THE ENGLISH COMMUNISTS ON PARIS.
AMANIFESTO has just been issued, followed by a good many well-known English workmen's signatures, which is perhaps the most significant and ominous of the political signs of the times. It bears, amongst others, the signature of George Odger, of B. Lucraft, of Thomas Motters- head, of Cowell Stepney, and of John Hales, and consists of an exceedingly vigorous and virulent defence of the Paris Commune. It is not an apology for the Commune ; it is not a plea in extenuation of its violence ; it is a thorough-going pane- gyric upon its aim and its deeds, bestowing, as far as we can apprehend its drift, implicit approval even on its most violent acts, such as the destruction of the great buildings of Paris and the massacre of the innocent hostages. The writing, as vigorous as Cobbett's, reminds us of that of earlier documents of the same Association, which have been attributed, we know not how truly, to the pen of the Corresponding Secre- tary for Germany, Karl Marx. But to whomsoever it may be due, it is a matter of no slight moment for England to find that ideas as violent as these are caught up and acknowledged by men who have taken no inconsiderable part in our recent English politics, who certainly sway the councils of a section, however small, of the working men's Unions, and who aspire (even though as yet unsuccessfully) to represent the hopes and dreams of English labour. Let it be understood that we are expressing no amazement and no regret that these shrewd and vehement men regard the cause of the Paris Commune with far greater favour than the cause of the Versailles Assembly. Those who have read our criti- cisms on the fierce civil war which is only just at an end, will know that we think the sin of these terrible events must be almost equally divided between the two combatants ; that Paris defied France, and that France insulted Paris ; that after the ?murder of the two Generals (which was not the act of the Commune), Versailles at first far outdid Paris in ferocity and bad faith ; that for a long time the Government inside Paris was singularly moderate and forbearing, though the demands addressed to the National Assembly were haughty and intoler- able as coming from the representatives of a small minority, how- ever energetic, of the nation, and as aiming virtually at the dis- integration of the nation ; that if towards the end of the second siege the passions of both parties boiled high, there was probably nothing to choose between the cruelty of the troops and the vindictiveness of the insurgents ; and that when at last the great buildings of Paris blazed and the hostages were put to the sword, there was as much apology as there can be for such evil and bloody deeds in the well-calculated cruelty of M. Thiers' proclamations, and the brutal executions ordered by such leaders as the Marquis de Gallifet. All this, we admit. Nor should we feel either surprise or dismay at any manifesto signed by English working-men which, after weighing the merits and deserts of the opposite parties in this bloody civil war, should have found much more that was noble in the ideal of the Commune, and much less that was malignant about its actions, than ordinary lookers-on. But that would be faint language indeed to describe the manifesto just pat forth by the Council of the International Association and approved by some of the leaders of the working-men. This manifesto finds but one serious fault with t1 e Commune,—
cement a real friendship between the two countries simply that it did not march on Versailles while Versailles
was still indefensible. For the rest, it overwhelms the Assembly and its leaders with charges of treachery and infamy, but it ignores wholly the wild suspiciousness, the utter want of reciprocal loyalty and co-operation among the leaders of the Commune ; it casts scorn on M. Thiers and his colleagues for their corruptness, but while intimating incident- ally that many of the Paris forts were bought by them from the Commune, it forgets to note in this the equal corruptness of many of the Commune's trusted adherents ; it denounces massacre in M. Thiers, but approves the retributive massacre of his antagonists ; it speaks of its heroes as martyrs to be "enshrined in the great heart of the working-class ;" and in a word, it justifies the bloody propaganda of the insurrectionary party of labour, just as the Holy Inquisition has justified the bloody propaganda of orthodoxy, or M. Thiers the " pitiless- ness " of his purpose of enforcing "expiation." R is hardly pleasant to see words like these with the signature of respect- able English working-class leaders at the bottom of them,— " When Thiers, as we have seen, from the beginning of the conflict, enforced the humane practice of shooting down the Communal prisoners, the Commune, to protect their lives, was obliged to resort to the Prussian practice of securing hostages. The lives of the hostages had been forfeited over and over again by the continued shooting of prisoners on the part of the Versailles°. How could they be spared any longer tiler the carnage with which Machlahon's prastorians celebrated their entrance into Paris? Was even the last check upon the unscru- pulous ferocity of bourgeois Government—the taking of hostages—to be made a mere sham of? The real murderer of Archbishop Darboy is Thiers."
