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 the 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 supposed to suppress 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.
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 Defense,
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. 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!
Please download and
read this text via the following link:
Further reading:
On the Time for Armed
Struggle, 1974, Pomeroy (6800 words)
The South African Working Class and the NDR, 1988, Slovo (14985 words)
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