The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1929-03-16
MARX ON THE PARIS
COMMUNE OF 1870

les. Inc priests were sent Dack TO
the recesses of private life, there to
feed upon the aims of the faithful
in imitation of their predecessors,
the Apostles. The whole of the ed
vocational institutions were opened to
the people gratuitously and at the
same time cleared of all interior
ence of Church and State. Thus, not
only was education made accessible
to all, but science itself freed from
the letters which class prejudice and
governmental force had imposed up
on it.
The judicial functionaries were to
be Invested of that sham independence
which had but served to mask their
abject subserviency to all succeeding
governments to which, in turn, they
had takeA, and broken, the oaths of
allegiance. Like the rest of public
servants, magistrates and judges
were to be elective, responsible and
revocable.
When thes Paris Commune took
the management of the revolution in
its own hands; when plain working
men for the first time dared to in
fringe upon the Governmental privi-
lege of their natural superiors,"
and, under circumstances of unex-
ampled difficulty, performed their
work modestly, conscientiously, and
efficiently,-performed it at salaries
the highest of which barely amount
ed to one-fifth of what, according to
high scientific authority, is the mini
mum required for a secretary to
certain metropolitan school board
the old world writhed in commissions
of rage at the sight of the Red
Flag, the symbol of the Republic of
Labor, flating over the Hotel de
Vile.
Wonderful, indeed, was the change
the Commune had wrought in Par
is! No longer any trace of the
meretricious Paris of the Second
Empire. No longer was Paris the
rendezvous of British landlords, of
Irish absentees, American ex-slave-
holders and shoddy men, Russian ex-
serf owners, and Wallachian boy
ards. No more corpses at the
Morgue, no nocturnal burglaries,
scarcely any robberies; in fact, for
the first time since the days of Feb
ruary, 1848, the streets of Paris
were safe, and that without any po-
lice of any kind. "We," said MEM
Der of the Commune, shear no longer
of assassination, theft, and personal
assault; it seems, indeed, as if the
police had dragged along with it to
Versailles all of its Conservative
friends" The cocottes had rebound
the scent of their protectors-the
absconding men of family, religion,
and, above all, of property. In their
stead, the real women of Paris
showed again at the surface = he
roic, noble, and devoted, like the wo-
men of antiquity. Working, think
ing, fighting, bleeding Paris : al
most forgetful, in its incubation of
a new society, of the canfibals at
its gates - radiant in the enthusi-
asm of it's historic initiative!
If the Commune was thus truly
representative of all the healthy ele-
ments of French society, and there
fore the truly national Government,
it was, at the same time, a working
mems Government, as the bold cham
pion of the emancipation of labor,
emphatically international. Within
sight of the Prussian army, that
had annexed to Germany two French
provinces, the Commune annexed to
France the working people all over
the world.
Working mems Paris, with its
Commune, will be for ever 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
priest will not avail to redeem them.