Report on week two of Solidarity’s “Problems of Socialist Organization” reading and discussion series
Ivan DZ, November 30 2025
Note: I’ve written a different sort of report this week: more of an article responding to the
central theme I think we approached in discussion, about the role of women in the Commune, and the different forms of power that burst forth once the capitalists and their politicians suddenly decamped Paris.
We had three dozen people call in to participate in this discussion. Carolyn Eichner started us off with a presentation about the book she’s working on now, about the life and struggles of woman Communard Louise Michel. I thought it added a human dimension to her book on the Commune, which we read a chapter from for this week. Because of the richness of her contribution, I think there were more questions and ideas than we could properly deal with in the 90 minutes of our class.
The next class is about the revolutionary days of the October revolution in 1917. We’re lucky to have an opening presentation by Paul LeBlanc, who has studied and written as much about the Russian revolution as anyone else alive. He has prepared three appendices for our class, which you can find on our course page here, or linked directly here: Map of political currents in the Russian revolution; Reform policies of early soviet gov’t; and Tentative Conclusions about Russia’s 1917 revolution. – IDZ
In State and Revolution, Lenin added something critical to Marx’s lessons from the Paris commune, that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” Lenin wrote that the historical experience of the Commune provides communists with a model for a state capable of breaking up the capitalist social order and transitioning to socialism. He wrote:
The Commune, therefore, appears to have replaced the smashed state machine “only” by fuller democracy: abolition of the standing army; all officials to be elected and subject to recall. But as a matter of fact this “only” signifies a gigantic replacement of certain institutions by other institutions of a fundamentally different type. This is exactly a case of “quantity being transformed into quality”: democracy, introduced as fully and consistently as is at all conceivable, is transformed from bourgeois into proletarian democracy; from the state (= a special force for the suppression of a particular class) into something which is no longer the state proper.
From here on, throughout his writing especially in 1917 and 1918, Lenin referred to the revolutionary worker’s state that the Bolsheviks were trying to build as a state of the “Paris Commune type.”
This was an idea I was already familiar with before Solidarity’s class on the Paris Commune. But through our discussion, and especially through reading Carolyn Eichner’s book on the Commune and her presentation at the beginning of our discussion, I got a sense that the “type” of state Lenin, Marx, and Bakunin all referred to, modelled on the Commune, was only one aspect of the Commune itself –– and only the formal part, missing its mass character and spontaneous energies.
These insurrectionary energies, inassimilable into the bourgeois state form and patriarchal capitalist mode of production that the Communards inherited and tried to overthrow, were centred not in the Commune government, which radically reformed the bourgeois form of “democratic” representation, but in the popular organizations where Communard women sensed, for the first time, a possibility of smashing the whole social order that oppressed them.
Carolyn Eichner, in her presentation and book, The Paris Commune: A Brief History, focused on an aspect of the Commune that these classic Marxists texts overlooked: the social revolution led and enacted by women. Women were formally excluded from the “universal suffrage” that Marx and Lenin celebrated in their reviews of the Commune, and from legal citizenship.
Eichner said “women had no role” in the Commune government. “They remained disenfranchised. And they did not push for women’s suffrage and male Communards never included them.” Instead, women Communards found their political theatre in the social revolution and its ad hoc institutions that sprung up around Paris. Eichner said, “You had women involved in different ways, fighting in the army, feeding and caring for soldiers, involved in the political clubs, and organizations, but not in the government itself.”
Eichner is identifying a central dynamic to the revolutionary moment in Paris, and to communist struggle generally. In our first discussion class, we discussed the communist dynamic as essentially “from below,” that communism depends upon the self-organization of working class people themselves. The example of the Paris Commune illustrates both the possibilities and the difficulties of assessing this ideal, wrought historically.
A working class state
The classical communist memory of the Commune is that it was a moment of working class unity against the capitalist class and its state. As Michael Lowy writes, in his article that we read as an introduction to Marx and Bakunin’s writing on the Commune, “The Commune was a movement of self–emancipation, self-organization and initiative from below.” The “self” in this self-emancipation, he says, was “pluralist and unitary,” in a new government that included “libertarians and Jacobins, Blanquists and social republicans.”
In The Civil War in France, Marx says this was “essentially a working class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour.” This victory, Marx wrote, was due to the radical reforms enacted almost immediately by the Communards: “universal” suffrage for all men, abolition of the army and its replacement by the distribution of arms amongst all the people, limiting pay for politicians to the average wage of worker (men), and by tightening democratic controls over elected representatives by the masses they’re meant to represent.
Alongside these legal and democratic reforms, social reforms were fought over in the streets as well as in the new halls of power. In Eichner’s “Florescence” chapter, she explains that these struggles were centred on how the Commune should manage the productive forces they inherited after capitalists fled the city. The consensus in the government was not anti-property, but the Commune government did agree to support workers taking over the factories of capitalists that had fled the city with Thiers. And signalling an identification with workers against bosses, and the primacy of producers above consumers, the Communards abolished night work in bakeries.
Dealing with inequality and the immediate problems of poor peoples survival, the Communards took a practical approach that limited the reach of their revolution. They did not go so far as to seize the public pawnshop, but did pass a law that recognized the poor were being fleeced by this form of poverty relief, allowing the return of pawned possessions worth less than 20 francs.
