[Ernest Mandel, editor of the Belgian revolutionary-socialist weekly La Gauche, gave the following speech May 16 to the more than 30,000 demonstrators assembled at the Mur des Fédérés in Paris for the Fourth International's commemoration of the Commune. It was against this wall that the counterrevolutionary forces, who invaded the city from Versailles, carried out their mass executions of Communards after the Paris Commune fell in May 1871. Mandel's speech was published in the May 28 issue of La Gauche, from which we have translated it.
The Paris Commune opened the historical era of proletarian and socialist June 28, 1971
revolutions. It offers us history's first example of a real dictatorship of the proletariat. It enabled Marx and Lenin to round out the Marxist theory of the state. Those who aborted two socialist revolutions in France, in June 1936 and May 1968, cannot hold their heads up in front of the Mur des Fédérés. Only the revolutionists who work untiringly for the victory of new socialist revolutions, in France and throughout the world, can celebrate the centenary of the Commune by carrying on its work.
The Paris Commune gave a brilliant demonstration that proletarian dictatorship can be combined with the broadest workers' democracy involving freedom of action for all currents in the workers' movement. Those who have just stamped out all vestiges of workers' democracy in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic; those who deny the East European working masses any freedom of action in the trade-union or political fields; those who continue to hold our comrades Kuron and Modzelewski in prison, despite the fact that the magnificent mass uprising of the Baltic port workers confirmed these comrades' diagnosis of Polish society and largely adopted their program of action; those who justify a privileged bureaucracy holding a monopoly of power - these people cannot hold their heads up in front of the Mur des Fédérés.
Only the revolutionists who fight for a state run by democratically elected worker^" councils, like the Commune, who fight for a low-cost state administration where no functionary will be paid more than a skilled worker, can celebrate the centenary of the Commune by carrying on its work.
Despite the little time at its disposal and the timidity its Proudhonian leaders exhibited toward the Bank of France, the Paris Commune inaugurated the era of expropriating the expropriators by decreeing socialization of factories abandoned by their owners, and by establishing a system of workers' self-management in them. This system was anticipated, moreover, in a prophetic article by Eugène Varlin, leader of the First International in France. In 1870 he wrote of the revolution whose outbreak he foresaw: "In order to be definitive, the coming revolution must not stop with simply changing the label of the government and passing a few minor reforms. ... Society can no longer let control of the public wealth, the product of collective labor, be decided by the whim of birth or success. This wealth can only be put to use for the benefit of the collectivity." ("Les Sociétés ouvri- ères," La Marseillaise, March 11, 1870.)
Despite its Jacobin-nationalist character, the Paris Commune opened a new chapter in the tradition of proletarian internationalism. It thus provided an initial example of the process of permanent revolution. It is well known that it chose for its banner the red flag of the worldwide republic of labor. It is also well known what a prestigious role was played by foreign revolutionists like Fraenkel and Dombrowski. Less well known is the fact that sixty-five years before the Spanish revolution of 1936, the Commune inaugurated the tradition of workers' brigades, creating a Belgian brigade and a French-American brigade. Several thousand foreign revolutionists and workers fought in the ranks of the Commune forces; the Versaillais arrested more than 1,700 so-called foreigners 'in the course of the battles.
The remarkable thing about the audacity of the Paris workers is that the fundamental problems they took up in March 1871 have not yet been solved to this day. We know the main reason for this. It does not lie in the immaturity of the objective conditions nor in any lack of vigor in the mass struggles. It lies in the absence of an adequate revolutionary organization. 608
Such an organization
, is indispensable to concentrate the enormous spontaneous energies of the working masses, with all their inevitable and healthy diversity, on one central goal - overthrowing the bourgeois state, eliminating private ownership of the means of production, creating a democratic government of the workers running their own economy and their own state.
In the wake of the Communards, the great socialist revolution of October 1917 in Russia, the Communist International in Lenin and Trotsky's time, endeavored to accomplish these tasks. The Fourth International has taken up the same task, embodies and carries on the same tradition. Of course, it is still weak, it is still only the initial nucleus of the future mass revolutionary international, of the future general staff of the world revolution. But it exists, it lives, it is struggling on five continents and in more than forty countries.
After today's demonstration, no one can doubt any longer that the Fourth International has thousands and thousands of well-organized and battletested cadres. It is important above all to realize that over the last several years, the Fourth International has undergone a real metamorphosis. From a small nucleus whose numerical weakness restricted it essentially to propaganda activity-to transmitting the program to the new generations - it has been transformed into a revolutionary vanguard already capable of taking the initiative, of drawing masses of people behind it, of influencing the course of events.
In the strike wave sweeping Europe since May 1968, the sections and activists of the Fourth International have pursued basically a threefold objective:
1. To popularize the experiences of the most advanced workers' struggles - both in the kinds of demands put forward and the forms of organization and struggle adopted - and to spread these regionally, nationally, and internationally.
