The Other People Now: Ending it on "The One" [*Political Affairs* and plain dealing]

Big Red Jeff Rubard

2010-02-04 21:14:33 UTC

New Style:

One of the great surprises of the modern Internet is that *Political
Affairs* -- the 'journal' of the old Communist Party of the United
States of America -- is a *supremely* [!!] useful 'gazette' of
political commentary and opinion at the present time. Celebrated both
as "old and cold" in an 'ethnically' un-useful way, and as those who
would *mysteriously* 'endure' whilst you /sued/, the Communists
[*distincte* from the /activist/ sectors of the American masses,
and /
with some reason] were "margin riders" that somehow lived it up in
New
York [!!] whilst you "slaved away" on a chain-gang of some /moment/
--
ideological /or/ "practical". However, their current *metier* [!!] is
as a *Consumer Reports* [!!] of 'right-thinking': all the views you
can assess a *bón chargé* [!!] for have a /practical connection/ to /
their/ "rules for radicals" - and if it's "rightly so" this says
something about /contemporary moment/ and What /Must/ Be as concerns
the direction of /pouvóir/ [illimited political disposal over socio-
legal ideals] in /this country/. That's the way it is, and /not/ the
way /it's got to be/ [as per "LA"] -- but hey, *take a look*:

----

Obama and the End of Racism? An Interview with Jarvis Tyner

By Political Affairs

click here for related stories: democracy matters
2-04-10, 11:52 am

(Photo credit: Phil Freedman, courtesy AFL-CIO/Flickr, cc by 2.0)

Additional resources:
Political Affairs Podcast #113 - In transition: An interview on the
economic crisis, politics and struggle

It's January 6th, 2009. On this episode we discuss national politics
with Communist Party chair Sam Webb, focusing on some of the ideas in
his recent report to the Communist Party's national committee. This
interview was recorded in December 2009. Stay with us.

Download the mp3 version of episode #113 here

Political Affairs Magazine

* Frank Sinatra and the Popular Front: The Leftism of an American
Icon
* Why Class Isn’t Just Another “-ism”
* Old Struggles in a “New Age”: The CPUSA and the 1960s
* Health Disparities: When We Don't Have “the highest level of
health for all people”

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PA Editors Blog

* In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts
* Amendment overturning SCOTUS corporate speech ruling
* OBAMA'S SECRET PRISONS

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Editor's note: Jarvis Tyner is national executive vice chair of the
Communist Party USA.

PA: In his concession speech last November, John McCain basically
said
“Okay, we’ve elected an African American President. Now I want
everybody who is discontented with things in America to just shut up.
We did what you wanted, so now it’s time to shut up and move
forward.”
That’s probably an attitude that’s shared by a lot of people. What do
you make of that kind of thinking?

JARVIS TYNER: Well, we elected an African American president, which
is
a wonderful thing. It is more than a wonderful thing. It was an
historic turning point for this country, given its history, but that
doesn’t mean that structural, systemic racism has disappeared. It
still is in every workplace. It is still in every public institution.
It is still a part of education. It is still part of safety on the
street. It still has half the prisons full of Black men and women.
Therefore, to say that racism has gone away is an act of racism in
itself, because it’s a total rejection of the suffering, exploitation
and oppression that people are still going through.

So John McCain doesn’t know what he is talking about. On top of that
there is a trend that says now that we have Obama in there everything
will be fine, and all that. Nobody should believe that, certainly not
anybody who understands what this country is all about. Certainly
people of color shouldn’t believe it. It is just another way to lead
people down a path where they won’t resist racism anymore. Then there
are some right-wing pundits have been criticizing civil rights
leaders
and calling them a bunch of opportunists. But it is they themselves
who are the biggest opportunists. These people consider the whole
issue of civil rights to be passé. You’re day is over, they say.
Reagan started that stuff when he told Jesse Jackson and the movement
that your time is not now – your time has passed and it is not coming
back. He made that point very directly.

In the meantime, these right wing opportunists have gone out and
organized one of the most racist movements we have seen in this
country in 40 years. These are the Tea Party people and the astro-
turfers who sprang up around the health care issue like they were
some
kind of spontaneous movement. We know that they were well financed
and
linked to extreme right wing think tanks and the insurance companies.
This movement, the way they treat the President, is racist. I think
people understand that. It is an intolerant movement. Look at the
signs they carry, putting a white face on the President like a
minstrel. And saying that President Obama is some kind of Hitler and
things like that. Then there’s the notion that he is going to
introduce white slavery, as some of them are saying.

They also use red-baiting, which is something they have always done
to
the civil rights movement and fighters against racism – linking them
to socialism and communism and red-baiting them. They can then claim
that their actions against him aren’t racist and that they are acting
against him to save the Republic from socialism and that kind of
thing. The linking of the two has been a long-term pattern of the
ultra-right and their racist attempts to defend racism and protect
Jim
Crow, all the things that we have suffered through over the years.
The
reality is that we cannot be passive about what is going on. I think
we have to make a real effort now to expose what this Tea Party
Movement is about, and all the other similar groups that helped to
elect Scott Brown in Massachusetts. If we do so, hopefully by
November
they will be more isolated and unable to achieve similar successes.

PA: The Obama election campaign and victory was probably the biggest
national show of interracial working-class solidarity in decades. Now
you have the Tea Party people and Pat Buchanan and some of these
other
right-wing talking heads trying to force a wedge between whites and
blacks and other people of color who strongly supported that
grassroots campaign. What is it going to take for the labor-led
people’s movement that elected him to maintain its unity?

TYNER: One of the great things about the last election was the role
of
the AFL-CIO. Richard Trumka made that fantastic speech calling on
working people, particularly white working people, to get involved in
the fight against racism and to elect Obama. And a lot of that
happened. Even though a majority of whites who went to the polls
voted
for McCain, or other than for Obama, the fact is that 43 percent of
the white voters did vote for Obama, which is higher than what Kerry
got in the previous election. Now we’re not satisfied with that, but
we are happy that there was progress in that regard and that his
campaign saw a lot of breakthroughs.

