In the different accounts of the Paris Commune, the referent of “Commune” is unstable. It shifts from all of Paris, to the people of Paris who voted representatives to the Commune, to the working class, to those elected to the Commune, to those who served in it, even to particular sets of voices in the Council. While a politics can and should be traced in these shifts—for this movement is nothing but the expression and enclosure of a political subject—we might also note that the fact of shifting indexes an irreducible feature of the people as non-all, non-totalizable, and never fully present to itself. The people is only present as few, some, or many. The substitutionism about which Trotsky warned is not a danger particular to communist or working-class parties. It’s an unavoidable condition of any popular politics with emancipatory egalitarian ends. Neither people nor class (nor movement nor mass) exists as a unity. Every attempt to invoke, create, or speak in behalf of such a unity comes up against an ineliminable, constitutive division.
Instead of solving a political problem, the Commune poses one: the sovereignty of the people. Is it possible and what forms can it take? The non-all character of the people has been a consistent sticking point in democratic theory. If the people are not a unity, how can they rule themselves? How can they speak or legislate? And how do we know? The theoretical discussions occur under various headings—foundings, constituent power, and the possibility of bringing something new into being. Taking the place of the mythic social contract, the power of the people to make their own history comes up against its grounding in what cannot be other than a crime against the prior order.
In contrast, Marxist theory makes the prior order itself the crime, repeating the series of need, crime, and justice Taine associates with the crowd. The revolutionary class gives its ideas “the form of universality” and represents these ideas “as the only rational, universally valid ones.” Marx explains, “The class making revolution emerges at the outset simply because it is opposed to a class not as a class but as a representative of the whole of society.”<sup>32</sup> This is the sense in which class struggle is a political struggle. Rather than determined within the economic conditions in which class confronts class as two distinct forces with particular interests, the class making revolution represents its interests as general over and against the particular will of the oppressing class. More precisely, class partisans and allies struggle to present the Real of the crowd’s destructive interruption as expressions of the desire of the people.
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