Anatole Sawosik | Pole of Communist Revival in France (PRCF)
When we talk about the Commune, most people immediately think of Paris, of the popular uprising that broke out in March 1871 and was crushed by the Bloody Week two months later. However, reducing the history of the communes to Paris means missing out on a whole dynamic that extended far beyond the capital. For the Commune was not only Parisian, it was also Lyonnais, Marseillais, Toulousain and, more broadly, a movement that affected the whole of France, albeit unevenly. Understanding this is essential to grasp the Commune not as an isolated episode, but as the expression of a deeper and more widespread desire: to give local populations the power to organize themselves, manage their affairs, and collectively build their future.
At the turn of 1870, the fall of the Empire and the proclamation of the Republic did not take place solely in Paris. In Lyon, Marseille, and Toulouse, on September 4, 1870, the Republic was proclaimed even before Paris did so. These were popular uprisings that expressed a desire to break with the Empire and heralded the aspiration for more local power, closer to everyday realities. When the Paris Commune was born on March 18, 1871, these cities did not remain indifferent. Marseille, Lyon, Saint-Étienne, Narbonne, Toulouse, Le Creusot, and Limoges in turn experienced communal experiments, sometimes lasting a few days, sometimes a few weeks. They were brutally repressed, but they demonstrated the same desire: to wrest from the central government the right to decide for themselves, to build a political space where residents were not spectators but actors. In the countryside, there was also an echo: trees of liberty were planted, committees were formed, and addresses of support for Paris circulated. But caution prevailed, as isolation, low politicization, and fear of reprisals slowed the revolutionary momentum.
The important thing to remember about this history is that the Commune was not a purely Parisian event. It expressed a national aspiration for autonomy, local democracy, and social justice. Paris was its beating heart, but the provinces were its resonance and extension. The Commune was the idea that men and women, in their towns and villages, could unite to decide how they would live together, manage their resources, and transform society from the bottom up. This ideal, although shattered by the repression of 1871, continues to haunt history because it embodies a universal truth: the will of peoples to take control of their own destiny.
But this ideal does not stop at 19th-century France. Even today, in other contexts, on other continents, it is being reborn in new forms. Contemporary Venezuela is a striking example. There, the notion of the commune is not limited to a fleeting insurrection or a localized uprising. It refers to a mode of popular organization, a way of building power from the bottom up. It is a living fabric of solidarity, collective planning, and shared responsibility. The commune is poetry in action, the seed that germinates, the drum that calls for unity. It is the place where the people decide together, create together, transform together. Here we find, transposed to another time and space, the same idea that animated the French communes: the idea that collective life can and must be organized directly by those who live it.
In Venezuela, the communal project reached a turning point with Chávez’s “Golpe de timón” speech, when he stated that the construction of communes was not the responsibility of a single ministry but of the entire government and society. Today, under Maduro, this orientation is being vigorously pursued. Concrete mechanisms have been put in place to bring the communes to life: popular consultations, assemblies where the future is debated, collective votes to choose priority projects, and above all, direct access to resources. It is the residents themselves, their neighbors, their comrades in struggle, who administer the resources with shared supervision. This changes everything: people no longer write to an inaccessible elected representative, they address the person who lives on the same street, who shares the same problems, and who is accountable to their community.
This experience is not without its difficulties. Building a communal state, as Venezuelan activists say, is a long process that will take decades. It is not just a matter of building new institutions, but of transforming human relationships themselves, breaking with the logic of domination and selfishness inherited from capitalism. That is why the communal state begins in everyday life: in the way we love, share, and care for one another. People who have been fighting for years to have water in their neighborhood finally get it thanks to collective organization and support for communal projects. These are stories of regained dignity, shared efforts, and concrete victories.
The Venezuelan commune is not just an institution: it is a school of democracy. In a living commune, dreams cease to be individual and become collective. This requirement for participation, this obligation to be an actor, creates a dense social fabric, a sense of belonging, a healthier society. Here again, we find a resonance with the Commune of 1871: the desire to break out of passivity, to break down the separation between rulers and ruled, and to build a truly popular power.
In 19th-century France, as in Venezuela today, the commune thus appears as a historical response to imperial invasions and oppression. In France, in 1871, it was a way of resisting the crushing of a people by a centralized and conservative state and the Prussian invasion. In Venezuela, it is a way of building a new state, not on the basis of distant institutions, but on the basis of the daily practices of the inhabitants in a context of terrible threat from Yankee imperialism. In both cases, the commune expresses the same conviction: that freedom and justice cannot be given by any force other than the people themselves.
Beyond its insurrectionary aspect, the Paris Commune sketched out the contours of a genuine socialist society, in which the commune was to constitute the basic cell of the new state. This transition required a radical transformation of economic relations, which the Communards began to implement through concrete measures: the socialization of the means of production through the reactivation of workshops abandoned by their owners under cooperative management, the organization of collective work through the abolition of bargaining and the prohibition of night work in bakeries, and the first steps towards the abolition of capitalist private property through a moratorium on rents and the requisitioning of vacant apartments. These experiences, although brief, demonstrated a consistent desire to build a social republic where political democracy would be based on economic democracy, with each commune becoming the place where popular sovereignty would be exercised in all areas of social life.
We can therefore conclude that the Commune, far from being an episode frozen in Parisian history, is a living idea. It spans eras and continents, reborn in various forms, adapting to different contexts. In France, it was brief but intense; in Venezuela, it is unfolding over a long period of time. But in both cases, it embodies a universal aspiration: that of peoples to organize collectively, to decide for themselves, to transform the world by transforming their own lives. The Commune, the world’s first experiment in the dictatorship of the proletariat, is both memory and future; it is the link that connects yesterday’s struggles to today’s hopes. And that is why, when we talk about the Paris Commune, we must always remember that communes are everywhere where women and men decide to unite for their common ideals of social justice and popular sovereignty.
