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Title: Vive La Commune! Author: Anarchist Communist Federation Date: 1991 Language: en Topics: Organise!, Paris Commune, Kronstadt Source: Retrieved on April 26, 2013 from https://web.archive.org/web/20130426072844/http://www.afed.org.uk/org/commune.html Notes: Published in Organise! issue 22, March-May 1991
Seventy years ago the Communist government led by Lenin and Trotsky
introduced their New Economic Policy, a measure which started the free
market in agriculture and sections of industry. Today, Gorbachev and his
supporters are once again trying to establish a latter day variant: the
free market is celebrated after decades of the command economy. Always
anxious to base new moves on the basis of Marxist-Leninist precedence,
we can expect the Kremlin to highlight the anniversary of the NEP with
banquets and other celebrations.
What will not be celebrated, we can be sure, is the single event that
made Lenin’s NEP so urgent: the uprising by soldiers, sailors and
civilians at the Soviet naval base at Kronstadt. 1991 is also the
anniversary of the Paris Commune which took place in 1871, fifty years
before Kronstadt. This article will examine some of the issues involved
in these two commune movements and construction of anarchist communist
societies.
Both the Kronstadt and Paris Communes share some interesting features
and tell us a great deal about the states which drowned them both in
blood after only a few weeks of existence.
The Paris Commune provided revolutionaries with an example of the
possibilities inherent in spontaneous popular self-activity. Though
defeated, it inspired anarchists, including Bakunin, who claimed it as
their own. Even Marx, who had hitherto emphasised the necessity of
“political” i.e. parliamentary struggle, temporarily adopted an almost
libertarian position on the Commune. The Communards, he declared
lyrically, “have stormed heaven” and, though careful not to abandon the
concept of proletarian dictatorship, Marx and Engels identified that
dictatorship with the self-activity of the masses that the Commune
brought about.
Lenin, ironically, was for a brief period before the October revolution
enthusiastic about the Paris Commune, advocating the creation in Russia
of the “Commune State”. However, Marx’s, Lenin’s and Engels’s
libertarianism were extremely temporary. Lenin in particular soon
abandoned the superficial libertarianism of his “State and Revolution”
and imposed an iron dictatorship of the Party and Cheka (secret police).
Having praised the Paris Commune for its libertarian self-activity, he
subsequently crushed Russia’s home-grown variant: Kronstadt.
What did the Paris Commune achieve? Firstly it created a popular army
from the ranks of disaffected government soldiers and the armed populace
of Paris. Though ultimately defeated by the forces of the state, it
fought valiantly from street to street until the final surrender.
Militarily, the Commune made the strategic blunder of awaiting the
government attack on Paris. Had it met the invading army some way
outside Paris the outcome might have been very different. But, as a
model of military organisation, the Commune gave us the people’s or
workers’ militia as an alternative to the standing army which acts as
guardians of our oppressors.
On the social level the Commune carried out a number of reforms. It was
extremely egalitarian, fixing a modest upper limit on earnings for
servants of the Commune. Those employers who had fled Paris were
expropriated and the workshops were run by the workers. This latter
development was of crucial importance since it demonstrated the
feasibility of ordinary working people taking control of production
themselves. Similarly, the question of distribution was placed in the
hands of the Paris masses. In addition, whereas bourgeois “democracy”
effectively removes any decision-making from the people, the Commune
destroyed political hierarchy and initiated a system of delegate
democracy. Delegate democracy gave the workers a direct say in the
administration of their everyday lives by which elected delegates were
mandated to carry out their wishes and were subject to dismissal should
they fail to do so.
The Commune in its day to day activity carried out a number of changes
which stemmed from their everyday oppression. For example, night work
was abolished for the bakers of Paris. The Parisians would have to wait
for their bread! Pawn shops, which were seen as exploitative, were
closed down and the church which had played the role of ideological
oppressor of the masses was disestablished, its property socialised and
its involvement in education terminated.
These measures, though inadequate from an anarchist communist
perspective, were all part of a thoroughly progressive and
anticapitalist popular social experiment. Anarchists would today perhaps
point out the limitations of the Commune, for example the continuation
of the wages system and the introduction of the cooperative as an
alternative to private capitalism. However, had the Commune not fallen
and had the model been adopted elsewhere in France (and abroad), a more
thorough-going federation of communes might have arisen to replace the
nation-state.
The Paris Commune arose in response to a conservative bourgeois
capitalist state, determined to maintain its power in a period of war.
The Kronstadt Commune, in contrast, arose at the end of a period of
civil war. But again, it was the libertarian expression of
revolutionaries exasperated by the activities of a dictatorial state.
The Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 had been carried out in
the name of the soviets or workers councils which had sprung up
spontaneously earlier in the year. The Bolsheviks very quickly created a
highly authoritarian police state which by early 1921 had abolished
virtually all political activity except that of themselves.
The period from October 1917 to 1921 had been one of continual civil war
which had sapped the morale of even the state’s most enthusiastic
supporters. However, rather than harness popular anti-capitalist
feeling, the government strove to harness it within its own ideological
and organisational straight-jacket. It was against this system that the
Kronstadt sailors (“the flower of the revolution”, according to Trotsky)
rose up. The Bolsheviks brought into being a dictatorship which extorted
produce from the peasants at gunpoint, which enslaved workers under a
hierarchy of political commisars and which granted privileges of extra
food rations and accommodation to Communist Party members. The whole
perverted system of restrictions and state corruption (there were over
50 levels of food allocation, depending on rank) was documented by Emma
Goldman in volume two of her autobiography. Incidentally, this is now
cheaply available from Freedom Books and should be read by anyone
interested in the “communism” of the period.
It was in the Baltic fleet that the original ideals of the closing
months of 1917 were retained in their strongest form. Despite attempts
to condemn the Kronstadters as Whites or backward peasants or worse, all
of which have since been shown to be false, there is no doubt that they
wanted a libertarian society controlled by the working class through
their own assemblies. At the naval base and on the ships the sailors
held mass meetings to formulate their demands. These were summed up most
clearly in the “Petropavlovsk revolution”.
Far from being counterrevolutionary, the demands of the Kronstadt
Commune continued a tradition that went back at least to 1905 when
Russian workers first brought about the reality of the soviet. In fact,
the first demand called for “immediate new elections to the soviets”
which had by then become mere rubber stamps of the government
bureaucracy, being totally devoid of any independent life whatsoever.
The Kronstadters also wanted to see a restitution of proletarian freedom
which had been systematically eliminated by the Bolsheviks since 1918.
The communards had absolutely no desire for any restoration of power to
the exploiters, but freedom of speech and assembly for the peasants,
workers and their political allies was an important demand. This attempt
to restore the freedom of the pre-October days was of some urgency since
it was not only the bourgeoisie who were to be found in the prisons:
virtually the whole of the non-Bolshevik left had been incarcerated.
In reality, a whole dictatorial, oppressive state system had been
brought into being by Lenin and his party. Their knee-jerk response to
any difficulty which arose after their seizure of power was to tighten
the screw further: repression, bureaucracy and control were the methods
used. A pleasant irony in all of this is that Lenin died a deeply
unhappy man once he belatedly realised the reality of his Frankenstein
society. Not only was Lenin’s Russia a dictatorship but it was also an
extremely hierarchical one. Bourgeois privilege had given way to the
privileges of the “commisarocracy”. Not surprisingly, the sailors of
Kronstadt demanded the “equalisation of rations” for all workers except
those engaged in dangerous or unhealthy jobs.
There is no doubt that the insurrectionaries had had a gutful of the
Bolsheviks and their methods. Only the overthrow of the Bolsheviks and
their replacement by organs of self-organised production together with
the granting of freedom to artisans and peasants (as long as they didn’t
hire labour) could retrieve the situation, argued the Kronstandters. But
the Kronstadt demands, even though they had been mouthed by the
Bolsheviks themselves, were met unsurprisingly with repression and
slander. Like the communards of Paris, those of Kronstadt put up bitter
resistance to the state’s bullying and military assault. With the
destruction of this last breath of 1917 died the last hope of Russia’s
oppressed. Only now is there any sign of a rebirth of libertarian
ideals.
The Paris and Kronstadt Communes were expressions of working class
self-activity which continue to provide inspiration.
Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist groups will cynically invoke the former when
it suits them whilst, inconsistently, condemning Kronstadt as
counterrevolutionary. If they are particularly hypocritical they will
cry crocodile tears over the destruction of Kronstadt, pointing to the
“tragic necessity” of it all.
But we anarchist communists see in the commune a sketch of how society
could be organised. The commune model provides an organisational basis
for creating self-directing, integrated units which when federated with
similar bodies could have a national and even international character.
The Paris and Kronstadt Communes were both brought about under extremely
difficult circumstances and lasted only for a matter of weeks. Despite
their preoccupation of survival, they demonstrated the practicability of
the commune as an organisational form which generated the maximum level
of freedom, solidarity and equality. The commune as a geographical
entity can accommodate both community and workplace anarchy. It is a
model for the future.