The seats of power in the imperial core — Biden, Scholz, Macron, Starmer, etc. — who have the power to end this genocide with a phone call decide instead to brazenly defy the wishes of their own people, who have been protesting for Palestine nonstop for over a year.In such a context, it’s easy to feel dismayed. It’s easy to feel like nothing we do matters, like we have no power to change it.

But this is exactly what our imperial masters want us to think. They want us to stop supporting Palestine, to stop calling for an end to their meddling. The less they are challenged, the more they can continue the genocide on unimpeded. They want us to be complacent and quiet, but doing the opposite of what our enemy wants is already a step towards victory!

Be careful of actors who urge us to stay quiet and still, who try to redirect the riled up masses towards ineffective means of protest — or even stop them in their tracks.

What would have happened if Vietnam had said, “We can’t take on the might of the U.S. army, let’s surrender”? Or if Cuba had said, “The Batista regime is propped up by U.S. money, we’ll never win”?

What if Palestine had said, “This is hopeless, let’s accept our death”?

We can take inspiration from popular movements that succeeded, and study their tactics to apply them. But we have to do so on our terms, not on the terms our enemies decide are best for us.

In the West, we have long abandoned violence as a systematic means of political protest. It wasn’t so long ago that it used to be commonplace: just look at worker strikes in the late 19th century to see how they used to protest for things we now take for granted, such as universal health insurance or the eight hour workday. Over time, the bourgeoisie gave us token concessions to protect their power, and this had the (intended) effect of calming workers down. It’s harder to die for a cause when you have something to lose.

People like Gandhi are lionized over contemporaries like Bhagat Singh. Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela are heralded as champions of non-violence, despite both using violence (in different ways). And the John Browns, Malcolm Xs, and James Connollys of history are made out to be monsters.

The message is clear: to be a “good” citizen is to be peaceful, to make no waves, not to upset the social order. Non-violence has become a synonym for peace. Thus we have become accustomed to extending the olive branch to our violent political enemies in the name of peace, i.e. maintaining the status quo. But, as Kwame Ture said: “There’s a difference between peace and liberation, is there not? You can have injustice and have peace. So peace isn’t the answer, liberation is the answer. [To the question ‘you seem free at the moment’] I seem peaceful at the moment.”

Violence still exists around us — institutional violence, that is. Palestinian children are being bombed with our weapons. They’re being starved with our policies. Our governments demand peacefulness and compliance while they happily ignore popular demands and enact immense violence both abroad and at home. This is hypocrisy, and it’s built into the system.

The Palestinian Resistance has repeatedly expressed support for the massive movements of solidarity across the world, from marches to boycotts to student encampments. They want us to do more of this. We must listen to them, because they know best what will help Palestine, not “Israelis,” and certainly not Biden — the resistance knows best because they have been fighting the occupier for decades and have now made it into a global pariah, achieving all the goals the Operation Flood al-Aqsa sought to achieve; whereas zionists want to keep killing all Palestinians and would rather you not make a fuss or call attention to their genocide.

The International Court of Justice, a U.N. organ, agrees that “Israel” is committing a genocide and has ordered it to stop, to no avail. Now, their peacekeeping forces are being shot at — something which UNIFIL reports on the daily. “Israel’s” disobedience of U.N. orders is providing us with justification to keep the pressure on, and do each what we can to intensify that pressure.

I don’t know what the prognosis on Gaza looks like. I don’t think “Israel” knows either. This is reason enough to fight; nothing is settled until it’s over. We can only be sure about what’s happening right now, and the situation at this moment is this: there is no way “Israel” comes out of Gaza as anything other than a pariah state.

With every day that passes, zionists expose themselves just a little bit more as the deranged killers that they are. And through supporting them, our governments show themselves to be on the wrong side of the issue — and that this isn’t solely a problem with one or two individuals in government, or a problem of ignorance (that they don’t know what they’re supporting), but that this is calculated, institutional, and that it has gone on for decades even as different parties and individuals succeeded each other in office.

Zionists still expect to go about their lives unimpeded, when we’ve all watched babies mangled beyond recognition by missiles. After all they’ve done, they still expect to be able to fly their settler flags without consequences or promote zionism unchallenged in public.

They don’t grasp just how bad the situation will get for them yet. They will have no more friends. Much like “Israel” is ostracized from the world, so must we ostracize zionists from all circles. This means going against our instilled sense of peacefulness, which we have been brought up on to respect authority and politeness in all situations.

When you cheer for the killing of babies and families so you can own a beachfront property, you clearly position yourself as an enemy of all people, everywhere.

Zionism is not popular. In fact, zionism is so unpopular that our politicians have to make believe that their constituents are zionist, the media has to run sob stories about the poor IOF bulldozer drivers who ran over hundreds of Palestinians to get us to sympathize with them, social media has to ban us for posting anything against “Israel,” authorities have to crack down on protestors, and “private” interest groups have to spend millions doxxing students and buying out politicians to speak in favor of “Israel.”

If the protests were not effective, then they would not have required the repressive baton of the police to stop them. All of these acts of repression are meant to beat us into submission, to teach us learned helplessness. The major problem collective acts pose to the ruler is that they let us see we are far from alone, that there are millions of people on our side, and comparatively very few on theirs.

If zionism was so right, then the state of “Israel” wouldn’t need to be pouring millions into hasbara, making entire books filled with talking points that other zionists should use to defend their stolen homes and the massacres they cheer for.

They have the power of bombs on their side, but they don’t have the power of the masses. Those who have institutional power use different tactics than those who don’t. There’s already an imbalance of power, and so the balance of tactics must be equalized by other means than their bombs and their money.

We are expected to still carry polite conversation with zionists because our upbringing demands that we “respect our differences,” while they would never extend this politeness to us were we Palestinians — or even in the way of something they desire. They are polite with us because they think they can convert us to their death cult; the moment they realize we’re not buying, they will wish for our death all the same. Anyone who prevents settlers from stealing land might as well die, for they will not be useful to the grand plan.

All of this must change, and it will change. There is no world in which we can watch a 19-year-old burn alive in his hospital bed and still call to respect “both sides.” Anyone who does so has an agenda and is being duplicitous, and the first step for change is realizing when they’re doing this.

People on the fence must be corrected about their misconceptions and taught. Nobody is born with instilled science, we live and we learn. Many have spoken about how they “only” became firmly anti-zionist after October 7, when they saw the response from “Israel.” We must accept them — better late than never. But, we must see that they are genuine; again, don’t let the enemy tell you what to think. Many zionists like to pretend to be “concerned about civilians on both sides,” a position from which they will try to get you to abandon the fight and render you ineffectual. Anything short of the complete dismantlement of “Israel” is a concession to the enemy that they will use to drop more bombs and missiles and commit more open-grave massacres.

To do this, we must ourselves be exhaustively educated about zionism. Theory and practice go together, there can not be one without the other. Read and learn, and then apply that knowledge in the material world to effect material change: protest, strike, unionize, boycott! Refuse to order or ship items to “Israel” at your place of work, if you’re able. Take longer to deal with clients there. Misplace their orders, accidentally bump their items against a corner if you work in logistics. Get involved with local organizations that are doing direct action for Palestine!

