THE FUNAMBULIST Politics of Space and Bodies

SYRIAN COMMUNES
LEILA AL-SHAMI

THE BARRICADE
AND THE COSMOS
CHARLOTTE GRACE

GUANGZHOU’S
1927 COMMUNE
TINGS CHAK

A DECOLONIAL RAGE
AGAINST MONUMENTS
JOACHIM BEN YAKOUB

VENEZUELAN
COMMUNES
GEO MAHER

1870 INSURRECTION OF
SOUTHERN MARTINIQUE
JACQUELINE COUTI

PÉTROLEUSES AND
MEXICAN MORRAS
IRMGARD EMMELHAINZ

PARIS’ WORKING-CLASS
NEIGHBORHOODS
MOGNISS H. ABDALLAH & HAJER BEN BOUBAKER

NEWS FROM THE FRONTS ABOUT

WESTERN SAHARA (SIDAHMED JOULY)
TAMIL EELAM (BRINTHA KONESHACHANDRA)
ARTSAKH, ARMENIA, AND THE LEVANT (PANOS APRAHAMIAN & JESSIKA KHAZRIK)

AN INTERNATIONALIST ISSUE FOR THE

150TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE COMMUNE
34 /// March-April 2021

THE PARIS COMMUNE

AND THE WORLD
WELCOME

BEHIND THE SCENES

Dear subscribers and readers,

Welcome to our 34th issue, this time dedicated to the cel- Before we conclude, we’d like to extend our profound grat-
ebration of 150 years of the Paris Commune. At the time itude to Léopold for giving us such a unique opportunity
we’re writing these words, The Funambulist is on the verge to be part of this incredibly transformative journey we have
of what for us seem as various crucial milestones. endured at crucial moments in our lives. A journey that
sharpened our worldview and has shaped us both at many
Allowing us, to begin with, what the past five months have different levels — professionally and personally.
been subject to hour-long conversations, we believe it is timely
to share with you some of these discussions, as we’re cur- Please, do take care and stay safe.
rently in the midst of a full organizational restructuring process.
Margarida Waco & Caroline Honorien
Given the fact that none of us, who over the years, have Copenhagen & Paris, February 12, 2020.
formed part of the editorial team have been trained to do
what we do, we decided for the next step to be a profession-
alization of the office. To this end, we will soon be welcoming
a new team member, who will not only make history as the
first-ever full-time team member alongside Léopold but also,
will help to further position the magazine and professionalize
our operations. Consequently, as of this spring, we, Margari-
da Waco and Caroline Honorien, will be stepping down from
our current positions. And although this decision was not an
easy one to reach, on the contrary, yet we stay deeply hope-
ful for the future of the magazine. As we’re turning one page,
we’re also entering a new chapter filled with prosperity. In par-
allel to this, we’re happy to announce that we will constitute
a new formalized editorial advisory board consisting of past
team members, including Flora Hergon, Nadia El Hakim, No-
elle Geller, and ourselves. Besides, our current intern, Amel
Hadj Hassen, is also finishing her internship at the end of this
month. But she leaves us with yet another secret — for the
time being — project that is about to be launched shortly. This
editorial endeavor is the result of year-long discussions about
how to make the podcasts accessible to all — a department
where we unfortunately to this date have been failing so far.

On the other end of the spectrum of our recalibration efforts,
is yet another editorial project which we’ll soon embark on:
The Funambulist Correspondents. Materialized as a proj-
ect supporting a global network of writers reporting on the
spatial struggles of their particular geography, the project
is born out of the ambition to increase the frequency of our
publishing activities and developing more content in the spir-
it of open access that would allow individuals from various
backgrounds, regardless of means and financial situation, to
freely access. Finally, we’ll soon lift the veil of months of work
developing a brand new website and a new visual identity
that comes along with it. Without revealing too much, it’s safe
to say that an integral feature of our upcoming website will
be dedicated to the many incredible people — more than
400 contributors and counting — who over the years have
enriched the magazine. However, we’ll leave it here for now,
much more on this soon to come.
THE ISSUE’S COVER
EXPLAINED
This issue’s cover shows the Vendome Column a few hours
after its ceremonialized destruction by the Paris Commune’s
Federation of Artists presided by painter Gustave Courbet
on May 16, 1871. This event is extensively described by Joa-
chim Ben Yakoub in his contribution to this issue (see pages
28-33). In addition to the Commune’s barricades you may
notice the fallen statue of Napoléon Bonaparte — dressed
in the modest attire of a Roman emperor — on the ground.
The Column, rebuilt today (on the dime of Gustave Courbet
who was forced to pay for the reconstruction), constitutes
indeed a monument to the French first Empire (1804-1814)
and, as such, constituted a key target of the internationalist
(although not enough anti-colonial) Communards.
 AGAINST CONTINUOUS ERASURE
in the civil war roughly spanning from 1958 until 2009. The Regardless of practices being held in public or private,
NEWS FROM
THE FRONTS
memorial structure was erected by family members of the Tamil memorialization, as well as Tamil mourning, Tam-
victims to commemorate their lost and loved ones, who il joy, Tamil culture, Tamil heritage is surveilled, policed,

