{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","uuid":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","normalized_title":"crowdsandparty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","isbns":["9781781686942","9781781686720","9781781687666"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Crowds%20and%20Party","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/search"},"page":{"printed_page":84,"pdf_page":83,"physical_index":83,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"0bdc763c7a14a1cd82b9d9a889493784c027777c040af841614c14f561234f53"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Consider reception of the Commune in the United States. Rather than animated by fidelity to the egalitarian crowd event, it was configured through the politics of Reconstruction.<sup>28</sup> Political commitments antithetical to equality and collectivity attempted to appropriate the energy of the Parisian crowd. Some in the US North saw Paris as wrongfully seceding from France, just as the Southern states wrongly left the Union. Commune and Confederacy both rejected legitimate centralized government. Others in the North, increasingly mistrustful of popular sovereignty, used the Commune as an emblem of the failure of Reconstruction. An editor of The Nation railed against the “Socialism in South Carolina” that came from “allowing incompetent black men to govern and vote.”<sup>29</sup> As he saw it, neither Paris nor the South had the political capacity to govern itself. Some Southerners embraced the parallel between Paris and the Confederacy, particularly the revolt against a repressive governmental authority. Weirdly, in 1880 a former vice president of the Confederacy identified himself as a communist—Alexander Stephens, who became a member of Congress after the war. For Stephens, to be a communist means to favor home rule, the sovereignty of the local government.<sup>30</sup> He explicitly rejects the abolition of private property, capturing communist desire in a racist ressentiment that substitutes for and attempts to displace class struggle. In any case, the point is clear: contra Marx, the multiplicity of Commune interpretations has nothing to do with the expansiveness of the commune form. Rather, this multiplicity points to the struggle over the name incited by the rupture of the crowd event.\n\nMarx suggests that the Paris Commune provides a glimpse of a solution to the problem of the political form of the people. While all previous forms of government had been repressive, the Commune is a “thoroughly expansive political form.”<sup>31</sup> Marx’s rhetoric is stirring, polemically suited to struggle over the meaning of the Commune. “Commune” names aspiration and antagonism; it designates the alternative to the empire. Within the ongoing struggle over the positive realization of that alternative, Marx prioritizes one among the multiple interests that tried to see itself in the Commune form, presenting the Commune “essentially” as the political form “under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.”\n\nAnalytically, Marx’s account is less satisfying insofar as it equates proletarian selfgovernment with a federal system comprised of local communes, district assemblies (comprised of delegates elected from the communes), and a National Delegation of deputies sent from these assemblies to Paris. That this arrangement presented itself does not make it uniquely suited for the emancipation of labor. Distributed and federal political arrangements have served bourgeois and imperial power quite well. Marx even acknowledges that in the Commune’s governing schema rural producers were brought under the lead of the towns, so the Commune did not eliminate repression. To the extent that “Commune” names a governing body, apparatus, or schema, one comprised of an arrangement of offices, the rules for their maintenance and distribution, as well as a set of dictates connecting this arrangement to the people it would govern, “Commune” institutionalizes some possibilities and excludes others. It puts repression to work. Marx, faithful to crowd rupture, presents the Commune as a continuation of the egalitarian moment. My point is that the institutional specificity of the political form of the Commune matters less than the fidelity of its presentation. We should attend to Marx’s rhetoric rather than his (weak) analysis. Marx’s rhetoric signals his fidelity to the egalitarian rupture of the crowd event. The Commune incites a partisan subjectivization, an event in the political expression of the working class.\n\n84","previous_page":83,"next_page":85}