Only you can decide how far you are able to get involved, but the first step is to recognize that together, we are stronger than they are. Start talking about Palestine with those around you, and find people in your proximity that feel the same way we all do after one year of open genocide. Talk to them, listen to each other: you’re not alone.

If we don’t want this genocide in Palestine to succeed, if we don’t want to send a message that genocide is tolerated and will happen with our silence from now on, if we don’t want genocide to the be new normal — then we must act!

The world is upside down. It is entering the height of its contradictions. They are culminating and soon a leap will happen: everything will change all at once in ways we cannot fully predict yet. But things are in motion already.

This is the law of dialectics, and it’s always faithfully happened.

I don’t want genocide to be the new normal, and if you don’t want that either, then ask yourself: what can I do right now to play my part?

The U.S. imperial senate immediately swept into action to protect its client state, even as the embattled Democratic Party leader, the octogenaric ambulatory corpse Joseph Robinette Biden, leaked his displeasure with the zionist attempts to draw their imperial protector into a regional war. But, of course, this is what the zionists have been seeking ever since their resounding defeats of October 7, 2023: to instigate the flames of war across the region and force their doddering big brother, the U.S. empire, to enter the conflict officially and at scale.

The zionists are beyond the control of the U.S. ruling class, which has shown itself unable or unwilling to cut off aid and reliant on the zionists to support U.S. hegemony. Now, the political configuration of the zionist state pushes it to engage in further and more extreme steps of genocide. The Iranian response to the zionist provocations was intentionally limited; Iran released a statement that they now consider the matter resolved. This provides an offramp for the U.S. imperialists to de-escalate and reign in their client. If the zionists provoke further violence, it will demonstrate conclusively that the U.S. has lost control of its vassal. 

The rightist unity government now running the show in Tel Aviv is fighting for its survival, both in the military field against the Palestinian resistance, and in the political arena against zionists to their left flank. Genocide hawks, who prefer the immediate and sharp destruction of warfare to the slow ethnic cleansing of the “left” zionists, have gone so far as to begin the sale of real estate in Gaza and parade the vision of a genocidally cleansed shoreline, replete with zionist ocean-side resorts, in conferences and on zionist news media.

On the one hand, the zionist response to the brave attacks of October 7 has put the continued existence of their state at risk. On the other, this same collapse of the occupation military in the face of concerted guerilla action has put the political future of the right-leaning genocidaires on the line. These genocidal elements see total victory, the elimination of Palestine as a nation, as the only path to retain political and economic power within the zionist state. To that end, they have reached out to the reserve of zionists located abroad; ultra-rightists in Europe and the U.S. have raced to their support.

One of these transparent efforts at instigating a regional war, in which U.S. interests in Saudi Arabia and Jordan would be imperiled, forcing the U.S. imperial garrisons to respond, was the April 1 bombing of Iran’s embassy in Damascus. The zionists were hoping for a response to this war crime. They are desperate for any excuse to call for help and any fig leaf to present the zionist state as under attack in the media. Why?

The zionist military is defeated. It can only hope to achieve something remotely like victory if it receives direct assistance from its imperial master, the U.S. In order to do so, the occupation has been lashing out at neighboring countries and threatening to destabilize the whole region. Their sole hope, as this paper has reported, has been for the zionists to convince the U.S. to lend direct aid.

In fact, prior to this punitive strike, Iran appealed to the U.S. empire and the U.N. for aid. They were rebuffed. Open conflict remains the last available option to them, despite the danger that it might trigger a U.S. backed war, or worse, a retaliatory nuclear strike.

As the IRGC pounds zionist military targets, obliterating U.S.-provided hardware and degrading the zionist occupation force, Tel Aviv is set to receive a new aid package from its U.S. master. It is now imperative that we block this aid. All U.S. organizers of all tendencies should exert pressure on their House representatives, up to and including disrupting their Congresspeople’s personal lives and giving them reason to fear voting for the bill the Senate just passed.

Some may ask what duty we have to the “working class of Israel.” This question is malformed and improper. If there is a working class in the zionist state, it is the duty of that working class to attack and defeat its own government in Tel Aviv. To the extent that there are so-called Communists within the zionist state, they must now call for the complete disarmament of the Tel Aviv regime and an acknowledgement that the zionist entity is doomed. Failure to do this is a betrayal of international solidarity on their part, not on ours. Others may claim that the Clarion thereby takes a “neither Tehran nor Tel Aviv” position. This is incorrect. This author — indeed, the Press Organization as a whole — critically supports the Iranians in their efforts to bloody the nose of the zionists. Palestine has broken out in waves of anti-zionist violence in the wake of the drone and missile attacks, and many Palestinians are celebrating the battering given to the occupation by the IRGC and Ansar Allah.

Further, it is our duty in the West to take any and all measures to prevent the imperialist armed forces of the U.S.-Canadian empire and their junior partners in NATO from entering the arena. As Aaron Bushnell and Senior Airman Herbert have demonstrated, there are ways to attack the morale of the U.S. imperialist armed forces. We must attack not only their morale, but degrade their capacity to function through all means at our disposal. Such is our duty. Even if the moral situation of the genocide did not already demand it, the imperialist chain may very well break in Tel Aviv — weakening the U.S.-Canadian capitalist empire fatally. Our own interests are tied with those of Palestine. Solidarity is not only a moral necessity, it is a strategic requirement.

The ruling class of the U.S. capitalist empire cannot afford to surrender its grip on the strategic necessity of the zionist state; its brutal dominance of the capitalist world-system is dependent on the zionists to a large degree. It is, perhaps, a foregone conclusion that the lackeys of the ruling class will vote for aid to the zionists — unless they are more afraid for their physical wellbeing or economic livelihood than they are for the strategic value of the zionist state.

Although it would be irresponsible to suggest, as Lucy Parsons did, that “every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or a knife, and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich,” action must be taken — direct, immediate, and sharp action. That action must inspire terror in the hearts of the ruling class, such that they cannot imagine continuing their support of the genocidal zionist state. Onward, to revolution!

The mass media, slaves to the ruling class, are nevertheless beating the drums of war. The Washington Post (“Democracy dies in darkness”) openly trumpets that the war in Ukraine is good for the U.S. Empire in all of the expected ways: It will “break up” the Sino-Russian alliance, it will defeat “our” enemies (who are “we” here? The editorial doesn’t say, but merely assumes that anyone reading the rag is bourgeois, upper petit-bourgeois, or otherwise aligned with the political class of the Empire), Ukraine is a good place to test experimental weapons and gear up to go to war with the People’s Republic of China, and the perennial favorite, U.S. manufacturing will return if we go to war. Of course, the author Marc Thiessen, speechwriter for some of the most evil people on the planet, doesn’t mean general domestic manufacturing — he means high-tech jobs in the murder sector like Raytheon and Northrop.