AND GENOCIDE: THE FIGHT disappeared during the Mullivaikkal massacre. criminalized, and erased. In the past decade, the Sri Lank-
an government and authorities have removed, erased,
“REGARDLESS OF
PRACTICES BEING

FOR EELAM TAMIL MONUMENTS

Uprooted from their lands, a large part of the Eelam replaced, and destroyed traces of Tamil history, traces of HELD IN PUBLIC OR
PRIVATE, TAMIL MEMO-
Tamil diaspora across the world have learnt to preserve the injustices and genocide perpetuated against the pop- RIALIZATION, AS WELL
memories of their people through commemoration days ulation. Sinhala supremacism has taken a toll on dictating AS TAMIL MOURNING,
TAMIL JOY, TAMIL CUL-
as their connection with their homeland is rendered who can be remembered and how: the right of the Tamil TURE, TAMIL HERITAGE
difficult, if not impossible. Many stateless refugees left population to commemorate is constantly being violated. IS SURVEILLED, PO-

BRINTHA KONESHACHANDRA their homes bringing little to no personal belongings with
them. For my family, my mother’s stories were our unique
bridge to the homeland. In the past years, my personal
connection to my heritage has also been fulfilled through
yearly commemoration days. Commemorating Maveer-
ar Naal, the Remembrance Day of the Liberation Tigers
of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) militants who fought for the libera-
tion of Tamil Eelam on November 27, or Mullivaikkal Re-
membrance Day on May 18, was all that was left for me,
an Eelam Tamil woman, living far from my community,
to connect with my land, people and history. On these
days, my body goes through a process of mourning for
the pain and suffering that my people went through, and
the intergenerational traumas of genocide that I also car-
ry on my shoulders. It is a day where I remember collec-
tively with my diaspora, it is a day of collective resistance
against the past and current oppression of our people.
While the psyche of the Eelam Tamil diaspora is partly
centered around these remembrance days, the Mul-
livaikkal memorial, erected in 2019 ten years after the
last stages of the state-sponsored genocide, has also
become part of the Tamil psyche in Eelam. Across the
world, it is part of the Tamil identity, a symbol of Tamil
LICED, CRIMINALIZED,
AND ERASED.”
Attempts to remove and erase Tamil history and pres-
ence on the island have multiplied since the ‘formal’
end of the war. In postwar Sri Lanka, Eelam Tamils are
not anymore massacred at a large scale, but remain
supervised and surveilled while celebrating events like
Thai Pongal, which is a Hindu harvest festival observed
by Tamil Hindus and non-Hindus. The Scottish-trained
Sri Lankan Special Task Force (STF) troops have also
intervened during numerous private Maveerar Naal
remembrance events, and destroyed memorial struc-
tures. Not a single memorial in memory of the Tamil ci-
vilians was constructed by the government. Meanwhile,
violence resides within Sinhala monuments deliberately
erected across the lands where the Tamil reside, and
“ON THESE DAYS,
across the North and East, Buddhist temples are re-
MY BODY GOES
placing Hindu temples — as was recently the case in THROUGH A PRO-
CESS OF MOURNING
the Kurunthurmalai region. A process of Sinhala colo-
FOR THE PAIN AND
nization is at stake, one where Sinhala supremacists SUFFERING THAT
establish their dominance and hegemony spatially, ma- MY PEOPLE WENT
THROUGH, AND THE
terially and in the rewriting of history. One where Eelam INTERGENERATION-
Tamil monuments of commemoration are progressively AL TRAUMAS OF
GENOCIDE THAT I
being erased and replaced (see Sinthujan Varathara- ALSO CARRY ON MY
jah’s article in The Funambulist 11 Designed Destruc- SHOULDERS.”

