a class attribute. "
"Another measure of this class was the surrender to associations of workmen, under reserve of compensation, of all closed workshops and factories, no matter whether the respective capitalists had absconded or preferred to strike work"
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm
>Strickly speaking the Commune didn't really have a full-fledged state but
>did maintain a sort of semi-state within the commune while pushing for the
>abolition of the national state. They maintained a representative system
>and thus a hierarchical forms of control.
By this do you mean that any representative system, especially those coupled with a hierarchical form, is one form a state? From what I've been reading, they seemed to be trying to move away from such thing:
"The Communal Constitution has been mistaken for an attempt to break up into the federation of small states, as dreamt of by Montesquieu and the Girondins,[B] "
"neither cheap government nor the "true republic" was its ultimate aim; they were its mere concomitants"
> I >would prefer to see their representative council thing replaced >with
> >directly democratic mass assemblies. And, to the best of my >knowledge,
>patriarchy continued to hold sway in Paris.
Their representative councils were built from "the ground" up if I understand what is here (especially the last sentence):
"The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time."
"The Paris Commune was, of course, to serve as a model to all the great industrial centres of France. The communal regime once established in Paris and the secondary centres, the old centralized government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers.
In a rough sketch of national organization, which the Commune had no time to develop, it states clearly that the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and that in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an extremely short term of service. The rural communities of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandat imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents. The few but important functions which would still remain for a central government were not to be suppressed, as has been intentionally misstated, but were to be discharged by Communal and thereafter responsible agents.
The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excresence.
While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society. Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well-known that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business generally know how to put the right man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly. On the other hand, nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supercede universal suffrage by hierarchical investiture."
I'm afraid I'll have to read and comment on your offerings at some other point. It's late here, and I have to cut some branches before the sun goes completely down (nothing worse than cutting branches while balancing on a ladder in the dark, eh?).
Todd
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