Basics,
Part 10b
The Armed People
A practical, actually-existing alternative to the bourgeois
State – The Commune – arose in Paris, France, in the beginning of 1871.
It was more than the “right of recall”, and it was more than
the whole people collectively in power and in perpetual democratic session. It
was also the reappearance of The Armed People in a new kind of societal
framework.
So-called Primitive Communism is an Armed People. Primitive
Communism has been destroyed, and continues to be destroyed, by the
simultaneous rise of property relations and fall of the women. But here, in the
Paris Commune, was an Armed People in advanced productive circumstances. The
Paris Commune prefigured the end of the bourgeois State’s monopoly of violence,
and the consequent eventual fall of the bourgeois State in the world as a
whole.
The security forces (army and police) existing in France prior
to the Paris Commune had been paid by the bourgeois State to guarantee its
survival. They were tasked with suppressing the working class, whenever they
found suppression to be necessary, by any means of suppression they thought
necessary, and they were therefore constantly prepared for bloodshed and
slaughter. These forces were disbanded by the Commune and were not replaced
until the Commune fell.
With hardly any exceptions, all “separations of powers” were
abolished in the Paris Commune, leaving one main and constant power: The Armed
People.
A century later in Chile, in the time of the Popular Unity
government that fell on 11 September 1973, instead of an Armed People, a virtue
was made of disarmament, and a “Peaceful Path” was worshipped as the new political
Golden Calf.
In the document linked below, Volodia Teitelboim gives a
brief description, from the point of view of one of those who was involved in
the Chilean Popular Unity government, of its disastrous end. The fascists used
the national army to overthrow the national government on behalf of the
bourgeoisie. It was a shocking reminder of the real purpose and nature of the
“special bodies of armed men” that are part of The State. They are there to
preserve the allegiance of the State to the bourgeoisie.
Teitelboim calls for “A Reappraisal of the Issue of the
Army,” meaning a return to the view of the Paris Commune, which is mentioned in
the first line of Teitelboim’s document. This document is sufficient as the
basis for a very good and necessary discussion in South Africa at this time.
Like the Chilean Popular Unity government, ours in South
Africa today is a multiclass government underpinned by a class alliance for
common goals. It is a unity-in-action, otherwise called a Popular Front.
Why has the South African NDR survived for 17 years, while
the Chilean Popular Unity fell after 1,000 days?
The answer could be that we are not pacifists, as so many of
the Chilean Popular Unity politicians were.
Or, the answer could be that our crisis has just not arrived
yet.
Or, that we have passed at least one crisis, which may not
yet be the last. That was in mid-2008, and it was resolved by the recall of
President Mbeki and the resignation of various ministers including Terror
Lekota and Mluleki George, Minister and Deputy Minister of Defence,
respectively.
Picture: There
are very few images of freedom fighters in formation, in action, or ready for
action, to be found on the Internet, whether of MK or of any other liberation
army. But there are many photographs of freedom fighters in captivity, or dead.
Full justice has not yet been done. Alive or dead, the
revolutionaries are still rebels and outcasts in the minds of the “respectable”
bourgeoisie, who owned the cameras, then, and who own the photo-archives, now.
For our part, we are still singing the Internationale,
composed in Paris in the days of the Commune by the communard Eugène Pottier.
The picture is of a statue of the freedom fighter Dedan
Kimathi, under the blue sky of Kenya.
AMANDLA!
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: 1,000
Days of Popular Unity Rule in Chile, 1977, Teitelboim.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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