Secondly, the AFL-CIO is continuing to adopt an anti-racist posture
by
participating with Black churches, the NAACP, and other organizations
around the fight for jobs and health care, and around all the issues
that are vital to advancing things in this country, including being
against racism. That is very very important.

Pat Buchanan really shouldn’t be on the air, if you ask me. But who
am
I to decide that? Every chance he gets, if he can get away with it,
he
tries to drive a wedge between black and white. He says that white
people are never going to accept this. He said that during the whole
campaign when Obama was running. He said you just wait and see, white
people will not vote for him. But the truth is that although a
majority of white voters who went to the polls didn’t, a larger
minority of white voters voted Democratic and for Obama than in the
previous election. The fact is this country is a multiracial country,
and the majority of people who went to the polls voted for Obama-
Biden.

We have to work with those who lag behind in their understanding.
Martin Luther King said we have to work with of our less conscious
sisters and brethren who do not realize how evil racism is. We have
to
work with them, especially those who are working people, in order to
move them toward a more rational understanding of why racism is
holding them back too. It seems to me that we really need an anti-
racist upsurge against these new right-wing groups. To do that we
need
to emphasize the issues of jobs, health care, a cleaner environment,
and schools – all the things that we as a people need, all the things
that we can’t achieve because of racism and disunity. I don’t think
we
have fallen back from the election, in the feeling in the country and
in the desire for change. But I do think there is a lot of confusion
out there. The right has pushed very hard to foster racial division
and it’s had an impact, but I think it can be reversed and we can go
forward.

PA: Let's talk a little about Black History Month. Do you think that
a
lot of whites today see Black History Month as something that only
African Americans need to celebrate? Don't white Americans also have
a
reason to celebrate Black history too?

TYNER: I think that a lot of whites do understand this, but there is
a
constant struggle to elevate the anti-racist consciousness out there.
I am not with those who want to abandon Black History Month, those
who
say white people can’t be convinced, or you can’t build unity. The
last election shows you can build broad, multiracial unity based on
democratic values and expanding democracy, on the question of jobs
and
peace, and all the other issues. I think the possibility of bringing
more people into the movement is very important, especially when you
have an African American President.

And, keep in mind, with an African American President you see the
opposition against him taking on an inherently racist form, both in
the nature of their rhetoric and the symbols they use. They are
appealing especially to a certain racist, visceral feeling among many
whites. To me the fact that Obama and the first family are African
American requires an even higher level of struggle against racism
than
we had before. Remember when the right wing said that he couldn’t
speak to the school children because he would introduce them to
socialist ideas? Now that wasn’t about socialism (I’ll say something
about the socialist part in a minute), it was about the fact he was a
Black president and that he would be fostering unity. It was about
their fear that the younger generation would have an image of the
President of the United States, the most important elected official
in
the country, as an African American, and that they would hear from
him
about the importance of staying in school. He would assume a hero
status for them – which he already is with a lot of them. That is
what
they are fearful of, that black, white and brown, Native American and
Asian, will all get together and fight for justice, peace and
economic
equality.

The fight against racism has to be part of every struggle for jobs,
for health care, for the environment, all those things. You have to
link it to them, because it is linked, and because the attack of the
enemy is a racist attack against an African American President whom
they deeply resent. In their mind this a “white country” and the
president should be white. That is the kind of ignorance we are
dealing with, and it is time that we take it on and advance
everyone’s
thinking.

Now about the charge of socialism and the red-baiting of Obama. Obama
is certainly no socialist, and socialism does not emerge out of some
conspiracy. I keep saying that when I speak in various places. It is
not a conspiracy. It grows out of human need. For instance, we cannot
solve the health care crisis without some element of public
ownership.
You can’t do it. In fact, I think that once we start going down the
road of health care reform, people will see that it is necessary to
have a single payer system that is accessible to everybody. Frankly,
to me getting quality health care should come with your birth.

I think that when people see the economic problems we are facing –
what happened on Wall Street and in the housing market, and the
resulting massive loss of jobs, they do begin to question capitalism
–
and they have a right to question capitalism. I heard a reporter on
television this morning saying he was in Europe and everybody there
is
questioning capitalism. He was with a number of CEOs at some
conference, business executives from India, France, Germany and other
places, and they were saying that they were all following the
American
path to prosperity, and now that it has collapsed they don’t think
that model is workable anymore. Has capitalism lost its viability?
Yes, it definitely has, and as a consequence the right wing is
stubbornly trying to block people from thinking in a healthy and
natural direction. If capitalism isn’t working, why not go in a
socialist direction? Isn’t socialism an alternative that at least
ought to be examined?

Of course, in our view, there is no question we ought to be heading
that way. But we Communists have to be very sophisticated in this
period on how we respond to things. The main thing we have to do is
build unity with the broad mass of people, those who are now going
through a radical transformation in their way of thinking, those who
want to see this country become a better country and want to see a
more peaceful world. People are tired of 30 years of right-wing
misdirection. They are fed up with that. They are looking for
something better. According to a recent Pew Research poll a
considerable percentage of people even have a preference for
socialism
- and they have the right to do that. To me this is healthy and
natural, and it isn’t any conspiracy – it’s just people trying to
live
a better life.

PA: Could you give us your top moments in Black American history?

TYNER: Well, the first one would obviously be the overthrow of
slavery, the beginning of Reconstruction, and the establishment of
the
new democracy. That was very very important. It was a turning point
for the nation as a whole.

Next comes the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement, which
did not just begin in the 1960s. It actually started happening in the
30s and 40s. I was at a book party the other night for a new book
called Red Activists and Black Freedom by James and Esther Jackson.
It
talks about a period in the struggle for civil rights that, due to
the
McCarthy period, has been really erased from the history books. That
struggle was based on the great efforts of the Left and the Communist
Party, black, brown and white, who went into the Deep South to
register voters and organize against Jim Crow. That was really the
beginning. It laid the foundation for the great things that happened
in the 60s. There are so many things.

