Forerunners of the contemporary world: the Paris commune (1871) and the taiping revolution (1851–1864)

Abstract

The Paris Commune made clear what socialism could be: a more advanced stage in human civilization. It established an authentic democracy, abolished the exploitation of labour, and associated the producer citizen with the political citizen. The Taiping Revolution overthrew the despotic imperial autocracy of the Qings. It abolished the regime of peasant exploitation. It rejected the forms of capitalism that had infiltrated through the chinks in the tributary system: it abolished private trading. With similar vigour it spurned the foreign domination of imperialist capital very early, just at the beginning of imperialist aggression—the Opium War of 1840. The Revolution of the Taipings formulated the first revolutionary strategy of the peoples in the peripheries of the capitalism of the imperialist world. The Taiping Revolution was the ancestor of the “anti-feudal, anti-imperialist popular revolution” as formulated later by Mao. It inspired Mao and it indicated the path to the revolution for all the peoples of the peripheries of the modern world capitalist system, the path that enabled them to commit themselves to the long socialist transition.