ABSTRACT
The role that the Paris Commune has played as a paradigm for the political organization of socialist society is of tremendous importance in Marxist thought. The organizational structure of People's Power in Cuba, instituted nationwide in the late 1970s after a two-year pilot experiment in the Province of Mantanzas, conforms in many respects to the features of the Paris Commune lauded by Marx. In China and Eastern Europe, unions and other mass organizations have enjoyed little autonomy from the party and the party-state, although this pattern was broken in Poland with the establishment of Solidarity. The tendency to rely upon bourgeois forms of organization, in the economic sphere as well as the political one, has been present in all socialist revolutions since the Russian Revolution. Only an across-the-board implantation of genuinely democratic forms of organization in the production process can prevent the survival of capitalist social relations and the revival of class exploitation.
