My apologies, but I got very sick in the last two days and was unable to post this evening. The group will publish tonight’s discussion on Wednesday, May 30th, at 6:00 p.m. EDST.
This postponed diary will discuss Karl’s Marx’s analysis of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement of his day – when the people of Paris took over the city, not only the streets of Paris, but the government buildings as well and actually ran the city, its services and its labor laws. They called themselves the Paris Commune. Marx saw in their actions the seeds of a new, human society -- even though the Paris Commune only lasted one month!
Marx described the communards' actions and their significance with great vividness and passion, as you can see from this snippet from his "Civil War in France"
Here is the beginning of Marx’s address on the Paris Commune to the First International Workingmen’s Association in 1870, written two days after the demise of the commune in an counter-revolutionary bloodbath. For the entire article see:
http://www.marxists.org/...
The Third Address(See the whole article at marxists.org
May, 1871
[The Paris Commune]
______________On the dawn of March 18, Paris arose to the thunder-burst of “Vive la Commune!” What is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalizing to the bourgeois mind?
“The proletarians of Paris,” said the Central Committee in its manifesto of March 18, “amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs.... They have understood that it is their imperious duty, and their absolute right, to render themselves masters of their own destinies, by seizing upon the governmental power.”
But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.