“Yalpanam, Jaffna.” /
Artwork by Suman
Nissi, created in the
wake of the demolition
of Mullivaikkal Memori-
al, on January 8, 2021.
On January 8, 2021, the Sri Lankan army conducted
the bulldozing of the Mullivaikkal Memorial on the
University of Jaffna in Eelam. This destruction is one
of many against the markers of Tamil commemora-
tion of the genocide, as Brintha Koneshachandra
explains in this text.
The Mullivaikkal Memorial used to stand still in the gar-
den of the University of Jaffna. From afar, Eelam Tamil
students, professors, lecturers, staff members, and vis-
itors could see the monument’s stone arms and hands
reaching out from the soil. These were arms and hands of
the tens of thousands of Tamil civilians massacred in the
village of Mullivaikkal by the ethnocratic Sri Lankan gov-
ernment. Located on the North Eastern coast of Eelam,
the village of Mullivaikkal was designated as a no-fire
zone by the Sri Lankan government during the final stag-
es of the war. In the first five months of 2009, between
70,000 and 140,000 Tamils were gathered and entrapped
in this no-fire zone, before being executed by the Sri
Lankan army. Mullivaikkal marked the culmination of the
state-sponsored genocide targeting the Tamil population
suffering in the genocide, as well as resistance against
oppressions through remembrance. Not even two years
after its construction, the monument was deliberately de-
stroyed by authorities with assistance from the military on
January 8, 2021. In bulldozing the memorial, the right to
commemorate and sentiments of the Tamil people was,
once again, bulldozed as well.
Since its independence from British colonization, Sri
Lankan political sphere has been dominated by a Sin-
hala supremacist vision, one that has materialized, and
continue to materialize itself, through anti-Tamil violence
and subjugation of Tamil existence, bodies and history
to a Sinhala hegemonic governance. Even though war
mechanisms of oppression and genocide ended in
2009, different methods of oppression against the Eelam
Tamil population were elaborated upon and now well
established in the country. War tactics of genocide and
bombings were rapidly replaced by technologies of re-
pression visible in space, in the built enviroment, through
internal Sinhalese colonization but also by the constant
systemic discrimination including surveillance, intimida-
tion, arrest and imprisonment of Tamil people. These
new technologies of repression continue to interfere dai-
ly with processes of memorializing struggle for the Tamil
population in Eelam.
tions, 2017). The process of undoing and erasure is
highly political as the government dictates and wishes
to rewrite the course of history.
Tamil heritage is being subjugated at the hands of an
ethnocratic state whose purpose is to remind the popu-
lation that they will have no agency and autonomy over
their own lands. Years after years, the resistance of Eelam
Tamils performed through commemorational gatherings,
or around memorial structures is being banned or erased,
the ethnocratic state showing, once again, that they will
have no agency and autonomy even over their psyche
and collective memory making. The Sri Lankan state has
firmly adopted a political choice going against memorial-
ization, where there is no space given to honour freedom
fighters, soldiers, and civilians. When a people’s right to
memory is banned, a people’s right to memory is denied.
The evidences of internal Sinhalization and active denial
of Tamil memorialization all lead to the reality where the
war genocide of Eelam Tamils has become replaced by a
cultural genocide of the population in postwar Sri Lanka.
Indeed, removing and replacing the Mullivaikkal Memo-
rial is part of the Sri Lankan government’s wider agenda
to erase the injustices targeting the Tamil population and
to erase this particular part of history, since the Sirisena

2 THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// NEWS FROM THE FRONTS THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 3