I think that the defeat of Goldwater in 1964 was very important.
Otherwise we would not have had a Civil Rights Bill and all the other
social programs that Lyndon Johnson was won to support.

I also would include how our country renewed its anti-racism during
the period of anti-apartheid. When 1991 happened and the socialist
countries collapsed, all was gloom and doom for those of us who
thought socialism was the best next step for humanity. All of a
sudden, though, racist apartheid, really fascist apartheid,
collapsed,
and then came this new democracy in South Africa. That was a
tremendous movement on a world scale. There are so many other things,
the collapse of the colonial world, etc, etc. To me these things mean
a lot.

I also think the freeing of Angela Davis was very important, because
when Angela Davis, who was the target of racism and anti-communism,
was freed it really established a great precedent that allowed us to
move forward. Then there was Dr. Du Bois becoming a Communist in
1968.
Martin Luther King said that he was a brilliant man and that was his
choice. All these moments, in every period of our country’s history,
have helped to strengthen the ideological and political struggle
against racism. I am just happy to have lived through a lot of it.

PA: In other words, collective movements and struggles are more
important in your view than individual achievements?

TYNER: We as a people have never made any great change solely on the
basis of individual effort. It has always been made by movements and
collective action, and that is why we now need to go forward, more
than ever maybe. That’s our history.

----

The conversation then took a philosophical turn. JOHNSON. "Human
experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great
test of truth. A system, built upon the discoveries of a great many
minds, is always of more strength, than what is produced by the mere
workings of any one mind, which, of itself, can do little. There is
not so poor a book in the world that would not be a prodigious effort
were it wrought out entirely by a single mind, without the aid of
prior investigators. The French writers are superficial, because they
are not scholars, and so proceed upon the mere power of their own
minds; and we see how very little power they have."

"As to the Christian Religion, Sir, besides the strong evidence which
we have for it, there is a balance in its favour from the number of
great men who have been convinced of its truth, after a serious
consideration of the question. Grotius was an acute man, a lawyer, a
man accustomed to examine evidence, and he was convinced. Grotius was
not a recluse, but a man of the world, who certainly had no bias to
the side of religion. Sir Isaac Newton set out an infidel, and came
to
be a very firm believer."

He this evening again recommended to me to perambulate Spain.34 I
said
it would amuse him to get a letter from me dated at Salamancha.
JOHNSON. "I love the University of Salamancha; for when the Spaniards
were in doubt as to the lawfulness of their conquering America, the
University of Salamancha gave it as their opinion that it was not
lawful." He spoke this with great emotion, and with that generous
warmth which dictated the lines in his "London," against Spanish
encroachment.

*Life of Johnson*, ed. Jack Lynch

----

Political Affairs [*sans phrase*]
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/
And, after Bathing at "Baxter's":
http://www.cleveland.com/plaindealer/

Tell 'em "Frenchy" sent you.

----

Keane (movie, 2004)

Plot

Searching for his missing daughter Sophia in the Port Authority Bus
Terminal, from which she was abducted several months earlier, William
Keane confronts ticket agents and random passersby with a newspaper
account of her disappearance, but no one recalls seeing the little
girl. After spending the night wandering the streets and sleeping
along the side of the highway, he returns to the cheap hotel where he
is living and finds he is unable to get into his room. The desk clerk
tells him his payment is in arrears, and Keane covers the cost of
another week's stay with a disability check.

Alone in his hotel room, Keane drinks beer and talks to himself about
his ex-wife and the birth of their daughter, and he reads the
clippings about another abducted New Jersey girl who was found and
reunited with her parents he keeps in an envelope. He makes contact
with a drug dealer and purchases cocaine, and the more he ingests the
more paranoid he becomes, certain he is being followed and watched. He
goes to a nightclub and snorts coke with a woman named Michelle, then
has sex in a toilet cubicle with her.

Back at his motel, Keane meets Lynn Bedik and her daughter Kira, who
is close in age to his missing child. Lynn clearly is having financial
difficulties, and he insists she take the $100 he offers her. She asks
Keane to watch Kira for a few hours, then calls the motel and leaves a
message she will not be returning that night as planned. Keane
reassures a despondent Kira, who fears Lynn has abandoned her, that
her mother loves her and will be back.

The following day, Keane takes Kira to a local indoor skating rink and
teaches her how to ice skate. While they are playing skee ball in the
adjacent arcade, Keane believes he is being watched by another patron
and becomes agitated. Kira manages to calm him and they return to the
motel. When Lynn arrives later, she explains she was with Kira's
father Eric, who has arranged for them to move to Albany, where he has
found a job.

Desperate not to lose Kira because she reminds him so much of Sophia,
Keane goes to her school, takes her without permission, and brings her
with him to the Port Authority, allegedly to meet her mother there and
board a bus to Albany. There he sends her to buy candies, as her
daughter had done several months earlier, just minutes before she was
abducted. It seems as if Keane is reviving the tragic loss of his
daughter, perhaps expecting the abductor to show up again and try this
time to abduct Kira to -as he was expecting him to show up every time
he was visiting the station for all those months, imagining his plan
and his schedule. This doesnt happen. He cries for his losses and
decides to really get her to her mother. Kira tells him she loves him
and he says he loves her too.

Production

----

The movie *Keane* explains the principles of American *Francophonie*;
roughly, the way in which /portions/ of life in the American Republic
approximate the *circonstancés* of living in the Republiqué Francaise.
The "perfection" [*sans accenté*] of life in Brooklyn, New York goes a
long way towards /explaining/ this: the extant power of the /enormity/
of old plans for America before "sharpness and clarity" as regards /
public conduct/ became *de mode* during the New Deal /in fact does
allow/ for the not-keeping-up of appearances to /rule the roost/: that
is, for a *pattern of conduct* which seems /obscenely inappropriate/
to in fact be judged "acc'ep'ta'ble" [tho' not perhaps by the
*marginalisé*]; this is not MOST OF LIFE in our "Lincolnian" country
[consider What Price "Abe" and What he Got], but it is a /real enough/
part of the U.S.A. that the *popolo* [!!] can be called-upon to
*reflect considering* at /certain/ 'places, times, and manners'.