2. To propagate the idea of challenging the authority of the bosses, the struggle for workers' control, and get it rooted in the working masses. It is through challenges like this that the workers will acquire the consciousness and practice necessary for them to take control of the factories and socialize production when future general
strikes and revolutionary explosions develop.
3. To encourage setting up organs to lead strikes that are controlled by the mass of the workers, that is, dem ocratically elected strike committees reporting regularly to general assemblies of the strikers. If the workers learn how to run their own strikes, they will learn all the more quickly tomorrow to run their own state and their own economy.
All this activity of the Fourth International has ceased to be limited to publishing periodicals and tracts. I recognize here in the crowd our comrades who gave the impetus for electing strike committees at Paillard in French-speaking Switzerland, in the first major strike in that country for thirty years. I recognize the Belgian comrades who gave the stimulus for electing the strike committee at the Vieille-Montagne factory in Balen Wezel in the Antwerp Campine. I recognize the french comrades who provided the thrust for similar experiments in workers' struggles. I recognize the comrades who were among those who initiated the election of shop delegates at the FIAT plant in Turin, the starting point of the movement for workers' councils, so important in Italian big industry.
I recognize in the crowd the German comrades who were the driving force in organizing a vast movement of apprentices that enabled the working youth in their country to determine its own demands and become a force in its own right in the unions. I recognize the comrades of Luxembourg who were a driving force in the recent mobilization of high-school students in their country against repression. I recognize the British comrades who are playing an exemplary role in organizing solidarity with the victims of their own imperialist bourgeoisie - the Irish, Ceylonese, Pakistanis, and Arabs. I recognize the French comrades who, along with all their other activities, have revived the real communist tradition by their campaign against repression in the armed forces and by their bold actions against tendencies to reconstitute a fascist movement.
And finally there are all those who, because of material difficulties or repression, cannot be among us today but who testify no less to the interne tional rise of the Trotskyist movement. There are our comrades in the United
States who gave impetus to the impressive antiwar mobilization of April 24, which assembled 800,000 demonstraors in the streets shouting: "Immediate and Unconditional Withdrawal of U. S. Troops from Indochina!"
There are our Ceylonese comrades who are trying to fuse the revolutionary forces scattered throughout the island - the insurgent rural youth, the city proletariat, and the plantation workers-into a single bloc. There are our Indian comrades who have begun mobilizing the most exploited of all the exploited sectors on the land to win their liberation - the poor peasant untouchables in Bengal who are now beginning to occupy the lands of the rich and organize them selves.
There are oux Bolivian comrades, already influential in the unions, who are beginning to win broad influence within the new peasant movement and the student movement, with the aim of preparing the masses of their country for the armed struggle to seize power. There are our Argentinian comrades who have written a magnificent page of revolutionary audacity by their role in the insurgent working masses of Córdoba. There are our Greek comrades, the "hard core" in the prisons and concentration camps. The military dictatorship will not release them, and at the same time they have to defend themselves against supplementary terror by Stalinist goons. There are our Spanish comrades of the Liga Comunista Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Communist League], who are giving impetus to the struggle for boycotting the fascist union elections, in a united front, I believe, with other farleft groups.
This is the real picture of the Fourth International today. It is still a modest organization by comparison with the audacious goal it has set itselfachieving the victory of the world socialist revolution. But it is already a combat organization capable of incisive actions coordinated nationally and internationally.
Comrades, the overall crisis of capitalism is continuing and deepening. This system which refuses to die is incapable of solving any of its fundamental contradictions. The critical decline of the dollar is the latest glaring demonstration of the economic contradictions rending the capitalist system. The heroic Vietnamese masses, who, aided by the antiwar movement in the U. S., are driving American imperialism inexorably to defeat in Indochina, have given a brilliant demonstration of the social and military crisis of capitalism. This defeat is the harbinger of new revolutionary tempests throughout Southeast Asia.
Listen, listen to the bell that is tolling in Indochina, you Versaillais in Djakarta, your hands red with the blood of 500,000 Communists and revolutionists! It is sounding the death knell of your abject dictatorship; it heralds new and victorious Communes in Indonesia!
Listen to the bell that is tolling in Indochina, you hangmen in Karachi, who massacred the dock workers in Chittagong, who murdered the workers, women, and children of Dacca. The Bengali Commune will punish all your crimes mercilessly!
In Europe the young revolutionary vanguard has also heard the message of the Vietnamese revolution. It has steeled itself for combat. It is forging the instrument of victory - the revolutionary party and the revolutionary International. It is preparing to avenge the victims of the Mur des Fé- dérés and Le Châtelet, and with them Karl Liebknecht, Rosa, and all the victims of the counterrevolution, those killed by Hitler and Franco, and the Bolsheviks shot by Stalin. With the help of our old friend the mole, this vanguard will dig the furrow tomorrow in the soil of our planet, the furrow that will lead from the Paris Commune, triumphant at last, to the French Socialist Republic, to the Socialist United States of Europe, to the Worldwide Republic of Workers' Councils.