Anonymous Comrade submits "Guy Debord / Attila Kotányi / Raoul Vaneigem

Theses on the Paris Commune

1

“The classical workers movement must be reexamined without any illusions,
particularly without any illusions regarding its various political and pseudotheoretical
heirs, for all they have inherited is its failure. The apparent successes of this movement
are actually its fundamental failures (reformism or the establishment of a state
bureaucracy), while its failures (the Paris Commune or the 1934 Asturian revolt) are its
most promising successes so far, for us and for the future.” (Internationale
Situationniste #7.)

2 `

The Commune was the biggest festival of the nineteenth century. Underlying the events
of that spring of 1871 one can see the insurgents’ feeling that they had become the
masters of their own history, not so much on the level of “governmental”
politics as on the level of their everyday life. (Consider, for example, the games
everyone played with their weapons: they were in fact playing with power.) It is also
in this sense that Marx should be understood when he says that “the most important
social measure of the Commune was its own existence in acts.”

3

Engels’s remark, “Look at the Paris Commune — that was the
dictatorship of the proletariat,” should be taken seriously in order to reveal what
the dictatorship of the proletariat is not (the various forms of state dictatorship over
the proletariat in the name of the proletariat).

4

It has been easy to make justified criticisms of the Commune’s obvious lack of a coherent
organizational structure. But as the problem of political structures seems far more
complex to us today than the would-be heirs of the Bolshevik-type structure claim it to
be, it is time we examine the Commune not just as an outmoded example of revolutionary
primitivism, all of whose mistakes can easily be overcome, but as a positive experiment
whose whole truth has yet to be rediscovered and fulfilled.

5

The Commune had no leaders. And this at a time when the idea of the necessity of
leaders was universally accepted in the workers movement. This is the first reason for its
paradoxical successes and failures. The official organizers of the Commune were
incompetent (compared with Marx or Lenin, or even Blanqui). But on the other hand, the
various “irresponsible” acts of that moment are precisely what is needed for the
continuation of the revolutionary movement of our own time (even if the circumstances
restricted almost all those acts to the purely destructive level — the most famous
example being the rebel who, when a suspect bourgeois insisted that he had never had
anything to do with politics, replied, “That’s precisely why I’m going to
kill you”).

6

The vital importance of the general arming of the people was manifested practically and
symbolically from the beginning to the end of the movement. By and large the right to
impose popular will by force was not surrendered and left to any specialized detachments.
This exemplary autonomy of the armed groups had its unfortunate flip side in their lack of
coordination: at no point in the offensive or defensive struggle against Versailles did
the people’s forces attain military effectiveness. It should be borne in mind,
however, that the Spanish revolution was lost — as, in the final analysis, was the
civil war itself — in the name of such a transformation into a “republican
army.” The contradiction between autonomy and coordination would seem to have been
largely related to the technological level of the period.

7

The Commune represents the only implementation of a revolutionary urbanism to
date — attacking on the spot the petrified signs of the dominant organization of
life, understanding social space in political terms, refusing to accept the innocence of
any monument. Anyone who disparages this attack as some “lumpenproletarian
nihilism,” some “irresponsibility of the pétroleuses,” should
specify what he believes to be of positive value in the present society and worth
preserving (it will turn out to be almost everything). “All space is already occupied
by the enemy. . . . Authentic urbanism will appear when the absence of this
occupation is created in certain zones. What we call construction starts there. It can be
clarified by the positive void concept developed by modern physics.” (Basic Program of Unitary Urbanism, Internationale
Situationniste #6.)

8

The Paris Commune succumbed less to the force of arms than to the force of habit. The
most scandalous practical example was the refusal to use the cannons to seize the French
National Bank when money was so desperately needed. During the entire existence of the
Commune the bank remained a Versaillese enclave in Paris, defended by nothing more than a
few rifles and the mystique of property and theft. The other ideological habits proved in
every respect equally disastrous (the resurrection of Jacobinism, the defeatist strategy
of the barricades in memory of 1848, etc.).

9

The Commune shows how those who defend the old world always benefit in one way or
another from the complicity of revolutionaries — particularly of those
revolutionaries who merely think about revolution, and who turn out to still think
like the defenders. In this way the old world retains bases (ideology, language,
customs, tastes) among its enemies, and uses them to reconquer the terrain it has lost.
(Only the thought-in-acts natural to the revolutionary proletariat escapes it irrevocably:
the Tax Bureau went up in flames.) The real “fifth column” is in the very minds
of revolutionaries.

10

The story of the arsonists who during the final days of the Commune went to destroy
Notre-Dame, only to find themselves confronted by an armed battalion of Commune artists,
is richly provocative example of direct democracy. It gives an idea of the kind of
problems that will need to be resolved in the perspective of the power of the councils.
Were those artists right to defend a cathedral in the name of eternal aesthetic values
— and in the final analysis, in the name of museum culture — while other people
wanted to express themselves then and there by making this destruction symbolize their
absolute defiance of a society that, in its moment of triumph, was about to consign their
entire lives to silence and oblivion? The artist partisans of the Commune, acting as
specialists, already found themselves in conflict with an extremist form of struggle
against alienation. The Communards must be criticized for not having dared to answer the
totalitarian terror of power with the use of the totality of their weapons. Everything
indicates that the poets who at that moment actually expressed the Commune’s inherent
poetry were simply wiped out. The Commune’s mass of unaccomplished acts
enabled its tentative actions to be turned into “atrocities” and their memory to
be censored. Saint-Just’s remark, “Those who make revolution half way only dig
their own graves,” also explains his own silence.⁽¹⁾

11

Theoreticians who examine the history of this movement from a divinely omniscient
viewpoint (like that found in classical novels) can easily prove that the Commune was
objectively doomed to failure and could not have been successfully consummated. They
forget that for those who really lived it, the consummation was already there.

12

The audacity and inventiveness of the Commune must obviously be measured not in
relation to our time, but in terms of the political, intellectual and moral attitudes of
its own time, in terms of the solidarity of all the common assumptions that it
blasted to pieces. The profound solidarity of presently prevailing assumptions (right and
left) gives us an idea of the inventiveness we can expect of a comparable explosion today.

13

The social war of which the Commune was one episode is still being fought today (though
its superficial conditions have changed considerably). In the task of “making
conscious the unconscious tendencies of the Commune” (Engels), the last word has yet
to be said.

14

For almost twenty years in France the Stalinists and the leftist Christians have
agreed, in memory of their anti-German national front, to stress the element of national
disarray and offended patriotism in the Commune. (According to the current Stalinist line,

“the French people petitioned to be better governed” and were finally driven to
desperate measures by the treachery of the unpatriotic right wing of the bourgeoisie.) In
order to refute this pious nonsense it would suffice to consider the role played by all
the foreigners who came to fight for the Commune. As Marx said, the Commune was the
inevitable battle, the climax of 23 years of struggle in Europe by “our party.”

GUY DEBORD, ATTILA KOTÁNYI, RAOUL VANEIGEM

18 March 1962

[TRANSLATOR’S NOTE]

1. Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, one of the Jacobin leaders during the
French Revolution, was executed along with Robespierre in 1794.