Otherwise. Not. *And* [an /accepted/ imposition, this "conjunctive
gambit"] when it is merely the *structuralés* of such /fétés/ that
remain -- the works of the *philosophé* Alain Badiou /may/ prove a
useful "addition" or /complementary/ to the *sensíble* views of /
persons such as/ Tyner and Webb, Attorneys at You. Badiou is the '68er
who has (heh-heh) /least/ to re-cant, and /so/ his works are
*oppressively liberal* -- the tenor of *actually* living in a great
and cosmpolitan Urban [!!] area of the Global Nórth. He is for you,
*enough*, enough for his Black kid and the general needs of Parisians
to be *agin* their carefully-coïffed Hungarian *wunderkind* Sarkozy
and other such authorities. He has done a *fine, fine, superfine* job
of this, without any need to be 'individious' as regards the
implications of our discourse concerning /him/; so, take a look ---

----

Logic of the Site
Author(s): Alain Badiou, Steve Corcoran, Bruno Bosteels
Source: Diacritics, Vol. 33, No. 3/4, New Coordinates: Spatial
Mappings, National Trajectories
(Autumn - Winter, 2003), pp. 140-150
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3805808
Accessed: 04/02/2010 16:13

http://www.jstor.org

LOGIC OF THE SITE ALAIN BADIO U The Commune Is a Site 1. Ontology of
the Commune Take any world whatsoever. A multiple that is an object of
this world-whose elements are indexed by the transcendental of this
world-is a site, if it happens to count itself within the
referentialfield of its own indexation. Or again: a site is a multiple
that hap- pens to behave in the world with regard to itself as with
regard to its elements, in such a way as to be the support of being of
its own appearance. Even if the idea is still obscure, we can begin to
see its content: a site is a singu- larity, because it convokes its
being in the appearing of its own multiple composition. It makes
itself, in the world, the being-there of its being. Among other
consequences, the site gives itself an intensity of existence. A site
is a being that happens to exist by itself. We will ask: can we give a
more concrete idea of what a site is? Is there a site? Let us consider
the world "Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870." We
are in the month of March 1871. After a semblance of resistance, and
shot through with fear of revolutionary and worker Paris, the interim
government of bourgeois "Re- publicans" capitulates to Bismarck's
Prussians. In order to consolidate this political "victory"-very
comparable to Petain's reactionary revenge in 1940 (where preferring
an arrangement with the external enemy to exposure to the internal
enemy)--it has an assembly with a royalist majority hastily elected by
a frightened rural world, an assem- bly that sits in Bordeaux. Led by
Thiers, the government hopes to take advantage of the circumstances to
annihilate the political capacity of the workers. But on the Parisian
front, the proletariat is armed in the form of a National Guard, owing
to its having been mobilized during the siege on Paris. In theory the
Parisian proletariat has many hundreds of cannons at its disposition.
The "military" organism of the Parisians is the Central Committee, at
which assemble the delegates of the various battalions of the National
Guard, battal- Translators' Note: This text is a small extract from
Alain Badiou's forthcoming Logiques des mondes (Logics of Worlds,
French publication expected in 2006) the much-awaitedfollow-up to his
major work L'etre et l'Fvenement (Being and Event, originally
published in 1988 and in Eng- lish translation in 2005). The principal
change in perspective between these two works, really the only
knowledge needed to follow the argument here, consists in the move
from ontology, as the science of being, to logic, redefined as the
science of appearing, or of being-there. Thus, whereas in L'etre et
l'fevnement, Badiou defines being as a multiple of multiples, so that
everything that is must be seen as a pure multiple, in Logiques des
mondes he makes the cohesion of appearing, or the there of a world,
depend on what he calls its transcendental, that is, the structure of
order that measures the identities and differences in this world by
assigning varying degrees of greater or lesser intensity to the
existence of its objects. The following extract, published here with
per- mission of the author, studies the possibility of real change
within a given regime of appearing, with specific references to a well-
known sequence in revolutionary politics, namely, the Paris Commune of
1871. The result is a complete rearticulation of the conditions in
which a given space can become the site of a radically transformative
event. diacritics 33.3-4: 141-50 141 diacritics / fall-winter 2003
Mari/yn with Wal/ Rachel Harrison
ions that are in turn linked to the great working-class quartiers of
Paris-Montmartre, Belleville, and so forth. Thus we have a divided
world whose logical organization-what in philosophical jargon could be
called its transcendental organisation-reconciles intensities of
politi- cal existence according to two sets of antagonistic criteria.
Concerning the representa- tive, electoral, and legal dispositions,
one cannot but observe the preeminence of the Assembly of
traditionalist Rurals,1 Thiers's capitulard government, and the
officers of the regular army, who, having been licked without much of
a fight by the Prussian soldiers, dream of doing battle with the
Parisian workers. That is where the power is, especially as it is the
only power recognized by the occupier. On the side of resistance,
political intervention, and French revolutionary history, there is the
fecund disorder of Parisian worker organizations, which intermingles
with the Central Committee of the twenty quartiers, the Federation of
Syndicate Chambers, a few members of the Inter- national, local
military committees. In truth, the historical consistency of this
world, which had been separated and disbanded [deliel owing to the
war, is held together only by the majority conviction that no kind of
worker capability for government exists. For the vast majority of
people, including often the workers themselves, the politicized
workers of Paris are simply incomprehensible. These workers are the
inexistent aspect [I'inexistantpropre] of the term "political
capacity" in the uncertain world of the spring of 1871. But for the
bourgeoisie they are still too existent, at least physically. The gov-
ernment receives threats from the stock exchange of this sort: "You
will never have financial operations if you do not get rid of these
reprobates." First up then, an impera- tive task, and a seemingly easy
one to carry out: disarm the workers and, in particular, recuperate
the cannons spread throughout working-class Paris by the military
commit- tees of the National Guard. It is this initiative that will
make of the term "March 18" (a single day- such as it is exposed in
the situation "Paris in spring 1871") a site, that is, that which
presents itself in the appearing of a situation. More precisely, March
18 is the first day of the event calling itself the Paris Com- mune,
