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Ten Years of Citizens’ Assemblies in Slovenia

Dave

Sat, 03/18/2023 – 17:01

The Federal Reserve’s new facility set up after the collapse of two U.S. banks last week could see up to $2 trillion of use, according to a new analysis.

Chile’s socialist experiment was made possible by a confrontational working-class political party and a militant labor movement. The experience shows the promise, and the dangers, of a movement based in both government initiatives and grassroots militancy.

Various groups of miners taking part in the festivities marking the first anniversary of Salvador Allende’s accession to the presidency, at the National Stadium in Santiago, Chile, November 4, 1971. (Bettmann Archive / Getty Images)

In the early 1970s, Chilean workers attempted something never done before: a democratic socialist revolution. Throughout the twentieth century, Chile was a deeply unequal society; it was also unique among the developing world because of its long-standing parliamentary tradition and a highly organized industrial working class and associated political parties.

After decades of struggle, the workers’ movement took power in a democratic election and, alongside grassroots efforts, initiated a transition toward socialism. Chile’s democratic socialist project was ultimately defeated by a capitalist-backed coup in 1973, but it has remained a powerful inspiration for democratic socialists around the world.

The past few years have seen a resurgence in democratic socialist politics in the United States. Socialists have won public office at all levels of government; young radicals are turning toward rebuilding the labor movement as rank-and-file organizers; many American workers are reviving and reforming their unions; and promising new organizing has sprouted at corporations like Amazon and Starbucks. Still, we’re a long way from socialism.

Without successful models of socialist revolution, those of us in capitalist countries with democratic institutions who want to see fundamental transformation must come up with a new road map. Chile’s attempt under Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity (UP) coalition remains one of the few models of a democratic socialist transition we have; both the UP’s victory, and its ultimate defeat, have important things to teach us.

Independent Political Action and Electoral Victory

Unlike other revolutionary socialist projects that took power throughout the twentieth century, Chile’s socialists made elections central to their plan for socialist transformation of society. And unlike the more electoral-oriented socialist parties of Europe, Chile’s socialists understood their task as breaking with capitalism. In his inaugural speech to parliament, Allende proclaimed that unlike the Bolsheviks’ “dictatorship of the proletariat” in Russia, “Chile is the first nation on earth to put into practice the second model of transition to a socialist society,” a democratic, “pluralistic” socialism.

Allende’s election was made possible by socialist political parties, firmly rooted in the industrial working class, that refused alliances with capitalists and remained committed to full democratization of the economy. The UP government’s 1970 election was the culmination of fifty years of working-class struggle. Chile’s first Marxist party, the Socialist Workers Party (POS), was founded in 1912, uniting the most radical wing of electoral politics with nascent labor struggles among nitrate miners. The POS renamed itself the Communist Party of Chile (PCCh) and joined the Comintern in 1922.

Ten years later, following the short-lived Socialist Republic of Chile led by Air Force commander Marmaduke Grove and his subsequent populist-infused socialist presidential campaign (garnering 17 percent of the vote), the Socialist Party (PS) was founded. The PS also identified as Marxist but was more heterogeneous than the Communists, distinguishing itself mainly by its refusal to toe the Soviet line on international politics or domestic strategy.

The Socialists and Communists eventually came together to present a united political opposition to the capitalists, setting the stage for Allende’s eventual rise. In the early ’50s, they unified a politically fractious labor movement under one central labor federation, the Central Única de Trabajadores de Chile (CUT), and then in 1956, alongside four smaller parties, formed an electoral coalition called the Popular Action Front (FRAP). FRAP fielded the Socialist Party’s Salvador Allende in 1958, nearly winning the presidency in a crowded race, and ran Allende again in 1964.

The Socialists and the Communists had different understandings of FRAP’s strategy. In the past, both the Socialists and Communists had participated in center-left coalition governments led by the middle-class Radical Party, but this strategy largely led to defeat. While the Communists retained the desire to broaden the FRAP coalition to include reform-oriented upper and middle classes and those they considered progressive capitalists less tied to US investment, by the mid-1950s, the Socialists had broken with their previous strategy of cross-class alliances.

Their experiences had taught the Socialists that to break with foreign ownership of Chile’s natural resources and the country’s semifeudal agricultural system, the working class would have to lead the fight.

Their experiences with such alliances had taught the Socialists that to break with foreign ownership of Chile’s natural resources and the country’s semifeudal agricultural system, the working class would have to lead the fight. The Radical-led governments the Socialists had participated in were incapable of carrying out these two tasks due, on the one hand, to their capitalist and middle-class leadership’s political and economic ties to foreign capital and Chile’s landed elite, and, on the other hand, the vacillation of the Communist Party between supporting the Nazi-Soviet pact and making alliances with national capitalists in the name of a “popular front” against fascism. Because of these moderating factors, the Radical-led governments could not carry out land reform, reneged on promises to support legalizing peasant unionization, regularly gave out ministries to the right-wing Liberal Party, and failed to promote state-led economic development, which would have required nationalizing certain sectors held by North American capitalists.

