The Paris Commune

The Paris Commune PDF Author: Donny Gluckstein
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608461181
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Get Book Here

Book Description
For two months in 1871, the workers of Paris took control of Europe's most celebrated capital city. When they established the world's first workers' democracy--the Paris Commune--they found no ready-made blueprints, and no precedents to study for how to run their city without princes, prison wardens, or professional politicians. All they had was the boundless revolutionary enthusiasm of Paris's socialists, communists, anarchists, and radical Jacobins, all of whom threw their energies into creating a new society. As the city's bakers, industrial workers, and other "ruffians" built new institutions of collective political power to overturn social and economic inequality, their former rulers sought to thwart their efforts by any means necessary--ultimately deciding to drown the Communards in blood. By paying particular attention to the historic problems of the Commune, critical debates over its implications, and the glimpse of a better world the Commune provided, Gluckstein reveals its enduring lessons and inspiration for today's struggles. Donny Gluckstein is author of The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class and The Tragedy of Bukharin. He is a lecturer in history in Edinburgh and is a member of the Socialist Workers Party.

The Paris Commune

The Paris Commune PDF Author: Donny Gluckstein
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608461181
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Get Book Here

Book Description
For two months in 1871, the workers of Paris took control of Europe's most celebrated capital city. When they established the world's first workers' democracy--the Paris Commune--they found no ready-made blueprints, and no precedents to study for how to run their city without princes, prison wardens, or professional politicians. All they had was the boundless revolutionary enthusiasm of Paris's socialists, communists, anarchists, and radical Jacobins, all of whom threw their energies into creating a new society. As the city's bakers, industrial workers, and other "ruffians" built new institutions of collective political power to overturn social and economic inequality, their former rulers sought to thwart their efforts by any means necessary--ultimately deciding to drown the Communards in blood. By paying particular attention to the historic problems of the Commune, critical debates over its implications, and the glimpse of a better world the Commune provided, Gluckstein reveals its enduring lessons and inspiration for today's struggles. Donny Gluckstein is author of The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class and The Tragedy of Bukharin. He is a lecturer in history in Edinburgh and is a member of the Socialist Workers Party.

The Paris Commune

The Paris Commune PDF Author: Carolyn J. Eichner
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978827709
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 157

Get Book Here

Book Description
At dawn on March 18, 1871, Parisian women stepped between cannons and French soldiers, using their bodies to block the army from taking the artillery from their working-class neighborhood. When ordered to fire, the troops refused and instead turned and arrested their leaders. Thus began the Paris Commune, France’s revolutionary civil war that rocked the nineteenth century and shaped the twentieth. Considered a golden moment of hope and potential by the left, and a black hour of terrifying power inversions by the right, the Commune occupies a critical position in understanding modern history and politics. A 72-day conflict that ended with the ferocious slaughter of Parisians, the Commune represents for some the final insurgent burst of the French Revolution’s long wake, for others the first “successful” socialist uprising, and for yet others an archetype for egalitarian socio-economic, feminist, and political change. Militants have referenced and incorporated its ideas into insurrections across the globe, throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, keeping alive the revolution’s now-iconic goals and images. Innumerable scholars in countless languages have examined aspects of the 1871 uprising, taking perspectives ranging from glorifying to damning this world-shaking event. The Commune stands as a critical and pivotal moment in nineteenth-century history, as the linchpin between revolutionary pasts and futures, and as the crucible allowing glimpses of alternate possibilities. Upending hierarchies of class, religion, and gender, the Commune emerged as a touchstone for the subsequent century-and-a-half of revolutionary and radical social movements.

The Paris Commune, 1871

The Paris Commune, 1871 PDF Author: Karl Marx
Publisher: Sidgwick & Jackson
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book comprises Marx's three addresses to the International Working Men's Association, together with Engel's introductions, and several additional pieces of correspondence and related material. A modern introduction by Christopher Hitchens analyzes the attitude of these thinkers to the Commune, examines the nature of the Commune itself, and traces its impact on the Europe of 1871 and its significance for today. -- Book jacket.

Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism

Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism PDF Author: Karl Kautsky
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900439284X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 366

Get Book Here

Book Description
Once deemed ‘the pope of Marxism’, Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) was the leading theoretician of the German Social Democratic Party and one of the most prominent public intellectuals of his time. However, during the twentieth century a constellation of historical factors ensured that his ideas were gradually consigned to near oblivion. Not only has his political thought been dismissed in non-Marxist historical and political discourse, but his ideas are equally discredited in Marxist circles. This book aims to rekindle interest in Kautsky’s ideas by exploring his democratic-republican understanding of state and society. It demonstrates how Kautsky’s republican thought was positively influenced by Marx and Engels – especially in relation to the lessons they drew from the experience of the Paris Commune. Listen to Ben Lewis discuss the book on [this podcast] by LINKSE HOBBY.

