Text presented at the political event organised by the Communist Party of Mexico (Marxist-Leninist) to commemorate the 18th anniversary of its foundation and the 125th anniversary of the Paris Commune.

The cause of the Commune is that of the social revolution, of the complete political and economic emancipation of the workers, of the universal proletariat. In this sense, it is immortal." (V.I. Lenin)
The 18th of March marks the 125th anniversary of the first experience of workers power. The Paris Commune continues to be the source of important historical lessons for the development of the struggles of the working class on the road to its emancipation.
Despite the fact that the Commune lasted just 40 days, it teaches us important lessons, and since the victories and defeats of the working class are our history, it is necessary to draw the relevant political conclusions which permit Marxist-Leninist communists to clarify what is the only road which leads to the complete eradication of wage slavery.
On this occasion, when we are gathered together to commemorate the date of the foundation of our Party and to pay homage to the Parisian heroes, let us emphasis just a few aspects of the wealth of lessons which the experience of the Communards has left us.
1. The first lesson of the Paris Commune is that the working class has to struggle for state power, because the proletarians of Paris learned that the constant promises of their exploiters led to nothing except betrayals and failures by the dominant class: the bourgeoisie in its different monarchist and republican fractions.
Today, at a time of the sharpening economic crisis, the neo-populist and social democratic positions of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia call on the working class to lower the red banner of proletarian revolution, in order to raise the banner of capital in the name of unity against the "Party of the State."
This can lead only to the repeat of political and historical errors which our class has paid for in blood.
We cannot hope for anything from the bourgeoisie except greater subjugation and exploitation. The history of the world is full of lessons on the role that the "national bourgeoisie" has played in order to secure capital accumulation. They do not call for the eradication of wage slavery, but only demand the removal of the obstacles that stand in the way of their growing rich on the blood and sweat of the working class.
During the workings of the Third Meeting for National Unity and Dialogue (which took place in Acapulco on January 27th and 28th), our Party drew attention to the fact that from the experience of the National Democratic Convention, it had remained clear that for the working class, the poor peasantry and the broad masses of the people, the demands for land, housing, education, work, health, democracy, freedom etc., are demands which should be included within a revolutionary-democratic minimum programme and should be summed up as: New Government, New Power, New Economy, New Constitution, the rejection of a planned transition and the calling of a Democratic, Popular and Sovereign National Constituent Assembly.
While pushing forward with these tasks, it is necessary to reorganise the forces of the working class and the poor peasantry in order to give a proletarian content to the popular mobilisation, above all when other classes and sections of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie are interested in placing themselves at the head of these processes.
The Paris Commune, and of course the Great Proletarian October Revolution and the experience of Socialist Albania) showed that the working class is the only class that can effectively formulate, lead and carry out revolutionary tasks, including those of a democratic character. This is because the implementation of the historical programme of the working class - that is to say the socialist revolution - is the only guarantee of the implementation of the democratic demands which are going around the movement today. Only under the leadership of the working class and its communist programme will the exploited and oppressed masses be able to achieve the satisfaction of their immediate and historical demands. The national bourgeoisie will not implement these demands, and if by chance it takes a few of them on board, it uses them as a means of coaxing a section of the petty bourgeoisie.
2. When the bourgeoisie holds state power, it dictates the economic and political pathways for its own benefit, because the state has a definite class character. The only sure guarantee that the working class and the working people will be able to realise their immediate demands and their historical aspirations to for them to seize state power in order to build socialism. The Paris Commune, in the space of 40 days radically transformed the state apparatus, abolished compulsory military service and the standing army, armed the people, suspended the payment of rents, reduced the average pay of state functionaries, nationalised all the wealth of the churches, established free education, reopened the factories that had been closed by the bosses as co-operatives under workers control, abolished night work for bakers, closed the pawnshops, decreed that all functionaries had to be elected and could be recalled, etc.
The workers of Paris implemented what the republican bourgeoisie did not dare to.
What does this historical lesson teach us today? Perhaps that to renounce the struggle for state power means leaving the exploiters to get up to their old tricks as usual? Of course, the working and the poor peasantry cannot allow the future of the country to keep on being determined by the financial oligarchy and imperialism, through their parliamentary representatives and the leading circles among businessmen, the church and the drug traffickers, who use parliament like an instrument to legitimise bourgeois power. The Paris Commune showed that it is not enough simply to lay hold of the existing state apparatus, but that it is necessary to destroy it and build a new, proletarian state on its ruins.
In Mexico, in order to accumulate forces in favour of the exploited and the oppressed, we have to struggle for a Democratic and Popular Constituent Assembly, because to draw up a new constitution is the guarantee of a new power. To reduce the struggle for the Constituent Assembly to a matter simply of constitutional reforms, with the same political agents who exist today in the Congress of the Union, so that they can legislate changes so that everything continues as before, means leaving the future of the state once again in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Therefore, we have to reject the discourse and the practice which seeks to restrict us to a non-existent "civil society" which oversees a "political society." The Communards of Paris showed what the working class is capable of achieving when it takes state power, abolishes private property and creates the basis for the emancipation of the working class.
Today it would be a contradiction for the working class to struggle for a new constitution and not struggle for power.
Our Party has understood that the proposal for a Constituent Assembly would be the expression of the workers-peasants-popular power, the road to socialist revolution.