Around the same time, the Socialists began trying to use fights for reforms as a way of radicalizing workers, rather than as ends in themselves. A minimum program to address workers’ immediate needs and demands would be determined through direct conversation with different sections of the working class. By winning these minimum demands through independent organization going head to head with capitalists and the state rather than through backroom deals with the boss or parliamentary maneuvers, workers could build their fighting capacity and consciousness. If the party lost the fight, it would demonstrate how Chile’s capitalists and their politicians were fundamentally opposed to workers’ demands, and if the Left won the fight, it would build the confidence of workers in their own power.

As opposed to the earlier strategy of cross-class center-left coalitions, by uniting the working class behind its own independent banner in FRAP, the Left could more seriously present an alternative program for society in direct conflict with capitalist parties. But the Socialist insistence on building a movement to fight for the interests of the working class first and foremost, and the Communist tendency to subordinate workers’ interests for the sake of building alliances with other classes, created a tension within the left coalition.

For the 1970 presidential election, FRAP refashioned itself into Popular Unity, in some ways a concession to the Communist position. Unlike FRAP, UP included some small middle-class parties, but its mass working-class parties led the coalition, and it didn’t budge on its commitment to socialism through establishing a workers’ government.

Still, the UP adopted a “moderate” strategy for socialist transition — its first six years would be a carefully controlled government-led process, laying the groundwork and building a popular majority so that the next administration could complete the transition. In these first six years, UP planned to nationalize portions of the commanding heights of the economy, expand democratic institutions, oversee redistributive programs, and carry out land reform.

Capitalist Retaliation and Working-Class Advance

UP ultimately won the 1970 election in a three-way race with just under 37 percent of the vote in a grassroots campaign, led by local committees of workers and supporters from the various parties and movements backing Allende. The activists on the ground leading the UP campaign were involved in active struggles in their workplaces and communities, like campaigns for independent unions. While both the Socialists and Communists were electoral parties, they saw building and leading a powerful labor movement as one of their major tasks, and they were the parties most popular with Chile’s working class. Their combined votes within the CUT amounted to nearly 60 percent of CUT membership in 1972, with other UP and radical left parties making up another 10 percent. The UP’s base in shop-floor organization was crucial to its early success and its ability to beat back, for a time, right-wing attacks on the socialist experiment.

While both the Socialists and Communists were electoral parties, they saw building and leading a powerful labor movement as one of their major tasks.

The Communists were the leading force in CUT, beating out the Socialists in membership among private sector workers in core industries. The Socialists advocated a more confrontational strategy, lamenting in the late ’50s that CUT overemphasized national unity and striking deals with capitalist politicians, which the Socialists thought dampened the unions’ ability to unite the working class around a strategy of class struggle. Despite moderation at times from the Communist leadership, these groups of organized workers would play a leading role in Chile’s attempted transition to socialism.

Socialists winning an election doesn’t mean that capitalists will peacefully and voluntarily give up their wealth and power, and they didn’t in Chile. Throughout Allende’s three years in power, Chile experienced capital flight, capital strikes, lockouts, shopkeeper hoarding, and middle- and professional-class strikes and slowdowns — all while facing a right-wing terrorist campaign, along with pressure from international capital and imperialist intervention. Many of these maneuvers were a rational response of capitalists and privileged sections of the middle class to UP’s socialist program. Rising wages alongside price controls, redistributive programs, and the threat of nationalization provoked capital flight, strikes, and hoarding, as capitalists could no longer guarantee future substantial profits nor, importantly, their control over the economy.

The UP government responded to capitalist sabotage by expanding the “social property area,” the government’s term for enterprises under state control. By bringing industries under public ownership and management, the government could operate firms at a lower rate of profit than capitalists would usually accept to maintain adequate levels of investment and production.

Socialists winning an election doesn’t mean that capitalists will peacefully and voluntarily give up their wealth and power, and they didn’t in Chile.

The State and the Shop Floor

In the face of capitalist resistance, a government choosing to socialize more of the economy is not a foregone conclusion; most socialist or social democratic leaders in other countries have feared heading toward an existential conflict with private property. It was mass action from below, rooted in the workplace — along with the initiative of radical state officials — that led Chile’s government to take this more revolutionary path. (The government of François Mitterrand in France, for instance, pursued the more common route of abandoning its socialist program in the face of capitalist resistance.)

Allende’s electoral campaign and victory inspired a new wave of grassroots action in the workplace and countryside, and that organizing in turn altered the course of government policy. In one dramatic example, workers at the Yarur textile mill kicked out their decades-old company union in favor of a militant independent union shortly after Allende took power. The shop-floor campaign was led by Socialist and Communist rank-and-file leaders, produced a newsletter with its demands for an independent union on one side and Popular Unity’s program on the other, and received support from local party organizations. The newly independent union struggled for control over the shop floor, forcing the removal of tyrannical managers and establishing shop-floor committees to oversee production to prevent capitalist sabotage.

