On July 14, 1789, poor workers took over the Bastille, a medieval prison in the center of working-class Paris and a symbol of feudal, aristocratic power. The great French Revolution had begun! The capitalist class (bourgeoisie) would replace the monarchy (king and nobles).

But some advanced revolutionaries were advocating an egalitarian, communist society. This was the birth of the modern working-class communist movement!

Lessons from the storming of Bastille
France was then an agricultural society ruled by noble landowners and a powerful Catholic church, with the king at the top. The urban bourgeoisie wanted a constitutional monarchy. That would give them more political power. They needed the urban workers, called “sans-culottes” – a French word meaning “worker’s pants”– to fight for them against the monarchy. But for a few years the “sans-culottes” fought for their own interests.

The sudden, violent overthrow of the French monarchy and landed aristocracy proved that the status quo was not “God-given,” not inevitable, not the product of “human nature.” It proved that the political structure could be changed for the better. A society with more equality and less exploitation was possible! The French Revolution also gave birth to future revolutionary communist movements.

The French Revolution was inspired by the Enlightenment, a bourgeois movement that attacked monarchies and feudalism. The Enlightenment popularized talk of human rights— liberal democracy, the so called rights of the people and equality for all. It argued that the power of kings and aristocrats was illegitimate.

In 1789 the French King had called a nationwide meeting (Estates-General) of nobles, clergy, and bourgeoisie, to vote for new taxes. When the bourgeoisie refused the King tried to shut them down. But the “sans-culottes” rebelled and stormed the Bastille. The revolution began.

Here are some lessons, especially from the most radical and democratic period of 1789 to 1795.

The “sans-culottes” of the cities—workers, journeymen, apprentices, working women—always pushed the Revolution ahead, towards more equality, more rights and power for working people.

The “sans-culottes” had no political party. The party of petty-bourgeois revolutionaries and sincere idealists who worked most closely with them was called the Jacobins.
But the working class needs its own party. This is the greatest discovery of Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik ( communist) Revolution of 1917 in Russia. Today, it’s the job of the Progressive Labor Party to fulfill that historic task.

It was the mass actions of the “sans-culottes”, sometimes supported by the most radical Jacobins, who pushed the Revolution to adopt the most democratic reforms.
The bourgeoisie, intellectuals, and “sans-culottes” all united to get rid of the king and aristocracy and to take land from the Church. But after that, their interests no longer coincided. The radical bourgeoisie needed the “sans-culottes” only as long as foreign armies threatened to destroy the Revolution.

Seizing the lands of aristocrats and the Church gave peasants their own land. They wanted higher prices for the food they grew. But the urban “sans-culottes” needed low prices. So, the peasants’ economic interests were more aligned with the bourgeois merchants, traders, and landlords than with those of the “sans-culottes”.

Once foreign armies were driven back, the bourgeois representatives—some of whom had been executed as counter-revolutionaries—turned against the Jacobins and the “sans-culottes” and established a more repressive state. After 1795 the propertied bourgeoisie was in firm control. They organized a bourgeois dictatorship, and then an authoritarian empire under Napoleon Bonaparte.

The communist movement begins
Gracchus Babeuf, a poor, self-taught worker, headed the last and most radical movement of the Revolution. His “Conspiracy for Equality” was crushed, and Babeuf executed. But one of his followers, Buonarroti, survived to influence the working-class and student militants of the 1840s, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

The working class of Europe learned from the experience of the “sans-culottes” of France. The Paris Commune of 1871, and the Russian Revolution of 1917, were the first revolutions by the industrial working class, the proletariat. They all sprang from the lessons of the great French Revolution.

Source: CHALLENGE, July 11, 2018. Suggested Reading: Suzanne Desan, Living the French Revolution and the Age of Napoleon (2013); Jacques Pauwels, Le Paris des sans-culottes : guide du Paris révolutionnaire, 1789-1799 (Paris, 2021).

It’s a hot fightback summer! From hotel workers, grad-student workers, writers, actors, workers are shutting it down!. Earlier this year, college teachers, healthcare workers, education workers, graduate students—all have walked off the job with overwhelming public support. As we go to press 40,000  rail workers from the United Kingdom are on the picket lines  leading the largest rail strike in 30 years. We may see strikes by 350,000 UPS workers in August and by auto workers this fall. Clearly, capitalism’s crisis appears to have triggered a period of sharper class struggle.

Workers are fed up with the inequalities—the rising cost of living, exacerbated by the capitalist-bred pandemic’s economic effects, stagnating wages, and more—which disproportionately hit Black and brown working families the hardest.

If you live or work in an area where workers are on strike, support the picket line! Greet workers with the revolutionary ideas of CHALLENGE and the chant, “hey hey ho ho! this capitalist system has got to go!”
Workers deserve nothing less than a communist world. That’s a world run by and for our class.

If the far-right Vox party joins Spain’s ruling coalition after the July 23 general election, it will be the first Spanish government to include open fascists since the death of mass murderer Francisco Franco in 1975. It would also mark the latest failure of liberal democracy to manage the growing global crisis of capitalism. As the U.S. bosses keep weakening in the face of an aggressive challenge by the Chinese imperialists, their junior NATO partners—the centrist parties that have ruled Western Europe since World War II--are losing their grip as well.

Instability is everywhere; everything seems up for grabs. With the war in Ukraine escalating and World War III looming, the old liberal democratic world order is in shambles. Confronted with runaway inflation, a wave of climate catastrophes, and mass unemployment (close to 13 percent in Spain), both the open fascist insurgents and the old guard liberals are scapegoating migrating workers—a hallmark of rising fascism. As millions of workers’ lives are upended in the general turmoil, a segment of the working class has been infected by the disease of anti-immigrant racism. In this dark night of weak class consciousness, the capitalist rulers are pulling out all the stops to mislead, deceive, and divide us. Regardless of which of the bosses’ factions wins the next round of elections, the rulers will ultimately need full-blown fascism to have any chance to destroy their competition and protect their profits.

