Anarchists
Anarchism is defined as Òa social philosophy whose central tenant is that human beings
can live justly and harmoniously without government...Ó [1]
The Commune government was in many ways, a primitive anarchy, in that it had many dysfunctional organizations all trying to rule the country, eventually resulting in a government more run by the individuals. This proved that the anarchists were at least partially correct: you don't need a government to live from day to day. During the Commune, the Anarchist faction was not organized as a single group,
but rather as a number of different thinkers analyzing the situation in their
own way in order to best take advantage of the development of the commune. In
many ways, while the Commune did have a government in some sense, for some time
there was no real centralized power in the Commune, it was a large number of
smaller local organizations taking care of the law. In that way, the Commune
was one of, if not the first true experiment in anarchy as a type of social
organization.
Following
the fall of the Paris Commune, the definition of anarchy changed somewhat,
moving away from the use of violent, radical movements to force change that was
advocated by the philosopher Mikhail Bakunin, or collectivism, towards
anarcho-syndicalism. This used the overall distrust of political actions and
use of the unions in order to create an organized working class that could
paralyze an economy by use of a general strike. The Commune itself acted to
advance the ideas inherent in anarchism. Peter Kropotkin wrote a long
essay on the Commune of Paris which discussed the effects of the Commune in
depth.