“For me, Les Soulèvements de la Terre are a contemporary example of a Commune form because they have managed to create a common front, and they have created it from very different groups and people. It’s a very specific form. It’s not a political party, it’s not a class- or ethnicity-based organisation, and yet it’s very organised. I’m not saying that Les Soulèvements de la Terre are a reincarnation of the Paris Commune. But they each reveal a way of managing the commons that emerges when the state withdraws. This form can be called ‘Commune’. The term has had many meanings historically. It has referred to the bourgeois cities of the European Middle Ages, to the most radically democratic aspect of the French Revolution, to peasant agrarian communities in the countryside throughout the world, to the desires expressed in workers’ meetings at the end of the Second Empire in France: desires, in other words, for a world based on association and cooperation.” |
Revolution as Hubris in Modern Tragedy