that is, the exercise of power by Socialist or Republican political
militants and organizations of armed workers in Paris from March 18 to
May 28, 1871. The balance sheet of this sequence is the massacre of
many tens of thousands of "rebels" by the troops of the Thiers
government and the reactionary Assembly. What is, exactly, in terms of
its manifest content, this beginning called March 18? Our answer is:
the appearing of a worker-being-to this very day a social symptom, a
brute force of uprisings and a theoretical threat-in the space of
governmental and political capacity. And what happens? Thiers orders
General Aurelles de Paladine to retrieve the can- nons held by the
National Guard. Close to three in the morning a coup is made by some
select detachments. A complete success, so it seems. On the walls an
announcement by Thiers and his ministers is to be read; it bears the
paradoxes of a split transcendental evaluation: "Let the good citizens
separate from the bad; let them aid the public force." Nevertheless,
by eleven in the morning the coup has totally failed. The soldiers
have been encircled by hundreds of ordinary women, backed up by
anonymous workers and members of the National Guard acting on their
own behalf. Many of the soldiers fraternize. The cannons are taken
back. General Aurelles de Paladine goes crazy, seeing in it the great
red peril: "The Government calls upon you to defend your homes, your
families, your property. Some misguided men, obeying only some secret
leaders, turn 1. The Assembly of "Rurals" is the nickname of the
National Assembly of 1871, which met in Bordeaux and was largely made
up of reactionary monarchists: provincial landlords, officials,
rentiers and traders "elected" in rural districts. There were about
430 monarchists among the Assembly of 630 deputies. 142
the cannons kept back from the Prussians against Paris." According to
him, it is a mat- ter of "putting an end to the insurrectional
Committee, whose members represent only Communist doctrines, and who
would pillage Paris and bury France." All to no avail. Despite being
without veritable direction the rebellion extends, occupying the whole
city. The armed workers organizations make use of the caserns, public
buildings, and finally the H6tel-de-Ville, which, under a red flag,
will be the site and the symbol of the new power. Theirs saves
himself, escaping via a hidden staircase. The minister Jules Favre
jumps out a window. The whole governmental apparatus disappears and
installs itself at Versailles. Paris is delivered to the insurrection.
March 18 is a site because, apart from whatever else appears here
under the ambig- uous transcendental of the world "Paris in spring
1871," it appears as the striking, and totally unforeseeable,
beginning of a rupture (true, still without concept) with even that
which has been the norm for its appearing. Note that "March 18" is the
title of a chapter of the magnificent History of the Paris Commune of
1871 published by the militant Lis- sagaray in 1876. This chapter is
of course about the "women of March 18," the "people of March 18,"
which attests to the inclusion of "March 18" (now a predicate) for the
purpose of evaluating whatever might result from the turns of events
comprising this day. Lissagaray sees clearly that, under the sign of
an eruption of being, the fortuities of March 18 have organized an
immanent overturning of the laws of appearing. Indeed, that the
working people of Paris were able to overcome the dispersion of their
political framework, and thwart a specific governmental act executed
with force (the seizure of the cannons), has resulted in the
imperative appearing of an unknown capacity, of an unprecedented
power. That is how "March 18" comes to appear under the injunction of
being as an element of the situation that it is. In fact, from the
point of view of regulated appearing, the possibility of a popular and
worker governmental power purely and simply does not exist. And not
even for the militant workers themselves, who speak the vocabulary of
the "Republic" indistinctly. On the evening of March 18, the members
of the Central Committee of the National Guard-the only effective
authority of the city whose legal tutors have absconded-re- main more
or less convinced they should not be sitting at the H6tel-de-Ville,
reiterat- ing that they "do not have a mandate for government." This
amounts to saying, in accordance with our conception of it, that they
balk at breaking with "the left." It is only with the sword of the
circumstances hanging over their heads that they end up, as Edouard
Moreau-a perfect nobody-will dictate to them the morning of March 19,
by deciding to "proceed to elections, to provide for the public
services, and to protect the town from a surprise." With this act
nolens volens, and counter to all allegiances with the parliamentary
left, they directly constitute themselves as a political authority.
This doing, "March 18" gets included as the beginning of that
authority, an authority in the effects of March 18. It is essential to
understand that March 18 is a site because it imposes itself on all
the elements that participate in its existence as that which, contrary
to the indistinct content of worker-being, "forcibly" calls for an
entirely new transcendental evaluation of the intensity of worker-
being. The site "March 18," this empirical "March 18" in which is
dealt out the impossible possibility of worker existence, is, thought
as such, a subversion of the rules of political appearing (of the
logic of power) by means of its own active support. diacritics / fall-
winter 2003 143
The Commune Is a Singularity Logic of the Commune, 1 As to the thought
of its pure being, a site is simply a multiple that happens to be an
ele- ment of itself. We have just illustrated this by the example of
March 18, a complicated set of peripeteia whose result is that "March
18" gets instituted, in the object "March 18," as the exigency of a
new political appearing, as forcing an unheard-of transcen- dental
evaluation of the political scene. Nevertheless, a site must be
thought not simply in terms of the ontological particu- larity that I
have just recognized in it but also according to the logical unfolding
of its consequences. Now, as a figure of the instant, a site appears,
only to disappear. Veritable duration, that is, the time a site opens
or founds, pertains only to its consequences. The enthusi- asm of
March 18, 1871, is most certainly founding of the first worker power
in history, but when on May 10 the Central Committee proclaims that to
save the "revolution of March 18, which it had begun so well," it
would "put an end to controversies, put down the malignants, quell
rivalry, ignorance, and incapacity," its boastful desperation betrays
what, by way of a distribution or envelopment of political
intensities, had ap- peared in the city for two months. That said,
what is a consequence? This point is fundamental for the theory of the
historical appearing of a politics. Obviously I'll have to leave out
the technical details of that theory here. The simplest thing to do is
to fix a value for the relation of conse- quence between two terms in
