If you read the newest article by CPUSA officer C.J. Atkins (managing editor of the party organ People’s World, and Executive Director of the pro-Canadian government NGO, ProudPolitics), How does the Communist Party elect its leadership, it’s clear that they still aren’t ready to admit new voices. We will address the hypocrisy that is the CPUSA constitution and the anti-democratic structure it enshrines to protect its opportunistic and careerist leadership below, but first we must deal with something that is purposefully hidden from new recruits in the CPUSA: the party’s own history.

For this reason, we urge the widest possible circulation of this pamphlet among the new recruits of the CPUSA, so they can make their choices clearly, and have their voices heard despite the pressure from the “national” organization. Only through real struggle — not the tame, leashed thing present at CPUSA conventions of the past century — can the party be vigorously purged of its opportunists and careerists and fit to participate in the revolutionary milieu of North American Communism.

A History of Opportunism

It’s not easy to learn the history of the CPUSA; comprehensive studies haven’t been compiled, and the publicly available information online is all tinged with bias one way or the other. Fatally for the CPUSA, the party’s own accounts of its history that are publicly available (for instance, Five misconceptions about the CP’s stance on Black liberation, written by a CPUSA employee who is paid through one of its shell corporations) are outright lies. We know this because other party members and even earlier party historians disagree. The Five misconceptions can be easily debunked by looking at the party records!

We can divide the history of the CPUSA into several major periods based on the predominant forces at work. The party’s roots can be traced back to the Pre-Party Period (roughly 1876-1919). The founding of the party (1919-1923) was followed almost immediately by fierce factional fighting between different types of political opportunists. We can call this entire period the Lovestone War (1919-1928). The party’s Third Period (1928-1935) coincides with the so-called Third Period of the Comintern. These three periods can collectively be termed the “early party” in which the membership was grappling with imperialist opportunism. The Early Party was followed by the disastrous Browder Period (1935-1958), during which open class-collaborationism ruled the day. The intervening Hall Period (1958-2000) was followed by the most recent period of open liquidation (2000-2019) and the Sims/Cambron Co-Chair Period (2019-present).

The Early Party

The party was initially created out of several social democratic organizations that had long subordinated internationalist concerns to mere economism — the narrow concerns of direct economic gains. A coalition of “leftists” brought together non-reformist elements of the Socialist Party of America. This group was known as the Left Wing Section, a formal faction within the party. This faction was not only praised by Lenin, but was even used by the Communist International (Comintern) to help form the Communist Party of the USA. So much for the ban on factions!

The early party was actually unable to cohere; immediately following the election of the Left Wing Section to most of the executive positions in the SPA in 1919, the moderates in the SPA expelled them. The non-English speaking “language sections” of the SPA broke off and founded the Communist Party of America. The SPA called an emergency convention in August of 1919 and the remaining left delegates formed the Communist Labor Party. These were both ordered by the Comintern to join into the single Communist Party of the United States of America and the CPUSA as we know it was born.

But it was not born without strife. The following ten years would be typified by a power struggle between two cliques represented more or less by two forces of opportunism within the party: the Ruthenberg-led former CPA and the Lovestonites. There’s a reason you’ve never heard of Lovestone: he was responsible for the thesis of “American exceptionalism.” This is the line that the CPUSA, openly or not, still materially follows. They can’t afford to educate you about Lovestone because you might see through their program.

His clique put forth the so-called analysis that capitalism was stronger in the U.S. than anywhere else on earth or in history, and that it could not be overcome by revolutionary might until it began to decay. He presented this thesis to the Comintern and helped lead the early CPUSA toward a position of capitulationism. He proposed that the party should just attempt to “hang on” until the revolution was possible, retrenching and defending itself from the capitalists but taking no moves to advance toward overthrowing the capitalist class. This basic thesis has informed top leadership in the CPUSA since.

The Comintern blasted Lovestone, as did Comrade Stalin himself. They ordered the CPUSA to cease factional fighting between Ruthenberg and Lovestone and chastised Lovestone as being a defeatist. This was not the end of Lovestone. By the 1960s, Lovestone would be an active CIA contact inside the AFL-CIO, funneling money from the counter-revolutionary forces of the Central Intelligence Agency into the labor movement.

At the same time, the African Blood Brotherhood was being integrated into the CPUSA and revolutionary action was proceeding in Alabama and the Black Belt. Harry Haywood is the most famous of the revolutionary theorists to come out of the U.S. during this period, and for good reason. Haywood was a proponent and defender of the Black Belt Thesis, the analysis that the Black population of the U.S. Empire was a nation-in-chains in the South, and this serves as a nexus of oppression everywhere until land reform is undertaken. He was a staunch opponent of revisionism and opportunism in the upper ranks of the CPUSA.

Those who opposed Haywood and the Comintern’s position on the Black nation classified racial prejudice as a “moral concern” that needed no special attention. Haywood, the Comintern, and many Black comrades in the U.S. defined Black liberation with regard to specific economic structures. The struggle within the CPUSA against Black liberation came to a head not during the early party period, but in the 1940s, under the villain Earl Browder, as the party tacked toward peaceful coexistence with the U.S. capitalist class, and then finally during the liquidationist period at the end of the 1950s as the party was permanently conquered by petit-bourgeois interests.

Earl Browder: Arch Class-Collaborationist

The never-unified CPUSA’s internal struggles continued to grow more dangerous throughout the middle and late 1930s. It had not been on any firm class footing, despite its membership achieving certain powerful successes in the U.S. class struggle. Earl Browder was appointed by the Comintern to suppress this factionalism and was selected to serve as the party’s head alongside William Z. Foster, the CPUSA’s candidate for president who ran on a Black Belt liberation ticket. Foster suffered from health problems, and Browder took command of the party apparatus.

In the early 1930s, the CPUSA considered president Roosevelt to be a fascist, and opposed joint work with the Democrats. Browder took the lead in convincing the Comintern that a new detente with capitalists in the U.S. was not only possible, but necessary to fight European fascism. He was the champion of the “People’s Front” — a corruption of Georgi Dimitrov’s United Front strategy — and by 1936, Communists were in key positions of the Roosevelt administration. Foster, now sidelined, fought against Browder’s collaborationism with Roosevelt, but Browder controlled the key party positions.

This is how the embarrassment of “Communism is 20th Century Americanism” came to pass. “Patriotic” Communism, as seen today, is a revival of Browder’s efforts at class-collaboration.

It doesn’t stop there.

Browder produced a piece of “theory” known as Teheran, Our Path in War and Peace which was published in 1944. Among other garbage, including a contention that imperialist exploitation of the world by the U.S. was weakening, Browder wrote that “There can be no effective national unity in America… that does not include big capitalists.”

“The Communists,” he wrote, “foresee that the practical political aims they hold will for a long time be in agreement on all essential points with the aims of a much larger body of non-Communists, and that therefore our political actions will be merged in such larger movements. The existence of a separate political party of Communists, therefore, no longer serves a practical purpose but can be, on the contrary, an obstacle to the larger unity.”

The party encouraged no-strike pledges during the war, ostensibly to protect Soviet Communism, but in actuality destroying the revolution at the time when the organization of the working class in the U.S. Empire was at its height, and a time when U.S. imperialism was weakened by fighting foreign enemies.

In 1944, Browder dissolved the party.

This move was nearly successful; throughout 1943 and ‘44, he suppressed all dissent to the buildup of the plan to dissolve the CPUSA as being in violation of party discipline. This toxic and ludicrous understanding of democratic centralism, preclusion of all dissent, persists within the CPUSA and many other “sister” parties to this day. It was only through the intervention of the French C.P. and the circulation of newspapers and letters from France blasting Browder and demanding his removal that the party was reconstituted in 1945.

Although the party was actually dissolved and Browder managed to issue party-wide orders to that effect, it was shortly thereafter put back together under the leadership of William Foster.

It was during this time of Browder’s leadership that the attacks on Haywood and the Black members of the party holding to the line of national self-determination grew stronger and stronger. Browder fought to suppress national self-determination as antagonistic to the new vision of the world he predicted in which the U.S. capitalist class would eventually peacefully hand over power to the working class.

The Traitor’s Convention: 1957

In response to FBI investigations and the prosecution of eleven highly-placed members of the CPUSA, the party took the position that it was not advocating for the overthrow of the capitalist state — a crime under bourgeois law — but for Browder’s “peaceful transition.” The eleven defendants were found guilty and each sentenced to five years in prison. This led to the prosecution of some 100 more party members throughout the early 1950s.

The party, having been led down the rabbit-hole of opportunism by Browder, who took advantage of the already-existing petit-bourgeois tendency for collaboration and conciliation with Roosevelt and the so-called “progressive” capitalists, was caught unprepared for this onslaught.

Khrushchev’s “secret speech” also rocked the party. John Gates, editor of the Daily Worker, called for dissolving the CP as a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party and became the center for a new liquidationist faction, intent on removing the revolutionary content of Marxism and making it palatable to the progressive capitalists. Liquidationists sprang out of the CPUSA woodwork. They demanded a “re-examination” of Marxism-Leninism and condemned the theory of the bourgeois state as an instrument of class rule.

The most fateful convention of the CPUSA, that of 1957, was fast approaching. A draft resolution was circulated in September of 1956 to be debated at the convention. The draft argued for what Haywood recorded as a “peaceful, parliamentary, constitutional transition to socialism.” It would be

…the development of an anti-monopoly coalition through “labor and popular” forces gaining “decisive influence in key Democratic Party state organizations and even liberal Republican movements.” Thus would develop the “American Road to Socialism.” The Communist Party would remain on the sidelines to “support and endorse” such progressive campaigns. On the Afro-American question, the right of self-determination was completely omitted and the Party urged wholehearted acceptance of the NAACP slogan of “Free by ‘63.” Working class leadership and proletarian revolution were entirely excluded from this document. The National Board voted in favor of the resolution, Foster and Davis voting a qualified “yes.”

Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik

Left opposition to this turn grew throughout the end of 1956 and the beginning of 1957. However, they were lacking central guidance; the left opposition was excluded from the National Board. They had no regular access to any of the party machinery to air their views, and leadership deliberately suppressed Marxist-Leninist education to maintain the status quo. All dissent was systematically suppressed, and inner-party democracy was quashed.

Three factions of rightists came to the Sixteenth Convention on February 9, 1957. The Gates faction was openly anti-Soviet and supported the liquidation of the party in its entirety. The center-right  faction was led by Eugene Dennis and called for the ideological liquidation of the party’s vanguard position. The left-center was represented by Foster, and were staunchly opposed to any further leftward movement — embracing open calls for revolution, for instance, in the face of FBI repression.

The Sixteenth Convention, in an attempt to quell the disunity that had plagued the party from the beginning, moved to suppress the split. The three right trends, which had captured the National Board, called for a “unity of all trends” during the convention. The left opposition attacked this false unity, and upset many of the “unity slates” — you see the beginning of the hideous slate system here — that were planned to oust left candidates.

As part of this “unity of all trends,” the three right cliques forced through the passage of the treacherous September Resolution, which spelled the death knell of the party as any kind of revolutionary force. Immediately following the convention, the three “unified” trends began to harass the left opposition within the party, driving membership out through bureaucratic gamesmanship. When Haywood attempted to challenge the slogan calling for the party to follow the petit-bourgeois lead of the NAACP, he was attacked by the leadership. The question of self-determination for the Black Belt and the oppressed Black nation was abandoned. The CPUSA had openly determined to follow the petit-bourgeois-dominated NAACP and the petit-bourgeois/bourgeois alliance that formed the central core of the Democratic Party of the 1930s-60s.

The Party Leaves the Struggle — So the Struggle Leaves the Party

The content of the CPUSA program has been, since the Sixteenth Congress, roughly the same for the last 70 years. In some periods it is more openly liquidationist (as we will see below, with the coming of Sam Webb), and in some less (as this current period), but the actual on-the-ground effect of every party program since 1957 has been, on one end of the spectrum, to tail the petit-bourgeois “progressives” or, on the other, to call for the complete abolishment of the party.

The Black Power movement and the New Communist Movement began in the mid-60s  as the CPUSA failed in its historical role to lead the working classes. In 1966, the Black Panther Party was formed. Organizations like the essentially anarchist Students for a New Democratic Society and its militant offshoot, the Weather Underground, sprang up. These were organic expressions of working class militant socialism that arose independently because the main outlet for the working class had been stopped up by the revisionist, opportunist, and government-infiltrated CPUSA. Two FBI operations, SOLO and TOPLEV, garnered many CPUSA informants; as early as 1948, the CIA had identified a goal to implement agents at the top levels of the CPUSA, and unredacted reports from the FBI as late as 1984 indicate a large number of government spies within the CPUSA ranks. Operation CHAOS, a CIA domestic spying program begun by Lyndon Johnson in 1967, undoubtedly planted even more spies within the CPUSA ranks.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the struggle thus, having been driven out of the party by its accommodation of U.S. capitalism, manifested in other organizations. Projects were undertaken to re-found the CPUSA or to purge it of its opportunistic elements. None of these produced lasting results. Because the CPUSA had consumed the oxygen for working class organizing on an all-Empire level, because it stood back and did nothing while the Black Power movement was slaughtered in the streets by police both in uniform and in suits, there was no way to challenge it, and all meaningful revolutionary activity drained away. By the late 1980s, party membership had dwindled from a once-proud 300,000 to 25,000.

The Ghost of Sam Webb

The next stage in the CPUSA’s development was the appearance of the treacherous Sam Webb in 2000. Webb became chairman, and kept the party on the same tack as its 1980-incarnation: playing a supporting role to the Democratic Party against the “ultra-right” threat of the GOP.

Webb repeated the Sixteenth Congress throughout his entire tenure. He directly contradicted the tasks set out by the socialists of the 20th century and embraced Bernsteinian revisionism as the order of the day. “While political supremacy of the working class and its allies is imperative, once acquired its task isn’t to smash the state into so many pieces, but rather to transform the class content of state structures,” he wrote in 2009. “[C]ommunists of our generation,” he sang, in the siren song we have seen above, designed to convince the petit-bourgeois, vacillating elements, “would do well to follow the example of our Depression-era comrades.”

He denounced Marxism-Leninism itself, calling it “rigid and formulaic” and said it was time to move “beyond Communist Parties.” At the 2014 convention, the party narrowly avoided removing Marxism-Leninism itself from the constitution and party documents.

Webb was ousted at this convention by John Bachtell — current editor-in-chief of the party organ, People’s World. Bachtell, who worked for the Obama campaigns, had worked extensively as chair on the so-called inside/outside project coordinating “Communists” within the Democratic Party. He was slightly to the left of Webb in that he didn’t call for open liquidation of the CPUSA as an organizational structure, but did hew, in his time as chair, to a tailist strategy to “defeat Trumpism” (as he put it). Class consciousness had begun to rise with the threat of the far-right fascist advancement of the Tea Party and then-metastasizing MAGA elements in the GOP. Webb, who advocated dissolving the party just as Browder had done, had to go. The party couldn’t countenance open liquidation — perhaps because it once again began to serve its purpose as a magnet for young Communists who don’t know any better. This allows the party to draw in potential revolutionaries and neutralize them by subjecting them to Byzantine, opaque, and undemocratic party structures. The rules require them not to get too feisty, and soon they find themselves forced to keep their revolutionary activity at a very low grade. At every opportunity, that energy is redirected into campaigning for the political class of the Democratic Party — to campaigning for our enemy. Sam Webb had to be sacrificed to save Webbism. Growing class consciousness threatened to push the working class into a revolutionary position. John Bachtell helped to negate it. The party had been winnowed down to some 2,500 members in the wake of Webb’s disastrous time as chair. After Webb was ousted, it grew again to roughly 5,000.

In 2019, Bachtell lost the chairship to long-time CPUSA members and Webbites Rossana Cambron and Joe Sims. This followed the even higher pitch of class consciousness during the Trump years; membership in the CPUSA appears to be as high as 8,000 people. The co-chairs immediately began to call for more revolutionary organizing to channel the surge of class consciousness — while maintaining the exact same 1957 line in action.

CPUSA’s Democracy — but For Which Class?

There exists at the top of the CPUSA a group of well-paid labor bureaucrats that make their living off of corporations owned by party members. Party properties and organs — in fact, all CPUSA assets — are owned by shell corporations like the International Publishing Corporation and Long View Publishing. This includes a network of charities and other corporations that pay out salaries, such as Military Voices Speak Out (the charity headed by Arturo Cambron, Rossana’s husband and a District Organizer for the party in California). Individuals are vetted to serve in these positions, then moved up through the CPUSA and the “mass” organizations that are controlled by high-ranking CPUSA members (like Long View, etc.)