There’s more money to be made in Ukraine, though: The U.S., which pushed Ukraine into war with the R.F., can turn around and “rebuild” its infrastructure. The empire and its junior NATO partners have already committed $66 billion to do just that. This would, of course, result in significant concessions within Ukraine to these foreign investors. In June of this year, the U.S. Empire announced its intentions to own the Ukrainian energy grid with a $1 billion investment. Criminal financial monopolists like BlackRock have taken time from their busy schedule of buying all the housing stock in the U.S. to help the clown Zelenskyy raise private capital so U.S. investors can buy his entire country. The war has turned out to be a fire sale for the West. Yes, we are all aware that “[p]rivate investors see a ‘tremendous opportunity,’” as the JPMorgan ghoul Stefan Weifer cooed in an interview with CNN, in the destruction and privation of the Ukrainian people, but we thank JPMorgan for pointing out that the investment firms intend to capitalize on human misery! Of course, the mass media has called out the feeding frenzy and publicized it so no investor need miss out on this opportunity to financially colonize a country.

Reuters released the results of a poll on Wednesday June 28, 2023, showing that this media saturation has had its intended effect. The poll “charted a sharp rise in backing for arming Ukraine, with 65% of the respondents approving of the [weapons] shipments compared with 46% in a May poll.”

In foreign policy, the U.S. government represents the most rapacious elements of U.S. Capital. Anyone who bucks this trend on the all-empire scale, including those within the ranks of the reactionary far-right GOP block, is rapidly silenced. The capitalists cannot afford skepticism about Ukraine, the war, and their part in it. Left-liberal politicians, for so long pointing to the Wagner Group within the R.F. as proof that the R.F. had its fair share of Nazis, rejoiced this month when the same Russian fascist private military contractor turned on Putin and the R.F.’s government. Whichever side they fight for, the U.S. ruling class and their pet politicians seem to keep eagerly lining up with various fascists. Global fascism, in fact, traces its funding and support directly to the post-World-War-II United States intelligence agencies.

We cannot afford to be duped by the mass media, by the politicians, or by the ruling class. We must agree that we will not support the imperialist Ukraine war. We say NO to all U.S. dollars and resources being spent to see bigger piles of bodies in Eastern Europe, to see blood spread across an ever-widening arc in Ukraine. The support of the U.S. is the kiss of death, and benefits no one except the far-right elements within Ukraine. We demand an end to U.S. support for this war!

France is infamous for its frequent, prolonged, and often violent protests and working-class uprisings. In our lifetime, the causes have usually been economic issues, either in the form of planned strikes led by the reactionary trade unions or mass demonstrations exploding spontaneously from the working classes of France. This has been, for nearly a century, the way the French Third Republic has managed to control the powder-keg on which it sits and avert the second great revolution that threatens to blow apart the criminal bourgeois state of France. But it is also true that throughout the last century, the murder of Algerian and Franco-Maghrebi people by the French imperial police has sparked civil unrest and outright attacks on the murderous Parisian regime. These two forces — the economic demands of the French working class and the political demands of the colonized Algerian and Moroccan French — are both fronts in the social revolution. That is, the national self-determination of France’s colonized population represents one front in the struggle, and the economic and political oppression of the French working class represents another. Neither of these fronts can see total victory until they are integrated and led as a single movement. The ultimate victory of either cannot be brought about until the ultimate victory of the social revolution itself.

Since 1794, for over 200 years, the proletariat of France has struggled to move from the bourgeois revolution to the proletarian revolution. The forces unleashed in 1789, crushed by reaction in the Thermidor of the Directory, have not died. They have only become more powerful, threatening the revolutionary overthrow of the French Republic not once, but again and again, the great colossus of proletarian power held down only by the flimsiest of chains. In 1830, the July Revolution toppled the restored monarchy; in 1832, the June Rebellion sought to establish the socialism promised by 1794. In 1848, the February Revolution destroyed the July Monarchy and established the Second Republic. That Republic was almost immediately captured by reaction in the form of the second Napoléon who transformed France into the Second Empire — which saw yet another revolution in 1871 that established, for the first time in human history, in the first place on the Earth, an egalitarian socialist republic: the Paris Commune.

This revolutionary force was first concentrated only in Paris itself, the premier city of Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1789, there lived in Paris the largest concentration of handicraftsmen and workers in Europe. These men and women, the sans-culottes (literally, the people who did not wear the fashionable short pants of the time) were the driving force of the French Revolution of 1789. Although the wheels of the revolution were put in motion by the bankruptcy of the French crown and a growing liberal clique within the French nobility, the sans-culottes drove ever onward toward total abolition of property. From the Law of the Maximum, setting a maximum price to the sale of grain, to the Conspiracy of Equals, the revolutionary potential of the Parisian proletariat and craftsmen sought ever-greater concessions from the bourgeois radicals in charge of the national government. It was only with the brutal suppression of the Directory and the Empire that the second revolution, the revolution of 1794, was defeated.

Although the social revolution may be delayed, it can never be destroyed. As capitalism spread through France, class consciousness followed. Not only the workers of Paris, but the workers of cities like Lyons, Marseilles, and the other manufacturing centers of France, contributed to the upheavals and turmoil of the 19th century. In fits and starts, the social revolution has struggled to be born in France. In 1917, during the height of the First World War, the French army mutinied and nearly overthrew the Third Republic. This unrest, these upheavals, are part of the same stalled process that was rolled back in 1794 and left uncompleted.

One of the ways in which the French state pacified their restive population was through the hyper-exploitation of Algeria, Morocco, Indochina, Viet Nam, and other colonies. This colonial-imperialist plunder flowed back into France and fatally weakened or corrupted the political arm of her insurrectionists: her labor and Communist parties. Rather than fight for social revolution, the political establishment (for, by the middle of the 20th century, they could now firmly be said to be the “establishment”) fought for mere economic improvements to the lives of French workers. They abandoned the struggle for international revolution and abandoned, too, the international working people who depend on the solidarity of the workers dwelling in the hearts of the colonial empires.

Even so, revolution reared its head. In May 1968, the liberal government of Charles de Gaulle was nearly overthrown by the combined militant action of the French Communist Party, the Situationists, French anarchists, the General Confederation of Labor, Workers’ Force, and the National Union of Students of France. However, the Communists failed to seize the moment and, rather than seize the reins of power and smash the old state machinery, a new election was called, and the Third Republic passed back into the hands of the bourgeois political parties.

This brings us to today. For the past three days, France has been on fire. Barricades have been built. On Thursday, 875 people were arrested overnight. Over the past few days, 40,000 French police have been deployed across France. Curfews were issued, and bans on public gatherings have been ordered. Neoliberal criminal Macron is now placed to see his rule of France rival the 2005 revolts over similar police murders of Franco-Maghrebi children Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore.

Naël, the child-worker shot to death by French police, was a delivery driver. He was studying to be an electrician. He was 17. The Macron government is doing its best to portray this as a singular event, an outlier, but it is part of the same violence faced by the workers of France, and particularly the nationally oppressed workers of France, every day.

The violent suppression of the Franco-Maghrebi population — necessary to continue the French plunder of the world through its colonial (Guadalupe, Martinique, etc.) and neo-colonial holdings (development loans, direct foreign investment, the French Colonial Tax, which affects 14 African countries, etc.) — is carried out not only abroad, but domestically within France itself. The violence of the French police in Nanterre is the result of the global empire by which France continues to plunder its territories. As long as it is capitalist, as long as it is imperialist, France will continue to murder the sons and daughters of North Africa. We have merely to look at the language used by the Alliance Police Nationale about the crisis:

Faced with these savage hordes, asking for calm doesn’t go far enough. It must be imposed.