Revolutionary Exiles

Revolutionary Exiles PDF Author: Woodford McClellan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000424456
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book, first published in 1979, examines the little-studied forerunners of the Russian revolutionary movement – the Russian section of the First International. It looks at the social democratic and Marxist Russians in the International, as well as examining the complex relations between the terrorist Sergei Nechaev and Marx’s friends, as well as tracing the activities of Michael Bakunin. It also analyses, for the first time in English, the activities of the Russian revolutionaries in the Paris Commune. It integrates early Russian social democracy into the larger context of European socialist and working-class movements.

Soldiers of Revolution

Soldiers of Revolution PDF Author: Mark Lause
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788730542
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
How war gave birth to revolution in the 19th century The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 introduced new military technologies, transformed the organization of armies, and upset the continental balance of power, promulgating new regimented ideas of nationhood and conflict resolution more widely. However, the mass armies that became a new standard required mass mobilization and the arming of working people, who exercised a new power through both a German social democracy and popular insurgent French movements. As in the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Paris Commune of 1871 grew directly from the discontent among radicalized soldiers and civilians pressed into armed service on behalf of institutions they learned to mistrust. If this militarized class conflict, the brutality of the Commune's subsequent repression not only butchered the tens of thousands of Parisians but slaughtered an old utopian faith that appeals to reason and morality could resolve social tensions. War among nations became linked to revolution and revolution to armed struggle.

Communal Luxury

Communal Luxury PDF Author: Kristin Ross
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784780545
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reclaiming the legacy of the Paris Commune for the twenty-first century Kristin Ross’s highly acclaimed work on the thought and culture of the Communard uprising of 1871 resonates with the motivations and actions of contemporary protest, which has found its most powerful expression in the reclamation of public space. Today’s concerns—internationalism, education, the future of labor, the status of art, and ecological theory and practice—frame and inform her carefully researched restaging of the words and actions of individual Communards. This original analysis of an event and its centrifugal effects brings to life the workers in Paris who became revolutionaries, the significance they attributed to their struggle, and the elaboration and continuation of their thought in the encounters that transpired between the insurrection’s survivors and supporters like Marx, Kropotkin, and William Morris. The Paris Commune was a laboratory of political invention, important simply and above all for, as Marx reminds us, its own “working existence.” Communal Luxury allows readers to revisit the intricate workings of an extraordinary experiment.

History of the Commune of 1871

History of the Commune of 1871 PDF Author: Lissagaray
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Paris (France)
Languages : en
Pages : 526

Get Book Here

Book Description


Revolution and Mass Democracy

Revolution and Mass Democracy PDF Author: Peter H. Amann
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400872987
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book Here

Book Description
Contributing to a growing "history from below" movement, Peter H. Amann argues that the major episodes of the French Revolution of I 848 can be rightly understood only if the perspective of the revolutionaries themselves is taken into account. His history of the Paris club movement of 1848 examines the most significant of the mass organizations through which the tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of revolutionaries expressed themselves. The author pieces together scattered archival sources to reconstruct the origin, strategies, and main goals of the club movement, and the reasons for its ultimate failure to resist successfully the newly installed republican government's drive to restore traditional authority. He suggests that the club movement may be viewed in a broader, comparative perspective as a characteristic revolutionary phenomenon of a society in transition to modernity. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Massacre

Massacre PDF Author: John M. Merriman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300212909
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of the most dramatic chapters in the history of nineteenth-century Europe, the Commune of 1871 was an eclectic revolutionary government that held power in Paris across eight weeks between 18 March and 28 May. Its brief rule ended in ‘Bloody Week’ – the brutal massacre of as many as 15,000 Parisians, and perhaps even more, who perished at the hands of the provisional government’s forces. By then, the city’s boulevards had been torched and its monuments toppled. More than 40,000 Parisians were investigated, imprisoned or forced into exile – a purging of Parisian society by a conservative national government whose supporters were considerably more horrified by a pile of rubble than the many deaths of the resisters. In this gripping narrative, John Merriman explores the radical and revolutionary roots of the Commune, painting vivid portraits of the Communards – the ordinary workers, famous artists and extraordinary fire-starting women – and their daily lives behind the barricades, and examining the ramifications of the Commune on the role of the state and sovereignty in France and modern Europe. Enthralling, evocative and deeply moving, this narrative account offers a full picture of a defining moment in the evolution of state terror and popular resistance.