To understand how this leadership retains control of the money and resources of the party as a whole, we can step through the sly doublespeak of C.J. Atkins’ article about elections within the CPUSA.

To begin with, Atkins starts with a canard. “In the Communist Party,” he cautions, “our unity and our collectivity are our most powerful weapons. Our democratic process is all about finding ways to include the voices, thoughts, and experiences of everyone in the party as we decide our policies — and doing so in a fashion that is collective, which safeguards our unity.” This sounds like a touching bit of organizational dogma, but what does Atkins mean when he says this? He admits right away that elections “might even strike [new members] as downright undemocratic when they first see it, totally top-down.”

What is he talking about? The slate system and the National Committee.

Let’s forget that the U.S. Empire isn’t a “nation” but rather a prisonhouse of nations. Set that to one side. What is the National Committee? It is the executive body of the CPUSA, and makes all decisions on all levels. It is the final arbiter of all disputes, and the body to which one would appeal if you disagree with another body. The National Committee is the Politburo and the Executive Committee and the Supreme Soviet rolled into one.

So how are members of this ultra-powerful party-brain elected? Once every four years (or longer, if the National Committee decides to postpone) a convention is held. Once the convention date is set, the existing National Committee creates a subcommittee called the Committee on Leadership. This subcommittee develops what Atkins calls “proposals” for who should staff the National Board and the National Committee, and who should serve as officers of the various subcommittees. How does it do this? Through no formal process. It “casts a broad net across the entire country.” How democratic! Can you submit your name for consideration? Not formally.

“Consultation is the name of the game,” Atkins says. “It’s all about ensuring that the leadership of our party is equipped with the diversity and experience that’s needed.” Ah, but the Committee on Leadership is also “tasked with guaranteeing the party’s continuity, and that means getting the right mix of seasoned party veterans and newly-emerging or young comrades who are growing into leaders.”

Break that down.

The leadership of the party, who have the absolute authority to expel or dismiss members, to select officers, to pick who get the lucrative sinecures of appointment to the party corporations and the payroll of party charities, breaks off a piece of itself (we don’t know, from Atkins’ article, how big the Committee on Leadership is — it might be composed of all the same members as the National Committee) to pick a few people “growing into leaders” (based on the criteria that they share the same political outlook as the current leadership) and “seasoned veterans” (by which they mean, charitably, the same small pool of people on rotation, or uncharitably, just themselves).

Is the floor open for nominations at the convention? Sure, but the vote is presented as a slate. Members are not allowed to campaign — Atkins presents campaigning as some filthy bourgeois tactic, rather than the knowing coalition of groups sharing struggles — so any attempt to campaign prior to the convention is just labeled factionalism and the campaigners are expelled.

But the process doesn’t end there. The National Committee then appoints a Presiding Committee — a credentialing committee and executive committee for the conference. The Presiding Committee makes final rulings on procedural questions, and then presents the slate of candidates selected by the Leadership Committee to the convention. No one that is not approved by the Presiding Committee can appear on the slate. Voting is not yes or no. It is not up or down. Voting proceeds by “choosing a minimum percentage of names from the final list of nominees” — the slate.

Truly, we can take Atkins’ words about process at their face value: the National Committee elects itself.

Debate about political lines and issues is prohibited until the convention begins. Such debate is (wrongfully) called a breach of democratic centralism in the long four-year plus stretches between conventions. Don’t like a party policy? Don’t like a party line? Even bringing up that fact inside a party meeting is grounds for discipline. How can you determine if you agree with people on the slate? How can you tell what you think about any individual candidate? You are left to the whims of the Leadership Committee and the Presiding Committee, both of which are wholly creatures of the National Committee.

Whom does this “democracy” serve?

It serves the clique of interested functionaries who live off of the wages of the rank-and-file party members. It serves John Bachtell, who is paid by Long View and International Publishers. Every few months, the party brass sends out a party-wide warning that People’s World needs more, more, more donations, or else they won’t meet their goal! What is their goal?

Subsidizing the very opportunist serpents that are paralyzing the party with coil after coil and loop after loop of bald-faced lies.

Proletarian Democracy Requires Struggle

It is not possible to achieve a meaningful contribution to the revolution without struggle. Bitter struggle! That means the combat of opposed viewpoints, the dialectic of conflict. Why is the CPUSA averse to conflict? Because its leadership cannot afford to be on the losing end. All struggle must be controlled and subsumed, lest the party be re-captured by the revolutionary element and its resources directed to the destruction of the capitalist state and the very lifestyles of the petit-bourgeois functionaries that now command it.

Do not let them defang the struggle.

Confront the beast in its lair.

Ever onwards, toward revolution!

The 18th Brumaire of Louis-Napoléon

Our story begins with the fall of the July Monarchy, itself the result of a brief explosion of street fighting in the early 19th century which rid France of the last restored Bourbon king, Charles X. King Louis-Phillipe d’Orléans took the place of Charles and instituted a vaguely liberal constitutional monarchy.

In February of 1848 — the year that saw Europe explode in upheaval against the so-called Metternich system, with revolutions breaking out in Italy, Vienna, Budapest, and Berlin — the people of Paris demanded Louis-Phillipe liberalize his government. When he failed to meet their demands, revolution swept the streets of the city. The radical socialists of Paris and the bourgeois liberals joined together to erect barricades in the heart of the city. Louis-Phillipe, unwilling to give the order for the army to fire upon the people of France and fearing the republican revolution would send him to the same fate as his father and uncle — regicide — fled first Paris and then France. The bourgeois ministers who reaped the rewards of this revolution would have no such compunction about ordering the army to turn their guns on their former allies, the radical socialists. The July Monarchy came crashing down.

The 1840s were also the years of the great potato blight that swept through Europe. Financial turmoil and an enormous market crash played a decisive role in spurring the 1848 revolutions and, in France, left millions starving and without work.

The bourgeois liberals at once moved to cut out the radical socialists and utopians from the new government. They founded what the French call the Second Republic (following the First Republic, that of the Revolutionary Government in 1792). Although the bourgeois government that took over from Louis-Phillipe promised to enact the “right to work” laws sought by the socialists, instead, they purposefully constructed mismanaged National Workshops in Paris to provide make-work for those thrown into unemployment by the blight, the financial crash, and the tumult of the February Revolution.

When the bourgeois republic of 1848 closed the National Workshops, as poorly managed as they were, the workers in Paris exploded in outrage. Thousands had come from the surrounding countryside to seek work, and now they were told they had scant days to clear out of the city. On 23 June 1848, the city rose. Barricades were built across the heart of Paris and the armed citizenry demanded the establishment not only of a democratic republic, but a social republic: one that solved the crisis of poverty and property. The Second Republic responded by calling out the National Guard, that body of petit-bourgeois shop owners formed into a 40,000-man-strong Parisian militia. Under General Cavaignac, the National Guard crushed the revolt of the June Days, shuttered the workshops, and deported nearly 4,000 insurgents to newly conquered French Algeria.

Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew to the former emperor of France and self-styled Prince, was permitted by the Second Republic to return to his native soil and to run in the parliamentary elections of 1848. In September of that year, he won a seat in the new National Assembly. Catholics and peasants, who missed life under the Empire which had at least seen to their needs, overwhelmingly supported Prince Louis-Napoléon; he was seated in the Assembly to cries of “Vive Napoléon!” and, more troublingly, “Vive l’Empereur!”

In December of 1848, Louis-Napoléon won the newly-created presidency in a landslide 74% vote in the first French election with universal male suffrage. The memory of the glories won by the emperor Napoléon had not faded. The France of the restored and then the July Monarchy was a beaten France, hemmed all around by former enemies that still cowered at the thought of the revolutionary wars that Paris and her armies had brought (along with fire, requisition, and the sword) to all of Europe for a generation. Embittered former soldiers of the emperor and those who longed for the days when tribute flowed into France — instead of out of it — swept the victorious miniature second Napoloéon to power. This movement was backed not only by the old officer corps and the class of career military men created by Napoléon I, but also by the big bourgeoisie, the mighty capitalists of France.

In December of 1851, facing the end of his term limits and unable to convince the Party of Order and the French Parliament to lift them, Louis-Napoléon followed his more famous predecessor. He staged a coup.

A fanatically loyal army was all he needed. On the morning of 2 December, Louis-Napoléon deployed troops all over Paris. His opponents were arrested. On the walls of the city were plastered flyers proclaiming the Six Decrees:

In the name of the French People.

The PRESIDENT of the Republic

DECREES:

The national assembly is dissolved.

Universal suffrage is re-established.

The French people are convened in their committees.

A state of siege is declared.

The council of state is dissolved.

The ministry of the interior is charged with the execution of the present decrees.

On January 14, 1852, the Prince-President declared himself Emperor. The Second Republic was abolished and the Second Empire begun. From 1852 until 1870, the social revolution, which had broken out in 1848 and been suppressed by petit-bourgeois republicans who had, in turn, been crushed by bourgeois monarchists, was crushed under the weight of the Second Empire. Napoléon III went so far as to restructure the face of Paris. Under his direction, the Baron Haussmann tore down entire districts, plowed broad avenues through the old warren of streets, and made certain no one could barricade the center of Paris — just as they had during the fall of the July Monarchy or the June Days, again.

The Franco-Prussian War

In 1870, Germany was being unified by iron and blood under the ungentle guidance of the arch-conservative Prussian minister, Otto von Bismarck. Von Bismarck had, in his own way, helped to shackle the social revolution in Prussia by granting constitutional reforms to disarm Prussian political radicals, just as Louis-Napoléon had argued for universal suffrage merely so he could have himself voted emperor.

When Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a prince of Prussia, seemed poised to take the throne of Spain, France took action to prevent an encirclement on both borders. Although the prince’s candidacy was withdrawn, Otto von Bismarck published a doctored telegram, called the Ems Dispatch, that appeared to show a diplomatic slight between the King of Prussia and a French ambassador. Napoléon III declared war. Many in his court approved, as did the big landowners and bourgeoisie in France, hoping to restore the French Empire to its former glory. Military advisors and Napoléon III  himself believed that the southern German states would ally against Prussia to help serve as a check on their aggressive northern neighbor.

The French army left Paris on July 28, 1870, driving for the German city of Metz. Far from joining the French, the southern German states revealed secret treaties of aid to Prussia, freeing up the entire Prussian army, renowned for its bloodthirstiness and precision, to concentrate against France. After a brief campaign, Napoléon III, surrounded at the small French border-town of Sedan, surrendered to the Prussian army on  September 1, 1870.

Prussia did not accept the surrender as the end of the war. It was Bismarck’s plan to reduce France as a European power; to do so, they would accept only an unconditional surrender. At home, the Second Empire was overthrown when news reached Paris. A group of moderate Republicans, Jules Favre, Léon Gambetta, and General Louis-Jules Trochu, led a coup against Napoléon’s remaining ministries and declared themselves to constitute the Government of National Defense.

The Socialists of Paris

Commune member and National Guard general Antoine Brunel said that the revolution that began on March 18, 1871 was “provoked by patriotic sentiment,” and he was right. For Benoît Malon, member of the Commune and the International Workingman’s Association, the Commune was essentially a socialist undertaking, and he too was right. Gaston Da Costa, a follower of the great revolutionary conspirator Louis-Auguste Blanqui and deputy procurator of the Commune, saw the Commune as a continuation of the Jacobin tradition of the first great French Revolution, and he too was right. The journalist and poet Maxime Vermersch saw in the flames set by the dying Commune a foretaste of the purifying revolution that was still to come, and he also was right. Massenet de Marancour, leader of a National Guard battalion and participant in the Commune’s battles, saw the entire event as the working class falling into a trap set by the bourgeoisie so the latter could have done with any threat to their rule, and he was right as well.

Communards, The story of the Paris Commune of 1871, As told by those who fought for it, Mitchell Abidor Ed., Marxists Internet Archive (2010)

At the time of Napoléon III’s defeat, Paris had many currents of radicalism and socialism within her walls. At the extreme right were the bourgeois republicans who wanted to see the end of the Empire but who demanded protection for private property, safety from the “mob,” and suppression of everyone to their left.

The socialists, of every stripe, advocated for what had come to be known as the “social revolution.” Everywhere in Europe, the questions of the future had been divided, cut in two. There was the “political question” — republic or monarchy — but there was also the “social question” — property or equality. Since the eruption of the French Revolution in 1789, every power in Europe had colluded to prevent the working people from answering the social question. Republicans, monarchists, parliamentarians; all were horrified by the specter then haunting Europe, the specter of Gracchus Babeuf and the sans-culottes of Paris, the specter of Communism.

Pierre Joseph Proudhon, although dead by 1865, lived and worked in Paris and left his legacy there. There were many Proudhonists among the Commune. There were also Jacobins and Babeufists, the heirs of Robespierre and Gracchus Babeuf, two towering figures of the French Revolution. Also among these socialists were the followers of Louis Auguste Blanqui. Although Marx called them “pure revolutionists,” for they followed Blanqui’s theories of the conspiratorial overthrow of the capitalist state, most had no social or economic solutions which would follow such an overthrow. Ideologically, most of the socialists within the Commune were unformed — they had no distinct comprehension of how they were to set about achieving socialism — what economic measures they should take. Their ultimate creation, the Commune, serves as the Marxist model for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The two strongest streams of  socialism, then, were the anarchism of Proudhon (which had been criticized thoroughly by Marx) and the vulgar putschism of the Blanquists. Yet, many of the members of the Commune’s governing bodies were also members of the International Workingmen’s Association — the party to which Marx and Engels belonged, and that would be involved in the Haymarket Massacre in 1886.

The average Communard was the average Parisian: young, between twenty-one and forty years of age. They included artisans and craftsmen. They were skilled and semi-skilled workers. Shoemakers, printers, small-scale artisans, construction workers, day laborers, domestic servants, shopkeepers, clerks, and men in the so-called liberal professions. The women of the Commune came from the world of women’s work, the textile and clothing trades, and prostitutes.

Of the 733 people participating in political clubs, 115 were women (15 percent), and 198 held a position within the Commune (27 percent). These were socialists without a precise program, or rather with many programs that had yet to be tested. Adolphe Thiers’ armies would start the fires used to test them; the Commune would finish them.

The Government of National Defense

On the morning of September 4,  1870, all of Paris poured into the Palais Bourbon. Debate was raging within. Jules Favre had proclaimed the end of the empire, and Adolphe Thiers, the most perfect servant of the murderous capitalists, called for the nomination of a provisional government of national defense. The crowd and the partisans, which included both the bourgeois republicans and some radical elements, moved to the Hôtel de Ville. There, they found a gathering of the most prominent socialists and quarante-huitards (Forty-Eighters), veterans of the failed 1848 revolution.

The Prussians wanted not only the official surrender of a government they could trust, but also the transfer of now-occupied Alsace-Lorraine. Louis-Napoléon was sent packing to Great Britain. The partisan Government of National Defense sued for “peace with honor,” but refused to accept a loss of territory. The Prussian army advanced into France and, unopposed, marched all the way to Paris.

This new government was aggressively conservative. They made it clear that they were committed to “God, Family, and Property.” Paris took on a festive air, all its residents confident they would be able to resist the Prussians, just as their ancestors had resisted the Austrians during the first Revolution of 1789. At the same time, the wealthiest residents of Paris fled the city. 

The socialists mobilized at the same time. The Arrondissements, the districts of the city of Paris, each created a local “vigilance committee,” composed of coalitions of radicals, which set out to organize the defense of the city. On 15 September, the committees published a red poster demanding elections for the municipal government. They formed a single Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements and signed the red poster. They demanded popular control over defense, the food supply, housing, and the universal armament of the Parisians. The word “Commune” was heard on the streets, referring back to the old Insurrectionary Commune of the Revolution. The Prussian armies surrounded Paris and took its forts, even as the Government of National Defense and France’s wealthy capitalists took flight. 

The first siege of Paris began on 19 September. The Prussian army ringed the city around, occupied its outlying forts, and encamped in the palace at Versailles. The Parisians treated it lightly until they heard, at the end of October, that the last hope of relief was gone: the French army under siege at Metz inexplicably surrendered to the Prussians. On October 31, this boiled into rage against the Government of National Defense. Angry workers attacked the Hôtel de Ville and, led by Blanquists, stormed it. Militants announced a new government but, once the crowd dispersed, the Government of National Defense swept in and arrested most of the leading socialist partisans.

By December, people were “talking only of what they eat, when they can eat, and what there is to eat…. Hunger begins and famine is on the horizon,” according to the journal of Edmond de Goncourt. Signs were hung advertising “canine and feline butchers.” Calls for the Commune grew louder, and twice more, the Vigilance Committees put up red flyers announcing that the hour had come for Paris to govern herself.