Months later, Popular Unity won an astounding 50 percent in the April municipal elections, reflecting the success of Allende’s redistributive program in cultivating popular support. This victory inspired the Yarur workers to strike, demanding and winning the nationalization of their factory against Allende’s initial wishes. This kind of bottom-up activity spread throughout Chile, resulting in many factories and enterprises being taken into the social property area that weren’t on the UP’s original list of firms to be nationalized. Similar processes occurred in the countryside as radicals organized peasant unions and mass land seizures, taking advantage of preexisting land reform laws but also going beyond them.

Allende’s electoral campaign and victory inspired a new wave of grassroots action in the workplace and countryside, and that organizing in turn altered the course of government policy.

The Ministry of the Economy collaborated with workers in organizing the social property area. Members of the ministry were in constant contact with workers on the shop floor, supporting them in developing the case and subsequent plan for nationalization. Their closer contact with the shop-floor movement, along with the economic need for socialization, made members of the ministry more inclined to support these bottom-up initiatives and to transform government policy in lockstep with developments on the ground.

As elite resistance intensified in October 1972 with a trucker owner-operator strike, lockouts, and shopkeeper hoarding, Chilean workers built new grassroots institutions they termed “Popular Power” to defend the revolution and maintain a functioning economy. Workers reopened factories they were locked out of, and coordinated producing and distributing goods as well as defending against right-wing violence and sabotage. In cities, they formed volunteer committees to requisition and distribute hoarded goods. And within the growing social property sector, workers pioneered new democratic structures of participation and management alongside the government.

But tensions were growing within the Left. The Communist Party approached Popular Power with skepticism and was at times antagonistic toward more radical developments in the countryside. In the party’s eyes, the bottom-up activity was jumping the gun on socialist revolution, would prematurely provoke capitalist counterreaction, and threatened the union structures that the party dominated. The strength of this perspective within UP was reinforced by the fact that the legislature and the judiciary remained under the control of capitalist forces who used their legal powers to obstruct Allende’s agenda and force a constitutional crisis. Meanwhile the left-wing of the Socialist Party and other smaller parties within and outside of UP embraced Popular Power and advocated that Allende more forcefully embrace the structures as central organs for carrying out the workers’ revolution and fighting capitalist reaction.

The Right remained committed to ending Allende’s government at all costs, eventually staging a coup in September 1973 that killed the three-year experiment at a democratic transition to socialism.

Despite left-wing pleas, Allende adopted a strategy similar to that advocated by the Communists, attempting reconciliation with capitalists to end the employer offensive of 1972. He agreed to integrate the military into his cabinet, and effectively demobilized government support for Popular Power, notwithstanding its continued growth after the October strikes. Despite further conciliatory efforts by UP, the Right remained committed to ending Allende’s government at all costs, eventually staging a coup in September 1973 that killed the three-year experiment at a democratic transition to socialism.

The Road to Power

A democratic socialist transition is far from the agenda in the United States. And, of course, the two countries’ political and social contexts are vastly different — not to mention that more than half a century has passed since Allende first took office. Nonetheless, Chile’s experience carries important lessons and raises vital questions for American leftists.

A democratic socialist transformation of society will likely have to pass through the conquest of power by the working class through its party or parties in a democratic election. But a workers’ party of the sort cannot solely be a vehicle for winning elections or passing legislation.

Chile’s Socialist and Communist parties were real, mass working-class movements, embedded in the workplace and shop-floor struggles and oriented toward the conquest of political power by the working class and the reorganization of the economy along the lines of social and democratic ownership and control. They operated independently of and in direct conflict with capitalists, and to the extent that they incorporated middle-class parties into their coalition, it was on the basis of the middle-class groups accepting a working-class program for socialism. This is in contrast to left-wing parties that moderate their demands to attract the middle class, as many social democratic parties have done in the past fifty years.

Abandoning their previous strategies of class collaboration and instead orienting toward building an independent working-class electoral formation in FRAP allowed the Left to consolidate a unified working-class movement behind a socialist program. In doing so, the Left successfully polarized society around the politics of class. As conservative and reform governments were unable to address Chile’s rampant inequality, inflation, unsustainable economic development, and imperialist domination, this independent force was able to put itself — and its program — forward as a compelling alternative.

Actions inside and outside the state reinforced one another, with victories in the electoral sphere both building upon and further inspiring grassroots action. Grassroots activity in turn set into motion revolutionary processes that state managers couldn’t control, although some encouraged and collaborated with them. The electoral and grassroots wings also came into conflict as a real contradiction emerged: the base’s growing expectations propelled the movement into a struggle that the leadership feared it couldn’t win.

Orienting toward building an independent working-class electoral formation in FRAP allowed the Left to consolidate a unified working-class movement behind a socialist program.

