This was the first of the two presentations in an open event for the 100 years of the October Revolution that took place in Athens in May of 2017. By P. Chountis member of the Central Committee of CPG(m-l).
It took a few decades to realize the picturesque finding in the
Communist Manifesto in 1848, that "A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre
of communism".
We could say that the massive presence of the working class in historical
development starts in the 1830s and 1840s. The labour struggles of Lyon and the
movement of Chartists are accompanied by the first socialist-communist
approaches. The revolution in Paris in 1848 is the first dynamic presence of
the proletariat and leads to the proletarian uprising in late June. The uprising
is repressed and thousands are executed and displaced in labour camps in
Algeria, but it affects a wave of uprisings across Europe. Marx describes the
1848 uprising in Paris as the "first
major battle between the two classes in which the modern society is divided".
The next wave comes with the
shocking events in Paris in 1870-71 that lead to the first
proletarian-revolutionary power, the Commune that lasts from late March to
late May. During these two months, the Commune replaces the regular army by the
militia, gives away all rents since October 1870, allows the election of
foreign nationals in the Commune, imposes a ceiling on Communist officials, votes
for the division of Church and State, the abolition of state subsidies for
religious purposes, the removal of religious symbols from schools, the
destruction of the guillotine, the demolition of the chauvinistic and warmonger
Column of Victory, the creation of collaborative cooperatives for the operation
of factories, the abolition of night shift for baker workers, the closing of
the pawnshops and more.
In late May the Commune is crushed by the army, in an agreement between
the French bourgeoisie and the German invaders. A mass massacre follows. Engels
says that "such a massacre has not
happened since the civil wars that prepared the fall of the Roman Empire".
And adds that in the uprising of 1848 "the
bourgeoisie showed the terrible toughness that its vengeance can reach, if the
proletariat dares to stand as a separate class with its own claims and
interests". To conclude with the observation that "yet, 1848 was like a game compared to the
rage of the bourgeoisie in 1871".
Τhe labour struggles are handed over to the
US working class. Nine years after the rail strikes in 1877, on May 1st 1886,
US unions go on strike demanding eight-hour working day. While thousands of
workers do achieve the eight-hour working day, mass strikes are facing brutal
police repression that leads to violent deaths, arrests and death sentences for
four workers in a parody-trial.
