What Are We To Do?

Theses on the Paris Commune; by Debord, Kotanyi & Vaneigem

(5) The Commune had no leaders. And this at a time when the idea of the necessity of leaders was universally accepted in the workers movement. This is the first reason for its paradoxical successes and failures. The official organizers of the Commune were incompetent (compared with Marx or Lenin, or even Blanqui). But on the other hand, the various “irresponsible” acts of that moment are precisely what is needed for the continuation of the revolutionary movement of our own time (even if the circumstances restricted almost all those acts to the purely destructive level — the most famous example being the rebel who, when a suspect bourgeois insisted that he had never had anything to do with politics, replied, “That’s precisely why I’m going to kill you”). 

(7) The Commune represents the only implementation of a revolutionary urbanism to date — attacking on the spot the petrified signs of the dominant organization of life, understanding social space in political terms, refusing to accept the innocence of any monument. Anyone who disparages this attack as some “lumpenproletarian nihilism,” some “irresponsibility of the pétroleuses,”(2) should specify what he believes to be of positive value in the present society and worth preserving (it will turn out to be almost everything). “All space is already occupied by the enemy… . Authentic urbanism will appear when the absence of this occupation is created in certain zones. What we call construction starts there. It can be clarified by the positive void concept developed by modern physics” 

Legalistic concerns and issues about the conduct of police come only _after_ the “moment of decision” that the police (individual or collective) that the police carry out (usually in a deadly manner). This is because the police exists in the space of the “norms of the realization of the law” (C. Schmitt) – the very ability for the law to correspond with fact – whereas stuff like body camera mandates and mandatory sensitivity training initiatives exist in the space of “the norms of the law” (C. Schmitt) – which is the space of self-referential, mutually-intelligible, mutually-reinforcing acts and signs that only make sense and have effect _after_ the “norms of realization” have been established in the first place. And this establishment of the norms of realization is necessarily arbitrary – the law cannot describe its own legitimacy or existence on the basis of its internal logic, for the simple reason that it cannot categorize what is by definition outside of or resistant to its categories.

There is no woman’s hairstyle that can be called standard, that says nothing about her. The range of women’s hairstyles is staggering, but a woman whose hair has no particular style is perceived as not caring about how she looks, which can disqualify her from many positions, and will subtly diminish her as a person in the eyes of some.

Women must choose between attractive shoes and comfortable shoes. When our group made an unexpected trek, the woman who wore fiat, laced shoes arrived first. Last to arrive was the woman in spike heels, shoes in hand and a handful of men around her.

If a woman’s clothing is tight or revealing (in other words, sexy), it sends a message—an intended one of wanting to be attractive, but also a possibly unintended one of availability. If her clothes are not sexy, that too sends a message, lent meaning by the knowledge that they could have been. There are thousands of cosmetic products from which women can choose and myriad ways of applying them. Yet no makeup at all is anything but unmarked. Some men see it as a hostile refusal to please them.

What Wittig tells us is that this is true of women as a class as well. An attempt to find a stable biological or bodily basis for answering the question “Who is a woman” is a means of naturalizing the class status of women. The entire point of shifting from thinking of women as a pregiven group to thinking of women as a class is to shift our thought in such a way that we can challenge naturalizing ideologies of womanhood which are attempts to justify the domination of women.  Any debate that starts by asking “who counts as a woman in class analysis” misses the entire point of using materialist class analysis in the first place. We seek to displace and destroy gender and the coresponding class positions of man and woman. We won’t do that by endless arguing over definitions which themselves ideologically reinforce the divide. 

for the few months after the october revolution bolshevik militants were crisscrossing the vast, barren russian steppe on motorcycles in these long leather jackets & fighting this war against tsarist generals who are executing communists en masse & slaughtering jews & inching closer every day

at the same time though they felt they were the vanguard of the russian proletarians, who were themselves the vanguard of a global proletariat. they felt that within a matter of weeks, at most months, the revolution would erupt throughout europe & then the world, ushering in an eternal epoch of messianic communism

and although they were mostly atheists, almost every one of them was raised learning the bible or torah, and the concept of a vanguard carried for them the echo of numbers/bamidbar 32:17, when the “vanguard” of “armed shock troops” led the israelites (russians, proles, humanity in general), recently liberated from pharaoh (tsar), in conquering the promised land (a communist new world)

but as they prevented apocalypse, the messiah (so to speak) was murdered by death squads in berlin, bremen, munich, budapest, milan & turin