a situation by the mediation of their degree of existence. If an
element a of a situation is such that the existence of a has a value
of p, and if the element b of the same situation exists to the degree
of q, then b is a consequence of a in measure equal to the dependency
of these intensities, or, if you like, their order. If, for example,
on the scale measuring the intensities of existence proper to a
certain situa- tion, q is greatly inferior to p, the dependency of b
to a can be validated. Henceforth we can say that a consequence is a
strong or weak relation between existences. The degree to which one
thing is the consequence of another is thus never independent of the
intensity of existence they have in the situation under consideration.
As such, the aforementioned declaration of the Central Committee of
May 10, 1871, can be read as a thesis on the consequences. It records:
-The very strong intensity of existence of the day of March 18, 1871,
or of that revolution which had "begun so well." -The implicitly
disastrous degree of existence of political discipline in the worker
camp two months later ("bad will," "rivalry," "ignorance,"
"incapacity"). -A desire (unfortunately abstract) to bring the value
of the consequences of the politics in course level with the power of
existence of its disappeared origin. A site is the appearing/
disappearing of a multiple whose paradox is self-belonging. The logic
of the site involves the distribution of intensities around the
vanished point which the site is. We must therefore begin at the
beginning: what is value of existence of the site itself? Then we will
continue with what can be inferred as to the conse- quences. Nothing
in the ontology of the site prescribes its value of existence. Sudden
ap- pearance is no more than a barely "perceptible" local apparition
(it is pure image since there is no perception here). Or again: its
disappearing cannot leave any trace. It is quite possible that,
ontologically appointed signs of "true" change (self-belonging and
disap- pearance in the instant), a site is nevertheless, by its
existential insignificance, hardly different to the simple
continuation of the situation. 144
On Tuesday May 23, 1871, for example, when nearly all Paris is at the
hands of the Versaillese soldiery, who shoot workers by the thousands
on stairs all over the city, and when no military or political
direction any longer subsists on the side of the communards, who fight
barricade by barricade, the remains of the Central Committee make
their last proclamation, which is hastily stuck up on a few walls, and
which, as Lissagaray said with a sombre irony, is a "proclamation of
victors." The proclama- tion demands the conjoint dissolution of the
(legal) Assembly of Versailles and the Commune, the retreat of the
Parisian army, a provisional government entrusted to the delegates of
big cities, and a reciprocal amnesty. How to qualify this sad
"Manifesto"? Due to its sheer incongruity, it cannot be reduced to the
normality of the situation. In- stead, this Manifesto expresses,
albeit in a derisory way, the Commune's self-certitude, its just
conviction of having marked a political beginning. It is a document
that, though the wind of the barracks will carry it aux oubliettes,
can be legitimately held for one of the site's elements. Nevertheless,
in the savage dawn of the worker insurrection, its value of existence
is very weak. What is in question here is the singular power of the
site. Certainly this Central Committee manifesto is ontologically
situated in that which holds the evental syntagm the "Paris Commune"
together but, as a sign of decomposi- tion or of powerlessness, it
leads the singularity of this syntagm back to the margins of a pure
and simple modification, or to its simple mechanical development, and
is lacking in veritable creation. On this point, let's cite the
terrible passage dedicated to the Commune's last mo- ments by Julien
Gracq in Lettrines. In 1981, I inserted this extract in the preface to
my Theorie du sujet so as to indicate that all my philosophical
efforts went to contribute, however slightly, to our (we, the
inheritors of the Cultural Revolution and May '68) never becoming
"marchands de bons de harengs." Gracq had been rereading the third
volume of the autobiography of communard leader Jules Valles titled
L'insurge'. Here is a fragment of his commentary: Marx was indulgent
of the leadership of the Commune, whose shortcomings he had perfectly
seen. The revolution also had its Trochu and its Gamelin. Valles's
frankness consternates, and might cause one to take horror at that
proclamatory leadership, those chand'vins revolutionaries, on whom the
bar- ricaders of Belleville spat as they passed by during the last
days of the blood- soaked week. There is no excuse to lead the good
fight when one leads it so lightly. A kind of atrocious nausea arises
while following the Ubuesque masquer- ade, the pathetic disorder, of
the last pages, wherein the unfortunate Commune delegate-no longer
daring to show his sash which he clasped under his arms in a newspaper-
a sort of quartier incompetent, of petroleur Charlot leaping between
shell blasts, incapable of doing anything at all, treated harshly by
the rebels who bear their teeth, wanders like a lost dog from one
barricade to an other distributing in disorderly fashion coupons for
fish, bullets, and fire, and imploring the spiteful crowd-which was
hard on his heels because of the fix into which he had plunged it-
pitifully, lamentably, "Leave me alone, I ask you. I need to think
alone." In his exile as a courageous incompetent, he must have
sometimes awo- ken at night, still hearing the voices of all the same
series of people who were to be massacred in a few minutes, and who
cried so furiously at him from the barricade: "Where are the orders?
Where is the plan?" [Gracq 205-06; see also Badiou 14-15] diacritics /
fall-winter 2003 145
So that this kind of disaster doesn't arise, it would be necessary
that the force of existence in the appearing of the site compensate
for its evanescence. Only a site whose value of existence is maximal
has the capacity for an event [est en puissance d'evenement].
Certainly this was the case on March 18, 1871, when, women at the
front, the working people of Paris forbade the army from disarming the
National Guard. But it is no longer the case concerning the Commune's
political direction as of the end of April. We will call a site whose
intensity of existence is not maximal a fact. We will call a site
whose intensity of existence is maximal a singularity. You will notice
that the repressive force of the Versaillese is accompanied by a
propaganda that systematically desingularizes the Commune, presenting
it as a mon- strous set of facts to be (forcibly) returned to the
normal order of things. This results in some extraordinary statements,
like the one that appeared in the conservative journal Le Siecle on
May 21, 1871, right in the middle of the massacre of workers: "The
social difficulties have been resolved or are in the process of being
resolved." It could not have been better put. It is true that as of