Re-establishing order in the republic and putting those arrested somewhere they can do no harm must be the only political signals to send out.

Our colleagues, like the majority of the public, can no longer have the law laid down to them by a violent minority.

This is not the time for industrial action, but for fighting against these ‘vermin.’ To submit, to capitulate, and to give them pleasure by laying down weapons are not solutions, given the gravity of the situation…

Today, police officers are the frontline because we are at war.

It is the duty of every French worker, of every French socialist, of the French Communists, to stand together with the family of Naël M. The struggle for liberation, for the social revolution, demands the solidarity of the workers movements across the globe with the nationally oppressed, the national minorities, the ethnically oppressed, and the gender- and sexuality-oppressed. France is burning; it is burning because the second revolution has been delayed. But the social revolution can never be defeated — only postponed.

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.

On 21 December 2022 Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the comedian-president of Ukraine, was flown on a U.S. Air Force jet out of his war-devastated country to beg for alms from his American masters in front of the U.S. Congress. Zelenskyy is the representative of the fascist-infiltrated government in Kiev and serves at the pleasure of a loose coalition of Banderite leaders — men who profess loyalty to the vision of the ultranationalist, antisemite, and murderer Stepan Bandera who organized mass executions during World War II. Before his televised debut, Zelenskyy stopped over at the White House to receive assurances from the decaying Joe Biden that the Banderite government of Kiev would continue to receive U.S. support. The U.S. imperialists, through their gerontocrat mouthpiece Biden, announced that they would not abandon the U.S. commitment to Ukraine. Indeed, the mobile corpse at the head of the U.S. executive said that he had “never seen NATO or the EU more united about anything at all.”

With these promises in hand, Zelenskyy delivered his speech to the U.S. ruling  classes with a bald-faced recognition of the truth — ”Americans won this victory.” Despite the fact that Ukraine is even now being reduced to a smoldering ruin, despite the fact that millions and billions of dollars in war machinery and materiel is being destroyed, Zelenskyy began by recognizing the power of the U.S. propaganda machine. He praised that the “victory” Ukraine has already won is, in Zelenskyy’s own words, a “hearts and minds” victory, a triumph of propaganda and intelligence. He thanked, in essence, the most powerful media presence in the world. With the U.S. imperialist war-lobbying machine at his side, how can he lose? In fact, by June of 2022, Ukraine had already lost 50% of its military equipment. On June 13 one of Zelenskyy’s advisors, Mykhailo Podolyak, tweeted that Ukraine needed at least 1,000 howitzers, 300 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS), 500 tanks, 2,000 armored vehicles, and 1,000 additional drones.

An estimate of Western-donated totals indicates somewhere around 200 howitzers, 51 MLRS, 250 tanks, and 700 armored vehicles have made it into Ukraine.
Zelenskyy went on to use the language of decolonization to describe Ukraine: Yet we have to do whatever it takes to ensure that countries of the Global South also gain such victory.” He hasn’t lost his gift for comedy! The “Global South” is dominated and colonized by the very U.S. Empire that Zelenskyy serves. The largest, most powerful empire in the world can’t “decolonize” anything!

This battle is not only for territory, for this or another part of Europe. The battle is not only for life, freedom and security of Ukrainians or any other nation which Russia attempts to conquer. This struggle will define in what world our children and grandchildren will live, and then their children and grandchildren.

Here, Zelenskyy appeared to be auditioning for yet another role — the battered president standing up against fascists, painting the Russian Federation with the same brush as Nazi Germany. This kind of rhetoric harkens to the world-shattering conflicts of World War I and II and, in good European style, Zelenskyy casts this war as one between democracy and destruction, between a free way of life and a dictatorship. But, like everything else in his presidency, for Zelenskyy this is nothing more than an act; this is no war between democracy and totalitarianism. Zelenskyy’s own government is shot through with fascists, and this big man of democracy role is merely a kind of sleight of hand. The real script is being written by the heirs of Stepan Bandera. Only a comedian could, with a straight face, defend the erection of statues to the antisemite and murderer of Poles Bandera, whose paramilitary Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists killed 35,000 Ukrainian Jews and between 50,000 and 100,000 Poles.  A fine deflection from his own Banderite government!

It’s of no small moment that Zelenskyy stood before the U.S. Congress to make this impassioned but bankrupt plea. It was the U.S. Empire and its machinations that put Ukraine on the frontlines. It is the insatiable drive of the U.S. imperialists for the natural resources of the Russian Federation, the pathological refusal of the U.S. ruling class to integrate Russia into the world-imperialist machine, and the bloody-minded desire of U.S. Cold Warriors who were sad to see the war end in their favor that put Ukraine on the path to war. For thirty years, the U.S. Empire has manipulated little Ukraine. The president of that embattled country must come to the U.S. and nowhere else to hold out his cap and beg for bullets, guns, bombs, even nuclear war. After all, Zelenskyy merely asked the U.S. to hold up the bargain its agents have been whispering in his ear since he took office. Make us like you, he says. Make us part of the imperialist West. And if his countrymen down to the last must die to fulfill the Banderite ambition? So what!

Zelenskyy went on to describe the Russian onslaught. “Every inch of that land is soaked in blood; roaring guns sound every hour. Trenches in the Donbass change hands several times a day in fierce combat, and even hand fighting.” But who, oh President Zelenskyy, invited that war? Who was it that loudly courted NATO, that loudly asked for the U.S. Empire to involve itself in the affairs of Ukraine? Whose government was it that waged a war of ethnic cleansing in the Donbass for the past three years? Oh, well, of course, Mr. Zelenskyy has nothing to say on those subjects.

But he admits that the Russian forces “have a significant advantage in artillery. They have an advantage in ammunition. They have much more missiles and planes than we have ever had.” The unspoken corollary: the U.S. must make up the deficit. You got us into this, Zelenskyy says without saying, now it’s up to you to get us out.

Of course, Zelenskyy couldn’t help but accuse the Russian Federation of what Ukraine itself has done. As early as February, Zelenskyy was releasing the prisoners in Ukraine to form penal battalions to fight the Russians. Yet, the comedian-president said to the Congress that “They [the Russians] sent convicts to the war.” And again, he cannot resist the comparison of Russian president Vladimr Putin to the Nazis: “[J]ust like the brave American soldiers which held their lines and fought back Hitler’s forces during the Christmas of 1944… [b]rave Ukrainian soldiers are doing the same to Putin’s forces this Christmas.”

But President Zelenskyy reminded Congress that the $68 billion USD sent by the Congress up to November 2022 is not enough money to win the war. “Financial assistance is also critically important.” The gross domestic product of Ukraine is only $200 billion USD; Zelenskyy warns that the entire output of the country is insufficient to win the war.

And what does winning look like, to this comedian president? “Ukraine has already offered proposals which I have just discussed with President Biden,” he said. Peace to President Zelenskyy looks like the Russian Federation voluntarily cutting the price of its gas and oil, guaranteeing food exports from Ukraine, releasing all of its prisoners, delivering over the sovereign regions of Donetsk and Luhansk back to Ukrainian war criminals and Banderite fascists, withdrawing all troops, submitting to an internal war crimes tribunal, and signing a peace treaty. Victory, in other words, is the complete capitulation of the Russian Federation and the return of the Banderite militias to the Donbass where they will continue to murder unopposed.