Attempting to moderate the base rather than encouraging bottom-up initiative may have stunted the movement from developing the capacity necessary to defeat or stave off a coup. Allende was right to want to avoid civil war, but it remains an open question of how to avoid civil war while retaining a commitment to deepening and expanding the revolution being carried out by the grassroots movement. Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband, in his classic essay “The Coup in Chile,” argued that only through wholeheartedly preparing for such a war, giving real institutional teeth and strategic leadership to organs of popular power, can socialists prevent one.

These questions may rear their head again if we’re ever so lucky to get as far as socialists in Chile did. But we’re still missing the central ingredients necessary to get there. In the United States today, there is no party or serious pre-party group representing an independent working-class political program and bottom-up struggle. Nor do we have a large, militant labor movement in which to root such a party. If we’re looking for an on-ramp onto the long democratic road to socialism, building those movements and institutions is a good place to start.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The world is facing an imminent water crisis, with demand expected to outstrip the supply of fresh water by 40 percent by the end of this decade, experts have said on the eve of a crucial UN water summit.

Governments must urgently stop subsidizing the extraction and overuse of water through misdirected agricultural subsidies, and industries from mining to manufacturing must be made to overhaul their wasteful practices, according to a landmark report on the economics of water.

Nations must start to manage water as a global common good, because most countries are highly dependent on their neighbors for water supplies, and overuse, pollution, and the climate crisis threaten water supplies globally, the report’s authors say.

Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, and a lead author of the report, told the Guardian the world’s neglect of water resources was leading to disaster. “The scientific evidence is that we have a water crisis. We are misusing water, polluting water, and changing the whole global hydrological cycle, through what we are doing to the climate. It’s a triple crisis.”

“There will be no agricultural revolution unless we fix water,” said lead author Johan Rockstrom. “And we never talk about water.”

Rockstrom’s fellow Global Commission on the Economics of Water co-chair Mariana Mazzucato, a professor at University College London and also a lead author of the report, added: “We need a much more proactive, and ambitious, common good approach. We have to put justice and equity at the centre of this, it’s not just a technological or finance problem.”

The report marks the first time the global water system has been scrutinized comprehensively and its value to countries—and the risks to their prosperity if water is neglected—laid out in clear terms. Like with the Stern review of the economics of the climate crisis in 2006 and the Dasgupta review of the economics of biodiversity in 2021, the report authors hope to highlight the crisis in a way that policymakers and economists can recognize.

Many governments still do not realize how interdependent they are when it comes to water, according to Rockstrom. Most countries depend for about half of their water supply on the evaporation of water from neighboring countries—known as “green” water because it is held in soils and delivered from transpiration in forests and other ecosystems, when plants take up water from the soil and release vapor into the air from their leaves.

The report sets out seven key recommendations, including reshaping the global governance of water resources, scaling up investment in water management through public-private partnerships, pricing water properly and establishing “just water partnerships” to raise finance for water projects in developing and middle-income countries.

More than $700 billion of subsidies globally go to agriculture and water each year and these often fuel excessive water consumption. Water leakage must also be urgently addressed, the report found, and restoring freshwater systems such as wetlands should be another priority.

“It’s quite remarkable that we use safe, fresh water to carry excreta, urine, nitrogen, and phosphorus.”

Water is fundamental to the climate crisis and the global food crisis. “There will be no agricultural revolution unless we fix water,” said Rockstrom. “Behind all these challenges we are facing, there’s always water, and we never talk about water.”

Many of the ways in which water is used are inefficient and in need of change, with Rockstrom pointing to developed countries’ sewage systems. “It’s quite remarkable that we use safe, fresh water to carry excreta, urine, nitrogen, phosphorus—and then need to have inefficient wastewater treatment plants that leak 30 percent of all the nutrients into downstream aquatic ecosystems and destroy them and cause dead zones. We’re really cheating ourselves in terms of this linear, waterborne modern system of dealing with waste. There are massive innovations required.”

The UN water summit, led by the governments of the Netherlands and Tajikistan, will take place in New York on 22 March. World leaders are invited but only a few are expected to attend, with most countries to be represented by ministers or high-ranking officials. It will mark the first time in more than four decades the UN has met to discuss water, with previous attempts stymied by governments reluctant to countenance any form of international governance of the resource.

Henk Ovink, a special envoy for international water affairs for the Netherlands, told the Guardian the conference was crucial. “If we are to have a hope of solving our climate crisis, our biodiversity crisis and other global challenges on food, energy and health, we need to radically change our approach in how we value and manage water,” he said. “[This] is the best opportunity we have to put water at the centre of global action to ensure people, crops and the environment continue to have the water they need.”