March 21, only three days after the insurrec- tion, Jules Favre was
prone to declaring that Paris was at the mercy "a handful of vil-
lains, holding above the rights of the Assembly I don't know what kind
of rapacious and bloody ideal." In the appearing of a situation
strategic and tactical choices oscillate between fact and singularity
because it is, as always, a question of relating to a logical order of
circumstances. If a world finally comes to be situated-from the
advening of a site in it-and is disposed between singularity and fact,
then it is to the network of consequences that it the decision falls.
March 18 and Its Consequences Logic of the Commune, 2 A singularity
diverges further from simple continuity than a fact because it is
attached to an intensity of maximal existence. If we are now compelled
to distinguish between weak and strong singularities, it is with a
view to establishing the relations of conse- quence woven by an
evanescent site with the elements of the situation that presented it
in the world. To be brief, we shall say that existing maximally for
the time of its appearing/dis- appearing accords a site the power
[puissance] of a singularity. But that making exist maximally is all
the strength of that singularity. For a strong singularity we shall
reserve the name of event. A few remarks are in order about the
predicative distinction strength/weakness as it applies to
singularities (that is, to sites whose transcendental intensity of
existence is maximal). Now, it is clear that, in the order of work of
a truth's appearing, the Paris Com- mune, crushed in blood in two
months, is nonetheless much more significant than Sep- tember 4, 1870,
the date when the political regime of the Second Empire collapsed and
the Third Republic-which lasted seventy years-began. That in no way
depends on the actors: on September 4 too, it was working people who,
under a red flag, invaded the place of the Hotel-de-Ville and, as
Lissagaray recounted so well, brought on a col- lapse of the
officials: "Important dignitaries, fat functionaries, ferocious
Mamelukes, imperious ministers, solemn chamberlains, moustached
generals, shake pitifully on September 4, like a bunch of weak hams."
On the one hand, then, an insurrection that founds no duration; on the
other, a day that changes the State. September 4, however, will be
confiscated by bourgeois politicians primarily concerned to
reestablish the or- 146
der of property. Whereas the Commune, Lenin's ideal referent, will
inspire a century of revolutionary thought, thus meriting the famous
evaluation Marx gave of it prior to its bloody end: The Commune was
[. . .] the initiation of the Social Revolution of the 19th century.
Whatever therefore its fate at Paris, it will make le tour du monde.
It was at once acclaimed by the working class of Europe and the United
States as the magic word of delivery. [3: 173] Let's posit then that
September 4 is a weak singularity, because it is aligned on the
general development of European states in their convergence toward the
parliamentary form. Moreover, let's say that the Commune is a strong
singularity because it proposes to thought a rule of emancipation, and
is relayed-perhaps against the grain-by Octo- ber 1917 and, more
precisely, by the summer of 1967 in China and May '68 in France. What
counts here is not only the exceptional intensity of sudden appearing
of singulari- ties (i.e. the fact that it is a matter of a violent and
creative episode in the domain of appearing) but also what of
uncertain and glorious consequences an evanescent emer- gence makes
available to lived time. Beginnings will be measured by the
rebeginnings they authorize. Whether an aleatory adjunction to the
world merits being taken-beyond continuities and facts- not simply for
a singularity but for an event depends on that which perseveres of it-
of its intensity-outside of itself. The Commune Is an Event Logic of
the Commune, 3 Everything depends, therefore, on the consequences. And
notice that there is no stronger a transcendental consequence than
that of making something appear in a world which had not existed in it
before. Thus it is with the day March 18, 1871, when a collection of
unknown workers are put at the center of political heat, workers who
were unknown even to specialists of the revolution-those old surviving
"quarante-huitards"-who had unfortunately encumbered the Commune with
their inefficient logomachy. Let's return to March 19 and to the first
of the declarations by the Central Committee, the only directly
accountable organism from the March 18 insurrection: "Let Paris and
France put together the bases of an acclaimed Republic with all its
consequences, the only government that will close forever the era of
invasion and civil wars." Who signs this unprecedented political
decision? Twenty people, three-quarters of whom are pro- letarians
whom only the circumstances constitute and identify. Right on cue with
the well-worn theme of "foreign agents," the governmental Officiel
self-assuredly asked: "Who are the members of the Committee? Are they
communists, Bonapartists, or Prus- sians?" In reality they were the
inexistent workers of the day before, brought into a provisionally
maximal political existence as a consequence of the event. Therefore,
we will recognize a strong singularity by its having for a situation
the consequence of making an inexistent term exist in it. In more
abstract fashion, we will posit the following definition: given a site
(a multiple affected with self-belonging) which is a singularity (its
intensity of existence, as instantaneous and as "evanescent" as it may
be, is nevertheless maximal), we will say that this site is a strong
singularity, or an event, if, in consequence of the (maximal)
intensity of the site, something whose value of existence was null in
the situation takes on a positive value of existence. diacritics /
fall-winter 2003 147
Thus, all we are saying is that an event has, as a maximally true
consequence of its (maximal) intensity of existence, the existence of
an inexistent. This evidently implies a violent paradox. Because if an
implication is maximally true and so too is its antecedent, then its
consequence must also be; we have thus come to a seemingly untenable
conclusion, whereby under the effect of an event the inexis- tent
aspect of a site exists absolutely. And indeed: the unknown members of
the Central Committee, who were politi- cally inexistent in the world
of the previous day, come to exist absolutely the same day as their
apparition. The Parisian people obey their proclamations, encourage
them to occupy the public buildings and turn out for the elections
they organize. The paradox can be analysed in three points. First, the
principle of this overturning of worldly appearing from inexistence to
absolute existence is a vanishing principle. This existential
transfiguration consumes all the event's power. As evental
multiplicity, March 18, 1871, has not the least stability. Next, if
the inexistent aspect of a site must fight for maximal intensity, in
the order of appearing, it is only inasmuch as from then on it has