Zelenskyy, who once told a reporter that the fact that he was Jewish “barely makes 20 in [his] long list of faults,” under whose administration statues of the notorious antisemite and killer Stepan Bandera have multiplied, whose administration is staffed by open far-right fascists, demands that the U.S. help his government reconquer the Donbass so those same fascists can return to their ethnic cleansing. So much for the vaunted democracy and freedom! He then went on to say “We’ll celebrate Christmas. Celebrate Christmas even if there’s no electricity.” Throughout his speech he said the word Christmas no less than nine times.

At a time when the decrepit Biden White House has proved its value to the U.S. capitalist class by crushing the railroad workers movement, at a time when the consumer price index in the U.S. is soaring and inflation is spiraling out of control, at a time when student debt relief was dangled only to be canceled, at a time when the domestic population of the U.S. Empire desperately needs some kind of monetary relief, Biden and the other cronies of the big capitalists have chosen to spend over $60 billion in war machinery, ammunition, and supplies for the Ukrainian army rather than to give any relief to the U.S. working classes. Zelenskyy is their reasoning. The rugged face of the handsome actor-president serves as a stand-in for argumentation. It now merely needs to flash his photograph in the news or mention his name on the radio for standing ovations and tearful protestations of loyalty to Ukraine to spill from the lips of regular U.S. citizens (nearly always in the form of the fascist phrase Slava Ukraini).

This is a war against Russia; this is a war against the Empire’s European partners; but this is also a war against the working class. It is a war against the working class in Russia, which suffers. It is a war against the working class in Ukraine, which chafes under the fascist yoke. It is a war against the working class in the U.S. Empire, which must make sacrifices so the U.S. government can enact its capitalist masters’ bloody will in Eastern Europe and remake the map of the world.

We must not be duped by Washington or Kiev. When they send in the clowns, we must be prepared with the real facts that led to this conflict. When they cry crocodile tears about human rights abuses, we must remind them who created the abuses, who funded the murderous fascists that perpetuate them, who even now send money and materiel to them so they can continue their depravities. We are not fooled by the funny man from Ukraine.

Washington, we see your hand in the shadows.

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 Tuesday, November 15, a wayward Ukrainian missile hit the village of Przewodowe in eastern Poland, just a few miles from the Poland–Ukraine border, killing two civilians.

In the immediate aftermath of the strike, the Associated Press, citing an anonymous (and, in all likelihood, nonexistent) U.S. official, falsely reported that the missile was fired by Russian Federation forces into Poland. This false claim was disseminated throughout the Western capitalist press.

Naturally, the Russian Federation government immediately and repeatedly denied responsibility for the strike. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement on Wednesday, November 16, which read:

[T]he Russian Federation immediately provided comprehensive clarification on Russia’s armed forces not being involved in this incident.

Despite this … the media [in NATO countries], without looking into the situation, scrambled as one to spread absolutely fake and unfounded allegations about Russia potentially being responsible… We see this mayhem as a deliberate effort made as part of a systematic anti-Russia campaign conducted by the West around Ukraine. At the same time, the speed with which accusations against Russia were made by the Kiev regime is notable. Kiev [takes] every opportunity to … consolidate Western support as the Zelensky regime appears to have tired its patrons.

We are confident that an impartial investigation and publication of the results will expose the facts of this provocation.

Remarkably, despite the ongoing inter-imperialist conflict between the Russian Federation and NATO, the two sides actually seem to be in unanimous agreement on this fact: The missile that struck Poland was decidedly not fired by the RF military, and was, in fact, most likely launched by the Ukrainian Air Force. This agreement on the facts is perhaps a first in the ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict’s eight-year history.

Already by the night of November 15, President Biden stated to reporters, “It is unlikely [given] the trajectory that [the missile] was fired from Russia.” Biden’s statement followed an “emergency” meeting of the G-7 imperialists (the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Britain, plus the European Union) and NATO.NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, of Norway, in an address on Wednesday, November 16, following an emergency meeting of the North Atlantic Council (NATO’s top executive body) stated the following:

We have no indication that this was the result of a deliberate attack. And we have no indication that Russia is preparing offensive military actions against NATO [i.e., Poland and other NATO member-states]. Our preliminary analysis suggests that the incident was likely caused by a Ukrainian air defense missile, fired to defend Ukrainian territory against Russian cruise missile attacks.

Stoltenberg, in customary NATO fashion, then proceeded to lay “ultimate blame” for the Ukrainian misfire on the Russian Federation.

For its part, the Polish government immediately forgave Ukraine.

On Wednesday, November 16, President Andrzej Duda of Poland stated in an address, “It is unfortunately highly probable that one of the missiles fired by the Ukrainian air defenses fell in our territory.” He added that the missile appeared to be an old Soviet-era model, and acknowledged that “There is no evidence, at the moment, that it was launched by the Russian side. It is highly probable that it was fired by Ukrainian anti-aircraft defense.”

Later, speaking to reporters, Duda, whose government has been focused on “calming down” the Polish public, emphatically insisted, “Nothing, absolutely nothing, indicates that this was an intentional attack on Poland.” 

Meanwhile, the United States, which leads NATO and the whole Western imperialist axis, both politically and economically, immediately acknowledged the findings of NATO’s “preliminary analysis.” Multiple U.S. military officials have conceded that the missile was almost certainly Ukrainian, not Russian, in origin.

Following President Duda’s remarks, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated that the U.S. government concurs that “this explosion was most likely the result of a Ukrainian air defense missile that unfortunately landed in Poland.” Austin also echoed, however, that the Russian Federation bears “ultimate responsibility” for Ukraine’s misfire.

Citing “Western diplomats,” Reuters reported, that Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman has been coaching foreign diplomats from NATO member-states and other U.S.-aligned countries, “asking them to adopt a cautious approach and to be ‘measured’ while the United States worked out how it would respond.” On Wednesday, November 16, the day after the incident, the Associated Press, along with the numerous outlets that had repeated its false report as fact, were forced by NATO’s consensus to issue a correction to its initial report:

In … a story published November 15, 2022, [the AP] reported erroneously, based on information from a senior American intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity, that Russian missiles had crossed into Poland and killed two people. Subsequent reporting showed that the missiles were Russian-made [in fact, the missiles were manufactured in the Soviet Union, and were thus not simply “Russian-made” — a common misconception that has been repeated by many Western media outlets] and most likely fired by Ukraine in defense against a Russian attack.

By the time this correction was issued, however, the damage had been done. The AP’s false report reignited the fervorous jingoism that the Western pro-imperialist press has worked so tirelessly to instill in the North American and European public, with yet another tale of Russian war crimes. Every time public support for NATO’s proxy-war with the Russian Federation wanes, or gives way to the fear of a potential escalation to world war, even by an inch, the Western pro-imperialist press applies another dose of — typically false — pro-war agitation. This formula hasn’t changed in decades; it’s been reapplied to each subsequent American imperialist war of aggression, whether against Iraq and Afghanistan, Vietnam and Cambodia, Korea, Yugoslavia, Haiti, or the greater part of Latin America. The Associated Press wasn’t concerned about their report’s truth. The point, after all, was its effect. 

