Workers' Liberty

The Paris Commune was the first successful workers' revolution. It
survived from 26 March to 30 May 1871.
Following France's defeat in its 1870 war with Prussia (the biggest
state in not-yet-united Germany), the bourgeois government allowed
Prussian troops to occupy Paris.

On 18 March the French government sent its army into Paris to ensure
that the workers would not resist the Prussians. The Paris workers
refused to give up their weapons. On 26 March, in a wave of popular
support, a municipal council composed of workers and soldiers - the
Paris Commune - was elected.

The Commune abolished conscription and the standing army and declared
that the National Guard, in which all citizens capable of bearing
arms were enrolled, was to be the sole armed force. It cancelled
rents and stopped sales of articles in pawnshops. Foreigners elected
to the Commune were confirmed in office, because "the flag of the
Commune is the flag of the World Republic".

It decided the highest salary received by any employee of the Commune
would be 6,000 francs. The Commune decreed the separation of Church
and state, the abolition of state payments for religious purposes and
the transformation of all Church property into national property. It
excluded religious symbols - pictures, dogmas and prayers - from
schools, saying these should be left "to the individual's conscience".
The guillotine was publicly burned, amid great popular rejoicing. The
Commune ordered a register of factories closed by their owners and
devised plans for workers to take them over. Factories were to be
organised as co-operative societies and linked together in one great
union. The Commune also abolished night work for bakers.

In May, the army of France's bourgeois government attacked Paris.
After an eight-day resistance, the Commune collapsed. 30,000 unarmed
workers were shot dead in the streets. Thousands were arrested, and
seven thousand sent into exile.

Marx believed the Commune should have seized the Bank of France and
that it underestimated the furious resistance that the ruling classes
would mount. He concluded that workers could not lay hold of the
existing state apparatus and take power peacefully. Instead the
bourgeois state had to be smashed and replaced with the Commune's
directly accountable representatives.