The Paris Commune | Lessons from the First Dictatorship of the Proletariat
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- čas přidán 22. 07. 2024
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Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
1:31 Leftwingbooks.net
3:20 Overview
9:33 Criticism
13:30 Conclusions
14:44 Special Thanks
Oh yes the Paris Commune, that brief moment where France was based
As revolutionary optimists, we must hold out hope for the return one day of based France after decades (well, centuries) of cringe
Forgot the whole French revolution, did you, eh?
@@sinthoras1917 The French Revolution got bourgeois-democratic'd so hard, so fast, it can't quite be considered in favour of the revolutionary proletariat. Still, anything that overthrew Feudalism deserves it's props.
@@sinthoras1917 It was semi-based. At the end was a burgeoise liberal revolution.
@@henriashurst-pitkanen8735 ofc the French revolution was bourgeois, it couldn't have been otherwise. But that at the time was a good thing, and the only thing achievable. The French revolution very thoroughly destroyed feudalism in France (much more thoroughly than the English revolution for example), and weakened feudalism basically all over Europe, basically being the beginning of its end on the continent.
I'll end with a quote that is correct to this day, yet still almost always overlooked or purposefully ignored:
"to punish the enemies of the people is clemency, to forgive them is cruelty" - M. Robespierre
Brilliant work, thank you!
Just wanted to let anyone who was curious know. I ordered from The bookstore mentioned in video. I never trust sponsors or ads (or even patreon…sorry Paul) on CZcams, but after I saw about the deal and checked out the website, I broke down and actually placed an order for some books. They arrived fast and in great condition. Highly recommend giving them a try. I figured supporting someone who supports Paul hopefully makes up for my patreon trust issues.
Ayoooo it came through
I've ordered 3 times now from leftwingbooks and had a great experience each time.
Thanks for the video! My favorite part has to be the critique, "we owe nothing to the bourgousie system" important and hard lesson this historical event teaches us. Anyone serious about communism needs to learn.
This video is awesome. As communists, it is vital we know our history and observe class struggle all around the world, but also learn from our mistakes and shortcomings :)
This was an amazing analysis, Comrade Paul. :) I can imagine how many people would be saying simply "Oh, it just failed. I mean, look at how short it was!", but no, for however brief a time, it represented something of a shining light, a starting point for communist inspiration the world over! There's a quote that springs to mind, I'm not sure if it was Mao or somebody else, something about a "first shot starting the Paris Commune, the second starting the Bolshevik Revolution", maybe?
The Paris Commune failed in every way imaginable save for all the adults vanishing overnight and forcing the kids to form their own society. It was a shining light, all right, but that shining light was a lighthouse beacon warning against mortal danger.
Fab video as ever, comrade!! Really handy for me too, as my knowedge of details of the Paris Commune are shamfully and embarrassingly lacking, in all honesty! Much here I didn't know, so special thanks for filling in vast gaps in what I knew about this extremely important historical event!!
It proves that in *CAN* be done. If the French could do it, and the Russians could do it, and the Cubans could do it, why can't we?
Great video. I've been putting off watching your videos but when I find the time, I will definitely binge more.
Great and insightful video. I've only recently took the time to actually understand what the commune was about and you kept it straight to the point. Thank you.
The united front of China is a great example of what to do, whilst the united front that Dimtrov wanted had errors we must learn from.
yes, what a fabulous regime to live under.
@@cheesepatrol2376 Honestly, yes.
I look forward to today, because both Marxist Paul and Second Thought upload today
Today is the anniversary of the formation of the Paris Commune! Long live the international revolution! And cheers to you for the amazing video(s)!
I'm loving these videos! I find learning about revolutionaries and revolutionary movements in the past fascinating and inspiring! Please keep making these type of videos! 🙂
"2 views, 6 likes". Love it. Massive support from a member of CPGB, Paul! Solidarity!
Which CPGB?
@@TheAPTGamer Not the Stalinist LARP one.
@@henriashurst-pitkanen8735 All of them could be classified as "Stalinist", since that's usually just Trot speak for Marxist-Leninist, there are a few, though, so I was wondering which specifically.