taken the place of that which has disappeared; its maximality is the
subsisting mark of the event itself in the world. The trace [trace] or
the statement in the world of the evanescent event is its "eternal"
exis- tence. The proclamations of the Commune, the first worker power
in universal history, compose an historical existent whose
absoluteness manifests the arrival in the world of a wholly new
ordering of worldly appearing, a mutation of its logic. The existence
of the inexistent aspect is that by which, in the domain of appearing,
the subversion of worldly appearing by subjacent be-ing is played out.
It is the logical marking of a paradox of being. An onto-logical
chimera. Destruction Logic of the Commune, 4 Last, an inexistent
aspect must return within the space in which existence is subse-
quently maintained. Worldly order is not subverted to the point of
being able to require the abolition of a logical law of situations.
Every situation has at least one proper inex- istent aspect. And if
the latter happens to be sublimated into absolute existence, another
element of the site must cease to exist, thereby keeping the law
intact and ultimately preserving the coherence of appearing. In 1896,
adding another conclusion to his History of the Commune of 1871, Lis-
sagaray makes two observations. The first is that the troop of
reactionaries and workers' assassins of 1871 is still in place.
Parliamentarism obliging, it has even been augmented with "some
bourgeois fifes who, under the mask of democrat, facilitate its
advances." The second is that the people from then on constitutes its
own force: "Three times [in 1792, in 1848, and in 1870] the French
proletariat made the Republic for others; now it is ripe for its own."
Otherwise said, initiated March 18, 1871, the Commune-event did not of
course have the consequence of destroying the dominant group and its
poli- ticians. But something more important was destroyed: the
political subordination of workers and the people. What was destroyed
was of the order of subjective incapacity: "Ah!," exclaims Lissagaray,
"they are not uncertain of their capacities, these workers of the
country and the towns."2 The absolutisation of worker political
existence (the existence of the inexistent), convulsive and crushed,
had all the same destroyed the 2. Lissagaray 470-71. This fragment is
not included in Eleanor Marx Aveling's English translation. 148
necessity of a basic form of subjection: that of a possible
proletarian politics to the schemes of (leftist) bourgeois
politicians. Like every veritable event, the Commune had not realized
a possible, it had created one. This possible is simply that of an
inde- pendent proletarian politics. That a century later the necessity
of subjection to the left has been reconstituted, or rather reinvented
under the very name of "democracy," is yet another story, yet another
sequence in the tormented history of truths. It remains that what took
the place of the inexistent aspect (worker political capacity), was
the destruction of that which legiti- mated this inexistence
(subjective incapacity). At the beginning of the twentieth cen- tury,
the place of death no longer occupies worker political consciousness,
but-even if it did not yet know it-the prejudice as to the natural
character of classes, and as to the millenary vocation of proprietors
and the wealthy to detain social and state power. The Paris Commune
accomplished this destruction for the future, even in the apparent
mise a mort of its own superexistence [surexistence]. Here we have a
transcendental maxim: if, in the form of an evental consequence, what
was worth nothing comes to be worth the whole, then an established
given within appearance is destroyed. What had sustained the cohesion
of a world is struck with nonexistence; such that if the
transcendental indexation of beings is the (logical) base of the
world, then with good reason it must be said: "the world will change
its base." When the world is violently enchanted by the absolute
consequences of a paradox of being, all appearing must, when
threatened with the local destruction of a customary evaluation,
reconstitute a different distribution of what exists and what does
not. Under the eruption being exerts on its own appearing, nothing can
happen to a world except the chance - mingling existence and
destruction-of another world. Conclusion I believe this other world
resides for us in the Commune, yet altogether elsewhere than in its
subsequent existence, which I have called its first existence, that
is, the Party- State and its social worker referent. Instead, it
exists in the observation that a political rupture is always a
combination of a subjective capacity and an organization-totally
independent of State -of the consequences of that capacity. It is also
important to maintain that such a rupture is always a rupture with the
left, in the formal sense I have given to that term. This is also to
say that today a rupture is a rupture with the representative form of
politics, or, if one wants to go further in the way of founded
provocation, a rupture with "democracy." The notion that the
consequences of a political capacity are obligatorily of the order of
power and State administration belongs to the first account of the
Commune, not to the one that interests us. Instead, our problem is
rather to return-prior to this first account (prior to Lenin, if you
will)-to what was alive but defeated in the Com- mune: to the fact
that a politics appears when a declaration is at one and the same time
a decision as to the consequences, and, thus, when a decision is
active in the form of a previously unknown collective discipline.
Because we must never stop recalling that those who are nothing can
only stick to a wager on the consequences of their appear- ing through
the element of a new discipline, a discipline that is a practical
discipline of thought. The Party in Lenin's sense certainly
represented the creation of such a discipline, but one ultimately
subordinated to constraints of State. Today's task, being undertaken
notably by the Organisation politique,3 is to support the creation of
such a 3. The Organisation politique, of which Badiou is one of the
founding members, dates in its current form from 1984. It is currently
engaged in a series of precise campaigns concerning diacritics / fall-
winter 2003 149
discipline subtracted from the grip of the State, the creation of a
thoroughly political discipline. Translated by Steve Corcoran with
Bruno Bosteels WORKS CITED Badiou, Alain. Theorie du sujet. Paris:
Seuil, 1982. Gracq, Julien. Lettrines. (Euvres completes. Paris:
Gallimard, 1995. 205-06. Lissagaray, Prosper-Olivier. "The Eighteenth
of March." History of the Commune of 1871. Trans. Eleanor Marx
Aveling. New York: International Publishing, 1898. 78-87. Trans. of"Le
18 Mars." Histoire de la Commune de 1871. Paris: La Decou- verte,
2000. 111-19. Marx, Karl. Civil War in France. First draft. Moscow:
Archives of Marx and Engels, 1934. <http://www.marx2mac.com/M&E/
CWFdrf71 .html#sO> immigration, housing, and the political status of
work and workers. Its views are expressed in La distance politique.
150