Seven calls to action on water

1. Manage the global water cycle as a global common good, to be protected collectively and in our shared interests.
2. Ensure safe and adequate water for every vulnerable group, and work with industry to scale up investment in water.
3. Stop underpricing water. Proper pricing and targeted support for the poor will enable water to be used more efficiently, more equitably, and more sustainably
4. Reduce the more than $700 billion of subsidies in agriculture and water each year, which often fuel excessive water consumption, and reduce leakage in water systems.
5. Establish “just water partnerships” which can mobilize finance for low- and middle-income countries.
6. Take urgent action this decade on issues such as restoring wetlands and depleted groundwater resources;, recycling the water used in industry; moving to precision agriculture that uses water more efficiently; and having companies report on their “water footprint.”
7. Reform the governance of water at an international level, and including water in trade agreements. Governance must also take into account women, farmers, indigenous people and others in the frontline of water conservation.

On this day in 1871, the Paris Commune began its brief history before a conservative government drowned it in blood. While it lasted, the Commune sketched out a new way to run a major city based on democracy and the public good, not private profiteering.

National guardsmen pose in front of an artillery barricade in the Place Vendome, during the civil war between the Third Republic and the Paris Commune, following the Franco-Prussian War. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

The Paris Commune ended in mass violence with the slaughter of thousands of Communards on the barricades and the burning of much of the city. This final struggle forged the Commune as an iconic event in the history of socialism and the collective memory of popular struggle.

Yet it is now only vaguely remembered that before the Commune’s demise, the people of Paris had set about reconstructing authority and governance in the city along unprecedentedly revolutionary lines, grounded in the popular euphoria surrounding the central government’s retreat from Paris on March 18, 1871.

Despite near-constant threats to the Commune’s existence from the rival government occupying Versailles, the audacious common folk of Paris imagined and began to constitute a new city and a new politics of their own design. Time, as it turned out, was short.

Birth of the Commune

The surrender of Napoleon III to the Prussian army on the outskirts of Paris in early September 1870 had set the stage. A provisional government faced little choice but to mobilize the population in defense of Paris and other major cities.

The Paris Commune ended in mass violence with the slaughter of thousands of Communards on the barricades and the burning of much of the city.

Into this political space a broadly republican popular movement leapt forward to provide organization for resistance and to claim the right to self-governance. This meant enhancing the National Guard, organized in neighborhood-based units and only minimally under a central leadership already badly discredited by the military debacle of the previous weeks.

Encircled by the Prussian army, Parisians endured months of privation unequally distributed along class lines. At the same time, cut off from outside political and military support, Parisians invested local government, reinforced by the National Guard, with greater authority, through the “localization of activity.”

That strategy included the formation of cooperatives, local political clubs, and secularized public schools. November municipal elections brought a significant augmentation of the Left’s influence, though well short of a dominating presence except in a handful of arrondissements.

The advent of the Commune came only in the aftermath of a succession of events that profoundly altered the political stakes for a besieged Paris. First came the signing of an armistice on January 28, 1871, between the provisional national government ensconced outside the city at Versailles and the Prussians.

The terms of the armistice proved humiliating and included the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, a substantial indemnity payment, and a brief symbolic march of Prussian troops through the heart of Paris. A newly emboldened, broadly republican movement in which the Left’s influence had grown dramatically seized the role of defending the “fatherland” by asserting Paris’s autonomy.

The months of resistance and hunger set the stage not only for national resistance but for a civil war. On the one hand stood the Communards, and on the other, a discredited national government barricaded with its middle-class supporters at Versailles and in the rural areas adjacent to Paris.

The government’s failure to recapture cannons that were under the control of the Central Committee of the Parisian National Guard crystalized an already polarized politics. The central government added fuel to the fire by rescinding the Commune’s moratoriums on the sale of goods in government pawnshops and reinstituting the payment of rents and other bills that had accrued during the siege.

The First Order of Business

For an all-too-brief period, before being overtaken by brutal and ultimately cataclysmic suppression at the hands of central government troops under the command of Adolphe Thiers, the Paris Commune provided a unique setting for new forms of local governance to crystalize and challenge the traditions of urban bourgeois hegemony.

The Paris Commune provided a unique setting for new forms of local governance to crystalize and challenge the traditions of urban bourgeois hegemony.

Following the final withdrawal of the central government in March, the Commune issued a succession of declarations outlining in broad principles what was already being carried out to varying degrees in the streets and arrondissements. The first order of business was to establish viable democratic polities and governing procedures in the spirit of the Proudhonist vision of local associationism, which had deep roots among Parisian working people.

Municipal elections on March 26 produced a new governing council for the self-declared Commune of Paris. While attacking bureaucratic control by setting maximum salaries of officials and breaking lines of authority from the central government, the Commune also limited the claims of landlords and creditors, affirmed “municipal liberties,” and circumscribed religious authority.

The communal vision came somewhat more sharply into focus with the famous April 19 Declaration, even as the prospects for all-out civil war deepened. A month of political contention and two municipal elections had set the stage for a programmatic statement of far-reaching scope. The former mayors and deputies had shown their class colors and largely retreated to the protective embrace of Adolphe Thiers’s Versailles government-in-waiting.