@@TheAPTGamer I meant in terms of singular mentality. From what I've seen of their party documents, they put a bit too much emphasis on historical fixation on the Union instead of policies relevant to local British conditions. I could be mistaken as I haven't committed to serious research or anything, but they seem smaller and more fringe, less well-connected to the trade union movement and less active in terms of organising. These are the reasons I felt more drawn to CPGB.
@@henriashurst-pitkanen8735 But which CPGB. there are three. Is it the CPGB PCC, CPGB ML or CPGB ML but the one run by the Brars?
Still yet to read much about the Paris commune, this is a great starter vid. Thanks!
“Massacre” by Merriman is a good account by a respected academic - he was not a communist, but definitely sympathetic to the Communards in that work.
@@ronbunn1349 awesome! Added to the list of things to read
I've got a couple of questions now
Is the nature of the paris commune being an isolated area one of its main drawbacks? Like should it have...somehow, waited until other areas would too embrace this nature before being the target of the state? Is a revolution, especially now with communist parties, a national event rather than the isolated event, spreading outwards until it reaches the whole country or the government?
And with people's armies, are they too supposed to be nationally organised so they can defend against these reactionary forces? How does a people's army differ from having many and multiple people's militias everywhere?
One day France...One day...🥖🚩
Fantastic video, comrade!
Cheers, Gregory!
our first revolution of many
Currently, on page thirty-something of The state and revolution, boy does this video help put things into perspective. Thank you!
Brilliant video as always! Please please do a video on the limerick Soviet or Shanghai commune etc etc
a video on the chinese revolution in the 20s would be very interesting. most views ive seen are very ideologically driven by the tired stalin/trotsky divide
Guangzhou +.Shanghai.Communes of
armed workers seized those 2 cities.
There was also.a small anarchist
movement (railroad workers. etc.
while Communist + Nationalist Parties
?briefly joined vs. warlords.
There was also 1919 May 4th.student
movement--- nationalism + etc.
Ngl, the first time I've heard the term "Communard" was in Disco Elysium and I thought it was supposed to be a slur against communists 😆. Keep up the good work, Paul! ✊
Another banger!
Mashallah daddy Marxist Paul has uploaded
will you make a video on people's war?
Great video that I'm sharing with my anarchist friends and comrades,
"So as not to fall into a one sided analysis"
Fantastic, exactly.
Do not get me wrong, I am no anarchist. But we must study theory and history objectively.
Otherwise dialectical and historical materialism, like in acience, becomes a tool of confirmation bias, threatening to falsify our conclusions and observations.
Maximilien Robespierre: We'll transform French society and make France based again.
The Communards: Hold our beer, we'll show the world how to be based again.
The communards would litteraly not exist without robespierre and the montagnards, by their own admission, plus they all failed so who cares
@@yc6018 in a way, you're right. Without Robespierre, there wouldn't be no Communards. However, it's important to note the differences in ideology between Robespierre and the Communards. Lastly, failure doesn't mean that nothing can be learnt from the Communards. Without the Communards, there wouldn't be no Bolshevik or Chinese Revolution.
@@anushghosh4606 how course they were ideologically different it was a century earlier the notion of working class wasnt even a thing in the 1790's
@@anushghosh4606 and about the failings you are right, the 1792 revolution greatly influence the paris commune and the paris commune greatly influence the russian and chinese revolution
@@yc6018 wrong. The working class did exist in the 1790s but at the time, the capitalist system wasn't established in France so firmly as it was established by the 1870s. The primary contradiction in French society in the 1790s was between feudalism and capitalism. The primary contradiction in French society in the 1870s was between capitalism and the working class desiring to get rid of the capitalist system.
4:47 - 5:02
Nice double entendre there, comrade. I see what you did there. 😉
Commenting for revolutionary engagement :)
The OGs.