“As Long as One of
Us Remembers.”
/ Artwork by
@artists.muse, 2021.
Wickremesinghe regime and today continuing under Ma-
hinda Rajapaksa’s despotic governance. Nevertheless, the
genocide of the Tamil people is in fact eminently present
in the Eelam Tamil collective consciousness and memory.
Instead of working toward justice and reparations toward
the victims and giving space for memorialization, the Sri
Lankan ethnocratic government continues to adopt political
positions of dominance over the Tamil minority.
“TODAY, IN POSTWAR
A parallel needs to be drawn between the destruction of
SRI LANKA, UNDER the Mullivaikkal Memorial at the University of Jaffna and
GOTABAYA GOVER-
the burning of the Jaffna library in 1981. The latter was one
NANCE, AUTHORI-
TIES CONTINUE TO of the most prestigious libraries on the Asian continent,
ERASE, REMOVE
containing unique collections, manuscripts and archival
AND DESTROY THE
TAMIL PEOPLE AND sources of Tamil history. Prior to its destruction, Sri Lanka
THE TAMIL HISTORY, was in the midst of an election campaign and tensions had
FROM WHICH THE
TAMIL GENOCIDE IS already risen. The Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF)
PART OF.” representing the Tamil community stood for the creation
of an independent state. In order to gain control over the
electoral results, the United National Party (UNP) com-
missioned officers of the Sri Lankan police force and the
paramilitary to intimidate Tamil voters. On May 31, 1981,
the day of the burning of the Jaffna library, Sri Lankan cab-
inet ministers Cyril Mathew and Gamini Dissanayake, sent
officers of the Sri Lankan police forces to disrupt a rally or-
ganized by the TULF. Tension rose, confrontations started
and three Sinhalese police officers were shot. Later on that
day, and for two days, organized mobs of Sinhala suprem-
acists set fire to the library, destroyed the TULF headquar-
ters, attacked and destroyed many homes, shops, Tamil
4 THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// NEWS FROM THE FRONTS
cultural centers and religious figures. This organized act
of destruction was an ethnic biblioclasm against the Tamil
people, the starting point of the decades of ethnic cleans-
ing that followed. Symbolically, through this violent act, the
Sinhala supremacists wished to burn to the ground and
erase the presence, the history and heritage of the Tamil
people from the island in 1981. Today, in postwar Sri Lan-
ka, under Gotabaya governance, authorities continue to
erase, remove and destroy the Tamil people and the Tamil
history, from which the Tamil genocide is part of.
In the early 2000s, the library was reconstructed by state
authorities. After days of hunger strikes and protests led
by Jaffna University students, Jaffna University Vice-chan-
cellor Sivakolundu Srisatkunarajah announced that a new
monument will be rebuilt: a peace monument; one where
memory is not allowed to live, one where the history of
the massacre of tens of thousands of Tamils can not be
honored. Today, a new memorial will be built to satisfy
the Sinhala hegemonic vision and narrative of unity and
peace, over the ruins of a memorial structure that was built
in memory of the genocide of a people. ■
Brintha Koneshachandra is an Eelam Tam-
il-French illustrator, poet and PhD candidate
based in unceded land of Tiohti:áke, Montreal.
Her research focuses on the relation between (ur-
ban green) space and race in the city of Detroit.
Her artistic work explores Tamil history, Tamil
identity and social injustices at large.
THE ENDURING STRUGGLE
FOR SAHARAWI LIBERATION
SIDAHMED JOULY
Girl carrying the SADR
(Western Sahara) flag
during the 41th anni-
versary of proclamation
In December 2020, the United States recognized the
of the Saharawi Arab
Democratic Republic settler colonial sovereignty of Morocco over West-
in 2017. / Courtesy of ern Sahara. In exchange, the Moroccan monarchy
Saharawi Voice.
normalized its relationship with another settler co-
lonial state, Israel. Saharawi writer Sidahmed Jouly
provides us with a synthesis of the last 45 years of
struggle for the liberation of the country.
The conflict in Western Sahara is one of the oldest run-
ning conflicts in Africa, which has resulted in the longest
refugee crisis in the continent. Western Sahara used to be
known as “the Spanish Sahara,” as it was colonized by
Spain from 1884 to 1975. Unlike many European coun-
tries, Spain left this former colony without decolonizing it.
Neither did the Spanish State enable the Saharawi people
of their right to self-determination, as the United Nations
(U.N.) has constantly had asked for since the territory was
listed as a non-self-governing territory since 1963, pend-
ing the decolonization process. Instead, in a move that
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// NEWS FROM THE FRONTS
NEWS FROM
THE FRONTS
goes against international law and legality, Spain decid-
ed to divide the territory between Morocco and Maurita-
nia who both claimed state sovereignty over our country.
These claims were refuted by the International Court of
Justice(ICJ), whose advisory opinion on Western Sahara
in 1975 called for the viability and implementation of U.N.