During the siege, the Vigilance Committees did what there was to be done to help distribute the little resources they had. The Government of National Defense suspended rent payments and debt repayments. The National Guard swelled to 400,000 strong and its petit-bourgeois, shopkeeper character was completely overwhelmed by radicals, socialists, and workers who joined either for ideological reasons or because the Guard continued to pay a stipend, even while the city was starving.

On January 28, 1871, the Government of National Defense agreed to the first preliminary armistice with the Prussians, ending the siege of Paris and permitting food to re-enter the capital. Two days later, the government signed the surrender at the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. France would have to pay an enormous war indemnity and cede the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to the Prussians. The government scheduled new elections almost immediately, despite the outcry that this would favor monarchists and conservatives. True to the fear, the monarchists dominated the National Assembly, which removed to Bordeaux rather than its ancient seat of Paris. Adolphe Thiers, an avowed restorationist, was elected head of the executive authority of the republic. Thiers and the other reactionary capitalists had been long suspected during the war of favoring a slow strategy of attrition so the Prussians would bleed out the radicals in Paris. Many had heard the wealthy muttering “Better Bismarck than Blanqui.”

Although the armistice had disarmed the remnants of the French armies, the National Guard were permitted to keep their weapons and, above all, their cannons. Some of the guard units had paid for those guns themselves. Thiers and the new government were wary of the National Guard, and feared that they would side with the radicals — which they would, because they had been thoroughly infiltrated.

On March 7, the National Assembly ended the moratorium on debts and rent, declaring repayment due immediately on penalty of eviction from rented rooms. They also ended the daily stipend of 1.50 francs for national guardsmen, leaving tens of thousands of families without enough money to buy food or fuel. Adolphe Thiers and the National Assembly moved the seat of government from Paris to Versailles and issued their orders from the safety of the old royal palace.

On March 17, Thiers decided to be done with his enemies in Paris, the militant socialists and republicans. On 18 March, the Versailles government sent army troops to take the cannons from the National Guard of Paris. The guns had been moved to Montmartre and Belleville, where they could command a range of fire over the city. He said, “Businessmen were going around constantly repeating that the financial operations would never be started until all those wretches were finished off and their cannons taken away. An end had to be put to all this, and then one could get back to business.”

At Montmartre, the 171 cannons were ranked up into two rows on the heights and also on a plateau further down. At 4:30 a.m., March 18, troops began to enter Montmartre. A column of 4,000 men under the command of General Bernard de Susbielle began marching to place Pigalle at the foot of the great hill. As women in these neighborhoods woke to buy bread first thing in the morning, they found themselves facing the French army.

The residents of Montmartre mounted the steeples of their churches and sounded the tocsin bells, which had been the call of the insurrectionary Commune going back to the first Revolution of 1789. The National Guard answered. The civil war had begun.

The Civil War in France

Although the troops from Versailles had arrived to secure the cannon in Montmartre, they had failed to bring horses with them, and so the guns remained immobile. When horses finally came, they started to limber the cannon and move them down from the hilltop. But the women who had been out that morning had wakened their families, and Louise Michel, the so-called “Red Virgin,” the fighter for socialism, had donned her National Guard uniform and run out to assist. The crowd threw bottles and rocks at the regular soldiers. One observer saw “women and children swarming up the hillside in a compact mass; the artillerymen tried in vain to fight their way through the crowd, but the waves of people engulfed everything, surging over the cannon-mounts, over the ammunition wagons, under the wheels, under the horses’ feet, paralyzing the advance of the riders who spurred on their mounts in vain. The horses reared and lunged forward, their sudden movement clearing the crowd, but the space was filled at once by a backwash created by the surging multitude.” A national guardsman shouted, “Cut the traces!” Men and women drew their knives and cut the harnesses that tied the cannon to the horses. To cries of encouragement, the artillerymen left the guns and joined the crowd in eating meat, rolls, and wine. On the other side of the hill, troops refused to fire on a national guard platoon. The national guard began building a barricade. The troops withdrew. 

On Montmartre itself, General Lecomte stepped forward to get the guns moving again. He ordered his men to fire into the crowds. They did not move. He ordered again, and still the men did not fire. He ordered a third time. A woman shouted back, “Will you fire on us? On your brothers? On our husbands?  On our children?” Lecomte threatened to shoot any man who refused to fire and asked if his men “were going to surrender to that scum?” Louise Michel later wrote that a noncommissioned officer left ranks, “placed himself before his company and yelled, louder than Lecomte, ‘Turn up your rifle butts!’ The soldiers obeyed… [T]he Revolution was made.”

All of the columns were engaged in similar scenes, though the troops on rue Lepic had been beaten off by gunfire. National guardsmen took Lecomte and a few other officers prisoner.

Mayor Clemenceau, a petit-bourgeois politician and mayor of the 18th Arrondissement, which contained Montmartre, went down to broker the general’s release. At the same time, national guardsmen arrived with another prisoner: General Clément Thomas, the butcher of ‘48, who had slaughtered so many working people during the June Days. The crowd pulled Thomas and Lecomte into a garden and shot them both.

Adolphe Thiers ordered the troops out of the city to regroup at Versailles and ordered the evacuation from the forts of Mont-Valérien, Issy, Vanves, and Montrouge. He quickly realized that abandoning Mont-Valérien was a mistake, and his troops beat off a halfhearted assault by the National Guard to retake it.

The communist Rigault took command of the police. He ordered the release of political prisoners. The Blanquists demanded the National Guard follow Thiers’ retreating army to Versailles and destroy the Versailles government, but the Central Committee of the National Guard (which had been reorganized along democratic lines) demurred. The Jacobins and members of the International agreed; they would try to resolve the crisis by peace.

On 19 March, Émile Duval warned the Central Committee that conservative elements in the wealthy First and Second Arrondissements were on the move. They had summoned their conservative, bourgeois National Guard units to Versailles. Members of the committee protested that they did not have the popular mandate to defend Paris and refused to take authority over the revolution. They only went so far as to order detachments of guardsmen to key points in the city such as the Bank of Paris and the Tuileries. The committee then determined to hold elections.

They sent out a list of demands to the National Assembly in Versailles insisting that Paris be granted the right to elect its own mayors, that the prefecture of police be abolished, that the regular army be kept outside of Paris, that the National Guard be allowed to elect its officers, that the moratorium on rents be resumed, and that the National Assembly proclaim the republic. They declared that since 18 March, Paris “has no other government than that of the people and this is the best one. Paris is free. Centralized authority no longer exists.” But the mayors of the arrondissements refused to meet with the central committee, as did the deputies of Paris in the National Assembly.

The conservative and monarchist National Assembly met in a secret session on 22 March. They determined that no concessions would be made. “The criminals who now dominate Paris have attacked Paris: now they attack society itself.” Thiers explained that they should give the Commune time to establish itself while they built up an army so they could make the bloody execution of the Commune’s members appear legitimate. Thiers relished the thought of civil war. It was understood by Thiers and others in the Assembly that this was a class war.

On March 23, the Paris branch of the International proclaimed, “The independence of the Commune will mean a freely discussed contract which will put an end to class conflict and bring about social equality.” The supporters of the Commune were now being called Communards, and the specter of Communism clearly animated the Versailles government, which was terrified that the Commune would redivide property. Protestant minister Élie Reclus said, “Lazare, always starving, is no longer content with the crumbs that fall from the table of the rich, and now he has dared ask for his part of the feast.”

The city held municipal elections on 26 March to elect a central council of the Commune. Most of the delegates were Jacobins, Blanquists, and members of the International — the wealthiest residents had already fled the city.

The Commune needed money. It needed to pay the national guardsmen their 1.50 francs a day and to pay its municipal employees their workman’s wage. Arguments broke out in the provisional authority over where the money was to be gotten. Some demanded the remaining gold reserves left during the siege be taken from the Bank of France. However, the delegate for finance, François Jourde, instead arranged a loan of 700,000 francs and credit for 16 million francs more — nothing compared to the 258-million-franc credit received by Versailles.

The Commune Council met 57 times during the life of the Commune. It established executive commissions, each run by a delegate. These commissions convened twice daily at the Hôtel de Ville, but the meetings ran long, were increasingly contentious, and wasted much time discussing issues of no importance. Some members were swept away in the ceremony of their new authority. Most of the servants of the Commune had no experience in government.

On 10 May, the newly constituted German Empire and Thiers’ treasonous Versailles government signed the Treaty of Frankfurt, formalizing the capitulation of France. Immediately, Bismarck released captured French soldiers to Versailles, swelling the size of the counterrevolutionary army.

The forces of the Commune were led by their delegate for war, Gustave Cluseret, a Paris-born graduate of the elite military school of St. Cyr. He had been wounded in Algeria in the colonial venture of the very last Bourbon king and had fought as a commander of the Guarde Mobile to put down the June Days in 1848. He had gone to the United States to fight for the Union Army in the American Civil War and become an American citizen. He returned to France in 1867 committed firmly to social revolution and was jailed in 1868 for writing revolutionary articles.

He believed that if he could hold off Thiers and his minions, the Commune would be able to reach a negotiated settlement with Versailles. But the National Guard resisted Cluseret’s attempts to make it into a regular army. The democratic councils within the Guard sent out their own commands and ignored Cluseret.

The first fighting began on March 30, 1871, two days after the Commune was officially proclaimed. A patrol of the Versailles army came upon a Communard perimeter post. The troops hesitated to fire. General Gaston Gallifet ordered the artillery to fire and threatened them with a pistol. He then charged forward and took prisoners as the Communards fled. This was the first time the army had obeyed orders to attack their fellow Parisians and Frenchmen. It would not be the last.

On April 2, a skirmish broke out at Courbevoie. A military surgeon general called Pasquier approached the Communard lines to negotiate, but his uniform resembled that of a gendarme colonel. The Communards shot him, and a firefight saw the Communards beaten. Thirty or so Communards were taken prisoner, but General Vinoy ordered that all soldiers, men from the Guarde Mobile, and sailors who were taken prisoner were to be shot. There would be no quarter and no prisoners. Any citizens of Paris taken under arms would be summarily executed as traitors.

In response to the losses at Courbevoie and the massacre of the Communards there, the Commune assembled some 20,000 men and, in the early morning of 3 April, they marched out of Paris towards Versailles. The cannons of the national government began to shell them immediately from Mont-Valérien. The columns straggled. They failed to coordinate. Some of the National Guard seemed to be barely paying attention as the troops from Versailles closed on their positions.

In fact, many of the guardsmen assumed that the line troops would not fire on them and would turn their rifles around, butt up, like they had done on Montmartre. They did not. Two Communard generals, Émile Duval and Gustave Flourens, important and energetic men within the Commune, were taken captive. Flourens was hacked to death on the banks of the Seine by a gendarme. Duval and his chief of staff were shot.

This disorganization and hesitance would typify every military action taken by the Commune. By the time it was determined to act, it was already too late.

The Red Flag

The Commune banned the death penalty, though Thiers had no such scruples. On April 7 at the place Voltaire, below the prison of La Roquette, the national guardsmen burned a symbolic guillotine.

On April 16 the Commune ordered a survey of abandoned workshops. They expropriated these and turned them into workers’ cooperatives. A cooperative iron foundry was started in Grenelle employing 250 workers and producing shells for the city’s defense. Night baking was abolished on 20 April. Maximum salaries for municipal employees were set at 6,000 francs a year. Employers were barred from assessing fines from workers’ wages. Labor exchanges were established.

“The social revolution will not be operative until women are equal to men. Until then, you have only the appearance of revolution,” proclaimed Citoyenne Destrée. Louise Michel said, “[A woman] bends under mortification; in her home her burdens crush her. Man wants to keep her that way, to be sure that she will never encroach upon his function or his titles. Gentlemen, we do not want either your functions or your titles.” Proletarian women were (and are) doubly exploited — by gendered labor and by their employers. Bosses are the “social wound that must be taken care of.” 

Élisabeth Dmitrieff, née Elisavieta Koucheleva, was actually dispatched to the Commune by Marx himself to act as an observer there. She became intimately involved in calling for the creation of workshops for unemployed women, for equal salaries for male and female workers, and for a reduction in overall work hours within the Commune. She founded the Union des Femmes alongside four other women and took a position as its general secretary.

The Commune held up a revolutionary morality — a high standard of honesty and accountability. The Commune rejected high salaries for officials. Public servants in appearance and rhetoric were to be public servants in fact. Marx covered the public aspects of the Commune and its political organization in detail.

The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at any time. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class…. The police, which until then had been the instrument of the Government, was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workmen’s wages. The privileges and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves…. Having once got rid of the standing army and the police, the instruments of physical force of the old government, the Commune proceeded at once to break the instrument of spiritual suppression, the power of the priests…. The judicial functionaries lost that sham independence… they were thenceforward to be elective, responsible, and revocable.

Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, pp. 217-21 (1973)

To illuminate what this meant, Lenin compared the governance of the Commune to the modern parliamentary “democracies.” The bankrupt nature of “representative” government in, for instance, the U.S. Empire is made clear by the comparison to the truly representative government of the Commune.

The way out of parliamentarism is not, of course, the abolition of representative institutions and the elective principle, but the conversion of the representative institutions from talking shops into “working” bodies…. [T]his is a blow straight from the shoulder at the present-day parliamentarian country, from America to Switzerland, from France to Britain, Norway and so forth — in these countries the real business of “state” is performed behind the scenes and is carried on by the departments, chancelleries, and General Staffs. Parliament is given up to talk for the special purpose of fooling the “common people.”

V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1918)

Counterrevolution: The Bloody Week

On April 2, the second siege of Paris began; Versaille ordered the armies of counterrevolution to begin shelling Paris. By 21 May, Versailles had indiscriminately killed hundreds and possibly thousands of Parisians and destroyed hundreds of buildings in the western and central districts. The British resident John Leighton said that Versailles was “not content with” battering forts and ramparts killing Communard soldiers but also targeted “women and children, ordinary passers-by [including] unfortunates who were necessarily obliged to venture into the neighbouring streets, for the purpose of buying bread.” U.S. diplomat Wickham Hoffman agreed: “It must always be a mystery why the French bombarded so persistently the quarter of the Arch de Triomphe — the West End of Paris — the quarter where nine out of ten of the inhabitants were known friends of the Government.”

This was worse by far than the Prussian siege. Versailles bombed medical facilities. Thiers proclaimed defense of property while the cannons of Versailles obliterated rows of houses on the Champs-Élysées.

The Commune tried to achieve a negotiated settlement with Versailles, but every attempt was rebuffed. Even as late as 21 April, the Freemasons in the city sent a delegation, but Thiers sent them away with the dismissive (and telling) remark that “A few buildings will be damaged, a few people killed, but the law will prevail.”

On April 28, with the Versailles cannon pounding the city continuously and threatening to reduce its fortifications, the Commune floated a plan for a five-member Committee of Public Safety. On May 1, the Commune approved the creation of the committee by a vote of 34-28. The Committee was a self-conscious echo of the 1793 Committee of Public Safety. It immediately called up General Gustave Cluseret, and, blaming him for transforming the National Guard into an effective army, he was accused of treason and incarcerated in the Conciergerie.

One by one, the forts of Paris fell to the army of Versailles. The National Guard showed up in fewer and fewer numbers to their musters. On May 9, only 7,000 guardsmen arrived to a call that was meant to call up 12,000. On May 12, Jenny Marx, who was in Paris, told her father that the Paris Commune would be destroyed. “We are on the verge of a second June massacre.”

Spies and counterrevolutionaries in the employ of Thiers brought him information about the state of affairs in the city. He spoke menacingly of his obligation to order “dreadful measures” to destroy the Communards. He bribed guardsmen away and operated a secretive military organization within the walls.

On May 15, the leaders of the Commune saw that the end was coming. They knew they could not defend the city. Instead, the Commune determined to deny the old order of the city, to destroy the symbols of despotism and class-rule throughout the city. They fired Adolphe Thiers’ house first. They destroyed the Vendôme Column, the symbol of Napoléon’s empire, on May 16. 

On May 21, a counterrevolutionary in the city realized the Point-du-Jour was undefended and Porte Saint-Cloud was unmanned. He waved a white flag from the ramparts and Thiers’ killers entered the city. Within the hour, line troops under General Félix Douay had entered the capital. Porte Saint-Cloud and Porte d’Auteuil fell without resistance. The defenders began to build their last barricades within the city, each National Guard unit taking responsibility for its own defense and refusing to follow central orders.