Despite this remarkable international consensus, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the CIA-installed, NATO-backed, puppet-dictator of Ukraine, has continued to insist that the missile was fired by Russian, not Ukrainian, forces.

In a video uploaded on November 16, Zelenskyy stated, “Today happened what we warned of a long time ago… Terror is not limited to our national borders… [T]oday, Russian missiles hit Poland… How many times has Ukraine said that the terrorist state will not be limited to our country?”

Zelenskyy went on to say that “This is a Russian missile attack on [NATO’s] collective security. This is a significant escalation. We must act.”

Zeleneskyy implored the Polish government to invoke Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty, which allows a NATO member to invoke the principle that “an attack against one is an attack against all,” and thus compel NATO to consider collective military action. Poland, alongside fellow NATO member-states Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, already invoked Article Four of the treaty in February, shortly after the Russian Federation launched its invasion of Ukraine; the fourth article may be invoked when a member-state perceives a military threat, but has not been directly attacked, in order to procure military reinforcements from its NATO allies. This has resulted in a build-up of several thousands of NATO troops along NATO’s “eastern flank.” Now, in no uncertain terms, Zeleneskyy was imploring Poland, as a NATO member-state, to initiate a world war between NATO and Russia — a world war between nuclear-armed powers.

Zelenskyy’s blustering has been repeated by other Ukrainian government officials.

On November 15, Ukraine’s Minister of Defence Oleksii Reznikov tweeted an especially bizarre statement: “Poland. This is not a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the reality we’ve been warning about. We were asking to close the sky, because [the] sky has no borders. Not for [Russia’s] uncontrolled missiles. Not for the threat they carry for our [EU and NATO] neighbors. Gloves are off. Time to win.”

Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba similarly tweeted on November 15, “Russia now promotes a conspiracy theory that it was allegedly a [Ukrainian missile] that fell on [Poland]. Which is not true. No one should buy Russian propaganda or amplify its messages.” Kuleba’s claim of a “Russian conspiracy theory” was made despite the fact that, by that point, NATO, including Poland itself, had already acknowledged that the missile was fired by Ukrainian forces.

In response to the Ukrainian government’s continued false assertions, the Russian Ministry of Defense reiterated in a statement its assertion that “The statements of various Ukrainian sources and foreign officials on the fall of alleged ‘Russian rockets’ in Przewodów are a deliberate provocation aimed at escalating the situation.” The statement also claimed that “All [destruction] in the residential quarters of [Kiev]” were caused not by Russian missiles, but by “self-destruction of the air defense missiles launched by Ukrainian forces from the foreign-manufactured air defense systems deployed within the [Kiev] city limits.”

At a November 16 meeting of the United Nations Security Council on the “maintenance of peace and security of Ukraine,” the Russian Federation’s Permanent Representative Vasily Nebenzya spoke of “the attempts by Ukraine and Poland to provoke a clash between Russia and NATO. The completely irresponsible statements made by the leaders of these two countries cannot be interpreted any other way,” he said.

Citing Zelenskyy’s false statements (the same statements we quoted above), Nebenzya said, “This is not just an intentional attempt at disinformation, but a conscious attempt to involve NATO, which is conducting a proxy-war with Russia in Ukraine — to [draw NATO] into a direct conflict with our country.”

Nebenzya proceeded to say that, “The Russophobic authorities of Poland … unequivocally stated that they were the target of Russian attacks… And this is in spite of the fact that photos published … leave no doubt that Ukrainian air-defense missiles had crossed into Poland. And now this has been confirmed even by NATO.”

Nebenzya added, “If not for that [evidence], all these facts would be concealed from the [Western] public, in order to promote the [narrative] of Russian guilt.” He cited other instances in which Ukrainian missile misfires have been blamed on the RF military, and reminded the Security Council that the Ukrainian government has imposed laws banning civilians from publishing photo and video evidence of Ukrainian war crimes on social media.

Finally, responding to the claim that the RF bears “ultimate responsibility” for the Ukrainian misfire, Nebenzya said that “We would not find ourselves in this situation if not for the fact that, in 2014 … with the direct participation of a number of Western states, a bloody anti-constitutional coup had not taken place.”

The RF permanent representative referred to the CIA-manufactured Euromaidan coup, which overthrew the previous Ukrainian government. The coup ousted an internationally neutral president, Viktor Yanukovych, and installed a pro-NATO, pro-European Union regime, led by the Zelenskyy government since 2019.

While the leaders of the Western imperialist axis will, of course, not subscribe to the overarching narrative of the Russian Federation government, and while NATO continues to cast “ultimate blame” on the RF for the Ukrainian misfire on Poland, the facts of the incident are now established beyond dispute.

In fact, President Biden has now directly countered Zelenskyy’s claim that the missile was fired by Russian forces.

On Thursday, November 17, when asked by a reporter for his “reaction to President Zelenskyy saying that the missiles that landed in Poland were not Ukrainian,” Biden simply replied, “That’s not the evidence,” before waving and walking away.

Why have NATO and the Russian Federation agreed on the facts?

Why has even the President of the United States, the central, foremost, unrivaled leader and figurehead of the Western imperialist axis, acknowledged the fact that NATO’s great rival, the Russian Federation, did not strike Poland?

For all their imperialist machinations and ambitions, neither the Western imperialist axis nor the Russian Federation stand to benefit from nuclear war. The only possible outcome of such a world war is, as it always has been, mutually assured destruction. Even the most bloodthirsty imperialist is forced to the table of diplomacy by this fact. Both “sides” of the proxy-war in Ukraine have thus taken great pains to ensure that, whatever happens — no matter which “side” gains and loses more, and no matter how much destruction Ukraine suffers in the process — the inter-imperialist conflict remains a proxy-war, that it remains within its prescribed bounds, and that it does not escalate to a world war. 

Only President Zelenskyy and the deranged leaders of his military-dictatorship regime have departed from this international consensus. As the war in Ukraine rages on, the Zelenskyy regime grows increasingly desperate for a direct war between NATO and the Russian Federation — no matter the toll. If the war does not end soon, we may well see the Zelenskyy regime resort to even more drastic measures to provoke a world war, and we may well live to see the unimaginably violent collapse of the existing world order.

The Western imperialist axis created and unleashed this monster. Now, the common people of Ukraine, of Russia, and of Europe, especially the working classes and the poor, are suffering for it. If this monster cannot be contained or destroyed, then the rest of the world, the rest of humanity, may lose everything.

Queen Elizabeth II, chief of the British parasites, representative of a class of parasites, died on Thursday, September 8, 2022. Her funeral on Monday, September 19, was the most expensive state funeral in the United Kingdom’s history, costing taxpayers over £7.5 million. It was attended by thousands of foreign leaders and dignitaries, and it is likely that hundreds of millions of people across the world watched the live broadcast.

