The Meaning of Paris Comun

On March 18, 1871, artisans and Communists, workers, and anarchists took control of the city of Paris and established the Communists. This radical experiment in Socialist self-government lasted seventy-two days, before being suppressed by a brutal massacre that placed the Third Republic in France. However, Socialists, anarchists, and Marxists have debated the significance of this event ever since.

Christine Ross, in her new important book, Communal Luxury: The Political Language of the Paris CommanderIt cuts down the controversy alloyed over the municipality, which it says has been calcified in false polarities: anarchism against Marxism, villagers against workers, revolutionary yakobin terror against anarcho-syndikalism, and so on.

Now that the Cold War is over and that French Republicanism is crushed, Rossi argues we can free the municipality [or KomunEn] from such sclerosis. Such emancipation can revitalize the container left to act and think about today's challenges. No work more specifys Marx's claims that, the greatest achievement of the Paris Community, was its current “existence. ”

This book restores the Paris Congregation in our time. Why is the Community a source of thought to the demands of our present day?

I'm glad you chose the word “burim” more than that “lesson.” People usually insist that the past offers lessons or teaches us what to avoid. The literature surrounding the municipality is filled with second-hand speculation, the satisfaction of hearing mistakes: if only municipalities did this and that, they took the money from the bank, marched into Versailles, made peace with Versailles, was more organized. Then they would succeed!

To my mind, this kind of post-factual theoretical superiority is both pointless and essentially historical. Our world is not a community world. If we understand just that this is the case, then it becomes easier to see the ways in which their world isWell, actually, close to ours, maybe, than it was our parents' world.

The way people, especially young people, live today is like then economic instability, when workers and artisans did it, most of which spent most of their time not working but looking for work.

After 2011, with the virtual return of the political strategy placed in the grip of space, the measurement of countries and territories, the return of cities from Istanbul to Madrid, from Montreal to Oakland to theatres for strategic operations, the Paris Community has become increasingly stable or visible again, it has entered the present security.

Its forms of political invention have become available to us not as lectures but as sources, or since Andrew. Ross says talking about my book as <x0 user variable.” The municipality becomes the figure for a story, and perhaps for a future, different from the course taken by capitalist modernisation, on one hand, and the Utilian Socialist state on the other.

This is a project that I think many people today share, and “Communal imaginary” is the center of this project. That's why I've tried in this book to think of the Communist as something that belongs to the past, and as something that is opening up before us, amid current troubles, like the field of possible futures.

“Communal Luxury” was the motto of the municipality's section of artists and so you have entitled your book. Can you tell us about the gene of this phrase?

Unlike the <x0-Republishing universe, ” “municipal volux” was not an important municipality slogan. I found the phrase in the last sentence of the manifesto that artists and artisans produced under the Communists how to organize themselves into a federation. For me, it became like a kind of prism through which to fold a number of key discoveries and key ideas of the municipality.

The author of the phrase, the decorative artist Eugene Pottier, is better known to us today through another text, “International”, composed at the end of the Blood Week before the blood of the massacre is dried up. What he and the other artists understood by “the municipal” was something like the program in “public beauty”: the improvement of villages and towns, the right of each person to live and work in a satisfactory environment.

This may seem like a small and even “crucial”. But it does bring not only a comprehensive reconfiguration of our relationship with art, but also with work, even social relations, nature, and the better living environment. It implies a complete mobilization of the two municipality slogans -- decentralisation and participation/participation. It means that art and beauty should be deprivatized, and integrated into our daily lives, rather than hiding in private halls or centralized in the nationalist obscientian monument.

The aesthetic sources of a society and its achievements should not, as the municipalities made clear in action, take the form of what William Morris called the basic subx0> Basisisision of the Nepoleonic Tapision,” Local Columbus. After the fall of the Komuna, in the works of Reclus, Morris and others, I show how the demand that art and beauty flourish in daily life contained the foundations of a set of ideas that we call today “ecology,” and that can be traced to the critical “of beautiful” in Morris, for example, or Crokin's insistence on the importance of the region's self-sufficientness.

In its most speculative arrivals, “municipal glucose” involves a set of criteria or a system of different assessments than the one set up by the market, which decides what society to assess, what is valuable and how much. Nature is valued not only as a reserve of resources but as a goal in itself.

Your book extends Komuna's life to the work of Cropotkin, and British socialist William Morris, among others.

It's very easy to enjoy, in a terrible way, from what Flatbert called “goticity” of the municipality, from which I can only hope that he meant the rampant horrors of Blood Week, and the massacres of thousands of people who brought to its end. In no way do I minimize the importance of the actual massacre, I see that extraordinary effort by the state to wipe out one by one and block its class enemies as a founding act for the Third Republic.

But I was more concerned with the record of what I see to be Prolongation The way the municipalities thought was released after the end of the Blood Week, as the municipal survivors and those who left met and collaborated with supporters you mentioned to the travellers for whom the Communist event had profoundly changed what Jacques Racciere would call “awareness of sensitivity. ”

Describe how the shock that the Comuna felt as an event, like the discussions and association that stemmed from its survivors changed the methods of these thinkers, the issues they addressed, the materials they selected, the political and intellectual landscape that drafted for themselves, the whole of their course. All these immediate shocks are a continuation of the turmoil, but with other means. They're an additional part of an event, and they're just as important to the logic of the event as the beginning shares on the streets.

Perhaps the biggest change can be detected in Marks' post-Comunal trajector a change that takes paradoxically even in strengthening his theory with separation from the very concept of theory. The municipality made it clear to Marks that not only the measures shape history but also that by doing so they reform not only the actuality but also the theory itself. This is, in fact, what Henry Lefebvre meant when he spoke of “dialics of the living and the conceived. ”

The thought and theory of movement are released only along and after movement. Actions create dreams, not the opposite.

Peter Cropotkin, Elise Reclus and William Morris were, as you say, preoccupied with the marchalism together with the old-fashioned <x0-tensives related to precapitalist and non-capitalistic forms with the radical potential of emergency practices.

Not only Cropotkini, Reclus and Morris, but even Marx was also preoccupied with “existence “anacronic “>> in their time of precapitalist forms and ways of life.

Fate obschinaThe Russian communist agrarian forms that have lasted for centuries were the major focus of the Western Socialists. The theoretical challenge that took place after the municipality revolved around the question of revisiting the forms of the municipality - how to think together the amazing uprising that had taken place in major European capitals with the perseverance of these old communist forms in villages.

These thinkers were all extremely attentive to what we might call <x0). They seem to have removed Morris' interest from Iceland of his day and from her medieval past, for example, as a nostalgic. Morris was actually quite capable of seeing precapitalistic forms and lifestyles like those that had blossomed in medieval Iceland as once, in the past and at the same time, as determining a possible future.

This is the sign, in my opinion, not of a homesickness, but of a deep history of thinking. Without it, we don't have any way of thinking about the possibilities of change, or living the present as something that is contaminated and open.

Taken from Jacobine Magazine - What?