This is kind of a niche request maybe, but do you think you could include some kind of brief bullet point recap of the major points of the topic near the end, like the sequence of events and the reflections of Marx and Engels and their observations of the major failings of the commune (anarchist opposition to marching on Versailles, holding on to the gold)? I know you did do a conclusions section but maybe something that lays the major beats out in bullet points would be really helpful for me to retain the biggest takeaways, even if it's just a text slide to pause on at the end
W.E.B DuBois refered to the radical reconstruction-era south US as a "Dictatorship of Labor" what is your perspective on this analysis
This video conveys a really important message in a really subtle way. Well done.
This did the commune so grimy. France hasn't recovered since.
Does anyone know why my positive review of the in video sponsor keeps getting deleted? Does CZcams think it’s spam if I’m trying to let everyone know that it’s a good book site? Is my message still visible to everyone but me?
Weird, I can't see them anywhere.
If you're including links in the comment, that could be why they're getting caught in CZcams's filter. Maybe remove ".net" from the comment and try again?
Definitely copy and paste the comment onto a Notepad document or something like that to save it though, just in case
Thanks. I already did save it. I’ll take out the link and post again.
I’m going to repost message in a couple of future videos, if that’s okay with you, to ensure more people see about my positive experience.
Also, great video….as always.
Great video!
I always learn something I didn't know from watching your videos Paul.
I really hope you make a video like this someday about the October Revolution as well.
Damn, late again! Another video, another banger!
Great video
Based. For the algo.
👍🏿🖤❤️🖤👍🏿
A cautionary note about the Paris Commune: if you overthrow the capitalist republic and install a "more democratic" republic, you still have a republic, which is makes it easier for the average civilian to see their place in the system as nothing more than a voter who leaves the job of decision-making up to other people. That, in turn, supports the methods of the old system that existed under capitalism, where the people are only allowed to hope that their elected rulers are wise and benevolent. Socialists do not need or want wise and benevolent rulers; they need and want to get rid of all rulers, elected or otherwise, and fill that role with bottom-up democracy.
People who claim to be socialist while also insisting that a republic is the vehicle for socialism because it's "more democratic" than X or Y, are not really looking at the issues that face republics, and are instead falling into the trap of "it's better than what we had before, therefore it's socialism." Socialism is not wise rule or "better" rule, but proletarian rule by proletarian decision-making that rejects any kind of autonomous state, because an autonomous state, even if completely elected and recallable, will find a way to increase its autonomy and its authority. And because socialism is the rule by the society through community-level/based democracy, not the rule OVER society "in the best interests of society" from above by state-level republicanism.
7:55 And this is where I have to disagree with Marxist Paul: the revolution must begin before the physical revolution ever threatens to materialize. Socialists must build it from the ground up, and should never, under any circumstances, believe that they can legislate and force it from above "if only our party takes power." (Socialism is not state rule, so socialists need to stop thinking in ways that are governed by systems of state rule.)
What that really means is organizing communities into democratic units, normalizing the practice of actual democracy (not republicanism where people merely vote for someone else to make decisions) within those communities, building mutual aid networks (because networking is vital to a successful democracy), and in all other ways building the basis for the society that they want to replace the existing one so that when the physical revolution happens, there is already a strong *commonly shared* understanding of what everyone needs to do to make it work, networks for finding out what needs are so they can be met, etc etc etc. The physical revolution is supposed to overthrow the old system and replace it with the new one, but if the new system is left up to the leadership (elected or otherwise) to determine...then nobody has any business calling that socialist. It may be "better" for the proletariat than what it replaced (at least until the party decides it needs to consolidate power, corruption becomes more prominent, and the purges and other things start), but socialism is a specific brand of "better" that can't be lumped in with every form of leftist "better."
Additionally, the role of the party should be nothing more than advisory. The party should never do more than offer analyses and guidance for the people in the organized communities to democratically work through. The moment it starts trying to "lead" the movement in any other way is the moment that the party shows its true colors as merely wanting to create a new hierarchy of power with the party leadership at the top, and at that point it's not fundamentally different from any other anti-socialist party that wants to seize control "in the name of the people."
Truedat. Long before real democratic selfrule can be possible, before we can ever usefully fight the tendencies of autocracy to preserve itself,we have to combat the thousands of years of programming in every person. We all have a little nazi deep down inside, pushing against the hard work wemust do to see systemic exploitation for what it is and stop feeding it.