The Declaration of April 19 was vague at key points, and its aspirations were ultimately overwhelmed by the imperative to defend militarily the fragile social and political space within which the Commune defined itself. Nonetheless, it delineated the outlines of an alternative social order. This was to be a city within a federation of similarly constituted cities.

Such a locally constituted republic would forge an alternative unity of French citizens. Through the free exercise of liberties within self-governing municipalities, cities would claim democratic control of their own budgets and administration. They would expand municipal services, create a whole new set of institutions ranging from public schools to cooperative workshops, and while not directly attacking property, would “universalize power and property,” as circumstances might dictate.

Their vision was prescriptive, open-ended, and optimistic about the promise of municipal self-government. Future generations of municipal socialists would draw inspiration from that promise and the project of “social regeneration.” More importantly, the experience of governing in those early days suggested more powerfully than prescriptive declarations the tangible meaning of the municipal social republic envisioned.

Haussmann’s Legacy

Though piecemeal and incomplete, the Commune took some concrete steps to implement this vision both before and after the declaration. Some initiatives had been rooted in communal resistance to monarchist authority over the years immediately preceding the Commune.

Ironically, the bourgeois transformation of Paris created conditions that promoted a diverse new citywide working class.

The massive reconstruction of Paris at the hands of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann during the prior two decades took on legendary status, thanks in part to his own self-promotion. The construction of wide boulevards less susceptible to barricading and the destruction of many old, central working-class neighborhoods created a new urban landscape into which the rapidly expanding population of Paris flowed with unpredictable consequences.

That expanded population included large numbers of construction workers and stonemasons, some of whom had long been part of regular seasonal migrations to Paris from other parts of the country, like the Creuse. Their slow displacement from the central boarding houses and hiring fairs of the Place de Grève accompanied more permanent settlement in the new working-class neighborhoods on the periphery.

Whether by reputation for chronic contention with authorities or because of the new solidarities in their adopted neighborhoods, the stonemasons and other building workers were overrepresented among the arrested and deported Communards following the final street battles in late May.

Systematic studies by Jacques Rougerie, Manuel Castells, and others confirm that this “urban revolution” was not driven by a new proletariat but rather, as Rougerie termed it, “an intermediate working class” which included building workers, traditional artisans, and a significant component of shopkeepers, clerks, and professionals. As Castells put it:

They were the people of a great city in the process of mutation, and the citizens of a Republic in quest of its institutions.

David Harvey has shown that the “Haussmannization” of Paris in the years after 1848 produced urban space more starkly organized on class lines that set the stage for the upheaval of 1871.

Ironically, the bourgeois transformation of Paris created conditions that promoted a diverse new citywide working class infused with the scent of a broader internationalism that potentially challenged the bourgeoisie’s “superior command of space.” And that challenge, as Roger Gould has argued, grew precisely out of the neighborhood solidarities of these new “urban villages” that encompassed a new class.

Harvey and others have enumerated workers’ urban initiatives in the Commune that reflected their own claims over the control of Parisian space. The organization of municipal workshops for women; the encouragement given to producer and consumer cooperatives; the suspension of the night work in the bakeries; and the moratorium on rent payments, debt collections, and the sale of items from the municipal pawnshop at Mont-de-Piété reflected the sore points that had bothered working-class Paris for years.

In some cases, during the days immediately following March 18, as Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray recounted, “former subordinate employés” assumed new responsibilities, as happened for instance in the postal service. They had to improvise with limited resources in the face of sabotage by departing higher officials.

The Commune’s brutal denouement has, in some respects, obscured the innovative, localist social and political reforms that it briefly instituted and that it passed on to social democratic reformers who, in the 1890s and beyond, sought to craft a municipal socialism shorn of the revolutionary aspirations and the risks that were all-too-brutally embodied in the crushing of the Commune.

Interpreting the Commune

Memory of the Commune lingered for decades, not only in the nightmares of the bourgeoisie and their reformist allies but among social democrats who, like their Communard forbearers, saw in the city the opportunity to address the immediate grievances workers continued to face and to dream of an alternative social and political order they might constitute in cities.

Contestation over the memory and meaning of the Commune unfolded most vigorously among socialists themselves.

The paradox of brutal defeat in defense of what increasingly came to seem the utopian promise of municipal revolution was not lost on subsequent commentators. Contestation over the memory and meaning of the Commune unfolded most vigorously among socialists themselves.

Karl Marx’s The Civil War in France in its earliest editions provided almost instant history of the events in Paris as they unfolded. Drawing on what limited sources he could find — newspaper accounts, smuggled letters, and occasional firsthand reports — Marx cobbled together a report to the General Council of the First International delivered in late May 1871 just days after the final massacre of Communards. Marx’s agenda was multilayered, and each layer subsequently fed into the memory and constructed meaning of the Commune.

First, he sought to assert the proletarian character of the revolt, though he would subsequently revise that assessment. Second, and perhaps most basically, he defended the nobility of the Communards’ revolt and sacrifice, seeing it as a watershed event in the promulgation of socialism, though its immediate consequences were clearly more ambiguous.

