Red and Black Unite

Red and Black Unite

From Empty Hands History: The Anarcho-Historian by Spencer Beswick

The Paris Commune and Socialist Democracy

Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!

Otto von Bismarck (1872, reflecting on the split in the First International)

What is socialist democracy? And can Marxists and anarchists unite in building new political forms that enable true proletarian self-government?

Revisiting Marx’s classic piece on the Paris Commune, “The Civil War in France,” with our DSA Marxist Reading Group reminded me of his liberatory vision of the new form of proletarian power. Although Marx and Engels name it the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” their description of it is actually very similar to the explanation of anarchist communism outlined by Peter Kropotkin in his classic book The Conquest of Bread.

Is it possible to reconcile the two visions? This is not a new argument, but I think that the Commune lays out the basic political form of what libertarian socialism looks like in practice—one that anarchists and Marxist alike could support.

First, a clarification of terms. When I teach about Marxism, one of the first things I stress to my students is that Marxists define the word dictatorship very differently than others do. It does not mean the authoritarian rule of one person. Rather, dictatorship simply means which class has power in society. Thus, capitalism is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie because the capitalist class holds power. A dictatorship of the proletariat would mean that the working class holds power instead. But these two classes cannot hold the same orientation towards the state. Proletarian power must look different than bourgeois power. Why?

The state, as Marxists define it, is a structure of class rule. Anarchists, on the other hand, argue that the state to a certain degree stands outside of society and has its own interests. In either case, the state is alienated power par excellence. It is necessarily a small group of people holding power and ruling over society. This works very well for the bourgeoisie, as they are a small group of people seeking to hold power. But it does not work for the proletariat.

How can the proletariat, the vast majority of society, exercise power through the state when it is necessarily a small group of people making decisions for majority? We have seen that neither representative democracy nor the Soviet state model actually enables true proletarian rule. We need new political forms that enable the proletariat to hold and wield power directly as a class, rather than mediated through alienated state forms.

In “The Civil War in France,” Marx and Engels agree. Marx famously argues that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” (629). Rather, this machinery must be “shattered” and new forms of power built. The “true secret” of the Paris Commune was that “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 economic emancipation of labour” (634-35, emphasis added).

What is the new political form that enables the emancipation of labor? It cannot be modeled on the bourgeois state, nor the ancien regime. In his introduction, Engels says that the Paris Commune encapsulates his vision of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. He says that the Commune’s political form was shaped by “two infallible means” which differentiate the DotP from the bourgeois state:

“In the first place, it filled all posts—administrative, judicial and educational—by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time by the same electors. And, in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers. […] In this way an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism was set up, even apart from the binding mandates to delegates to representative bodies which were added besides” (628).

Marx then demonstrates how the Commune’s political structures enabled a new form of proletarian democracy. He explains the bottom-up structure, emphasizing how workers elected and empowered delegates to carry out the democratic will of local assemblies. Each local assembly made decisions about what directly impacted them—for example, workers would democratically decide how to run their own workplace, and a neighborhood could organize its own public safety measures. Then these local assemblies coordinated their decisions through the higher Commune bodies. They sent delegates to these bodies who were empowered to carry out the will of the lower bodies. If they erred, they were immediately recallable.

This structure of delegation is a fundamentally different system than that of representative democracy, in which the people elect representatives to ostensibly carry out their will in the halls of power. The delegates are workers themselves, paid a workers salary, and directly accountable to the decisions made by local assemblies.

These structures would be replicated across the country. Local communes would coordinate with one another through this same system of revocable delegation. It is worth quoting Marx at some length explaining the Paris Commune’s (and thus his own) vision of the reorganization of national democracy: “the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet […] the rural communes of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assembles were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandate imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents.

The few but important functions which still would remain for a central government were not to be suppressed, as has been intentionally mis-stated, but were to be discharged by Communal, and therefore strictly responsible agents. The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by the 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 excrescence” (633).

Readers familiar with the anarchist tradition may be justified to think I am accidentally quoting Kropotkin describing his anarchist vision of a federated Commune of Communes. No! This is Marx describing the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the new working-class state!

