{"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":87,"pdf_page":86,"physical_index":86,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"9650ce069b583617903d4cf590d3f3e4e0cc89381a8c9b30129edfdfec866db0"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"For Ross, the Commune’s most profound elements are horizontality, emancipation from social division, and the politicization of everyday life. She finds the horizontality of the Commune in its “largely leaderless revolutionary government.” This horizontality manifested itself symbolically in the destruction of the Vendome column. Social divisions broke down as workers asserted themselves as artists and authors, as all governmental agents received workers’ wages, and as barricades blocked previous patterns of urban circulation and created new ones. Both horizontality and the elimination of social division figure into the politicization of everyday life as centralized state power is replaced by the Commune, a political form that did not concentrate power into an excrescence parasitic on society but operated as society’s own politicization.\n\nCritical of what she calls “the ‘mature’ Marx, author of scientific socialism,” Ross distances the politics of the Commune from the politics of a working class inexorably marching toward communism. Exceeding the limits of class and property, the revolutionary praxis of the Commune came from its “challenge to the boundaries between work and leisure, producer and consumer, worker and bourgeois, worker and intellectual.”<sup>37</sup> This challenge disrupts the linear, centralizing movement of capitalism’s development into communism, a disruption Marx recognizes in The Civil War in France. Ross brackets Capital in order to link Marx’s account of the civil war in France to his early critique of Hegel. The significance of Marx’s writing on the Commune, for Ross, is its acknowledgement of a displacement of politics from “a specialized set of activities, institutions, and occasions” into “concrete problems of work, leisure, housing, sexuality, and family and neighborhood relations.”<sup>38</sup> She thus uses Marx against Marx in order to present the Commune in terms of variegated, multiform revolution traversing the social field. Ross writes, “Revolutionary struggle is diffuse as well as specifically directed, expressed throughout the various cultural spheres and institutional contexts, in specific conflicts and in the manifold transformations of individuals rather than in some rigid and polar opposition of capital and labor.”<sup>39</sup> Revolution isn’t the expression of class struggle. It’s a matter of multiple differentiated “transformations.” In Ross’s version of revolution, what happens to an individual takes the place of what a class makes happen.\n\nIf the unique contribution of the Commune was the challenge to boundaries between work and leisure, producer and consumer, worker and bourgeois, worker and intellectual, then it pre-enacts communicative capitalism. To see in Ross’s depiction of the Commune a precursor to our mediated present isn’t even a stretch. She emphasizes the “astounding abundance of newspapers, pamphlets, tracts, propaganda brochures, professions of faith, declarations of intentions, manifestos.”<sup>40</sup> During the two months of the Commune, over seventy new periodicals were introduced. The policy of the Commune was “instant information.” Posters covered the walls of Paris. Proclamations were often read aloud to people in the streets. Cartoons, caricatures, satires, and insults —often highly sexual—circulated widely.\n\n87","previous_page":86,"next_page":88}