Third, he stressed the state-dismantling and state-building features of the Commune in ways that implicitly challenged the anarchists’ celebration of what they asserted was its nation-state–destroying character. Subsequently, he would belittle the moderation and “feel-good” measures undertaken by the Commune in the days and weeks following its initial creation.

A further subtext in the responses of Marx, Engels, Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Lenin, and other Marxists was the continuing ideological war with Proudhonist associational influences, which, in their view, had been all-too-manifest in the Commune. Its emphases on localism, decentralized democracy, and producerist cooperative economy were seen as harbingers of a different socialist order, one that subsequently would continue to animate the practical reform programs of municipal socialists.

Communal Spirits

The horrific scenes of the Commune’s suppression between May 21 and 28 provided ample material for the elevation of those events to legend. Estimates of those slaughtered in battle or by execution ranged from seventeen thousand to forty thousand. Nearly fifty thousand were arrested, many sent into exile as far away as the French colony of New Caledonia in the South Seas.

The horrific scenes of the Commune’s suppression between May 21 and 28 provided ample material for the elevation of those events to legend.

Subsequent observers would continue over the next decade and more to attempt to make sense of the stirring events in Paris or, in the case of anti-Communard bourgeois commentators, to contest or efface its memory. In France, socialist politics became a tangled web in which the Commune served as a touchstone for both “possibilist” and “impossibilist” factions.

Paul Brousse, who served a “political apprenticeship” as an anarchist, came to believe in the revolutionary promise cities held, despite the failure of the Paris Commune. He advocated “le Socialisme Pratique” wherein “meaningful socialist measures could be achieved on the local level prior to revolution at the centre.”

The key was a shift in tactical thinking away from violence toward politics. Others drew parallel conclusions, albeit in different contexts. Mary Putnam, an American living in Paris as the events of May 1871 unfolded, enjoyed close ties to a family sympathetic to the Commune and believed the events she witnessed signified a legitimate defense of “municipal rights.”

The Commune continued to be honored as a moment of socialist martyrdom, and anniversaries and other symbolic occasions provided opportunities to affirm the sacrifices of the Communards on behalf of socialism. International commemoration of the Commune and particularly the date of March 18 became, in the words of Georges Haupt, “an idea, a profession of faith, and a confirmation of a historical future, of the inevitable victory of the proletarian revolution.”

But even as commemoration of the Commune became a fixture of socialist rhetoric and iconography, so did the debates over its meaning intensify. The relevance of the Commune to the ongoing project of socialist transformation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected the deep polarization within the movement itself.

American socialist Phillips Russell, visiting Paris in May 1914, on what turned out to be the eve of the Great War, joined a procession of “thirty, perhaps forty thousand . . . working men and women, and children too,” in commemoration of the Commune. The huge crowd grew suddenly silent as it approached a wall in the Père Lachaise cemetery.

This was the spot where, as Russell recalled, “the workingmen and women, who took charge of Paris forty-three years ago and ran it peacefully and well,” had been mowed down by the army of Thiers, “their bodies piling in heaps against the wall.” Deeply impressed by the commemoration, in the face of a massive police presence, Russell “learned that the spirit of the Commune still lives in the hearts of its working people.”

This is an abridged extract from Shelton Stromquist’s new book Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism, available now from Verso Books.

The world’s largest central bank isn’t in crisis, but it is losing money at the moment.

The end of World War I was a moment of world-historical importance. The collapse of the once-powerful Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires brought the catastrophic conflict to a close and paradoxically opened the way to renewed conflagration as the peoples of radically reconfigured Central and Eastern Europe struggled to revise a settlement imposed upon […]

Here are some recent headlines from U.S. newspapers concerning developments in Xi Jinping’s China, putatively America’s foremost adversary on the world stage: “STIFLED BY XI, DISSENT ROARS BACK TO LIFE”; “ANTI-LOCKDOWN PROTESTS CALL FOR XI TO RESIGN”; “XI JINPING APPROACHES MULTIPLE POINTS OF NO RETURN”; “A WITNESS TO MAO SEES WORRYING SIMILARITIES IN THE ERA OF XI”; “XI’S CHALLENGE: HOW TO MOURN PREDECESSOR”; “BEIJING’S BARGAIN WITH ITS PEOPLE IS SHAKEN..”

It is a common saying in China that Mao Zedong made the country free, and Deng Xiaoping made it rich. Mao’s communist revolution did set China free from the stranglehold on its economy exercised by Western powers since the mid–nineteenth century, but his cruel experiments in economic development resulted in mass famines on a colossal scale. It was indeed his successor, Deng, who set China on a course of economic modernization that brought remarkable prosperity to the country, especially in the urban areas, in little more than two decades. Deng accomplished this by opening China to foreign trade and investment and making it an integral part of the globalization process then underway, asserting that no country in the world had been able to modernize successfully without doing so. His successor, Jiang Zemin, continued Deng’s approach, which happens to be what provoked the headline concerning Xi’s difficulty in mourning him—because Xi, after he took office, had soon undertaken to curtail Jiang’s and Deng’s open-door policy.

