Paris Commune

More specifically, he attacked the Law of Suspects, which he claimed had imprisoned 200,000 citizens on the flimsiest of grounds.

Of course, in an era when the Paris Commune sanctioned the arrest of anyone who did as little as show concern for other suspects, Demelard was smart enough not to assault the revolutionary government directly.

A free press did not exist in the Terror, and although he was advocating for its re-establishment, Demelard knew that there were limits.

So, in a move that would no doubt be well received by a grey history audience, instead of denouncing the law of suspects and the government which enforced it, he conducted an elaborate history lesson.

And that history, you know, that sort of historical gesture, like, you know, goes back to the early American labor movement.

So the Paris Commune in 1871 gets this reputation for there being these women called the Petschkluses, who are like women who are walking around lighting fires.

which is an image that comes out of the final repression, the final days of repression in the commune.

They never existed really, but there were women who were fighting and were lighting fires.

They just weren't a specialized role in the Paris Commune.

Then in the great upheaval of 77 in the US, after the Paris Commune has been repressed, everyone has been murdered or literally sent to an island penal colony.

They start talking about communards and petroluses, like they're coming, they're attacking.

That's what's happening here in America.

The procedure was that special days would be set apart for carrying out wholesale domiciliary, domiciliary searches which stripped the inhabitants of the bulk of their clothing, linen, and other articles, and left them, by way of rations, merely a shirt apiece, a couple of handkerchiefs, and so forth.

Let us take a description of a particular squeezing day, which in nineteen twenty-one was carried out in Yekaterinodar on the anniversary of the Paris Commune.

At nightfall that day, all houses inhabited by persons unlucky enough to have been found gentry or merchants or leading citizens or lawyers or officers before the revolution, and to be doctors or professors or engineers, in short, bourgeois at the present time, were invaded by Red Guards and Bolshevists armed to the teeth, who made careful search everywhere and removed all money and other valuables, dragged the houses' occupiers outside in their indoor clothes, and without regard for age or sex or even the state of health, so that persons suffering from typhus were taken, loaded the lot onto wagons and dispatched them to destinations elsewhere, half of them to a local concentration camp and the other half to Petrovsk to, for forced labor in the Caspian fisheries.

And this atrocious deportation of families by the hundred went on for a day and a half, accompanied with confiscation of the property of the deported and distribution by the same amongst the local workers, though as a matter of fact, we do not know how far it really reached those workers.

It's got crime.

There's an 1877 rail strike, which drew comparisons to the Paris Commune.

We've talked about that when we talked about Les Mis.

The Paris Commune has come up a couple times in this show.

But that was famously, you know, the city of Paris declaring itself completely separate and self-governed, part from any federal government, because it wanted to represent the people directly.

The fact that there is a rail strike that's drawing comparisons to that just shows how unionization wasn't like management, labor, negotiate contracts and drives up prices for everybody.

Well, Marxism presents three stages of development.

The first stage is the stage that covers the period when Marx and Engels clarify the laws of motion in a free competition capitalist economy, which lead to ever-increasing concentration of capital and when revolutionary activities ranged from 1848 revolutions to Marx's ideological leadership of the Working Men's Association, which is called the First International, to the successful armed revolution of the proletariat in the Paris Commune.

Anytime you hear me say Commune in this entire thing, think Paris Commune very specifically because that was seen as a huge victory, uh, to M- Marx and to Lenin.

Stage two.

Stage two covers the period of Lenin's clarification of the growth of capitalism into imperialism and the Bolshevik Revolution and Stalin's carrying forth the theoretical and practical work of Lenin.

They both state that they believe that.

Marx does not give a way as to how that will occur.

He talks about the dictatorship of the proletariat a lot when he talks about the Paris Commune, but there's no sense that that's what leads to communism for him.

Now, E. Michael Jones was the very first time I ever heard the 1848 revolutions, um, treated as, as positive things.

Uh, usually, you know, this was a Masonic move, but, but from that point of view, uh, the anti-capitalist part of this, and I'm not, I'm not talking about the, you know, the French Commune or any Paris Commune, but the anti-capitalist side of this, um, capitalism is a, a revolutionary doctrine that was simply taken over by, uh, Marxists for their own purposes.

Marxism never had anything to do with, with workers.

I'm, I'm telling you this, and certainly not farmers.

Kropotkin had sympathy for France and hostility toward Germany.

He saw France as the heir to the revolutionary tradition of 1789 and the Paris Commune, and he saw Germany as the embodiment of militarism and authoritarianism.

He believed the war was a poor moment for social revolution and feared that a German victory would usher in decades of political reaction, wiping out the hard-won freedoms that had been achieved in countries like Britain and France.

His support for the Allies was rooted in his broader view of history: That social progress was never guaranteed and could always be reversed; that periods of freedom and cooperation could collapse into authoritarianism.