Though it lasted only 72 days, the Paris Commune was a defining moment for the European left.
The e spirit of the Commune is alive today among, for instance, the Indignados in Spain
and inside the Occupy movement
The commune promised a world in which ‘everyone would … have his or her share of the best.’
Does this no smack of romantic idealis
However, everywhere the word “Commune” was understood in the largest sense,
as referring to a new humanity, made up of free and equal companions,
oblivious to the existence of old boundaries, helping each other in peace from
one end of the world to the other.
’ The insurgents saw themselves as free people,
not just free French people, and were forming a genuine Internationale
– a federation of free men and women. In the words of one Communard it was
‘an audacious act of internationalism’.
The enactment of the Paris Commune was as
‘evanescent event’, the act by which a people declares itself into existence
and seeks to follow through on that declaration, we might say that politics is the commune and only the commune.
‘I believe this other world resides for us in the commune,’ Badiou writes, very Platonically, ideal society..
The commune is the sudden transformation of the febrile sterility of the nothing of the world into a fecund something, a moment of radical rupture that obsesses Badiou, a seizure by thought in an event that is a seizure of power.
Yet and yet, the evanescent event did not last. After 72 days, the Paris Commune was crushed by the military forces of Thiers, the future first president of the Third Republic.
Some twenty thousand Parisians were slaughtered.
Understood politically, the
event of the Paris Commune is that moment of novel, brief, local, communal rupture that breaks with
a general situation of social injustice and inequality (as seen by the Communards).
Of course all actions are reactions and
Of course all actions are reactions and
Robespiere, he leader of the Jacobin terror and of the 'National Razor' the Guillotine, wrote
that. It is time to horrify all the conspirators So legislators, place Terror
on the order of the day! Let us be in revolution, because everywhere
counter-revolution is being woven by our enemies. The blade of the law should
hover over all the guilty."[
No comments:
Post a Comment