To most of the British public and throughout much of the Western and Anglophone world, Elizabeth II is seen as a positive symbol of a post-imperial Britain. Her reign of over 70 years — the second-longest reign of any monarch in recorded history — was marked by the decolonization and independence of many of Britain’s colonies and protectorates, the official “abolition” of the British Empire, and the empire’s formal transition into the British Commonwealth of Nations. The Commonwealth was established in 1926, and took its current shape in 1949. Gradually, especially from the 1950s onward, anti-colonial independence movements gained momentum across the Third World, and the British Empire began to fracture; as the empire lost or relinquished sovereignty over its former dominions, most of the newly forming states were integrated into the Commonwealth. Today, of the Commonwealth’s 56 member-states, all of which are former British dominions, 15 are constitutional monarchies that recognize the British monarch as their head of state, while the remainder, in accordance with the London Declaration of 1949, recognize the British monarch “as the symbol of the free association of its independent member nations and as such the Head of the Commonwealth.”

The Commonwealth Charter officially describes the British Commonwealth of Nations as “a voluntary association of independent and equal sovereign states.”

The truth, however, is that Britain never truly relinquished its colonies. Today, as the sun sets on Elizabeth Windsor’s reign over the United Kingdom, it retains a vast capitalist empire. Elizabeth II did not oversee the decolonization and abolition of the British Empire. Rather, she assisted in its modernization, its transformation into a network of capitalist neo-colonies, in the form of the Commonwealth.

The Commonwealth of Nations is an instrument of Britain’s capitalist empire. It maintains the greater share of Britain’s “former” colonies in the chains of manufactured underdevelopment and mass poverty. The transition from “empire” to “commonwealth” was nothing but the transition from the “old” colonialism, characterized by direct control of colonies through military occupation, to the “new” colonialism, characterized by indirect control of “former” colonies through enforced underdevelopment and economic dependency. Most Commonwealth member-states are underdeveloped and developing African, Caribbean, and south and southeast Asian countries, which are entirely dependent on Western capital, allowing Britain and other imperialist countries to plunder their natural resources, use them as cheap tourist destinations, and exploit their working classes in unbearable mines and sweatshops, while keeping most of the population in a state of extreme poverty.

Revolutionary theoreticians, most notably the pan-Africanist and Marxist political leader President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, call this new form of capitalist imperialism “neo-colonialism” — its final stage.

Crimes of Britain under Elizabeth’s rule

Elizabeth II received word of her father’s death and her ascension to the throne on February 6, 1952, while staying at a luxurious lodge in Kenya, then a British colony. The post-war Empire was in crisis — or rather, was suffering a series of crises, beginning with the decolonial revolutions that threatened British dominance across the globe. When Elizabeth Windsor (actually, Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, but the royal surname was changed in July of 1917 to distance the crown from the Kaiser, as well as the deposed Tsar of Russia) was crowned in 1953, decisions needed to be made. Far from being a passive observer of the monumental upheavals in the empire, Elizabeth was an active architect of the new form of empire — she served, during her exceptionally long reign, as the guiding hand behind the modern British dominion.

Later that same year, in October of 1952, an anti-colonial rebellion, led by the militaristic Mau Mau movement, swept across Kenya. In response, British colonial authorities declared a state of emergency. As a colony of the crown, the administrators of Kenya (like all the crown domains) were recommended to the monarch by the Civil Service Commission, but only served as a result of royal, crown orders: the so-called royal prerogative by which they were appointed and could be removed. To be perfectly clear: the continued service of the colonial authorities and civil servants, not only in Kenya but throughout the empire, was purely at the pleasure of the crown; Elizabeth II could have dismissed the men who were about to unleash a nightmare in Kenya. She could have recalled any of the men serving in the colonies during her reign. Crown colonies answer to the crown. She did not.

Those colonial authorities mobilized tens of thousands of troops and colonial police to put down the rebellion. By 1960, the Mau Mau movement had been crushed. British forces killed upwards of 20,000 civilians and freedom fighters, many of whom were tortured and raped. In a typical example of the British Empire’s racial policies, the official Corfield Report on the Mau Mau rebellion, prepared by the Queen’s government, described the insurgents as “mentally deranged Africans,” “dominated by bestial impulses and influenced by world communism,” who needed to be forcibly “detribalized” by working under European tutelage. However, though the rebellion was militarily crushed, it cost Britain over £55 million (around £1.4 billion today), and was disastrous for the land-grabbing white settler population in the Kenya colony. Ultimately, when anti-colonial resistance made the price of occupation greater than the economic benefits of exploitation via direct colonization, the crown was forced to concede to the aspirations of the Kenyan anti-colonial movement. Kenya finally gained its independence in 1963, and repudiated the British monarchy by becoming a republic in 1964 after electing its first Black-majority government.

The monarch inherited the so-called “Malayan Emergency” (the Anti-British National Liberation War), which had begun years before. On June 18, 1948, four years before her accession, His Majesty’s Government began a 12-year-long war against the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), the military arm of the Malayan Communist Party. The MNLA waged a guerilla war against the occupying imperialists, attacking rubber plantations, police stations, and infrastructure in an effort to cost the imperialists and drive them out.

After Elizabeth took the throne, her government waged a scorched-earth terror campaign in Malaya. Colonial troops, in her name and under her banner, razed the houses and farms of anyone suspected of aiding the MNLA and forcibly relocated some 400,000–1 million people into concentration camps. Under orders from the colonial government, the soldiers sprayed Malayan fields with Agent Orange to starve out the “insurgency.” 

The colonial authority rounded up and executed countless Malayans without trial or even formal charges or arrest. At Batang Kali, in December of 1948, a regiment of Scots Guards massacred 24 unarmed villagers suspected of being Communists. For the next sixty years, the public demanded accountability for this heinous crime. Investigations were blocked by the Foreign Office and prosecutions were refused by Her Majesty’s prosecutors. In June of 1993, Queen Elizabeth denied a petition for a new investigation into the massacre. This should come as no surprise: she was protecting her father and his government the same way the Foreign Office would when it destroyed colonial documentation of the government’s crimes at the close of decolonization.

She failed to put a stop to the crimes in Malaya — crimes which she was undoubtedly aware of through the detailed civil service records submitted by the colonial administrators to their queen.

Yet another “emergency” reared its head in 1955 (so-called by the royal government because the insurers in London would not cover civil wars) — the Greek Cypriot War of Independence. The island of Cyprus was claimed by the British as spoils at the close of World War One and in 1925 it was declared a crown colony — that is, a direct possession of the monarchy, subject to Orders in Council and the Foreign Service, and not governed by the British Parliament. Although many Greek Cypriots longed for reunification with Greece and although Greece repeatedly approached the crown to reintegrate the territory, Elizabeth refused again and again. Lack of investment in the island’s infrastructure and the crown policy to transfer the office of the Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, from Suez to Cyprus, gave the embattled nationalists the momentum to begin the war. Fighting continued from 1955-1959, with the British colonial troops committing massacres, torture, and widespread rape.

Upon Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953, young Evagoras Pallikarides, then fifteen years old, tore down the Union Jack raised at his school, like all schools on the island. After fighting in the war for the independence of his people for years, he was captured by British troops and tried for the murder of a British informant. “I know you will sentence me to death,” he said in his 1956 trial, at the age of eighteen, “but whatever I did, I did as a Cypriot who wants his liberty.” Queen Elizabeth, although she had the power to pardon him, declined to act. On March 14, 1957, he was hanged by Her Majesty’s Government. At the time of his death he was nineteen years old.