Versailles moved slowly, executing everyone under arms they found. They swept the streets for traps, mines, and ambuscades. They poured fire into any house they believed held Communards. Fifty thousand line troops were soon in Paris and, within seventeen hours, 130,000 of Versailles soldiers, along with heavy artillery, had entered the city. They moved easily along the great boulevards. No Communard cannons concentrated on them — they were too uncoordinated. In twenty-four hours, Versailles had taken one-third of Paris from the Commune. Everyone they captured, they gunned down.

A woman ran into a building carrying a red flag. She was found in her attic with crates of weapons. The troops of Versailles hauled her down the stairs, but shot her before they reached the bottom.

The barricades were not enough. That Monday, on the rue Montmartre, a retreating Communard soldier screamed in tears, “Betrayed! Betrayed! They came in where we did not expect them!” At the place d’Italie, national guardsmen secretly tossed away their rifles, muttering, “It is the end!”

Vainly, at this late hour, the Commune proclaimed the levée en masse, the universal armament of the inhabitants of Paris. The American, W. Pembroke Fetridge, watched about thirty women demand a mitrailleuse machine gun to protect their barricade defending the Place du Palais-Royal. “They all wore a band of crepe round the left arm; each one had lost a husband, a lover, a son, or a brother whom she had sworn to avenge. Horses being at this time scarce in the service of the Commune, they harnessed themselves and dragged [the mitrailleuse] off, fastening their skirts round their waists lest they should prove an impediment to their march. Others followed, bearing the caissons filled with munitions. The last carried the flag.”

On Tuesday, the Commune issued an order stating, “Blow up or set fire to the houses which may interfere with your system of defense. The barricades should not be liable to attack from the houses.” The Commune ordered the burning of any house from which Versailles fired shots.

The Palace of the Conseil d’État was burned to deny it to the enemy. The Committee of Public Safety ordered the destruction of the Palais-Royal. The Ministry of Finance was torched. The Naval Ministry went up; the Hôtel de Ville was ordered destroyed. The Commune had become the scene of intense despair. Better to burn down the city than to give it to the enemy. Louise Michel warned, “Paris will be ours or cease to exist.” On Tuesday, May 22, the Communard general Jean Bergeret ordered the Tuileries Palace to be consigned to the fire. Two days later, a Montmartre woman asked what was burning; the Communard replied, “It’s nothing at all,” only the Palais-Royal and the Tuileries, “because we do not want a king any more.”

Communards were executed regardless of their resistance now. On the rue Saint-Honoré, line troops found thirty national guardsmen in a printing shop with no weapons. They took them to the rue Saint-Florentin and shot them in the enormous ditch in front of the remains of the barricade. Nearby, on the rue Royal, troops found six men and a young woman hiding in barrels. They were thrown in a ditch and killed. When line troops reached the place, Vendôme, Versailles shot thirty Communards.

At the Church of the Madeleine, Versailles used a mitrailleuse to execute 300 Communards. On May 23, an officer ordered a soldier who refused to shoot women and children shot. Not far away from there, troops killed a man who had done nothing, then shot his wife and child when they hugged him too long and then shot a passing doctor who tried to help the child.

By Friday, the line soldiers were lying to national guards on the barricades, telling them to come down and all would be well. They were taken aside and shot. Victims were taken to basements or attics to be executed. Police detachments hunted for suspected Communards. On Saturday evening, the Versailles troops blew up the gates at Père Lachaise and stormed in. Hundreds of Communards fell in the rows in hand-to-hand bayonet combat amid the tombs. Hundreds of guardsmen were lined up in rows along a wall and machine-gunned. Clemenceau would later recall that the machine guns were firing for thirty minutes without pause. On Sunday, groups of 150, 200, and even 300 were brought continuously to the cemetery where they were machine-gunned by the troops of Adolphe Thiers.

Pierre Vésinier, a journalist and member of the Commune, wrote that thousands of bodies “strewed the avenues and tombs. Many were murdered in the graves where they had sought shelter, and dyed the coffins with their blood…. [T]errible fusillades, frightful platoon fires, intermingled with the crackling noise of mitrailleuses, plainly told of the wholesale massacre…. Property, religion, and society were once more saved.”

Sunday, May 28, 1871, marked the end of the Commune. Executions continued until the end of July.

Lessons from the Paris Commune

“Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?”

(emphasis added.) Friedrich Engels, On Authority (1874)

“[T]wo mistakes destroyed the fruits of the splendid victory. The proletariat stopped half-way: instead of setting about “expropriating the expropriators,” it allowed itself to be led astray by dreams of establishing a higher justice in the country united by a common national task; such institutions as the banks, for example, were not taken over, and Proudhonist theories about a “just exchange,” etc., still prevailed among the socialists. The second mistake was excessive magnanimity on the part of the proletariat: instead of destroying its enemies it sought to exert moral influence on them; it underestimated the significance of direct military operations in civil war, and instead of launching a resolute offensive against Versailles that would have crowned its victory in Paris, it tarried and gave the Versailles government time to gather the dark forces and prepare for the blood-soaked week of May.

But despite all its mistakes the Commune was a superb example of the great proletarian movement of the nineteenth century…. The Commune taught the European proletariat to pose concretely the tasks of the socialist revolution.

The lesson learnt by the proletariat will not be forgotten.”

V.I. Lenin, Lessons of the Commune (1908)

The Commune has taught us the form and has played a historical role as the forerunner to the new society yet to come. It has taught us, too, that we cannot be lax in the prosecution of the social revolution. We cannot forget what our enemies will do to us if they should get the chance. Behind every smiling politician lurks the face of Adolphe Thiers, and behind every executive order is the Party of Order, waiting to strangle the revolution in its infancy.

Men and women died to teach us these lessons; they have died so that the revolution, the same revolution, their revolution and ours, may live.

The place was Chicago, the year 1886, and the ground fertile with revolution. With the Union’s victory in the U.S. Civil War — and the triumph of waged over enslaved labor, of capitalist industrial over slavery-based production — the development of capitalism in the U.S. Empire, long impeded by the backwardness of the Southern plantation economy, at last accelerated toward maturity. The country’s industrial output exploded, and its industrial proletarian workforce, swelled by Black freed persons and waves of migration and settlement from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, dramatically expanded. As U.S. capitalism matured, so did the proletariat mature as a class.

Chicago was then the central hub of the country’s transcontinental railway network. It connected the old U.S. colonial metropoles of the northeast Atlantic coast — New York, Boston, etc. — to the developing settler colonies along the Pacific.

The city had also earned a reputation as America’s larder, thanks to its massive slaughtering yards and meat industry. The Union Stock Yard & Transit Co. was founded by a number of railway firms in 1865. By the 1880s, the Union Yard spread over 375 acres and housed 75,000 hogs, 21,000 cattle, and 22,000 sheep at any given time. Each year, the Yards slaughtered somewhere on the order of 2 million animals. The horrible noise and the even worse stench were internationally infamous. This abattoir of animal (and, through overwork, exhaustion, and accident, human) flesh was famously cataloged by the socialist journalist and author Upton Sinclair in his 1906 novel The Jungle. By the end of the 1860s, the huge meatpacking firms in Chicago had perfected an ice-cooled refrigerator car, designed to transport meat by railway across the country without ruining it.

As the railyards and the stockyards consolidated, Chicago’s burgeoning industrialists were stricken with an unquenchable thirst for cheap labor. In 1880, the U.S. population was 50 million. Between 1880 and 1920, over 20 million Southern, Eastern, and Central European migrants entered the U.S., with smaller numbers arriving from Mexico, China and other east Asian countries, and the Ottoman Empire. In the 1870s alone, 60,000 Europeans flooded into Chicago, reaching a total of 204,859 by 1880. At that point, they were 56% of the workforce. By far, the largest number, 163,482 workers, came from the German Empire. The overwhelming majority of these immigrants lacked any property aside from their personal effects, and came to the U.S. as laborers. In the 1880’s, 40.5% of all residents in Cook County were migrants, and the majority were either first- or second-generation citizens. Well supplied by waves of poor freed persons and migrants, propertyless and desperate for work, and ripe for conversion into an industrial army of proletarians, the capitalists drank, and drank deep.

During the 1880–90 decade, Chicago doubled in size. Large factory complexes cleared land near the stockyards. The coal operators had established their own “company towns” or “planned communities.” Advertised as philanthropic ventures, a sort of “caring capitalism” in which the workers would be well-looked after by their bosses, these were instead planned towns centered on a company-owned mines, to which workers were lured, debt-trapped by a combination of low wages and artificially high costs of living, and effectively imprisoned in an endless cycle of indentured servitude. The Pullman Company, which owned the captive town of Pullman (just outside of Chicago, the rail hub of the Empire) to house the workers who made the Pullman railway cars, would, less than a decade later, cut the low wages of its workers to near-starvation levels. This triggered the infamous Pullman Rail Strike, during which striking workers brought the U.S. Empire’s railways to a halt from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Coal Wars were on the horizon.

Socialists and the Working-Class Movement

We find ourselves at the end of the “long 19th Century,” nine years after the revolutionary upsurge and Great Rail Strike that led to the formation and brutal repression of the proletarian St. Louis Commune. The Long Depression of 1873–1896 was in full swing. The period began with the “Panic of 1873,” which saw the collapse and ruin of one of the U.S. Empire’s largest banks, Jay Cooke and Co., a giant that had financed the Union during the Civil War and the Northern Pacific Railway thereafter, and the shut-down of the New York Stock Exchange for ten days. In the midst of the depression, socialist and anarchist labor agitators had found wide, sympathetic audiences among the increasingly impoverished, still-young U.S. proletariat, and labor mobilization across the country had reached a fever-pitch. Hymns for the martyrs of the defeated Paris and St. Louis Communes, the thousands of socialist workers mass-murdered by reactionary forces, were sung by demonstrators throughout the country. The clarions of socialism and political liberty had issued their call, and the people — the working-poor and oppressed — were answering in the millions.

This labor agitation came, however, with a patina of white-settler chauvinism. For instance, the 1877 “Great Uprising” in San Francisco, led by the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, which nearly overturned the government in that city, was at the same time virulently Sinophobic — violently hostile to recent Chinese migrants. The young, immature socialist movement in the U.S. would eventually fail to overcome the racist tendencies that predominated within it, and would collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions. The St. Louis Commune itself had collapsed largely because the white socialists actively chose racist discrimination against their Black fellow workers over solidarity and a fighting alliance against the capitalists.

The Militants of Chicago

Socialist and anarchist veterans of the Great Railway Strike of 1877 and the St. Louis Commune moved to Chicago and, along with the existing socialists of the city, opened the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, a German-language radical newspaper. Albert Parsons, Lucy Parsons’ husband, founded The Alarm in Chicago at around the same time. The Knights of Labor, a non-socialist and fundamentally capitalist-reactionary organization, began agitating in the city in the 1880s as well. Chicago was the industrial heart of the U.S. state, and socialists of all stripes were seeded among its workers and rising from their ranks.

A battle raged inside the U.S. socialist movement, and raged with particular intensity in Chicago, over whether or not the proletariat should organize itself into militias, over whether or not it should be armed. They had all watched in 1871 as the Paris Commune was destroyed. Albert Parsons threatened that “if people try to break up our meetings… they will meet foes worthy of their steel.”

One of those militants was August Vincent Theodore Spies. August left his home of Landeck, Germany in 1872. By the time he landed in New York he was well-read in German history — particularly what he saw as the social heroes of the Protestant Reformation, like Thomas Muntzer. Like many other German immigrants, Spies gravitated toward the capital of Teutonic life in the U.S.: Chicago. He settled in the North Side and began work as an upholsterer. By the end of 1875, when the city’s small band of predominantly German socialists began organizing massive parades demanding bread and work, August had been introduced to the writings of Karl Marx.

He watched as the city’s businessmen formed a militia to defend their stores from the socialist marchers of ‘75. By 1877, the year of the Great Rail Strike, Spies was an avowed Marxist. He met Albert Parsons and the two worked together as union organizers and socialist agitators. When the Rail Strike broke out, it spread to Chicago. On July 25, 1877, strikers gathered to hold meetings; they were attacked by patrolmen. That night, a Burlington switchman was shot dead by the police for the crime of being a striking worker. On July 26, the following day, blue-coated police shot into a crowd of protestors at the viaduct where Halstead Street crossed 16th Street.

The police marched up Halsted Street to the Vorwärts Turner Hall at 12th Street. Inside, the members of a cabinetmaker’s association were discussing the eight-hour-day question with their employers in German. Officers burst through the doors, clambered into the meeting hall, and clubbed cabinetmakers without mercy. Charles Tessman, a twenty-eight-year-old union cabinetmaker, was shot through the brain. Outside, a Chicago police sergeant fired his pistol at bystanders while his men beat cabinetmakers fleeing the hall in terror.

Having witnessed the “Battle of the Viaduct,” many German workers joined the Lehr und Wehr Verein (“Education and Defense Society”), an armed organization of workingmen dedicated to community defense. August Spies was among them. From then on, he adhered absolutely to Marx’s dictum that the proletariat must at all times be prepared for armed conflict with the enemy state and its apparatus of oppression.

In 1881, the Supreme Court of Illinois upheld a state law banning the Lehr und Wehr Verein and all other proletarian militias. Parsons and Spies watched as the businessmen’s First Regiment continued to arm itself in public and conduct drills, but the workers’ self-defense groups were banned. The Bill of Rights, Parsons argued, did not protect the socialist; it protected only their sworn enemies. (It is this case, by the by, Presser v. Illinois, in which Herman Presser was fined $10 for belonging to the Lehr und Wehr Verein, which formed the legal basis for all U.S. gun control until it was finally overruled in 2010. A century later, during the 1960’s and 70’s, the Illinois court’s ruling would serve as the legal grounds for the State of California, headed by then-Governor Ronald Reagan, to disarm another Communist organization: the Black Panther Party.)

The militants within the Socialist Labor Party took control of the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, a German-language socialist newspaper with a wide circulation among the organized workers, and hired August Spies as its editor. The militants held a conference in Chicago in 1881 and, tired of tepid trade-unionist reformism and its transitory, merely “paper”  victories, staged a split within the SLP. The splitting faction called their new organization the Revolutionary Socialist Labor Party. Its founding principles urged the formation of communistic trade unions that would forsake the ballot and take up arms. It proclaimed it would lead “armed organizations of workingmen who stand ready with the gun to resist encroachment upon their rights.”

Fight for the Eight-Hour Day

In 1886, most U.S. laborers worked 60–70 hours per week. Ten hours a day was the industry standard — and the capitalists wouldn’t accept a minute less from their workers. Indeed, some firms forced their workers to maintain the grueling pace of 12- or 14-hour days for six days a week. The rallying cry of the U.S. socialist movement was the reduction of the working day to 8 hours, the working week to 40 hours, but with the same, 10-hour pay. The Eight Hour League had begun the long and bloody campaign to realize this demand in the 1860s, but had failed to secure real reforms. Although the State of Illinois passed an eight-hour law under pressure from organized labor and socialist organizations in 1866, which went into effect on May 1, 1867, the employers categorically refused to honor it, and the State refused to enforce it. The capitalists claimed this infringed on their “freedom of contract,” and demanded the right to “freely contract” for longer hours. Through this “freedom of contract” “loophole,” the capitalist courts saw to it that the law was reduced to a mere cipher. No firm would hire those who refused the longer hours, and the workers were forced to accept employment on the capitalists’ terms. The reforms therefore represented only a paper victory for organized labor, and an inconvenience for the capitalists that was overcome with the stroke of a pen.

Chicago, the heart of the labor movement at that time, erupted into spontaneous marches and protests. The capitalists deployed the police to club them into submission. The eight-hour movement was devastated.

In October of 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, led by Marxists and other revolutionary socialists, set May 1, 1886, as the day by which the eight-hour work day would become the standard — whether the bosses agreed or not. This time, things would be done correctly; the victory would come not from a capitalist-owned state government, but from the organized workers themselves. All across the U.S., marches would be coordinated; there would be no spontaneous protests exposed to the batons of the urban cohorts of the capitalist police and National Guard. The U.S. labor unions began to prepare. The Arbeiter-Zeitung demanded the eight-hour day. “Eight hours work, eight hours rest, eight hours for what we will,” was the call.

Strike!

On Saturday, May 1, 1886, nearly half a million workers across the U.S. went on strike. They called it “Emancipation Day.” In Chicago herself, it was estimated that 40,000 workers left their workplaces to march, and twice as many people took to the streets to join them. The city was quiescent. Her vast skyline of smokestacks was nearly still. Factory power plants were silent, the coal slumbering peacefully in its stalls or barrels. Steamships rode at anchor, unable to take on supplies.