Later, Lenin would draw new lessons from the Paris Commune, emphasizing the need for workers to seize and exercise centralized State power. The Bolsheviks quickly broke the autonomy of the soviets (the workers councils), and the Soviet state certainly did not function as the bottom-up system of delegation that Marx and Engels describe. The Soviet Union did not operate as the “political form […] under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour,” but rather continued the system of political alienation in modified forms.

Red and Black can unite around a vision of a political form of libertarian socialism, as articulated by both Marx and Kropotkin, each reflecting on the experience of the Paris Commune. We need political forms that enable true democracy, the self-organization of the vast majority of people in our society. I personally find much of value in Murray Bookchin’s vision of libertarian municipalism and democratic confederalism, which we can see in practice today in Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi and in revolutionary Rojava in liberated Kurdish territory. This is an articulation of radical democracy and a vision for self-organization of political power from the bottom up. To put it simply: this is socialist democracy.

About the author: Empty Hands History is written by Spencer Beswick, a History PhD student at Cornell University who studies the history of the left to offer inspiration for today's movements.

There are 14 Comments

I can't tell if this is satire or self-parody, but I'm leaning toward self-parody. The idea that a modern (that is, almost post-industrial) society can be molded or directed by political formations that were more relevant to the beginnings of industrialism (let's please remember that there was no industry in Paris in 1871, but rather cottage crafts producing mostly luxury items for the bourgeoisie) is laughable. But we shouldn't expect too much radicalism from an academic who champions the post-anarchist Bookchin or the Potemkin revolution of Rojava. This paltry analysis is definitely in line with the squeamish leftism of the DSA, though. Any anarchist who falls for this nonsense deserves to be called Red. And I identify as an ancom!

maybe earnestness? which is why a jaded soul such as yourself can't decide what they're looking at?
NOT SARCASM?! NOT PARODY?! SYSTEM ERROR!!!

anyway, another grumpy ancom here and I agree with everything else you said

And also you lumpybrain, but your ancom is uneducated self-stupidity! Why can't you fools understand the incompatibility of anarch desires with the organised communist State? My mind reals at the enormity of your blindness!

Does this idiot troll think ancoms desire a State? LMAO how embarrassingly stupid can one idiot troll be? It’s not as if there aren’t enough ridiculous things about ancoms to poke fun at. Sheesh!

I AM TALKING ABOUT THE COMMUNIST STATE LIKE USSR, NORTH KOREA, VIETNAM, CHINA, and poor naive anarchists JOIN UP LIKE IN Spain '37, and THEN REALIZE, OH OH, noooo, we've just joined up with what basically are State organized cronies!
And i was quoting anarchist Orwell from Catalonia!3

you're talking about nothing that applies to anyone here jackass ...

i don't even have faith in half a dozen strangers being able to co-operate without shitty power dynamics and mental illness spoiling everything, let alone a utopian state! your ideas about leftist sympathizing anarchists are about 100 years out of date. sounds like you've been drinking that america koolaid where all roads lead to stalin's buttcrack. i don't even like roads! prefer the trees that used to be there. I still drive tho, that's my nihilism showing!

REAL NIHILISTS RIDE THE FREIGHT TRAINS FOR FREE!!
☆Boxcar Post-Bakunin ☆

Pretty sure these ancom drones are all just bots by now. They keep generating these ridiculous grandiose texts about rebuilding the Paris Commune in,like, 2021 Rochester or something, andseem totally impervious to any criticism this shit receives.

Does anyone have any intelligent critical engagement with this piece? Pearls before swine, I think...

It's completely and totally incompatible with anarchy. It's illustrative of everything that's wrong when leftists and liberals poke their stupid noses into anarchism. The only question we should be asking is: what is this leftist dogshit essay doing on our beloved anews?

'THE PARIS COMMUNE AND SOCIALIST DEMOCRACY' is an excellent piece. And timely as well, given that the United States is barreling towards collapse, and the framework examined here is exactly the sort of thing that will have to be engaged with in a full-scale revolutionary event.

-- If the current system is really going to fall apart, then you all had better be out organizing your future lives on a scale you can reach, because for sure other people with other beliefs and interests than yours will be (actually have been) doing it. I don't think arguing over what Marx thought of the Paris Commune in 1871 is going to be very useful. You need to figure out how to deal with your neighbors.

Why? Are you writing this from your fallout shelter atop a bed constructed of dehydrated tuna and purified urine? If not you had better get to preppin.

Add new comment