The charming term CHINAMERICA was now a thing of the past. But what did the future hold, observers now wondered—especially when it began to appear that anti-democratic sentiment was sweeping the globe, reaching even into the hinterlands of the United States? Aligned with that question was a further concern: Were China, as a rising, increasingly bellicose power, and the United States, a supposedly declining one, bound eventually to clash, possibly in nuclear warfare?

This concern was connected to a 2017 book entitled Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, by Graham Allison. Allison derived his question from Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, which chronicled the downfall of Athens at the hands of Sparta. “When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power,” Allison wrote, “the resulting structural stress makes a violent clash the rule not the exception.” A few years later, Allison’s theory was modified by Edmund Stewart, a professor of ancient Greek history at the University of Nottingham, in an article in the journal Antigone. Stewart questioned Thucydides’s notion that Athens was a rising power challenging the dominance of Sparta, and contended rather that differences in constitutional arrangements and political values—such as those between a democracy (Athens) and an oligarchy (Sparta)—are likely to lead to dangerous friction between national entities. This, obviously, could apply equally for the United States and China.

There has been a great deal of focus in recent years on China’s coming decline. One notable such effort, “THE END OF CHINA’S RISE” by Michael Beckley and Hal Brands, appeared in Foreign Affairs magazine in October 2021. Beckley and Brands argue that the phenomenal economic success China enjoyed for several decades was a “historical anomaly” resulting from several factors that are no longer existent. The first was the close and mutually advantageous economic relationship that developed between the United States and China after President Nixon’s visit there in 1972. The second was the economic and political reforms set in motion by Deng. The third was the dramatic rise in population growth that began after the end of the civil war between the communists and nationalists in 1949. But in more recent times, Beckley and Brands explain, China has experienced a reversal of fortune in all these areas. China is running out of water—half of its rivers have vanished, and 60 percent of its groundwater is undrinkable. It has destroyed 40 percent of its farmland through overexploitation.

Food insecurity is widespread. Despite its prodigious domestic production, China has been a net importer of agricultural products for nearly two decades. Most deleteriously, China’s population is shrinking, a consequence of the one-child policy adopted by the government in 1980. Between 2020 and 2035, Beckley and Brands estimate, China will lose 70 million working-age adults and gain 130 million senior citizens—a problem that will get worse through 2050. Age-related spending will have to triple by that year, reaching 30 percent of GDP (as a point of comparison, all of China’s government spending today comes to roughly that amount). Finally, Beckley and Brands inform us that most recent growth in China—since the financial crisis of 2008—has resulted from the government “force-feeding” capital into the economy, which the academic Daniel Lynch, in his version of “THE END OF CHINA’S RISE,” calls “the greatest monetary stimulus program the world has ever seen.”

How will China’s demographic and economic deterioration affect its behavior on the world stage? As Europe discovered in 1914, it is impossible to predict the future course of international events. Anne Applebaum wrote a piece for The Atlantic, “THE BAD GUYS ARE WINNING,” in which she portrays a coalition of anti-democratic states, led by Russia and China, determined to challenge the democratic order around the globe. It is particularly worrisome that Xi has emerged as a Mao-like tyrant, complete with books on “Xi Jinping Thought.” The deterioration of China’s economic status might make it more likely, rather than less, that Xi will take unwise actions. However, the United States has at the ready a number of allies in the Indo-Pacific—including Japan, Australia, India, and the Philippines—prepared to participate in countering Chinese belligerence. The future, an ancient sage might venture, is wide open to the vagaries of fate.

In 1923 Walter Benjamin published The Task of the Translator, a seminal essay in which he considers what is obscured and what is elucidated through the process of literary translation.

The translators of his short stories approached the task beautifully, and their talents and insights mustn’t go uncelebrated!

“In translating Walter Benjamin’s stories, it was important to capture rhythms, cadences, the lilt of a storyteller in the market square passing on lessons for life or unfathomable mysteries that will become the talk of the town” — Esther Leslie on the task of the translator.

“If the original text defies definitive interpretation, the translator’s task has to be one principally of deferral – the transferal of the task to the reader. To bring an incomprehensible text into the realm of comprehensibility is to kill it.” — Sam Dolbear on the anxiety of the translator.

“Benjamin introduces a distinction between “what is meant” by a text and its distinctive “way of meaning it”, a relation of disjunction between what and how.” — Sebastian Truskolaski on the labours of translation.

The central bank has lent about half as much as it provided during the 2008 crisis as banks rush to shore up their financials

Cash-short banks have borrowed about $300bn from the Federal Reserve in the past week, the central bank announced on Thursday.

Nearly half the money – $143bn – went to holding companies for two major banks that failed over the past week, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, triggering widespread alarm in financial markets. The Fed did not identify the banks that received the other half of the funding or say how many of them did so.

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