The workers were on strike — and not only in Chicago. All over the country, workers marched in solidarity. In New York City, they were on strike. In Detroit and in Milwaukee, they were on strike. The machines stopped whirring. The looms waited. In factories and plants all over the republic, the productive forces of Capital were frozen. The spindles and lathes, scythes and scissors, hammers and presses, that day-in and day-out had produced a continuous rattle, and continuous clink of coin for their capitalist owners, and a continuous exhaustion for their worker-operators, were now gathering dust where they stood. They were wasting away, and so was the potential for profits they contained, useless without the workers to set them into motion. If you listened closely, you could just about hear the soft sizzle of money burning.

But not at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Plant in Chicago. The Reaper Works was not idle. Its 360 foot, four-story brick face was alive with motion. The nine-room woodworking department was filled with sound. The nine-thousand square-foot blacksmith shop thundered with the labor of hammers. The foundries and the engine house: thumping away at their tasks.

Cyrus McCormick, Jr., president of the McCormick Harvester Company, was not about to be cheated out of his day’s profit by any socialist balderdash. No, he would keep his factory open while all the rest were luxuriating in the cool May air. And how? Cyrus McCormick had hired scabs. This came as no surprise, since McCormick had hired Pinkerton agency mercenaries in 1885 to beat trade unionists demonstrating in Chicago’s downtown streets.

In fact, at the Reaper Works there was a labor dispute still bubbling over from earlier in the year. After locking out striking molders, plant managers had sought replacements all over the midwest and issued revolvers to 82 loyal employees. They built kitchens to serve the 400 Chicago police sent to protect strikebreakers. Cyrus McCormick was ready on May 1, because he had been fighting this battle since April. As the rest of Chicago held its breath, the armed battalions at the McCormick Harvester Company simply went about another day, prepared to see the crowds gathered by the Arbeiter-Zeitung and the discharged unionized workforce howling on the street just outside the compound.

Nevertheless, fully half of McCormick’s scabs defected to the strike, leaving their posts in the works. The strike at McCormick, begun as an isolated dispute over pay, ran right up into the general strike of Emancipation Day. As the whole city, the whole country, joined the strike, even the McCormick strikebreakers left their posts. Management, now desperate, promised an eight-hour day to the strikebreakers if they returned. They made no concessions to the locked-out strikers.

By Monday, May 3, many of Chicago’s employers, reeling from a few days’ lost profits, started to cave. The breweries agreed to employ only union members, limit Sunday work to three hours, and set five break periods each day. The pork and beef packers agreed to the demand to cut the working-day from ten to eight hours, but with the same day’s pay. 

In the morning, August Spies rushed to his printing office to put together a special strike edition of the Arbeiter-Zeitung. He rushed all over the city to speak to strikers. In the early afternoon, a Czech-migrant lumber leader asked him to come down to the Southwest Side to give a speech, and the obliging Spies rushed there, too. When he got there, the crowd was large but uninterested. Just behind him and down the street stood “Fort McCormick,” the heavily armored and fortified Reaper Works. He was not there to rally the workers at McCormick’s. While he was still speaking, the bells at the works clanged, signaling the end of the strikebreakers’ workday. The McCormick strikers in the crowd wheeled away and surged toward the factory gates. Gunfire cracked and boomed from the heavily defended plant: the police had opened fire on the strikers. 200 armed officers boiled out of the Reaper Works, clubbing strikers with truncheons and shooting them at point blank range with pistols.

Spies escaped and sprinted back to the newspaper offices, where he grabbed handfuls of agitational leaflets before sprinting back into the fray. 

REVENGE! Workingmen, to Arms!!! Your masters sent out their bloodhounds — the police — they killed six of your brothers at McCormick’s this afternoon…. You have for years endured the most abject humiliations; you have endured the pangs of hunger and want; you have worked yourself to death; your children you have sacrificed to the factory lords…. [the master sends] his bloodhounds out to shoot and kill you! … If you are men, if you are the sons of grand sires who have shed their blood to free you, then you will rise in your might, Hercules, and destroy the hideous monster that seeks to destroy you. To arms, we call you. To arms!

Meetings of union workers and socialists were held that night to decide a response. Rather than gather the next day on Market Street, in their usual meeting place (because, as one socialist argued, this would serve as a “mouse trap” if the police attacked), the socialists decided to gather in a larger space — Haymarket Square.

4 May: Haymarket

On May 4, the strikes redoubled. Acts of rebellion erupted across Chicago. A dozen laundry girls employed at the Clifton House Hotel informed their foreman that they’d be running things. When he refused, they quit on the spot. Young women left clothing shops for the eight hour strike; at one shop, strikers removed the belt from an engine, rendering it useless. Ships were prevented from offloading at the queues by lumber shovers who refused to work unless they got their ten-hours’ pay for eight hours of work.

In the Pullman company town, union workers elected a committee to present their demands to Mr. Pullman himself. The delegation was made up of cabinetmakers, tinners, finishers, carpenters, wood turners, car builders, wheelwrights, upholsterers, and common laborers. Pullman, of course, refused to receive the delegation. In response, at 7 p.m. that day, the strike committee met with all 3,000 Pullman employees in the company baseball park, and they voted to strike.

Employers across the city demanded their still-legal shopowners’ militias be deployed against the workers. At noon on the 4th, Colonel E. B. Knox, commander of the First Infantry, was warned of 6,000 strikers in the lumber district. Knox called up the National Guard and armed them. The mob never arrived — the scare was a capitalist fabrication.

The Arbeiter-Zeitung compositor, Adolph Fischer, added the words “Working men, arm yourselves and appear in full force,” to a leaflet calling for the Haymarket meeting, even though the socialist planning committee had not suggested that workers bring guns to the rally at Haymarket. Spies demanded Fischer redraft the leaflet for fear that the words would provoke a police attack.

The rally began in the dark. The street stank of manure and rotting vegetables. A single gaslight on a lamppost guttered over the Haymarket. August Spies began the meeting saying it should be peaceable. For twenty years, he declared, workingmen had asked in vain for two hours less work each day; they’d trusted the “democratic” process, only to be betrayed by legislator “representatives” and treated with contempt by their employers. “I see Mr. Parsons is here,” he said, as Albert made his way through the crowd. “He is a much abler speaker in your tongue than I am, therefore I will conclude by introducing him.” Parsons climbed up on the wagons near Crane’s Alley and looked out on a street that was packed with 3,000 workers.

Parsons reminded the listeners of 1877 and the words of the railroad baron Tom Scott, who said of the striking trainmen in that year: “Give them a rifle diet and see how they like that bread.” He condemned the police for the outrage at the McCormick plant.

After Parsons, Samuel Fielden addressed the crowd. He warned of danger everywhere. He brought his speech to a fiery close, invoking the workers martyred in McCormick’s massacre the day before. “Keep your eye on the law,” he cried. “Throttle it. Kill it. Stop it. Do everything you can to wound it — to impede its progress.”

A storm was blowing up. Albert Parsons suggested adjourning. Fielden said this wasn’t necessary because he was about to conclude. Parsons left anyway, and so did some in the crowd. Even Fischer departed. By 10:20 p.m. only about 500 people remained at the Haymarket. Fielden finished his speech: “The Socialists are not going to declare war; but I tell you, war has been declared upon us; and I ask you to get hold of anything that will help you resist the onslaught of the enemy.”

Murmurs rippled through the gathered workers. Through the gaslight, it was clear that there was a column of blue tunics and brass buttons making its way across the entire width of Desplaines Street toward the Haymarket. George Brown, a Yorkshire-born shoemaker, said that he saw “a great company of police with their revolvers drawn, rushing into the crowd which parted to make way for them.” The police had decided to strike.

Their captain, William Ward, stopped his men. He shouted up to Fielden, “I command you in the name of the people of the State of Illinois to immediately and peaceably disperse.”

From Fielden: “But we are peaceable.” Then, after silence, “All right, we will go.” He started to climb down from the wagon.

There was hissing in the air. A Union navy veteran recognized the thing now passing overhead. He shouted, “Look out. Boys, for God’s sake, there is a shell!” A few men looked up. An orange flash ignited overhead, and the device detonated in the street.

The police reacted, without a second thought, by unloading a hailstorm of bullets. Although officers would later testify that the crowd had thrown the bomb and opened fire on the police, Captain Ward thought the bomb came from behind police lines. Two businessmen who later testified in the criminal trials likewise swore that no one in the crowd fired.

“Goaded by madness,” the Chicago Tribune wrote, “the police were in the condition of mind that permitted no resistance, and in a measure they were as dangerous as any mob of Communists, for they were blinded by passion and unable to distinguish between peaceful citizen and Nihilist assassin.” According to witnesses, patrolmen “emptied their revolvers, mainly into each other.”

The numbers of workers and of socialist and anarchist leaders killed went uncounted. The capitalist papers didn’t care. We know that the deployed police  killed seven of their fellow officers by friendly fire. We can only guess at what these rabid dogs of the capitalists inflicted on the demonstrating workers and their socialist leaders.

The state reacted to the Haymarket massacre, committed by their own shock troops — with at least seven, according to police reports, and probably far more, workingmen slain by police bullets — by arresting the editorial staff of the Arbeiter-Zeitung and several associated socialists and anarchists. Chicago city officials were determined from the outset to hang them; they had only to convince a stacked jury. The city coroner’s inquest listed the causes of death of the officers as bomb shrapnel “aided, abetted, and encouraged” by Spies, Parsons, and Fielden. For days, detectives flushed anarchists and Marxists from cellars, conveniently “discovering” caches of weapons and dynamite as they went.

Eight men — socialist and anarchist leaders — stood accused. The trial, Illinois v. Spies et al., started on June 21, 1886, and went on until August 11. The judge was openly hostile to the defendants. No union members or anyone with socialist sympathies was permitted to be seated on the jury. The jury returned eight guilty verdicts. The judge sentenced all but one man to be hanged.

Fielden received a governor’s commutation to a life sentence. One man blew his own face off with a blasting cap in his cell, lingering on for six hours in brutal agony, rather than face the shame of a public hanging. On November 11, 1887, four defendants — Engel, Fischer, Parsons, and Spies — were taken to the gallows. They sang the Marseillaise — a French Republican hymn. As he stood with the noose around his neck, Spies shouted, “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”

May Day: The International Remembrance

Solidarity with the Haymarket Massacre martyrs poured into Chicago from around the globe. In 1890, the Marxist Second International decreed May 1 “International Workers Day” in honor of the Haymarket martyrs. The 1904 sixth conference of the Second International asked all Social-Democratic parties and all labor unions in all countries to agitate for the eight-hour day on May 1. Today, International Workers Day is celebrated in some form in almost every country on earth.

Since it was established, May Day demonstrations have played a pivotal role in revolutionary history.

Bloody May 1929 marked the high point of Communist labor agitation against the corrupt bourgeois Weimar German republic. The German Communist Party, at the height of its popularity numbering over 350,000 members and millions of supporters, marched in defiance of the Social-Democratic Party government on May 1 in 1929 — and, as at Haymarket nearly fifty years before, the government unleashed its shock-troop police, and ordered them to open fire on unarmed marchers. The reformist, capitalist-captured Social-Democratic Party’s repeated betrayals of the workers caused its base of support to shrink and the socialist movement to become disorganized. The Nazi Party would soon use this instability to its own advantage. After the Nazis swept the German elections in 1933, the Social-Democrats capitulated and accepted fascist rule, leaving the Communists the country’s lone anti-fascist party.

For the international socialist movement, May Day has been a holiday held sacred since that fateful night in 1886. Recognized by all socialist states, it has been the subject of a thousand paeans and celebrations. In the Soviet Union, May Day was a celebration of the triumphs and accomplishments of workers the world over, but particularly those working toward socialist construction.

Our monopoly-capitalist rulers in the U.S. Empire and their loyal servant politicians in its appurtenant state machinery, of course, have done their best to suppress public celebrations and public awareness of the history of May Day in this country. In the U.S. Empire, labor is “celebrated” in September, not in May — an international idiosyncracy meant to keep us from getting any funny ideas about belonging to a global working-class movement! Officials in this country discourage marches, and there are no laws giving laborers the day off, either on May Day or on the U.S.-specific Labor Day in September. Why would there be? Our rulers won’t abide May Day celebrations taking off in the same country where the tradition first took hold; their aim is, and always has been, to force us back to work, from the first May Day until this one.

But the workers of the world know that May 1 is the day of labor’s emancipation. As our movement for Communism within and against the U.S. Constitutional Empire recovers from its nadir, we must all remember the socialist martyrs lost on May 1, 1886. More importantly, we must look ahead. We know, along with all the conscious workers of the world, that the victories of Capital are fleeting, while ours is the grand historical march of emancipation, the inevitable tide of total social revolution. That is what we celebrate. The sacrifices made by the brave socialist martyrs of the past, their deaths at the hands of our oppressors, are the links in the great revolutionary chain, by which we wend our way to the ultimate victory.

On 27 May 1797, the 8th of Prairial according to the new Republican calendar, François-Noël Babeuf, sometimes called “Gracchus” Babeuf, was executed by guillotine. A death sentence had been passed by the Therimdorians the day before. At the time of his death, Babeuf stood at the head of a clandestine organization that was attempting to undo the Thermidorian reaction, to return to the days of the Jacobin Terror, and to use the weapons built by Maximilien Robespierre and his allies to establish the first truly egalitarian society on earth in the form of a simple, agrarian communism. Babeuf’s plan, the so-called “Conspiracy of Equals” failed, and he died under the guillotine blade. However, many of the other members of the Conspiracy survived, as did their principle writings, and the Conspiracy of Equals would live on: first, in 1830 during the July Revolution; then again, in 1839 in the Blanquist coup, once more in 1848 in the February Revolution; and at last in 1871 in the formation of the Paris Commune. Babeuf’s shadow could be seen outside of France in the 1825 Decembrist Revolt of Russia. He was much admired by Karl Marx himself, it was through the living conspirators of the Society of Equals that the Society’s legacy has been passed down, even to this day.

What was the Society of Equals? What did they want? Where did they come from? The last children of the Jacobin political club, the Society cannot be understood without placing it in its context: the counter-revolutionary coup of Thermidor.

The French Revolution and Thermidor

The French Revolution began in 1789 with the public bankruptcy of the state. King Louis XVI’s ministers tried to raise money through various new taxes, but conflict erupted between the nobility and the royal administration over the right to levy new taxes. France was then divided into a patchwork of uneven territorial administrations. Its people were divided into three “feudal” orders or “estates”: the First Estate was the clergy, comprising roughly one-half of one percent of the population; the Second Estate was the nobility, roughly one percent; and the remaining 98.5% of the French population, the Third Estate, the commoners.

In 1789, after years of wrangling with King Louis and his ministers, the Second Estate forced the king to call the Estates General, a medieval decision-making body that the jurists and lawyers claimed was the only authority in France that could approve new taxes. Leading up to the Estates General, the crown permitted every region and estate in French society to submit a list of grievances. These cahiers de doléances were drawn up in every village, hamlet, city, and town, and for the first time the common people of France felt they might have a say in their government. To the surprise and horror of the First Estate, the Third Estate was united in its broadest grievance: that the Estates General should not vote by estate (such that the First and Second Estates could overrule the Third), but by head — and that the Third Estate should receive double the number of deputies than the other two Estates, for it was the Third Estate that made the country.

In the words of the Abbé Sieyès: “What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it hitherto been afforded in the political order? Nothing. What does it desire to be? Something.”

When Louis threatened, or appeared to threaten through his ineptitude, to double the Third Estate’s deputies but to force the Estates to vote “by order” (that is, one estate, one vote), the Revolution truly began. Angry Third Estate deputies, locked out of their meeting room, convened in an indoor tennis court at Versailles and swore the famous Tennis Court Oath not to be parted until the country had a new constitution. For some, this meant a constitutional monarchy to replace the old “absolute” monarchy of the Valois and Bourbon kings, but to others, notably the Breton Club (which would soon become the Jacobin Club), this meant a republic.

Through many twists and turns of revolutionary history, the Jacobins became ascendent after the so-called Girondins dragged the young republic into war with Austria. King Louis, attempting to evade the revolution and flee his role as “father of the Nation,” gave in to his wife Marie Antoinette, and fled toward the Austrian border so he could return at the head of an army. He was captured in the town of Varennes, having been recognized by his distinctive nose through the eyes of an astute postmaster who had long seen the king’s profile on the stamps, seals, and coins of the realm. After the Flight to Varennes, the Republic was born. Louis was tried as a traitor and executed, stripped even of his name, and called “Citizen Capet” before the guillotine.