Marx summarized this process with the claim that “the Commune intended to abolish that class-property which makes the labour of the many the wealth of the true.” His predicate “intended to” reaches around the structural limits faced by the Communards in the direction that their energetic reforms pointed. But he also risks overstating the degree of consensus that the Commune government had in favour of revolutionary socialism. There’s no aspect of social organization that exposes the limits of this consensus more than the organization of gender.
Whither women?
In Eichner’s The Paris Commune, she details the reforms that benefited women against the cross-class patriarchal front, which spanned most of those groups that composed the Communard government. The “old men” of the Jacobin tradition upheld gendered segregation as a necessity of social life, the Proudhonist anarchists said women were “naturally called to the peaceable minutiae of the domestic hearth”, and the labor left fought for gendered laws to restrictively define appropriate jobs for women.
Against this revolutionary patriarchal bloc, women Communards won concessions that weakened the legal designation of their second class status. The government recognized free unions, rather than only church-scanctioned marriage, and ended the legal category of “illegitimate” children. The government also supported the Union des Femmes, which, Eichner says, “challenged the norms in the labour movement that treated women as unfair competitors for men in the labour market.” But the most power that women Communards felt was in extra parliamentary movements outside of the government.
Eichner calls the Communard women’s movement a “sociocultural revolt” and explains that its axis was not the formal government of the rebellion, but the informal political clubs in “actions that constituted politics outside the government.” These clubs were the spontaneous invention of the French revolution against feudalism in 1848. They had been banned during the Prussian siege but sparked back to life with a renewed vigour with the Commune, where they met in churches in mixed gender and also women-only clubs.
Eichner says that while “feminists had focused on gaining political rights under the Empire, the Commune brought larger possibilities. They saw the potential of liberation expand beyond parity with men under an oppressive regime. Working-class women sought concrete change in their lives, not merely the ability to vote.”
While male Communards supported the Union des Femme, they did not support the women’s political clubs and the anti-patriarchal positions they generated. But Eichner’s books shows that it was exactly the vitality of the political clubs –- along with the renaissance of independent newspapers (there were 90 newspapers launched during the short-lived Commune) — that provided a revolutionary energy to the Commune. Yes, the formal Commune government drew political energy and direction from neighbourhood assemblies, whose delegates were an example of “from below” socialist organization if ever there was one, but the “self organization” of those working class assemblies was scrubbed of working class women’s “selves.” It was through the political clubs that working class women developed and exerted their political subjectivities, where, as the Union des Femme put it, those workers who suffered “double” exploitation, as “both workers and women,” could also practice their revolutionary politics.
The exclusion of women from the formal Commune government was more than simply a problem of sexism, it limited the revolutionary energy of the government, and distorted the politics the Commune government could represent. For example, while the Communards decided not to shut down the public pawn shop because they had no social welfare institution with which to replace it, they had no such hesitations before prostitution, a survival institution for poor women. The male delegate from the 11th arrondissement, a working class district, said, “The intelligent organization of women’s work is the single remedy for prostitution.” The government then compared prostitution to slavery and called for the banning of “houses of tolerance,” where “filles publique” were able to legally and, relative to the dangers of “street walking,” safely able to sell sex. If the government considered prostitution an outcome of economic misery, should the houses of tolerance not have been protected by the same logic as the national pawn shop? The politics of sex worker militants from the same era in London suggests that if the “filles publique” had Communard delegates, the debate would have gone differently.*
Revolutionary energy
When Marx and, later, Lenin, wrote that a workers power could not simply roll into the state forms established by capitalism but must instead immediately create a state of the “Paris Commune type,” they were not thinking of women’s underground and informal organizational bodies like the political clubs. But could the representational model of the Communard government exist if it did not have social roots beyond its limited enfranchisement?
I think we can understand the informal, energetic link between the political clubs and the Commune government as a political circuit, through which ran a current, from popular networks to delegated power. Women’s struggle, including their unpopular (amongst male communards) struggle against patriarchal power in the home, streets, and workplaces of Paris, must have worked as a sort of transformer, boosting the power of the Clubs into the Communard government. There was no where else that women’s power was better represented, and there is no other explanation for the passage of anti-misogynist laws and the government’s support of the women’s union.
We can find this sort of “from below” revolutionary current in all important revolutions. In 1917 it was the Soviets; in China in the 1920s, the peasant movement; in Italy in the ’20s, the factory occupations; in Paris, the political clubs. Formal representative political organization is undeniably essential because without it, there would be no practical way to take measure of the temperature of the spontaneous movement, nor lead it strategically against the enemy, let alone create new norms of production and distribution that break from capitalist tyranny.
But without spontaneous popular assemblies, workplace councils, neighbourhood defence organizations, open political clubs, where will those masses of differing temperaments gather and be heard, learn, and teach? From what well will the representative bodies draw revolutionary energy, and to whom will they be accountable? What the Parisian political clubs tell us is that the state “of a Paris Commune type” is not only representative, it is also popular. It is organized, and it is also dangerous. It is political, and it is also social. Like socialist revolution must be.
*See Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge University Press, 1980); Laura Maria Agustin, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets, and the Rescue Industry (Zed Books, 2007); Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).