Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id807518128
Workers wanted to organize their own social life according to principles of association and cooperation. They gave this desire the name “commune,” echoing the slogan that had begun resounding in workers’ meetings and clubs across the city at the end of the Second Empire. The Paris Commune was a pragmatic intervention in the here and now.
id807518457
The commune form is first and foremost about people living differently and changing their circumstances by working within the conditions available in the present.
id807518479
the Communards, there was less smashing going on, as I see it, than there was a kind of step-by-step dismantling. The dismantling of any number of state hierarchies and functions was underway, and most importantly the one that makes of politics a specialized activity sequestered away for the ponderous few operating behind closed doors.
id807518655
The soul of the French Revolution of 1789, its only vigor, he writes, consisted of the sixty-some districts issuing directly from popular movements and not separating themselves from the people, the districts that made of the city of Paris a vast insurrectional Commune
id807518646
Successive peasant insurrections played the generally underestimated but decisive role in radicalizing the revolutionary process between 1789 and 1794.
id807518751
The contradiction is not between the state and anarchy but between the state and another organization of political life, an alternative kind of political intelligence, a different kind of community. To the extent that the state recedes, the communes and their way of life flourish.