During this “second revolution” of 1792-93 when the monarchy became a republic, the city of Paris and its urban working class drove the reforms. Essentially every country in Europe attacked France, at first in response to the revolutionary government’s warlike posturing and invasion of Austria, but soon to combat the spreading virulence of anti-monarchism. The “sans culottes” or urban working class and the women of Paris demanded radical action to destroy old feudal rights, property rights, and so forth, while also demanding the government protect the economic lives of the people — by, for example, enacting maximum prices on grain to prevent hoarding.

For a time thereafter, the Jacobin Club and its guiding genius Maximilien Robespierre sought to advance the revolution forward at a steady pace along a narrow line of virtue. The wartime conditions and erupting counter-revolutions caused the Convention to convene a special executive body with plenary powers: the Committee of Public Safety. It was from this Committee that Robespierre crafted and executed the so-called Terror, and while sitting on this Committee that he justified its use.

[I]n order to lay the foundations of democracy among us and to consolidate it, in order to arrive at the peaceful reign of constitutional laws, we must finish the war of liberty against tyranny and safely cross through the storms of the revolution: that is the goal of the revolutionary system which you have put in order. You should therefore still base your conduct upon the stormy circumstances in which the republic finds itself; and the plan of your administration should be the result of the spirit of revolutionary government, combined with the general principles of democracy….

Since the soul of the Republic is virtue, equality, and since your goal is to found, to consolidate the Republic, it follows that the first rule of your political conduct ought to relate all your efforts at maintaining equality and developing virtue….

If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, amid revolution it is at the same time both virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is nothing but justice: prompt, severe, inflexible. It is therefore an emanation of  virtue. It is less a special principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most pressing needs.

It has been said that terror was the mainspring of despotic government. Does your government, then, resemble a despotism? Yes, as the sword which glitters in the hands of liberty’s heroes resembles the one with which tyranny’s lackeys are armed. Let the despot govern his brutalized subjects by terror; he is right to do this, as a despot. Subdue liberty’s enemies by terror, and you will be right, as founders of the Republic. The government of the revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny. Is force made only to protect crime? And is it not to strike the heads of the proud that lightning is destined?…

Social protection is due only to peaceful citizens; there are no citizens in the Republic but the republicans. The royalists, the conspirators, are, in its eyes, only strangers or, rather, enemies….

Tyranny kills; liberty argues. And the code made by the conspirators themselves is the law by which they are judged.

Maximilien Robespierre, On the Principles of Public Morality, Speech to the National Assembly of 5 February 1794

The republicans created a new calendar, new ten-day weeks, new rationalized months of thirty days each, and feasts of virtue. They renamed the streets of Paris to remove the names of saints. They set about changing the very geography in which they lived.

And yet, counter-revolutionary forces were at work behind the scenes. Some radical Jacobins sought to enrich themselves during the chaos. Conservative, “whites” (white was the color of the Bourbon monarchy) and slave-holding plantation owners from the French colonies, linked hands and joined together to protect themselves. When the radical Jacobins announced a new wave of investigations into financial impropriety among the politicians of the National Convention, a plan was drafted to destroy the radical leadership.

On 27 July 1794, what was 9 Thermidor II under the new calendar, Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just were murdered by counter-revolutionary opponents in the National Convention. The Jacobin revolution was over, killed by the bourgeois forces of counter-revolution that had once supported it. After Thermidor, the coup plotters established the anti-democratic Directory. Political repression was the norm, elections were regularly annulled, and a small clique of powerful politicians took over the country.

In the late 18th century, Paris was the engine of revolutionary sentiment and the center of progressive thought in the whole decaying kingdom. It was the second-largest city in Europe only outsized by London, and contained some 600,000 people. The vast majority of the city was inhabited by the working poor. There were 40,000 domestic servants working for petit-bourgeois families of which only about 5% were born in Paris; the rest came to the city from the provinces of the kingdom, looking for work. The city was replete with small handicrafts, and was dominated by the guilds. Unskilled labor was paid at a rate of roughly thirty sous a day; most families had to set all their members to work, including the children. Women made approximately 15 sous a day. The primary diet of the Parisian working poor was bread: two four-pound loafs, the average comestible intake of a family of two with two children, cost roughly eighteen sous throughout most of the 18th century and sometimes doubled or tripled in price during bad harvests.

In addition to the vast numbers of the working poor, Paris is estimated to have hosted approximately 13,000 to 14,000 on royal assistance and between 150,000 and 200,000 totally indigent persons at the beginning of the 18th century, with this number swelling as the period went on. By 1789, years of bad harvests and warfare had driven hundreds of thousands of new working poor into the city center and its extramural faubourgs. These urban poor were the engine of the revolution, and it was to them, the sans culottes, that Babeuf and the Equals now turned. Throughout the Revolution, whenever radical policy stalled or the conservative noble elements had attempted to regain control, they were always checked by the convention of a huge mass of protestors in Paris. In 1789, during the early stages of the Revolution, the city of Paris not only tore down the Bastille and executed its governor, they killed their own mayor and paraded his head through the streets, then established what became known as the Insurrectionary Commune of Paris — an elective assembly in the city that was far more radical than the National Assembly, and which often summoned mobs to threaten the Assembly when it attempted to renege on its more radical policies.

But France was more than Paris, and the Directory had eschewed the politics of the radical insurrectionary commune. In fact, they suppressed it, targeting radical deputies and paying the so-called Muscadins, bourgeois “gilded youth” dressed in expensive finery and armed with clubs, to roam the streets beating sans culotte patrols and suppressing the radical commune.

Babeuf came onto the public stage after the Thermidorians outlawed political clubs. He sought to revive the old Republic of Virtue championed by Robespierre and the radical Jacobins, and through his agitation he created the Society of Equals: a conspiracy with the goal of overthrowing not only the Thermidor government, but of abolishing all private property in France.

Early Communism and the Conspiracy

Where the radical Jacobins of Robespierre’s stripe represented the propertied interests of the petit-bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie and Thermidor was a liberal-noble reaction, the sans culottes and Babeuf were anti-propertarian proletarians: proto-Communists. Babeuf was not interested in the mere redistribution of some of the land of France; he advocated for, and convinced others in the Society of Equals of, the necessity for the redistribution of the fruits of the land. That is, the collective ownership of all land and the distribution-by-need of its products.

François-Noël Babeuf was a petit-bourgeois lawyer of the ancien régime, specializing in the feudal land law, keeping records of what peasants owed in rent and fees to the nobility, and working as a clerk for the nobles. He supported the revolution and the radical Jacobins. When Robespierre was sent to the guillotine and the National Convention was replaced by the dictatorial right-leaning Directory, he opened his own press and began to publish for the people.

The Conspiracy was formed in November 1795 and was directed by eight men, including Babeuf: Philippe Buonarroti, Augustin Alexandre Darthé, Sylvain Maréchal (who drafted the Manifesto of Equals), Félix Lepeletier, Pierre-Antoine Antonelle, Debon, and Georges Grisel. Jean Antoine Rossignol, the revolutionary general, was in charge of managing the Conspiracy’s agents. The leading members of the Conspiracy met in the prisons of Paris, having been jailed by the Thermidorians. They made their rallying cry “Insurrection, revolt, and the Constitution of 1793!” — the constitution which had promised the most egalitarian society to that point ever designed or dreamt of.

Babeuf put it this way in his newspaper, the Tribun du Peuple: “I have distinguished two diametrically opposed parties: I understand well enough that both want a republic, but one party wants it to be bourgeois and aristocratic, the other party for it to be a popular and democratic republic.” It was this popular and democratic republic that the Conspiracy of Equals was devoted. The Tribun du Peuple of 30th November 1794 included the paragraph: “the only way is to establish common administration, abolish private property, put each man to work according to his talents and the industry he knows, oblige him to hand over the fruits of his labour to the common stock, and establish a simple administration of distribution”. He wrote that the “French Revolution was just the harbinger of another much greater revolution, a far more important one: the last.”

Maréchal’s manifesto, which was meant to guide the Equals, was truly radical and truly Communist in its scope:

PEOPLE OF FRANCE!

For fifteen centuries you lived as slaves and, consequently, unhappy. For the last six years you barely breathe, waiting for independence, freedom, and equality.

…

The Agrarian law, or the partitioning of the land, was the spontaneous demand of some unprincipled soldiers, of some towns moved more by their instinct than by reason. We lean towards something more sublime and more just: the common good or the community of property! No more individual property in land: the land belongs to no one. We demand, we want, the common enjoyment of the fruits of the land: the fruits belong to all.

We declare that we can no longer put up with the fact that the great majority work and sweat for the smallest of minorities.

Long enough, and for too long, less than a million individuals have disposed of that which belongs to 20 million of their kind, their equals.

Let it at last end, this great scandal that our descendants will never believe existed! Disappear at last, revolting distinctions between rich and poor, great and small, masters and servants, rulers and ruled.

Sylvain Marechal, The Manifesto of Equals

Organizing the Conspiracy

The Equals met in the Paris prisons, held there by the Thermidorians for publishing seditious materials or for sedition itself. The Equals formed a revolutionary party in March 1796 and created an insurrection committee. In every arrondissement of Paris, the committee maintained agents. These distributed pamphlets, created clubs in private homes, collected funds, recorded hiding-places, drew up lists of sympathizers, and organized citizens. They reported directly to the insurrectionary committee about how much force the Conspiracy had, and where.

Unlike the loosely organized political clubs (the Jacobins, the various reactionary clubs, the Club Massaic, even the Pantheon Club), the Conspiracy of Equals divided into committees tasked with individual mandates. There was a military committee, which organized the armed wing of the Conspiracy, the “familial clubs” which organized on the ground level. The Conspiracy of the Equals was the very first insurrectionary communist party ever organized as a political organization.

The Conspiracy grew in leaps and bounds as the economic crisis of the Thermidorian Directory intensified. In the 40th issue of the Tribun, Babeuf praised the September Massacres of 1792 and demanded a more complete 2 September to annihilate the Directory itself, which he said was made up of “starvers, bloodsuckers, tyrants, hangmen, rogues, and mountebanks.”

Lack of ideological unity laid the groundwork for the Equals’ failure. The leading members of the Equals were not all committed Communists or proto-Communists. Babeuf and Maréchal alone were committed to the abolition of private property. The other Equals, some of whom had been rich nobles before the Revolution, balked at the more radical proposals in the manifesto. By the time of May 1797, Babeuf and Maréchal were disgusted with their former compatriots. Babeuf did not attend their last meeting; he said these “democrats lacked strength or means,” that is, they were insufficiently revolutionary.

One of the members of the insurrectionary committee, Georges Grisel, was a paid agent of the Directory. He turned over the Conspiracy and, on 2 May 1796, the Directory disarmed the Paris police legion because it had been “seduced by the Babouviste faction.” The Directory’s spy agency, the bureau central, knew that the uprising was set for 11 May 1796 and the Equals planned to unite with the remnants of the Jacobin Club. They had been receiving reports from Grisel for some time, and so acted before the Conspiracy could. On 10 May, Babeuf was arrested, along with many of his associates. Sylvaine Marèchal was never apprehended. The conspirators were tried over the next two months and most were executed. The former Jacobins were mostly acquitted and permitted to return to political service.

Aftermath: The Revolution to Come

Marèchal carried on the revolutionary tradition; the English word “communism” was coined by the English socialist Goodwyn Barmby after he spoke with living Babouvistes in the 1830s or 1840s. Those members of the Conspiracy who were not killed, and those who read Babeuf but did not act, would go on to influence French and revolutionary history in Europe. Most triumphantly, the heirs of Babeuf were deeply involved in the creation of the second insurrectionary commune of Paris, the 1871 Commune, from which Marx drew his most instructive lessons about the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Indeed, Babeuf’s personal files remain preserved not only in the National Archives of Paris, but in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Party Central Committee of the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Conspiracy of Equals, although it was a failure, would serve as the century-long wellspring of revolutionary fervor from which the scientific socialists of the 19th century would draw. It is through the clandestine organization of militants that Marxist-Leninsts have achieved revolutionary success not only in Europe, but in all corners of the globe. There is no doubt that Lenin’s formulation in his works on the structure of the revolutionary organization (What Is to Be Done? and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back come to mind) draw from the well first sunk by the socialist martyr François-Noël Babeuf.

On September 15, the calculating Biden White House delayed the hour of the forthcoming strike of U.S. railway unions. While the desiccated puppet Biden himself pays lip-service to the unions, his regime systematically undermines them. The latest outrage forces a 30-day “cooling down” period on the unions ready to strike by requiring them to consider an offer from Biden’s handlers that doesn’t come close to meeting even a single one of the rail workers demands.

One-hundred forty-five years ago, in July of 1877, the city of St. Louis was held by the authority of a revolutionary commune. The Commune of St. Louis began with a rail strike like the one Biden’s masters are afraid of tonight.

It began, as revolutions often do, with a depression.

In 1873 the world-capitalist economy was struck with stagnation and contraction. This depression was kicked off by the Panic of ’73. A series of bank failures in Austria soon spread to the rest of the economy. Credit sharply contracted. Loans defaulted. Banks closed.

Industrial production in the U.S., which had been previously growing at a rate of three times each year, slowed to 1.7 times yearly during the period of 1873-1890. There was a 10% decline in total manufacturing output from the U.S., most of the sectors affected being consumer goods, iron, and construction.

On July 14, 1877, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cut wages for its workers for the third time that year. The railroad workers had no unions, but they spontaneously broke out into strike.

The strike started that day, with B&O railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia. They blockaded the town, a critical rail juncture, and prevented all rail traffic from rolling through, demanding that the wage cut be revoked.

The governor of West Virginia dispatched the National Guard to clear the lines and resume rail service, but the guardsmen refused to fire on the strikers. At the same time, the B&O workers in Maryland took up the strike and closed the railroad center at Cumberland.

Albany, Syracuse, and Buffalo New York, all major railyards, closed. The strike spread from the B&O to other lines. In Pittsburgh, the Pennsylvania railroad baron Thomas Alexander Scott recommended the strikers be given a “rifle diet.”

On July 21, the Pennsylvania National Guard bayonetted strikers and then opened fire, killing 20 railroad workers. The strikers did not disperse; rather, they retaliated, trapping the guardsmen in a roundhouse and razing 39 buildings.

Striking railroad workers in Pennsylvania burned 104 locomotives and 1,245 freight and passenger cars. The Pennsylvania National Guard fought their way out of the roundhouse, shooting and killing over 20 people as they cut their way out of the railyard.

This was the background of the strike action in St. Louis. As the country seized in strikes and transport actions, the Workingman’s Party (the first Marxist party in the U.S.) and the Knights of Labor gathered in St. Louis. On July 22, one day after the massacre in the Pennsylvania railyards, train workers held a secret meeting to call for an increase in wages and determined to strike, their numbers stiffened by members of the Workingmen’s Party. They then held a public outdoor meeting, which was steered by that 200 members of that party.

That night, they held a third meeting, and the rail workers adopted a resolution (written by the Workingmen’s Party representatives) that read:

WHEREAS, the United States government has allied itself on the side of capital and against labor; therefore,

RESOLVED, That we, the workingmen’s party of the United States, heartily sympathize with the employees of all the railroads in the country who are attempting to secure just and equitable reward for their labor.

RESOLVED, That we will stand by them in this most righteous struggle of labor against robbery and oppression, through good and evil report, to the end of the struggle.

The demand was put to the bosses, who rejected it immediately.

The strike began at midnight in East St. Louis. Within hours of the announcement, the strikers controlled the city uncontested. They formed an executive committee, comprised of at least 47 people, although all their identities are not recorded and therefore not known. The committee, which met in Turner’s Hall, was elected by the striking workers.

St. Louis was the home of many radical Germans, who had been fleeing from the newly-constituted Germany for years to avoid the compulsory military service instituted under Prussian authority. Roughly 600 of the Workingmen’s Party’s 1,000 members in St. Louis were German socialists.

Missouri was also a former slave state. Two-thirds of Black persons in the state lived in St. Louis (26,387) in 1870, most of whom were either employed as domestic servants or as laborers, with a heavy influence along the levees and among the steamships. By 1877, the Ku Klux Klan had begun a campaign of lynch-terror in the state, and racism was stoked among the workers because the Black laborers were often used as strikebreakers.

In the morning of July 23, having more or less complete control of East St. Louis and with no police on the street to oppose them, the Executive Committee elected by the strikers issued General Order No. 1: no railroad traffic other than passenger trains and mail would be permitted to pass. The committee then appointed the mayor of East St. Louis, John Bowman, arbitrator of the labor dispute. He helped the committee select special constables to guard the property of the railroads from damage. Already, even in its nascent stage, we can see the Executive Committee’s unfortunate attention to the needs and wants of the capitalists.

