Each month, a word or phrase vetted by Emile ---- If the expression is returned to the
user in the writings of the Left Front, back when it saw in the presidential election
campaign the beginnings of a "civic insurrection" Social Republic is however not an idea
new and is not from a revolutionary idea. If M?lenchon, claiming establish a Social
Republic, called to found a sixth is that it forgot that the Republic is already defined
as "social" since the constitution of 1946. Obviously the term referred then simply a
welfare state in which a certain redistribution of wealth should be ensured. ---- Social
Republic, understood by the revolutionaries of the nineteenth century had a very different
meaning. Proudhon stated in 1848, in the gallery of the Assembly, where he was elected
following the February Revolution which established the Second Republic: "There is a
republic worthy of the name as the Democratic Republic social [....]
If you remove the socialist Republic your will what were all republics, bourgeois, feudal,
individualistic, tending to despotism and reconstitution of castes. [...] The Republic
without socialism is not the Republic. " For revolutionaries of the nineteenth century,
who lived mostly in more or less authoritarian monarchies, the Social Republic was the
result of a revolution that was already removing the country from the hands of dynasties.
If the res publica is a country's collective property of its citizens and inhabitants,
imagine how some continue to exploit others? The Republic must therefore necessarily
socialize the means of production, as she socialized political power.
But if the Republics appear gradually claim actually put their citizens on an equal
footing, it is especially overshadow some inequalities (between men and women, between
owners and proletarians, etc..). When these inequalities suddenly reappear,
revolutionaries quickly lose their illusions about the republican form. If the Second
Republic had chosen to kill workers in June 18481, the Third completes the divorce between
the Republic and the social revolution. It is inaugurated by drowning in blood the
Communards in 1871 and got into the habit of pulling on the strikers, as Fourmies 1 May
1891 (nine deaths) or against growers du Midi in 1907 (seven deaths). Since there is
little more than the tribunes bad representativity place yet social revolution in the
hands of a regime change.
1 See. "June 1848: the autonomy of the working class is needed on the barricades" in AL
No. 174 of June 2008.
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» (en) France, Alternative Libertaire AL #238 - Anticapitalist Dico: What the "social republic"? (fr, pt)