Only an international mass workers’ movement, led by communists, can beat back the rising tide of fascism. Only communist revolution, spearheaded by the fighting Progressive Labor Party, can end imperialist war and create a society run by and for the working class. The profit system can’t reform its way out of this crisis. History shows us that it can never serve workers’ needs. Capitalism must be destroyed, root and branch. Join us—we have a world to win!

As liberal democracy weakens, open fascists rise
Six years ago in Spain, nostalgic for the Franco years (foreignpolicy.com, 6/29), a splinter group denounced the right-wing Popular Party as too soft and set off on its own. Widely dismissed and underestimated, the Vox party exploited workers’ anxiety over the Catalan separatist movement, which was pushing to break away from the richest region of Spain (centered in Barcelona) and form its own country. Using the classic fascist tools of gutter racism and sexism, and taking a nationalist page from the U.S. Small Fascist forces fronted by Donald Trump (“Make Spain Great Again!”) Vox “opposes abortion rights, denies climate change and rejects the need for the government to combat gender violence” (New Indian Express, 7/18).

Now backed by 15 percent of voters nationwide, Vox is being courted to form a new parliamentary majority by the Popular Party, which is favored to win the upcoming election after shifting to a more openly racist, anti-immigrant platform (El Pais, 7/24/2018). If that alliance comes to pass, Spain would join a growing list of European countries--including the old World War II fascist axis of Germany, Italy, and Vichy France--with openly fascist parties either within the government or as a leading opposition to the government. And with Spain next in line to hold the presidency of the European Union, Spanish fascists could influence the EU’s agenda.

When liberal democracy fails the capitalist class, fascism gives the bosses more direct control over all aspects of society, from the media and universities to industrial policy and war preparations. It’s no accident that fascism is the fastest-growing political movement in Europe today. This reality would have been unthinkable in the decades following World War II, when fascist parties were outlawed In Germany and marginalized in France and Italy. But times are changing, and fast. Millions of workers have lost confidence in the ability of the traditional post-war European parties to solve the glaring problems of capitalism. Europe’s capitalist rulers—the dominant banks and industrialists—are terrified of losing the white working class, a fear compounded by Britain’s departure from the EU and recent mass protests against the French bosses’ pension reforms. At present, these rulers aren’t moving to smash Vox or the likes of open fascist leaders like Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. If anything, they appear to be hedging their bets--just as they did in Germany in 1933, when they sanctioned Adolph Hitler’s appointment as chancellor by the liberal-backed president.  

In the most recent elections in Germany, the most committed fascist nation during World War II, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) expanded its base, even after AfD members were arrested for helping to plan a fascist coup last December. The party is polling up to 20 percent, “neck-and-neck with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats and behind only the conservative CDU/CSU bloc” (france24.com, 3/7). In France, the National Rally headed by Marine Le Pen is now the highest-polling party in the country. Amid the ongoing rebellion over the French cops’ cold-blooded killing of a 17-year-old son of North African immigrants, it’s calling for harsher treatment of migrating workers, wholesale evictions of public housing residents for minor offenses, and the building of more prisons—the bosses’ modern concentration camps.

In their desperate attempt to hold on to power, the rulers’ mainstream liberal agents, from Joe Biden to Emmanuel Macron, are quickly adopting their own more virulent racist and anti-immigrant policies. From the Texas border to the segregated suburbs of Paris, they’re enabling mad-dog police terror. In France, the kkkops have even prohibited protests against their own racist violence! The result is a political spiral toward fascism. As the big capitalists move to the right, they’re legitimizing and energizing far-right parties that have little or no stake in liberal democracy. Vox, for example, is banning unfriendly news outlets from its events and calling for them to be shut down (Reporters Without Borders). As the bosses’ contradictions continue to sharpen, we can expect the liberals to follow suit in ditching the phony freedoms of capitalist democracy.

Only communists can defeat fascism
The working class cannot afford to sit around and wait for the capitalists to try to fix their unfixable contradictions. Economic and inter-imperialist crises inevitably lead to rising fascism and wider war. In World War II, the force that stopped full-blown fascism in its tracks was a communist-led working class. Although communists and other anti-fascists were defeated in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, they inspired workers throughout the world in the global conflict that followed, culminating in the Soviet Union’s destruction of Nazi Germany. The revolutionary Chinese Communist Party played an important role in beating back fascist Japan.

The Communist Party of Italy led the resistance that smashed the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini.
Today there are but two paths before us: fascism or communist revolution. There is no middle ground, no third way. As communist theorist R. Palme Dutt observed in Fascism and Social Revolution (1934), “Capitalism in its decay breeds Fascism. Capitalist democracy in decay breeds Fascism. The only final guarantee against Fascism, the only final wiping out of the causes of Fascism, is the victory of the proletarian dictatorship.”
And so our choice is clear. Build Progressive Labor Party!

The Progressive Labor Party in Haiti takes this opportunity to greet our comrades on the occasion of the PLP convention this month. We would like to be there with you, discussing the way we can build our Party into a fighting force for communist revolution, and building the PLP’s influence in the working class and among students and soldiers around the world. However, the phony borders erected by the capitalists around the world have prevented us from sending representatives to our Party’s gathering. We know that one day, those borders will be smashed, and workers will be able to move freely around the world, based on the needs of our class and our Party.