The Chicago & Alton company tried to start a freight train that morning, but it was stopped and turned back to the yard. The Union Railway & Transit Company removed their wage decrease, but the Transit workers continued to strike in solidarity with their brothers, stiffened by the militants in their ranks.

City officials wired frightened messages. Some warned that this was a repetition of the Paris Commune of ’71.

On the second day of the strike, July 24, the strikers expanded their blockade to include passenger trains. A train was decoupled from its passenger cars and only permitted transit when the locomotive was bare.

At 11:00 AM that morning, twenty-five strikers led by an Ohio and Mississippi Railway engineer seized two Missouri Pacific Railroad locomotives, took Missouri and Pacific engine shops, and tried to persuade the workers there to cease work. They refused.

As unrest increased, 3,000-4,000 people gathered at the depot. It was announced by the city authorities that six companies of infantry were marching to put an end to the blockade and clear the rail lines. For the first time since the strike began, police went out onto the streets and tried to disperse the crowd.

At 4:00 PM that afternoon, flatcars from other striking yards near the city arrived, loaded with more strikers. The word had gotten out that St. Louis was the hub of a powerful solidarity movement across all railway lines.

At 6:00 PM, six companies arrived from Fort Leavenworth. Their commander stated that he had “been ordered here with general instructions to protect the property of the United States,” but he declined to take any action other than to hole up in the army barracks and wait.

That night, Communist leaders held meetings throughout the city. Processions marched through the streets. The city government, paralyzed by the fear that they were not heavily armed enough to act, did nothing. The police remained “inert.”

On July 25, 1877, at 9 AM, the Communists gathered a crowd in a downtown marketplace. There, they convinced wire manufacturers to join the strike. At 10 AM they marched to Turner Hall where the Executive Committee was meeting. At a meeting that morning, a Black worker is said to have asked, “Will you stand with us, regardless of our color?” The crowd shouted back at him “We will!”

Across the river, the Workingmen’s delegates anticipated violence, though the strike remained peaceful in East St. Louis. One speaker across the river in downtown St. Louis said, “The workingmen now intend to assert their rights, even if the result is the shedding of blood…. They are ready to take up arms at any moment.” But the party did not arm the laborers. They were never given the weapons they needed to defend their gains.

An air of solidarity prevailed throughout East St. Louis. The Workingman’s Party declared that all work within the city would soon come to a halt. All would join the strike.

On the morning of July 26, a mass meeting of coopers agreed to cease work. Smelter and clay workers joined the strike. 35% of the striking workers were U.S. born; 29% were German; 18% were Irish; 12% were English or Welsh. A full 12% of the striking workers were Black.

The strike was controlled by its Executive Committee — it issued orders, demands, and instructions. The most prominent members of the committee were not themselves workers but were clerks, a student organizer, a doctor, a drug and bleach maker, a newspaper seller, and a boot fitter. There were many petit-bourgeois men on the committee, which perhaps accounts for its sensitivity to protecting small businesses and private property.

On the evening of Wednesday, July 26, in Carondelet, six miles south of the city center, iron workers arrived at the Martindale Zinc Works to call on its workers to join the strike. The foreman of the works struck a striker with a crowbar. When the police tried to intervene, the strikers drove them off with rocks.

The ironworkers took control of the zinc works and there they unfurled the red flag of the International. By the end of the day, there was not a single manufactory in operation. The strike had shut down the entire city. It was all in the hands of the Workingmen’s Party.

That evening, there was another mass meeting at Lucas Market of over 10,000 people. Peter Lofgreen, a Workingmen’s delegate, harangued the crowd and told them that if the managers could not restore their pay, it was time for the management of the railroads to be in the hands of the workers. Full nationalization would be one of the demands made by the Executive Committee.

Thomas Curtis declared that the demands of St. Louis must go all the way to the president of the United States. This, he said, was “not a strike – but a social revolution!”

On Thursday, barbers, wagon-makers, painters, blacksmiths, and mills closed, with only a few remaining open by order of the Executive Committee to make bread to feed the city. The National Stockyards were permitted to slaughter some few animals to keep the people fed. The mayor met with the Executive Committee repeatedly, begging for more shops to be opened, and the committee haltingly tried to oblige the business interests.

In Carondelet, 18 metal workers were organized into a makeshift police force that patrolled the streets. In East St. Louis, the railway workers had a parade with a brass band and banners that said “We Want a Peaceful Revolution” and “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”

That’s when the Executive Committee made its worst decision. At the dawn of the 27th, they caved to pressure by the petit-bourgeoisie and the mayor, who feared the Black labor solidarity and the marches, the mass meetings, the red flag of the International. They issued an order to calm the wealthy. This order stated that “in order to avoid riot, we have determined no large procession will take place until our organization is so complete as to positively assure the citizens of St. Louis a perfect maintenance of order.”

When a group of Black workers asked to join the party, the Executive Committee replied that “we want nothing to do with them.”

While shop-owners were begging the committee to stop the marches, reaction was not asleep. Merchants were raising $20,000 (close to $1 million today) behind closed doors to arm the militia that would eventually attack and destroy the Commune. The St. Louis Gun Club supplied shotguns. 1,500 rifles and 2 cannon were sent by the governor from the state armory. 11,000 volunteers were mustered into service.

On July 27, the governor sent a missive demanding the disbandment of the Executive Committee and all its strike committees. The Workingmen’s Party replied, “Nothing short of compliance to the [just demand for wages] will arrest this tidal wave of revolution.”

The papers were now referring to St. Louis as the “St. Louis Commune.”

At 3:00 PM on Friday July 27, municipal and federal forces arrived downtown. Police cavalry led the way, riding abreast to cover the entire width of the street. They were soon followed by foot police with rifles, the militia that had been arranged by the petit-bourgeois shop owners, and two cannon from the armory. The Workingmen’s Party, having failed to provide the strikers with weapons, had no way to resist them.

Half a block behind the city police came federal U.S. troops, marching with fixed bayonets. The cavalry plunged into the crowd outside Turner’s Hall where the Executive Committee met. One of the officers shouted, “Ride ’em down! Ride ’em down! They have no business here!”

The committee tried to broker an agreement with the city fathers. Those delegates they sent to the meeting were arrested. Within hours, several others had been taken from their hiding places and joined the detainees. 73 rank-and-file workers were arrested during the police surge.

The Executive Committee had failed to protect the revolution from counter-revolution. It had rejected the all-important aid of Black workers that made the seizure of the city possible, spat on the right of self-determination for the former slaves. The remaining members of the committee were now isolated. The strikers were at the mercy of the police.

From July 22 until August 1, the strike committee had controlled the city. It had failed, utterly, to establish the necessary self-defense required for the revolution. It had dealt with the mayor and business interests as allies – cold allies, but allies none-the-less. When the time came, those “allies” turned on the committee and the strike; every request from the businesses and the city fathers was little more than a delaying tactic.

The committee failed to expropriate the property of the dangerous and deadly foes of the revolution: because to them, they were not foes. Indeed, in the face of Black labor solidarity, the committee preferred its white shopkeepers to Black laborers.

What if they had not suspended the mass meetings? What if they had armed the workers? What if they had not broken up the solidarity of Black, white, and immigrant labor and instead expanded their demands to include those of the Black toilers? What if indeed. We cannot know what if, merely study their failings at a moment when power was in the hands of the people and their leaders refused to act.

We must learn the lessons taught by history, and overcome them. We must stand for the freedom of all, not the wages of a few. We must be prepared when the conditions for the next St. Louis commune arrive.

“PEOPLE HERE ARE DRUNK WITH LIBERTY…. The peril is great and it is imminent…. ARREST SUSPICIOUS PERSONS. SEIZE WRITINGS IN WHICH EVEN THE WORD FREEDOM APPEARS. Redouble your guard over your plantations, towns, and villages. Everywhere win over the free people of color. BE SUSPICIOUS OF THOSE WHO ARRIVE FROM EUROPE.”

—Letter of 12 August 1789 from Paris, by Saint-Domingue’s deputies

“[T]hey are inexcusable in my eyes for having wanted to set themselves up as despotic masters of the mulattoes, and as tyrannical masters of the blacks…. To shake off the cruel and shameful yoke under which they groan, they are authorized to employ all possible means, even death, even if they are reduced to slaughtering their oppressors to the last.”

—Jean-Paul Marat, L’Amis du peuple, No. 624 (12 Dec. 1791)

On the 22 of August in 1791, after months of planning and secret Sunday meetings, a slave named Boukman led a revolt through the North Province of Saint-Domingue. The rebels, armed with torches, guns, sabers, and makeshift weapons, set fire to the plantations and burned the fields. They freed slaves as they marched. Their army grew with ready-made revolutionaries. Black slaves flocked to their cause. Although Boukman would not survive the revolution, what he and others had begun would be the first and only successful slave-revolution of the new world.

“Your houses, Monsieur le Marquis, are nothing but ashes, your belongings have disappeared, your administrator is no more. The insurrection has spread its devastation and carnage onto your properties,” wrote the plantation owner Millot in a letter to his neighbor, the absentee landlord the marquis de Gallifet.

The bourgeoisie of newly-revolutionary France had won political rights from the ancien regime. The free colored men of the French colony tried to enforce a law passed in France that would grant them the same. Despite the fact that the National Assembly of France had issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789—and despite powerful progressive forces in France who championed them—the rights it guaranteed were not extended to women or free Black men. The Declaration of the Rights of Women was stillborn in the National Assembly and a 1790 uprising of “free colored persons” (gens de couleur) to secure their rights  in the French colony of Saint-Domingue had been crushed. Its leader, Vincent Ogé, executed by the Colonial Assembly of Saint-Domingue.

At the beginning of the French Revolution, the planters of Saint-Domingue allied with their one-time foes, the merchants of Nantes and Bordeaux in France. Though the planters typically found themselves at the mercy of the merchants (due to the royal licenses, called the exclusif, which gave the merchants and merchant-houses monopolies on the importation of goods from the French colonies), they suddenly shared a common interest: the protection of the slave trade. The colonial production of coffee, indigo, and above all else sugar was reliant on the importation of Afrikan slaves. Slaves were worked to death on Saint-Domingue, and they made both planters and merchants rich. With the outbreak of the Revolution, that trade was suddenly threatened by French “radical Republicanism” which promised freedom and equality for all men. The planters and merchants formed the Club Massaic, a political club with the express purpose of  maintaining the racialized class system of Saint-Domingue.

Opposing the Club Massaic in France was the Société de amis des Noirs, a group of radical abolitionists, who demanded the immediate freedom of all the kingdom’s slaves. Radical republicanism was the enemy of the King, of the nobility, of the colonial planters, and of the merchants of Bordeaux, Nantes, and La Rochelle.

In August of 1791, Black slaves held secret meetings near Gallifet plantation and swore to fight “a war to the death against the whites.” On August 22nd, rumors of a revolution terrorized the planters. They summoned a judge from the biggest city on the island, Le Cap Française, and when he arrived, the slaves rose up. Boukman, one of the early leaders of the rebellion, led nearly 2,000 slaves across the province.

On one plantation the rebels took “the refiner’s apprentice, dragged him to the front of the dwelling-house, and there hewed him into pieces with their cutlasses: his screams brought out the overseer, whom they instantly shot. The rebels now found their way to the apartment of the refiner and massacred him in his bed.” They then began attacking surrounding plantations. 

The slaves burned the hated cane fields. They torched the despised refineries and the sugar machinery that often crushed, mutilated, and mangled their arms. The conspiracy of revolt stretched across the entire northern plain of Saint-Domingue. Once the revolt was underway, the rebels destroyed “not only the cane fields, but also the manufacturing installations, sugar mills, tools and other farm equipment, storage bins, and slave quarters; in short, every material manifestation of their existence under slavery and its means of exploitation.”

By August 27, the insurgents were “reckoned 10,000 strong, divided into 3 armies, of whom 700 or 800 are on horseback, and tolerably well armed.” As in France, Saint-Domingue burned in the fire of revolution.

Class Composition of Saint-Domingue

Saint-Domingue had few members of the noble class; the French colonial nobility were absentee landlords who relied on agents and managers. Standing above the pre-revolutionary class hierarchy were the colonial secretaries, governors who were appointed by the king himself to oversee the island. The colonial secretaries had their seat in Le Cap Française, at Le Gouvernement, the house of the administration. Behind this was the military barracks, housing a thousand or more soldiers. The city was home to a large prison and several hospitals, twenty-five bakeries, and a slaughterhouse. It had its own municipal water system, fountains, and public squares. Le Cap’s 1,400 houses were built of stone and some had gardens. The city was called “the Paris of our island.”

The highest-ranked class on Saint-Domingue was that of the “grand blancs,” the big French planters who owned the majority of the land and the plantations. In 1700 there were 18 plantations in the whole colony, but by 1790 there were about 8,000 and Saint-Domingue produced roughly one half of all sugar consumed in Europe. Most of these plantations had been started by Frenchmen who took out loans from one of the merchant houses back in France. Those planters who prospered became members of the wealthy planter class, the grand blancs; those who failed turned over their plantations to the merchant houses in Bordeaux, Nantes, and La Rochell.

The plantation system was developed primarily for the export of sugar. Sugar production is labor-intensive. The mills were expensive and often deadly to their operators. When Saint-Domingue came into French hands in the 17th century, the plantations were worked by Afrikan slaves alongside white indentured laborers. In 1687, whites outnumbered Afrikan slaves on the island, 4,411 to 3,358. By 1700, the slave population was 9,082 and the white population had decreased by a few hundred. By the middle of the 18th century there were 150,000 slaves and fewer than 14,000 whites. In 1789 the official figures counted 465,000 slaves, 31,000 whites, and 28,000 free colored persons. At the end of the 18th century, more than 35,000 Afrikan slaves were brought to the island each year on the Middle Passage.

Later, the French built plantations for both indigo and coffee. Three-quarters of sugar and coffee sent to France was re-exported to other countries in Europe, with the difference in the price as it came into Bordeaux and Nantes and the price sold to Europe pocketed by the great merchant concerns in those cities. As many as 25 million French people depended on the Saint-Domingue trade. Nantes and Bordeaux flourished off of this trade. They became important centers of revolutionary activity and many of the bourgeoisie who fought for greater freedom for their class, for a political voice in the Kingdom of France, were only able to do so because they had grown fat on the trade of sugar and coffee.

On plantations with absentee landlords like those held by nobles or the merchant-houses, the chief agent was the procureur, who had power of attorney. These agents hired gérants, managers, but rarely visited the plantations themselves. The managers often exploited the slaves for their own gain, skimming commodities or money for themselves. The biggest plantations had économes, overseers, hired by managers and owners, who monitored the slaves in the fields and tracked the plantation’s slave population. These were all white or free colored men.

There was also a population of white urban craftsmen, and, increasingly as the 18th century went on, a growing class of poor or unemployed white persons who migrated into the colony with the hope that they might make themselves wealthy planters and plantation owners. Poor whites (petit blancs) were directed by the white planter class to vent much of their class-anger at the free colored people, many of whom were moderately wealthy or who owned slaves and small plantations of their own. This helped alleviate generalized class struggle in the colony.

Free colored persons (gens de couleur), were a legally recognized racial caste. Membership in this caste was initially small; in the early 18th century, many people of mixed Afrikan descent were legally classified as white, By the 1760s, new racial laws and measurements recategorized many of these persons and determined them to be “colored” — by blood quantum. In 1764, a royal decree forbade persons categorized in this fashion from practicing medicine, surgery, or pharmacy. The next year, another decree excluded them from working as lawyers or in the offices of notaries. A 1773 law made it illegal for them to take the names of their masters or white relatives. A 1779 regulation made it illegal for free people of color to “affect the dress, hairstyles, styles, or bearing of whites.” By the time of the Revolution, free colored people were subject to many laws discriminating against them on the basis of “race.” (There were many legal categories of “color” based on blood quantum.)

Still, wealthy free colored persons sent their children to be educated in France. White men married free colored women — however, in the 1750s and ‘60s some of those who had done so were removed as administrators and military officers. Poor whites or those arriving in the colony seeking to make their fortune were confronted with well-established free colored persons; in a naked maneuver designed to secure a cross-class alliance, the wealthy white planters assisted these poor whites by agitating for that legislation which deprived free colored persons of political, social, and economic rights.

Below the free colored people were the ranks of the Black slaves. The top of the slave hierarchy was marked by the slave driver. Drivers (or overseers) were in charge of the field slaves and often tasked with whipping those who where chosen for punishment. They had better food, clothes, and housing than field hands, and sometimes acted as collaborators with the masters and managers. Yet, a French manual for plantation masters advised them to watch their drivers carefully, as they were the most rebellious slaves on the plantation — and not without good reason. They had the most freedom out of all the slaves, and often gathered on Sundays to discuss matters with drivers from neighboring plantations. These men were the organizers of the revolt in 1791, doing most of the planning work at these Sunday meetings.

