chapter 7 Political Justice: Ethics and the Good Life of Democratic Socialism

Just as the previous chapter traced the development of distributive justice from capitalism through the various stages of communist distribution of social consumption from exchange and contribution to human need, this chapter will trace the development of political emancipation to human emancipation through an analysis of the socialist state of the Paris Commune of 1871.1 In his writings, Aristotle had used his theory of political or universal justice as a way of integrating his economic or particular theories of restitutive, distributive, and reciprocal justice, as well as his ethics and politics into his ideal state of a democratic polity. In a similar fashion, Marx’s analysis of the worker com- mune will integrate his various forms of social justice into a comprehensive theory of democratic socialism. We will examine the exceptionally broad intel- lectual range of Marx’s theory of political justice and the principles of natural law with a focus on the economic and political institutions that give concrete life to the values and ideals of economic freedom, equality, and democracy in the Paris Commune, the human emancipation of labour, freedom from racial, social, and wage slavery, workplace democracy as the ideal polity, and decent- ralised workers’ councils and producer co-operatives. In addition to these key features, there will also be an examination of the issues of the expropriation of the expropriators and the dissolution of class inequality, private property, and centralised state power, as well as the rise of collective ownership of property, economic self-government, and universal suffrage, recall, and popular sover- eignty. To further justify his theory of political and economic democracy, Marx will also ground his theory of social justice within a history of human emancipa- tion and phenomenology of the modern spirit (Geist). This phenomenology involves tracing the development of the self-consciousness of human free- dom and political liberalism in Western society from the natural rights of John Locke (property), political rights of Rousseau and the French Revolution of 1789 and 1793 (citizenship and sovereignty), inalienable rights of Thomas Jeffer- son (foreign oppression), human rights of Abraham Lincoln (racial equality), economic rights of Ferdinand Lassalle (rights of fair distribution), and the eco- nomic rights of Karl Marx (democracy). By drawing on these traditions, Marx is integrating the British, American, French, and German traditions of rights

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/9789004311961_009 political justice 273 and freedom into a comprehensive theory of human rights and social justice. In turn, his work on the Paris Commune, The Civil War in France, provides us with his clearest and most concrete statements on the nature of human eman- cipation and political justice.2

Franco-Prussian War and the Formation of the Paris Commune of 1871

In July 1870, France under the leadership of Emperor Napoleon iii and the Northern German Confederation under the Prussian leadership of Otto von Bismarck went to war ostensibly over a diplomatic incident. For Prussia and the northern German alliance, it provided the ideal opportunity to create the unified state of Germany by incorporating the southern German states of Bavaria, Württemberg, Hesse, Saxony, and Baden into the new German Empire. The French army was quickly and decisively defeated at the battles of Metz and Sedan. On 2 September, Napoleon, at the head of an 80,000 man French army, was captured at Sedan, effectively ending the government of the Second French Empire. He would comfortably spend the rest of the war as a prisoner in Wilhelmshöhe castle in the city of Kassel. Within days of the surrender, the republican and radical delegates of the French National Assembly led a popular uprising on 4 September, went to the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, and publicly announced the creation of a new provisional republican government called the Government of National Defense. The Paris deputies of the previous government now constituted the new self-appointed republic for Paris and the nation. The Paris Revolution began with the fall of Napoleon’s empire and ended with the rise of the Third French Republic. All this occurred with the German army standing before the walls of Paris and ready for a blockade of the city.3 The new self-appointed national government was led by Adolphe Thiers with a conservative and monarchist majority in the National Assembly. With the defeat of the French army at Sedan and the French army at Metz under a blockade, the German army began its advance on Paris with little resist- ance. But Paris was a heavily fortified walled city with a complex maze of external forts to protect the inner city. Two weeks after the Paris Revolution on 18 September, the siege began, and the city was completely surrounded by Prussian troops two days later. With most of the French army either surroun- ded in Metz or held captive in Germany, the new French government called upon the remote provinces to form new armies to come to the rescue of Paris. While the siege of Paris continued, there were numerous battles in other parts