3. Another important lesson of the Paris Commune is that the historic and heroic gesture of the French proletariat from March 18 to May 28 1871, represents, albeit with errors and historical limitations, the first experience of the working class in power.
But in the last period, when George Bush announced in Paris in 1990 the inauguration of a "New World Order", taking for granted the triumph of the "free market" and "liberal democracy", he was creating the political context which was expressed theoretically in the neoliberal theses of the Chicago School, Frances Fukuyama's work, "The End of History", and the theory of the "transition to democracy". These, together with the concepts of "new social actors", "civil society" and "non-governmental organisations" and the struggle to create a democratic space without fighting for political power, are the natural development of the liberal and idealist philosophy which has been taken up again by different social democratic organisations, and which is in the last instance the theoretical expression of bourgeois hegemony. It is for this reason that the historic experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat has been distorted and pilloried and had mud thrown at it.
Engels said: "Lately, the words 'dictatorship of the proletariat' have driven the social democratic philistines into flights of terror: well, then, gentlemen, you want to know what the dictatorship of the proletariat looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That is the dictatorship of the proletariat!"
The Paris Commune demonstrates to us the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessary historical phase in the transition to communism.
Therefore, we communists reclaim our history, we learn from our mistakes, but we also reaffirm our principles: it was no mistake for the working class to establish its dictatorship, but rather a historical necessity for its emancipation. Today various reformists and revisionists seek to vilify and to lessen the theoretical, political and historical content of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and put forward theses like "the dictatorship of the four classes", "democratic socialism", "market socialism", "extreme democracy", "self-rule" etc. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the fundamental historical step for the emancipation of the working class, and the Paris Commune represented in 40 days, through its meaning and its objectives, a historical experiment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
4. The historical context in which the Paris Commune developed in 1871 in practical terms represented the prelude to the development and the combativity of the working class, and it also poses a number of problems which have to be resolved: the role of the state, the nature of the revolution, class alliances etc. It also meant that the working class, in the face of the defeat that the French and German bourgeoisies inflicted on it, would have to reflect on what is needed to secure, develop and strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat and thereby guarantee the path to communism. Lenin provided a clear response, which Stalin developed, on the basis of what Marx and Engels had handed down, of course: they arrived at the conclusion that what was needed was a political party which represents the historical interests of the working class, that is to say an organised, disciplined, centralised vanguard detachment of the working class.
In the Paris Commune, there were objective limitations which prevented the economic and political transformations that the Paris proletariat implemented from being developed further. But the subjective factor was also important, since the great influence of the Blanquists and the Proudhonists prevented the elimination of the enemies of the working class. Instead, they tried to influence them morally. Also, the importance that military actions assume in a civil war was underestimated, but, as Lenin said, despite its errors, the Commune constitutes the most important proletarian movement of the 19th century, but it also leaves us with the lesson that a Party of the working class is needed.
At the end of this millennium, the working class requires of its vanguard party that it educate it and that it forges it in the class struggle and that its theoretical and practical leadership represents what is most advanced in the working class, armed with the proletarian ideology of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, and that it syntheses the lessons from the Paris Commune. For this reason, in these times of ideological confusion, we have to struggle against reformist and revisionist conceptions which call on the movement to lower the banners of socialist revolution, and advocate class conciliation. These differences are not nuances, but differences of principle. Either bourgeois ideology or proletarian ideology, either reform or revolution, either a bourgeois party or a proletarian Party.
To lose the perspective of building and consolidating the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party today is, in practice, to throw overboard the proletarian revolution, because without communist leadership the working class and the democratic movement will march along uncertain paths, and revisionism and reformism will lead this movement down the path of conciliation and concessions, the path of the petty bourgeoisie, social democracy or the liberal bourgeoisie.
Political leadership decides everything. After the death of Stalin, the main cadres of the Bolshevik Party were displaced from power. The clique headed by Khrushchev gave rise to the open process of capitalist restoration. The same thing happened in Albania with Ramiz Alia. The experience in Latin America speaks volumes: in the case of Nicaragua with the FSLN, social democracy with guns led to class conciliation; in the Allende case in Chile revisionism, in order not to strike at the national bourgeoisie and preferring the path of institutionalism and bourgeois parliamentarianism, allowed the organisation of the fascist forces who planned the coup and introduced military dictatorship.
5. The Paris Commune, despite being of short duration and restricted to a small area geographically, is extremely important politically for the struggle of the working class, breaking down borders and patriotic prejudices. While on the one hand the French bourgeoisie stirred up chauvinistic prejudices against Germany, and attacked and deceived Poland, the Paris Commune appointed a German worker as its Minister for Labour, and Polish workers were in the first line of defence of the cause of the Paris proletariat.
In this sense, the struggle of the working class and the seizure of power can have a national form, but their content is eminently international. For this reason, the struggle for push forward the proletarian revolution in Mexico plays an internationalist role, and is directly linked to the struggle for the strengthening of the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organisations. This has to be the consistent and militant practice of proletarian internationalism, which pays homage to the heroic gesture of the Paris Commune and its internationalist character. In this anniversary of the Commune, lets us reiterate that its lessons have in many respects cleared the path that we have to follow, and reaffirm our conviction that this struggle will culminate in the triumph of communism in the world. To advance towards fulfilling this goal is the best way of honouring the Communards of Paris.