The Paris Commune of 1871: The view from the left (Writings of the left)

By: Eugene Schulkind

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394178718
• ISBN13: 9780394178714
• Release Date: January 1974
• Publisher: Grove Press : distributed by Random House
• Length: 308 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Lessons of the Paris Commune

Please note that the substance of the following review has been used in the following three books. The Paris Commune 1871 by Robert Tombs; The Paris Commune of 1871 by Eugene Schulkind; and, The Paris Commune by David Shafer. March 18, 2006 is the 135th Anniversary of the establishment of the Commune so I have been doing some reading or rather rereading about that historic left event. My central concern has been the question of how the Commune could have continued beyond May 1871. This investigation has centered around the question of revolutionary leadership (or rather lack of it). These three books represent thoughtful presentations, obviously not without disagreements, in that pursuit. When one studies the history of the Paris Commune of 1871 one can learn something new even though from the perspective of revolutionary strategy the Communards made virtually every mistake in the book. Nevertheless, one can still learn lessons from those experiences and measure mistakes of the Communards against the experience acquired by later revolutionary struggles and above all by later revolutions, not only the successful Russian Revolution of October 1917 but the failed German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese and Spanish revolutions in the aftermath of World War I. More contemporaneously we also have the experiences of the partial victories of the later Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions in the post-World War II period. Notwithstanding the contradictory nature of the later revolutions cited above, and as if to show that history is not always totally a history of horrors against the fate of the masses, militants today proudly honor the Paris Commune as a beacon of the socialist revolution. It is just for that reason that Karl Marx fought tooth and nail in the First International to defend it against the rage of capitalist Europe and faint-hearted elements in the European labor movement. It is truly one of the revolutionary peaks. The Commune however also presented in embryo the first post-1848 Revolution instance of the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the international labor movement. That is, the need for a revolutionary party to lead the working class to victory. Placing the problems facing the Commune in this context made me realize that this crisis of revolutionary leadership really has a much longer lineage that I had previously recognized. I had previously placed its start at the collapse of the Socialist International at the beginning of World War I when most European socialist parties took a defensist position toward their own governments by voting for war credits. Unfortunately, the leadership question is still to be resolved. Many working class tendencies, Anarchist, Anarcho-Syndicalist, Left Social Democratic, Communist and Left Communist justifiably pay homage to the defenders of the Paris Commune and claim its traditions. Why does an organization of short duration and subject to savage reprisals still command