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The Paris Commune essentially arose out of the defeat suffered by the French ruling class at the hands of the Prussians and the Germans, like many other revolutions in history. Napoleon III made a huge error in provoking a conflict with the Germans, and Bismarck and gang were waiting. After this defeat inflicted on the French army, they fled to Versailles.

The Parisians, the workers especially, and the artisans and the intellectuals, said, “We don’t accept this surrender, and let us liberate Paris, and hold it, and fight the Prussians. We don’t want to be occupied either by Napoleon or the Prussians.”

Here you see echoes of Lenin’s position during World War I: We’re not going to support either side. We first saw glimmers of that in the Paris Commune, and they took over. They defeated the reactionary armies gathered in Versailles, and you had the first big outbreak of what we can only call workers’ and popular democracy.

Not all Commune participants were workers. There were many citizens involved who were small artisans in little workshops, artists, writers. Rimbaud, for example, wrote a poem describing going through the Paris Commune, which is incredibly moving.

Then the Paris Commune electrified everyone by saying, “We’re going to elect our own representatives from below,” because democracy did not exist at that time anywhere. Germany was probably the most advanced, but here too, a powerful emergency law had been put into motion to try and keep the Social Democrats at a distance. This democracy from below excited everyone, and these representatives went to the local assembly and their All-Paris Assembly and made their voices heard.

The Vienna Consensus in 1815was not too dissimilar to the Washington Consensus of the 1990s, where they said, “We must make sure that wherever revolution rises, wherever opposition forces develop, they are crushed immediately. We can’t take these risks.”

Then 1848 erupted with revolutions and demands for national self-determination all over Europe, and then you had the outbreak of the Paris Commune. This was very close to the hearts and the minds of revolutionaries all over the world. The message went out as far as the Philippines: “Look what’s happening in Paris. Look what’s said or what they’re doing.”

From 1871 onwards, you began to see the development of a current which was proto-Marxist. Marx supported the Commune completely, but felt that a huge number of tactical mistakes had been committed due to inexperience which could have been stopped. Those people who try and differentiate Lenin from Marx will find that actually what Marx said on the Paris Commune was very similar to what Lenin was going to say later.

The other thing about Lenin and the state that was created in 1917 is that all the Western alliance — the Entente powers, the United States — consisted of the people who would run American intelligence for years to come. John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles as twenty-somethings were present at that meeting to decide how to defeat the Russian Revolution. Britain was involved. Other European powers were involved. Twenty-two armies backed by the big powers of the Western alliance were trying to defeat the Russians. That left a very deep mark on that revolution.

You need an understanding of politics. Lenin, his generation, and Marx: these were political people. They understood that without politics, nothing could move forward. Lenin was of course in this sense a genius, as even his enemies acknowledged. Absolutely crystal clear, not painting defeats as victories, but saying that victories were possible if we did A, B, and C.