The horrors of the middle passage are well-documented. Over 100,000 slaves died during transport. 685,000 slaves were brought into Saint-Domingue from 1700-1793. Saint-Domingue accounted for between 8 and 11 million slaves overall, perhaps 10 percent of the entire Atlantic slave trade. Each year, 5 to 6 percent of the slaves died, an enormous fatality rate. Without a constant stream of new slaves from Afrika, the colony would exhaust its exploited Black workforce by literally working them to death in a matter of years.

The slaves on the sugar plantations were subject to the worst conditions on the entire island. Sugar refining was brutal and dangerous, and consumed the lives of the slaves on the plantations. Thus, the slave population was divided between the sugar slaves and the coffee and indigo slaves; these groups were further divided into drivers, artisans (barrel makers, sugarboilers, and so on), and field hands. Enslaved women were excluded from the high-status work. They worked as domestics or field-hands, and were also used as “breeding stock” — subject to rape, assault, and sexual exploitation by masters, managers, and overseers. Slaves were permitted to maintain personal garden plots, the produce of which they ate or sought permission to go to market on Sundays to sell.

Class Forces at Work

The tensions in the colony of Saint-Domingue on the eve of the Revolution ran thusly: 

1. White planters, “grand blancs”. By and large supporting the bourgeois Revolution in France, the planters generally joined with Club Massaic and the merchants of Bordeaux, Nantes, etc. They were opposed to the expansion of rights for free people of color, and violently opposed to any degree of liberation for the slaves. However, once the Revolution was underway, the planters would increasingly struggle against the current of radical republicanism that began to threaten the privileges of the big merchant houses.
2. White artisans and “petit blancs”. White artisans were positioned to become allies of the planters through their shared desire to maintain slavery, but they were less independence-minded and tended to be more loyal to France. Poor whites were non-revolutionary, but more or less allied with the white planters through a combined hatred of the racialized people of color, particularly those who had a higher class-status.
3. The free people of color. Opposed to the freeing of Black slaves, the free people of color also supported the Revolution in France and saw the position of Club Massaic as hypocritical while distancing themselves from the more radical abolitionist positions. Essentially, the free people of color on the island were agitating for expanded political rights and the right to assimilate into white French society. The free people of color were mostly concentrated in the west and the south; there they were armed and well-organized.
4. Black slaves. The enslaved population was divided into strata of its own: urban slaves, domestic slaves, drivers, and field slaves.
   1. Urban and domestic slaves. About 100,000 of the 500,000 slaves in Saint-Domingue were cooks, personal servants, artisans, etc. As a class, they were not inclined to join any movement, relying on the status of their masters to protect them.
   2. Drivers and field slaves. The 400,000 slaves who worked the fields or who directly administered the plantations were subject to the most brutal and inhumane treatment; these were the slaves that would become the engine of the revolution in Saint-Domingue, led by the drivers who organized the uprising.
5. The Maroons. There were a not-insignificant number of Afrikan slaves who escaped into the central mountains or the surrounding territories and became outlaws, raiders, and so forth. These so-called Maroons were often hardened warriors. There were also, among the slaves, those who had just recently been transported (stolen) from Afrika, many of whom had been taken in warfare. Regardless of their station or class as slaves, these slaves, “most of whom can barely say two words of French but in their country where accustomed to fighting wars,” taught the Saint-Domingue revolution tactics the French regulars were unable to match.

Setting the Stage for the Revolution

The initial conflict in Saint-Domingue was between the free people of color and the white population. As Revolution swept through France and the National Assembly became more radical, opening a split between the bourgeoisie and the French aristocracy, the upper strata of the free people of color in Saint-Domingue began to agitate for commensurate political rights as those that were being extended to the citizens of France.

Vincent Ogé, a free colored man who was in France when the Revolution broke out, appeared before the National Assembly with Julien Raimond to represent the free men of color on Saint-Domingue. They presented a petition which warned that “there still exists in one province of this Empire a race of men debased and degraded; a class of citizens consigned to contempt, to all the humiliation of slavery… [Though] born citizens and free” they were “slaves in the land of liberty.”

They tried to win over the planters at Club Massiac. They presented a plan for rights to be granted to “quadroons” (someone with one quarter Afrikan or Indigenous descent) born of legitimate parents with at least two generations of freedom. Ogé privately gave the club a separate plan — one which started by granting rights to free colored persons, but which would abolish slavery little by little. Club Massaic listened, but promised them nothing. As a result, they allied themselves with the Société des amis des Noirs. They presented a cahier des doléances to the National Assembly calling for “equality for all non-whites and freedom for mulatto slaves.”

Although many of the planters and merchants supported limited political rights for the free colored people, the call for full equality roused Club Massaic. The club took action against the delegates to protect the institution of slavery. The planter Tanguy de la Boissière published a pamphlet in 1789 arguing that the “pivot” of the “constitution, legislation, and regime of Saint-Domingue” must be “everything for the planter… There can be in Saint-Domingue only slaves and masters.” In March of 1790, the National Assembly proposed a law that the constitution of France would not be applied to the colonies. The law that was passed by the National Assembly stated that “all people” who were property owners over twenty-five would participate in the elections for the colonial assembly. The abolitionists in the National Assembly knew what was happening: the ambiguous language meant the French National Assembly at home was leaving the question for the colonial assembly of Saint-Domingue abroad — an assembly in which every representative was a planter and slave-owner.

That July, Ogé left France with a shipload of guns. In October of 1790, he landed in Saint-Domingue and armed hundreds of free colored men in the hope that he could enforce the law. He marched on and seized the town of Grande-Rivière, then sent letters to the Revolutionary Provincial Assembly in Le Cap demanding it apply the National Assembly decree granting all free citizens political rights. His uprising, however, was crushed by troops dispatched from Le Cap. He was tortured and executed.

By the following August, the North Province was in flames — not for the political rights of the free colored people, but for the freedom of the Black slaves. A rebel who was caught and executed was found to have “in one of his pockets pamphlets printed in France, filled with commonplaces about the Rights of Man and the Sacred Revolution; in his vest pocket was a large packet of tinder and phosphate and lime. On his chest he had a sack full of hair, herbs, and bits of bone, which they call a fetish.” The objective and subjective conditions for revolution had combined; the Black slaves of Saint-Domingue had developed a revolutionary consciousness.

In early August of 1791, before Boukman and the revolt marched through the cane, the free colored people organized a mass political assembly at Mirebalais. They selected delegates to the National Assembly of France, but were ordered by the governor to disband when the revolt broke out in the North Province. The angry free colored people took up arms. 

In the Western Province, the free colored people sought allies and took in a contingent of rebel slaves and dubbed them the Swiss — like the Swiss mercenaries in service to the King of France. The free colored rebels promised the Swiss they would be granted freedom for their service. By September 1791, the so-called Confederation of free colored people and Black slaves burned out and destroyed a contingent of troops from Port-au-Prince. A wealthy white planter proposed a solution: make peace with the free colored people. This betrayed the white class-alliance between planters and “petits blancs,” but it brought the free colored persons within the Confederate alliance to the table.

The Black “Swiss” rebels marched with their allies into Port-au-Prince. Behind closed doors, the white planters and free colored leadership agreed to deport the slaves rather than free them. An attempt was made to sell them in Belize, but when that failed they were simply abandoned on Jamaica. The British took them back to Saint-Domingue where they were executed by the French soldiery for their loyalty.

The attempted peace treaty also broke down. When a free colored soldier was insulted by a white soldier they began to fight. An angry white crowd lynched the Confederate, Scapin, and the free-colored soldiers opened fire on the white “patriots.” The outnumbered free-colored soldiers retreated from the town, but the whites followed them, murdering free-colored citizens in their homes or the street, and inadvertently setting fire to Port-au-Prince and reducing it to ashes.

The New France

In France, the Revolution was growing more radical. The King had been forced to sign the short-lived 1791 constitution, making the National Assembly the chief legislative body of the Kingdom and transforming France, with a pen stroke, into a constitutional monarchy. Civil commissioners were dispatched from the Assembly to Saint-Domingue, where they arrived in November; they carried a decree from the National Assembly stating that the “laws concerning the state of unfree persons and the political status of men of color and free blacks” would be established by the colonial assembly, overturning their previous promise for political rights.

The National Assembly had also declared a general amnesty for “acts of revolution.” Those who “returned to order” would not be charged with crimes for the violence or sedition they had committed.

Jean-François and Georges Biassou, the two victorious generals of the slave rebellion in the North Province, demanded the inclusion of the slaves in the amnesty. The planters refused, even as the commissioners realized there was no military solution that could destroy the growing power of the slave rebellion. Louis de Tousard, a veteran of the American Revolution, and a French officer, warned Jean-François and Biassou “Do not believe that the whites, and especially the members of an assembly of representatives from the colony, would lower themselves so far as to receive conditions dictated and demanded of them by their rebel slaves.”

Jean-François and Biassou replied to the commissioners, the planters, and Tousard, that “[o]ne hundred thousand men are in arms… Eighty percent of the population” of the north was rising. The leadership of this Black revolution was “entirely dependent on the general will” of the insurgents. Still, even Jean-François and Biassou, the rebel slave-generals, did not foresee abolition, merely reformed slavery. The rebel camps made it clear in no uncertain terms that they would not disband. There was no negotiation that would bring them back to the plantation. They would have general abolition of slavery, or they would, as Marat would say in December, be reduced to “slaughtering their oppressors to the last.”

After nearly a year of open rebellion, property damage, massacres of both Black slaves and white planters, on April 4, 1792, the National Assembly of France declared that “the hommes de couleur and the nègres libres must enjoy, along with the white colons, equality of political rights.” Did this free the slaves? No. It conscripted the free persons of color to fight the slaves. It reduced the complex racial hierarchy of Saint-Domingue to a simple one: on the one hand there were the free, and on the other the enslaved, and among the free there were no racial distinctions under the law.

In October 1792, news arrived in Saint-Domingue that the king had been suspended during an August uprising in Paris. The French Revolution entered yet another phase: one of radical republicanism in which a new assembly, based on universal male suffrage, was elected: the National Convention. France was now a republic. The colonial commissioners, Léger Félicité Sonthonax and Etienne Polverel were given extraordinary powers to suppress enemies of the republic by the National Convention.

In January of 1793, Louis XVI was executed. Spain and Britain joined Austria and declared war on France. As the other European powers threatened Saint-Domingue, the republic sent a new governor, François-Thomas Galbaud du Fort, who was a Port-au-Prince property owner. He immediately got into a dispute with the colonial commissioners; Sonthonax had him imprisoned. In response, the white sailors and French soldiers attacked Le Cap and the commissioners.

Sonthonax and Polverel issued a new decree: all “black warriors” who would “fight for the Republic” would be free. Any slave who fought in their defense would be “equal to all free men” and receive “all the rights belonging to French citizens.” But so, too, did the Spanish offer to free those who would fight on their behalf and capture the colony for the crown of Spain.

It was on August 29, 1793, that Sonthonax issued a decree abolishing slavery in the Northern Province. In the west and south, Polverel followed suit. Not only did the commissioners free them, the slaves were granted citizenship by the decrees.

From late 1793 until mid-1794, the British launched their invasion of Saint-Domingue. At the same time, the Spanish, from the Hispaniola side of the island, had recruited a number of free people of color, including the general Toussaint L’Ouverture. On 6 May 1794, after the Spanish crown refused to honor its promise to begin the abolition of slavery, L’Ouverture went over to the French and ambushed the Spanish as they emerged from attending mass at San Raphael. Toussaint’s Spanish-backed rebel army defected to Republican France and succeeded in pushing the Spanish out. The unifying colony now presented a threat to Britain in her rear: a slave revolt in Jamaica. L’Ouverture and the revolutionary general Rigaud together defeated the British and secured the island. An officer corps of free colored men was emerging, leading armies of liberated slaves.

Pan-Afrikanism and the Caribbean

The revolution flickered and was snuffed out in France, devolving in the Thermidorian Reaction, the execution of Robespierre and the radical Jacobins, the instatement of the White Terror, and ended in the creation of the Directorate, which was continually at war with all of Europe. After suffering abysmal military defeats, the Directorate was overthrown in the 18th Brumaire coup of Napoleon on 9 November 1799.

The revolutionary forces in Saint-Domingue, having secured the island and stilled the bloodletting among rival generals, declared their sovereignty from the French Consulate. In response, Napoleon dispatched an expeditionary force to Saint-Domingue to restore it to France, to profitability, and most of all, to slavery. Toussaint was defeated on 25 April 1802 and taken in chains to France. Rebel troops were executed by sulfur dioxide gas in the holds of General Rochambeau’s ships, shot en masse by firing squad, hanged, and drowned in bags.

The French troops, devastated by yellow fever and fighting, were reinforced by a Polish Legion who, seeing in the bravery of the slaves an echo of the plight of divided Poland, defected to join General Dessalines and would eventually be given citizenship and recognized as black under the Haitian constitution. The island revolted against the reimposition of slavery. The island revolts continued throughout 1802, and became a general war in October, when General Dessalines repudiated the peace and led the entire island once more against the forces of Consulate France toward independence.

Dessalines, in large part thanks to the British war on France preventing Napoleon from reinforcing the island, defeated the French armies and, on 1 January 1804, declared Saint-Domingue to be free and independent, rechristening it Haiti after its Arawak name.

In February of 1806 the young United States Congress adopted an embargo bill and continuously subject the Republic of Haiti to embargo until 1810 and did not trade with the republic until the 1820s. The U.S. did not recognize Haiti until 1862, after the southern states seceded. In 1825, the Haitian Republic was forced to pay 150 million francs to ex-slaveholders. Haiti eventually paid off its debt in 1947 — which bankrupted the country and forced it to take a loan from the imperialist French banks. In 1922, the U.S. seized all of Haiti’s customs houses, institutions, banks, and the national treasury.

This theft of wealth annihilated the productive capacity of the Haitian economy throughout the 19th and 20th century and has subjected the republic to a continuous cycle of debt, poverty, and invasion. In 2003, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was removed in a coup d’etat that was self-admittedly orchestrated by France because he called for reparations. The coup general who replaced him, Gerard Latortue, withdrew the demand. It remains one of the poorest countries in the Americas and nearly its entire government operating budget comes from the Venezuelan oil alliance Petrocaribe.

On 7 July 2021, the president of Haiti, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in the wake of his effort to combat U.S.-backed drug smuggling and trafficking (with roots in the 1986 Service d’Intelligence National, a CIA cutout that moved drugs through Haiti). Since that date, Haiti has had no president.

The U.S. settler-republic refused to aid Haiti because of the slaves they harbored in their own bosom. Despite the shared Enlightenment roots of the U.S. war for independence, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution, the U.S. sided with the Kingdom of France when it came to money and the fear of a slave uprising. The strength of the colonialist states in the west is such that if any of the imperialized nations attempts to break free from the U.S.-led capitalist world-market, if it attempts to shake the chains of imperialism and neo-colonialism, it marks itself out, just as the Republic of Haiti did, as a target.

However, each of these imperialized countries contains one or more New Afrikan nations; it is these descendents of the horrors of chattel slavery who have the power to shatter the imperialist chain. By banding together and rising all at once across the west, by threatening the monopoly capitalists not only in the peripheral colonies but also in the semi-colonies of the U.S. and Canada, the thinly-spread imperialist armies will be divided, unable to concentrate, unable to crush the rising state after state. It is through western Pan-Afrikanism that Haiti will be free of its debts and its status as a neocolony. It is through western Pan-Afrikanism that the Black Belt, the U.S. region of New Afrika, will throw off its capitalist, vampiric, rulers.

Walter Rodney wrote that, for “the vast majority of New World blacks, phrases such as ‘the reserve army of labour’, ‘labour reservoir’ and ‘last hired first fired’ adequately sum up the position. The reference to the black community in the US as an internal colony has many justifications, not least of which is the remarkable fact that black labour within America has virtually the same relation to whites in terms of skills as does continental African labour with regards to Europe and white America.”

“Imperialism,” he says, “has used racism in its own interest, but it turns out to be a double-edged blade, and that very unity that is engendered among black people — the unity of common conditions and common exploitation and oppression — is being turned around as a weapon to be used against imperialism.“

The lesson of Haiti is thus: we rise together when we rise, or we are cut down and crushed one by one, not only New Afrika, but the proletariat of the so-called New World.