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The historic and contemporary significance of the 1871 Paris Commune

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“The governments of all the major capitalist countries have not yet gone so far as to directly shoot down the citizenry. However, the staggering indifference to the loss of human life due to the ruling elite’s ‘herd immunity’ policy distinctly echoes the barbarism of Thiers.”

Indifference does not fully cover it. If the International Committee seeks to correct the errors of the leaders of the Paris Commune, it cannot put things down to indifference. The WSWS has taken the seizure of the cannons out of context. Thiers had acted “indifferent” to a German occupation after the fall of the Government of National Defense and the organization of the elections that put him in power. Napoleon III had acted equally indifferent, contemplating suicide and attempting to die in battle, a coward of the suicidal sort, during the battle of Sedan where he was captured by German forces in 1870. His wife Eugenie, the Empress, also asked why he had not killed himself before she escaped into exile. Germany considered restoring them to power once the Republic had been defeated, but they decided that the republic would better to contain the revolutionary sentiments of the people than an Emperor installed by a foreign military. That approach has continued to this day, with capital and capitalist states preferring republics under control of the banks to monarchs that ruled by decree. As Thiers himself noted, referring to the legitimate heir to the Bourbon monarchy: “One could say that the real founder of the Republic is the Count of Chambord.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…)

In other words, Thiers did not show “indifference” but a definite class orientation based on the massacre of the rising working class as it asserted its own interests over the state in national politics. This open dependence on massacre does not merely find “echoes” in the virus policy. The virus policy continues the rule of the banks and the oligarchy through a policy of massacres whenever the working class turns towards socialist political organization. Excusing Thiers as “indifferent” rather than “treasonous” had definite political ramifications, as the WSWS itself admits. It meant Thiers could escape arrest as a merely indifferent bourgeois type, caught up in culture or personal business or some such ignorant apologism. This ignorant apologism, practiced without shame by the WSWS, was precisely what allowed for Thiers escape and his assent as first president of the new republic. The consequent Scramble for Africa, the parallel of the United States’ Post-Civil War Westward Expansion, occurred without incident thanks to the peace secured by the French Republic on its border with Germany.

Without this context, a Marxist analysis proves impossible and the drawing and application of lessons fruitless. Only a thorough appreciation of Marxism, based on an understanding of the conscious class forces at work, will allow the political lessons to affect current policy.