Maybe that's why chairman fred was so big on marxist educational outreach. We need something like that if weare going to see real democracy in our lifetime.
The issue here is that you're falling into the trap of what Marx and Engels would identify as utopian socialism - conjuring up the perfect utopian society in your mind and attempting to impose that upon the world, rather than starting from material reality and building from the ground up based on the seeds of socialism that currently exist (socialised production, which finds itself in contradiction with private appropriation).
Learning from past experience, we fundamentally need to always ask: what worked? What didn't?
Your idea is beautiful, and will win many hearts and minds I'm sure, but until you go out and demonstrate this for us in practice, it will remain just that: a nice idea.
Meanwhile, over the course of the twentieth century, the Marxist path brought over a third of the entire planet onto the road to socialism.
That's not to say there weren't issues - there were, and these projects fell because of them. But this is a model that has been demonstrated to work more effectively than anything else we have so far, while the more recent developments brought forward through MLM (the mass line, cultural revolution, crit-self-crit, etc.) provide corrections to the errors of previous ML experiments that fell to revisionism and returning to the capitalist road.
"If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution[Paris Commune] has already shown." - Engels, A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891
@ebbathatgirl Of course, proletarian democracy should be a given
@@Marxism_Today good point: to achieve real democracy we can't pretend our way is always best and always worked,blindspotting failures of history. Thats what the bad guys always do. They lie and get a tiny,flaccid, propaganda victory without really improving anything for the population. That's kind of what all those marxist critique and logical argument methods are about right? Making sure we are thinking and reasoning as honestly as possible.
Interesting stuff.
When more streams comrade?
🔥🔥🔥
Great video as always comrade
Excelente! Abrazo desde Argentina!
Another Marxist Paul banger! ♥️☭✊🏽
A very good video
One day...
10:10
Oh my God. Why are anarchists always so cringe?
Algorithm comment
Go raibh míle maith agat, a chara
Engagement!
0:43 why'd they draw her so stacked
They left the historical context out of he video on purpose, while the Parisians had understandable grievances they weren't going to succeed no matter what their ideas were
Le cadavre est a terre, et l’idee est debout
Nice
Huh. You don't seem very angry at all
@@Marxism_Today I used to get really angry, now I'm more put together
Comment
We are to the Shanghai commune as Lenin was to the Paris commune
I'm so confused..... Lenin came AFTER the Paris commune he was wasn't even 1 years old yet when it happened.
@@djriqky9581 We must Learn from the Shanghai commune as much as Lenin did with Paris
based
0:11 democratically administer the affairs of paris in an embryonic dictatorship???? Pretty self-contradictory sentence right there.
"Dictatorship" just means "state power".
It does not mean "one-man dictatorship", à la Hitler
@@Marxism_Today Hitler was not a one-man dictatorship. Even a dictator needs support, so there really is no such thing as a one man dictatorship. All dictatorships are rather 1-party dictatorships, including the paris commune. And it's got f all to do with democracy.
@@Marxism_Today communism is just an authoritarian antidemocratic ideology, where a small corrupt elite overclass controls and plans the entire economy, and gets away with it by brainwashing their populations to believe that they now live in a utopian society, where they have done away with all the classes, everybody is equal and everyone is happy and the means of production are commonly owned.
But as we can clearly see in all historical examples of communism, nothing could be further from the truth. The working class is not emancipated or liberated, they are sent off to do slave labour in the gulags. The citizens of Soviet Union were not equal to Stalin. The citizens in North Korea are not equal to Kim Jong-un. Stalin didn't starve with his people when they starved, rather he used manmade famines as a tool to keep citizens down and crush separatist movements and political dissent.
Common ownership of the means of production, that's what we have here in the free part of the world. Any person is completely free to invest their money, buy some shares and some stock and become a common owner of the means of production. But it is not forced upon you. You are completely free to not invest your money, but rather spend it on consumer goods and tomfoolery.
Look up "Führerprinzip". The entire point of Hitler's dictatorship was to concentrate power and ultimate authority into the hands of one individual: the führer.
❤
Extremely rare French W
Engagement!
Badly needed!