Even this miserable excuse is taken away by the admitted fact that the hostages were murdered when the struggle was at a close, so that it could not exercise any restraining influence on the conduct of the Versailles Generals, while it could and did enrage the troops into fiercer frenzy. To execute a number of innocent persons as your last administrative act is a curious way of exercising "a check upon the unscrupulous ferocity of bour- geois government ;"—it was, indeed, such a "check " as a bottle of pure spirits is to delirium tremens, or the plunge of a spur to a horse that is running away. To our minds, it is a very grave fact that English working-men, however extreme, should be found to speak with enthusiasm of a party which, whatever may have been respectable and defensible in its aims, made light of the unity of France, preferred itself to the nation, and yet was so filled with mutual distrusts, that it could rely on no leader, could never bring more than a small fraction even of the people of Paris to support it at the polling-booths, and was forced to find its euthanasia in a. world of ruin and a sea of blood. We do not take a much higher view of M. Thiers than the International Association itself, though we feel no confidence in many of the savage imputations on him which it disseminates. But such a con- clusion as the following as to the merits of the Commune certainly startles us almost as much as would any direct English panegyric on the massacres of September, 1792, or on the bloody scenes of the December coup d'itat "Working-men's Paris, with its Commune, will be for over celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working-class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them."
The ominous element in this manifesto, considered, that is, as obtaining the adhesion of any real leader of the English working-class, is the firm conviction which pervades it throughout that the hands of the working-class must be against those of all other classes ; that the bourgeoisie of all countries are contemptible and corrupt ; that humanity and the Proletariat are convertible terms ; that in religion Voltair- ianism is the true creed of the working-class ; that unless the wealthy submit implicitly to be ruled by the poor, and for the apparent good of the poor, a social war is the only means of regeneration. Nor is it even easy to make out clearly what the special objects of the advocates of the Proletariat are. They denounce indeed the high salaries of office, and wish to see Government carried on by those who will accept working- men's wages because they belong to the working-class,—which seems to be held to be a guarantee for honesty,—bat be- yond this we get no clearer programme of principle than the following :— " The Commune, they [hostile critics] exclaim, intends to abolish pro- perty, the basia of all civilization ! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class-property which makes the labour of the many the wealth of the tow. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labour, into mere instruments of free and associated labour. But this is Communism,' impossible' Communism ! Why, those mem- bers of the ruling classes who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present system—and they are many— have become the obtrusive and full-mouthed apostles of co-operative production. If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a Snare; if it is to supersede the Capitalist system ; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of Capitalist production—what else, gentlemen, would it be but Communism, 'possible ' Communism ?"
We do not wonder at this dream, and still less do we blame it ; but we do wonder that any honest Englishman should regard, —as the International Association evidently does,—all the distrust felt of it as mere selfish fear, the recoil of corrupt luxury before naked right. Why, the dream is as yet hardly concrete enough to be sketched out in the imagination. How are the land and capital to be transferred to the co-operative labourers ? By whom is the amount of competition amongst different co-operative societies to be determined Is the Pro- letariat to organize itself into a number of Communes, each with the sole right of producing and distributing all possible wealth within its own area The dream is as yet a chaos which would fill, we should have supposed, even Mr. Odger with dread ; and yet the spirit of the pamphlet signed by him, amongst others, is one of fierce and even deadly animosity against all who do not join to preach and teach it as the gospel of the future.
For our own parts, we do not believe that England is tend- ing towards this whirlpool of inveterate scepticism and social passions. As yet English classes are (fortunately for us) thoroughly interfused, and the bourgeoisie are just as likely to demand the extermination of the aristocracy, as the work- ing-class to declare internecine war on the bourgeoisie. The leaders of one class are usually found in the class above it, and no movement commands the adherence of the one which does not find much powerful support in the other. We only trust that the lesson of the awful disruption of French society will not be lost upon us ;—that it will teach us to study the problem of the good of the Proletariat with an earnestness and sympathy that may ward off the danger of any such opening of the earth at our feet ; and that the wiser of the working-men will, in their turn, resist the temp- tation to harden their hearts against every politician and thinker who does not preach the gospel of a proletariat recon- struction of society, a new division of earth, and a repudia- tion of Heaven. These Red manifestos certainly deserve more anxious study than either Queen's speeches or party pro- grammes.
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