Rereading the French civil war from the 21st century’s Latin America

Abstract

The aim of this text is to reread Marx’s important essay on the French Civil War in the light of the processes that Latin America has lived through during the last twenty years. In this logic, the article begins with an attempt to reconstruct the complex Marxist theory about the level of the political, to distinguish between the spheres of government, the State, the ‘political superstructure’ and the figure of social power as political power, with a view to analyze the radical and profound transformations that the Paris Commune experience achieved in those four fronts. Finally, the article attempts to compare how these historical-universal conquests made by the 1871 Commune, are currently reproduced and enriched in Latin American territories, in the experiences of the Neo-Zapatista Good Governance Assemblies, of the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement Emplacements, of Argentina’s autonomous ‘piqueteros’ neighborhoods, or in some of Bolivia or Ecuador’s radical indigenous communities, among others.