One hundred and fifty-five years later, the 1871 Paris Commune remains one of the clearest guides to understanding both the possibilities and the limits of revolutionary struggle. Its enduring significance lies not simply in the fact that it was the first historical attempt by the working class to establish its own power and confront the bourgeois state in practice, nor in the extraordinary heroism of the Communards, but in the lessons it provided on the central question of every revolution: What must be done with bourgeois power?
Marx immediately understood the world-historical importance of this experience. In The Civil War in France, he described the Commune as “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour.” This formulation remains one of the greatest achievements of revolutionary thought. The emancipation of the working class could not be accomplished through parliamentary reforms or a change of government within the existing order. It required a new form of power born from the revolutionary action of the workers themselves.
Yet the Commune's greatest lesson emerged through its defeat. Marx's most important conclusion was not that workers could seize power, but that they could not simply inherit the existing state. “The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” In this sentence lies one of the fundamental dividing lines between Marxism and every form of reformism. The bourgeois state is not a neutral instrument that can serve different classes depending on who occupies its offices. It is a mechanism specifically forged to protect capitalist property, exploitation and class rule.
The Commune therefore disproved one of the most persistent illusions in political history: that society can be transformed in the interests of labor without breaking the power of the ruling class. The workers of Paris were not defeated because they went too far. They were defeated because they could not carry the revolution through to its conclusion. They conquered political power in Paris but left key pillars of bourgeois power standing. Most famously, the Bank of France remained untouched. The financial heart of the old order continued to function while the counterrevolution reorganized its forces. Political power and economic power could not remain separated for long. The bourgeoisie understood this reality better than many of its opponents.
This is why the massacre of the Communards was not an accident of history but a lesson in class struggle. Faced with the possibility of workers’ rule, the French bourgeoisie abandoned every democratic pretense and unleashed a bloodbath. Tens of thousands were executed during the Bloody Week. The ruling classes demonstrated a truth repeatedly confirmed throughout modern history: when their power is seriously threatened, they resort not to dialogue but to violence.
For Vladimir I. Lenin, the Commune was neither a tragic failure nor a romantic legend. It was a revolutionary school. He insisted that communists study its achievements and weaknesses with equal seriousness. “The cause of the Commune”, he wrote, “is the cause of the social revolution, the cause of the complete political and economic emancipation of the toilers.” But Lenin also understood that heroism alone could not secure victory. The Commune had revealed the necessity of workers’ power; it had not yet solved the problem of how to preserve and consolidate it. That required a revolutionary party capable of providing strategic leadership and carrying the struggle to its conclusion.
The October Revolution emerged from precisely this assimilation of the Commune's lessons. The Bolsheviks understood that the bourgeois state had to be smashed, that the economic power of the ruling classes had to be expropriated, and that the revolution had to defend itself against counterrevolutionary violence. In this sense, the 1917 Great October Socialist Revolution did not negate the Commune. It vindicated it. What the workers of Paris discovered through sacrifice, the October Revolution transformed into a victorious strategy.
Today, the Paris Commune remains profoundly contemporary because the essential questions it raised have not disappeared. Capitalism continues to generate exploitation, crises, inequality and imperialist wars. The state remains an instrument of class domination. And reformist currents continue to promise social transformation without confronting the foundations of bourgeois power. The enduring relevance of the Commune lies precisely here: every strategy that seeks to improve society without resolving the question of class power ultimately arrives at the same historical dead end.
The most important lesson of the Commune is therefore not that workers can rise up. History has shown that repeatedly. Its decisive lesson is that the working class must not stop halfway. The bourgeois state cannot be conquered, democratized or gradually transformed into an instrument of social liberation. It must be overthrown and replaced by institutions of proletarian power. On this question—the central question of every revolution—the Paris Commune remains one of the greatest schools of Marxism.
The Commune was defeated, but the historical problem it posed remains unresolved. Who shall rule society—the exploiters or the exploited? One hundred and fifty-five years later, that question remains at the center of world history. The red flag raised above Paris in 1871 was not the end of a struggle. It announced the beginning of an epoch whose fundamental challenge remains before us still.
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.