The British army remains on the island of Cyprus to this day, seventy years later. On September 9, when they were asked to stand silent and mourn her, crowds in Cyprus refused; her colonies remember Elizabeth’s crimes.

Elizabeth II was the reigning monarch of the Union of South Africa, a “herrenvolk” constitutional monarchy, from her accession until 1961, when South Africa became a herrenvolk republic. She ruled as head of state of an apartheid government for 13 years. Not once did she act to attack apartheid, the regime of racial separation that prevailed in the Union and later Republic of South Africa.

In the late 1950s, in the imperial British protectorate of Nyasaland (now Malawai), the Nyasaland African Congress protested against the British imposition of a federation with white settler-dominated Southern and Northern Rhodesia. What was Her Majesty’s Government’s response? The cold-blooded murder of fifty Africans. The pattern by now is clear. No “soft touch” monarch, Elizabeth permitted full leash to her colonial governments to murder, rape, and destroy her subjects with impunity so long as they did it in the name of colonial unity. It was this atrocity in Nyasaland, not any good nature on the part of the imperial monarch, that triggered the withdrawal of eleven colonies in the years thereafter.

In 1962, after the death of King Ahmed of Yemen, a civil war broke out between nationalists (backed by Nasser), who declared a republic, and royalists, who were supported by Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Jordan. Her Majesty’s Government proclaimed non-intervention from London while secretly financing and supplying fighter jets to the royalists. Airwork Services, a British defense company, trained Saudi royalist pilots.

Why? Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister, told John Kennedy that the British Empire would ensure that the “new Yemeni regime were occupied with their own internal affairs during the next few years” because they wanted “a weak government in Yemen not able to make trouble.”

What of Britain’s longest colonial shame, Ireland? Under Elizabeth’s watch, on January 30, 1972, the British military opened fire on a march in Derry protesting the passage of British legislation that permitted the jailing of Irish nationalists without due process or trial, shooting 26 marchers and killing 14.

We are told that the Queen was a “quiet supporter” of many “progressive” positions. She was a “quiet supporter” of gay liberation, they say. She was a “quiet supporter,” they say, of many things; she, the head of state, one of the architects of the neo-colonial Commonwealth, “quietly” supported many people. So quietly, in fact, that she never made a policy decision or spoke out about them in any way. So quietly, that she took her “support” to her grave.

Anti-Democracy and the Crown

Over and above her noxious assistance for some of the worst human rights abuses of the later 20th century and her position as head of state and reigning monarch of a capitalist-imperialist empire, beyond her as a person, the institution of the monarchy remains a powerful reactionary anchor for anti-democratic trends in United Kingdom’s government. So long as the monarchy, its obscene wealth, its hereditary head-of-state, and the royal prerogative and privy council continue to exist, the United Kingdom will never fully transition into a bourgeois democracy, let alone will it ever be a democracy for the people.

Far from the toothless, one is tempted to say emasculated, position depicted in television shows like Netflix’s The Crown, the monarch (and by extension the royal family) is far from “merely” one of the wealthiest people in the world, a figurehead with no power other than a grotesque degree material wealth. (Does it bear mentioning that this wealth is often physically embodied in looted artifacts from conquered cultures, one of the Empire’s favorite pastimes?)

The royal family controls somewhere in excess of $28 billion USD in assets, and the crown itself is tax-exempt. It was Elizabeth II who spent some of that money in 1973 to lobby the government to exempt the royal family from revealing its wealth to the public; in her interest, the police have been barred from searching the Queen’s private estates for stolen or looted artifacts, exempted from environmental laws, and so on. This concentration of wealth is not the greatest in the UK, but it is part-and-parcel with the types of wealth hoarded there: old money, in the hands of hereditary nobility.

As hereditary head-of-state, the monarch is unaccountable to the people. This important government position comes with the old constitutional law of the royal prerogative tucked in its pocket. That is, the legal authority for much of the government of the UK still flows from the absolute authority of the monarch. The monarch retains the power to dissolve Parliament, the elective body that is meant to represent the people of the UK. The monarch may appoint anyone they desire to serve as prime minister, even if there are now “customs” associated with whom and how. The monarch can unilaterally engage in diplomacy, cede territory, and regulate official colonies. All prosecutions in the UK are performed in the name of the crown. The monarch remains commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and can grant honours, titles, and ecclesiastical appointments in addition to appointing officers in the UK’s military.The monarch may also issue laws through the Privy Council; these “Orders in Council” bypass the Parliament and stand as laws as surely as any statute.

A British Republic?

No republic, bourgeois or otherwise, can stand at the mercy of a monarch. Though England was seized with revolutionary violence like the other European countries, its revolution was perpetually delayed; rather than transition to a bourgeois-capitalist republic, the reactionary fortress of the noble class salvaged the feudal project — and in so doing, wrested power from the monarch and transformed the absolutist kingdom into a so-called “constitutional monarchy.” As a result, unlike the other European powers, England (and the subsequent United Kingdom formed out of the violent agglomeration of Wales and Scotland) has remained in essence a monarchy, the contradictions of its ruling classes mediated through Parliament — the needs of the old merchant-capitalist class and the old nobility embodied in the House of Commons and the House of Lords respectively.

Elizabeth successfully piloted the monarchy into a new era, one in which its powers are largely unquestioned. Like the empire she helped to hide, the monarchy now has an aura of quaintness about it, as though it has passed on to a more democratic form. In reality, the naked sword of power has been sheathed and other, more subtle means, have been employed. The iron fist is still here; it does not change its nature merely because it hides within the velvet glove.

It is easy for us in the U.S. to mistake the British monarchy as a bourgeois institution. The U.S. media treats the royal family as merely a curious set of hyper-wealthy celebrities, in the same way the U.S. media portrays its own hyper-wealthy. The bourgeoisie disguise their political influence by presenting themselves (and being presented by the media) as feckless celebrities. It is not so. The British monarchy is the last redoubt of feudalist absolutism, and the existence of the monarchy continues to protect the feudal holdouts of the remaining nobility and large landlords. The crown has, under Elizabeth, successfully hitched itself to bourgeois capital while remaining above it.

Communism, which seeks to abolish the advantages of the few over the many, which puts into the hands of the many the power to govern their own destiny, which is itself the most complete democracy as it destroys the material barriers to the exercise of the people’s power and places the workers before the very levers of authority, is naturally republican. The destruction of monarchy, its total abolition in all and every form, is a necessary adjunct of Communism. Monarchy is itself, in as pure an expression as can be found, the privilege of the few elite over the many toiling masses; it is the incarnation of social hierarchy: unjust, maintained by brutal force, and the self-justifying principle of exploitation, theft, and rapine.

As committed social democrats, as committed republicans of the people’s voice, we must all rise and say “no more parasites; no more sovereigns” and bid Elizabeth II an ignominious farewell. We hope (and we must take steps toward the hoping) that she is the very last of the British monarchs — that the earth will never again be tormented, first upon its face and then within its bosom, with the presence of a thing so vile as a British monarch.