One day the people of Paris decided to stop work,
build barricades and overthrow the government.
That's what we call a revolution.
I'm Paul Mason and in this episode we'll look at ...
... what Karl Marx learned from two revolutions happening here in Paris.
In 1848 the French monarchy was overthrown.
Within days the revolution broke out in Berlin, Budapest, Vienna, and Milan.
"Who's in charge?," the elites of Europe asked.
Fingers pointed to the author of the Communist Manifesto,
holed up in Brussels, Belgium.
The police immediately put Marx on a train to the French border ...
... minus his luggage.
Marx arrived on 5 March 1848.
He went straight to a mass meeting of the most
radical organisation in Paris: the Society for the Rights of Man,
where he made a speech.
He said, when a ship is caught in a storm, time to throw somebody overboard.
And meant the rich.
The upper middle class, the bourgeoisie, had led the revolution.
They wanted democracy.
But the mass of people in Paris were workers.
They wanted democracy plus social justice.
Marx knew that the overthrow of the monarchy was just the start.
In June 1848, the middle class threw the working class over board.
This, the first ever photo of a social struggle,
shows the barricades workers erected as the bourgeois crackdown began.
Thousands were killed.
This is the exact spot, where that barricade was built.
Marx' lessons from these events still hold good.
Struggling for democracy is not enough.
You also have to end poverty, unemployment and inequality.
That is going to scare the rich.
This, defending democracy but fighting for social justice at the same time,
is the basic problem in all the recent uprisings:
from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring.
Marx said, if you don't attack the elite's economic power,
it will attack you.
After the 1848 revolution failed, a dictator ruled France for 20 years,
the self-styled emperor Louis Napoleon.
Paris became the world's pleasure capital,
the city of light.
Napoleon widened the streets, so nobody could build barricades.
But in 1871, they did build barricades, only bigger.
These remarkable photographs show the working class
as it took control of Paris and launched the Paris Commune.
The Commune wasn't just a political revolution,
it was the social revolution Marx dreamed of.
People drove government out of working class areas,
and Marx knew, the Commune was different:
It abolished the standing army, turned factories
into worker's co-ops and legalized sex-work.
People didn't just take control of the state, they took control of their lives.
When the French army retook Paris, they killed 30,000 civilians.
It's one of the first political massacres of modern times.
I've reported from the Arab Spring, Occupy, the revolts in Greece and Turkey.
None of them went as far as the Paris Commune,
which aimed to replace the state with people power.
Karl Marx never wrote a revolution manual.
If he had, it would have said two things:
First: Democracy is not enough, keep pushing for social justice.
Second: You can't take over the existing state.
You have to bring power closer to the people.
Subtitles: linguatransfair.de
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