The Internationalism

The collapse of French socialism at the outbreak of the First World War is considered by many historians to be the most significant case of its kind. We must go back in time to find its origins. The dramatic repression of the Paris Commune in 1871 was followed by a decade of shootings and the deportation of tens of thousands of revolutionary militants. Reactionary monarchical legitimism attributed the decline of France to the Revolution of 1789, but by then the nouvelles couches sociales , the new classes produced by capitalism, as Leon Gambetta defined them, demanded a politics free from economic, social and clerical ties. The Radical Party, a turning point of French politics, was its expression. The same taditional Catholic Judeophobia dating back to the Middle Ages — according to Michel Dreyfus’, research director at the CNRS in Paris, Anti-Semitism on the Left in France [Paris, 2009] — gradually transformed into the image of the Jews associated with money and modernity who des...

From the special series 1871-2021. The 150 th anniversary of the Paris Commune The struggle, by now more than a hundred years old, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie encompasses the whole world. One hundred and fifty years ago, in March 1871, in a single city — Paris — and in a very short time span — 72 days — the assault on the sky attempted by the proletariat and ferociously repressed by a rising bourgeoisie resolved, in practice, fundamental theoretical issues of socialism that until that moment only had provisional solutions. In the Manifesto [1848], Marx and Engels had limited themselves to stating that the indispensable precondition for the communist revolution was the conquest of democracy , i.e., the conquest of the state machinery on the part of the proletariat. However, it remained to be seen whether and to what extent the dictatorship of the proletariat could avail itself of the bourgeois state machinery. Moreover, in the definition Lenin gives, Marx’s theo...