resolutions that underscore the right of the Saharawi peo-
ple in self-determination and independence.
After its illegal partition, the Saharawi territory became
a battlefield for the indigenous Polisario Front — recog-
nized by the U.N. as the political representative of Western
Sahara — which is forced to push back new invaders. In
1979, Mauritania relinquished its occupied southern lands
to sign a peace treaty with the Polisario in Algiers, recog-
nizing Western Sahara as an independent country. How-
ever, the territory that Mauritania had withdrawn from was
subsequently invaded and annexed by Morocco, further
escalating military confrontations.
5
 “SMALL TOWNS, ITS
RESIDENTS IDENTIFY
THEMSELVES AS
NEGROS, MORENOS,
AFROMEXICANOS,
OR AFROMESTIZOS,
AWARE THAT THE five refugee camps that were set up during the 1970s in and nationalism, 2011). Palestine and Western Sahara are
TERM MESTIZO OR
the middle of the Algerian desert, near Tindouf. These two connected as clear cases of occupation in international
MEXICAN, BY ITS
CONSTRUCTION, groups of people are separated by the longest active mili- law, as well as in the ways both colonizing occupations in
NEGATES THEIR tary wall in the world known as the Berm, described by the these lands utilize the same tactics in order to assert their
EXISTENCE.”
Saharawis as the Wall of Shame. This wall is surrounded legitimacy. Separating walls are one of these tactics used
by millions of landmines that still claim the lives of many on both occupied lands to divide people from each oth-
Saharawis and their animals. er. Both occupiers are also defended by imperial powers
Left. People celebrat- that make sure to remain unpunished. Israel and Morocco
ing the Saharawi Lib-
eration Army soldiers,
The illegal exploitation and extraction of Western Sahara both use media propaganda, foreign investments, and
returning from the front Since then, about two thirds of the territory has been oc- potential oil reserves that belong to a small indigenous mineral, fishery, and other resources has been criticized by settlers to create a de facto occupation that the rest of the
lines in 2020. Right.
cupied by Morocco and the rest is under Polisario control, population. In addition to receiving support from France many international institutions including U.N. legal top coun- world normalizes, whilst the rightful owners — Saharawis
Aerial shot (2019) of
Smara refugee camp, which is considered by Saharawis as liberated territories. at the level of the U.N. Security Council, the Moroccan sel, Hans Corell in 2002, and the European Court of Justice and Palestinians — continue to suffer on a regular basis in
one of the six Saharawi regime has always felt emboldened to move forward with in 2016 and 2018. These institutions, in illustration, have refugee camps, in exile, or on their occupied lands. How-
refugee camps located
near Tindouf in south- After 16 years of war, the UN brokered a ceasefire in 1991 its occupation. They gradually consolidated it through in- publicly rendered their judgment in considering Morocco ever, I still believe in international solidarity and people’s
west Algeria. / Courtesy and the two parties, namely Morocco and the Polisario volving many international companies to take part in the and Western Sahara as distinct and separated territories. power to push for change and support the Saharawi fight
of Saharawi Voice.
Front, signed a peace agreement for which a referendum plundering of Saharawi people’s natural resources and Consequently, any exploitation of occupied Western Saha- for our lands and self-determination, to raise more aware-
of self-determination was the ultimate goal. For these lands in order to legitimize its de facto occupation. Mean- ra’s resources must take into account the approval and the ness about Western Sahara such as through academia
“THEY GRADUALLY purposes, the U.N. set up a peace mission under the while, the indigenous Saharawis live in extreme poverty benefits of the Saharawi people or their legitimate represen- and the media. Much can be done in order to help shed
light on this neglected struggle issue. ■
CONSOLIDATED IT
THROUGH INVOLVING
acronym of MINURSO (U.N. Mission for Referendum in either in refugee camps that are dependent on human- tatives. However, many companies and the E.U. itself still
MANY INTERNATION- Western Sahara). This mission has been tasked to mon- itarian aid or in the occupied territories under brutal op- deliberately takes part in this illegal plundering and ignores
AL COMPANIES TO
TAKE PART IN THE
itor the ceasefire and, as its name suggests, to organize pression and blockade. the verdicts that their own courts have issued before. Their Sidahmed Jouly is a known civil society actor and
PLUNDERING OF a free and democratic referendum through which the interests are undoubtedly driven by economic and strategic Campaigner originally from Western Sahara. He cur-
SAHARAWI PEOPLE’S
people of Western Sahara would decide on their future. On November 13, 2020, the Moroccan army carried out benefits with Morocco, showing what is prioritized above rently lives in Sahrawi refugee camps in southwest-
NATURAL RESOURC-
ES AND LANDS IN OR- Under James Baker’s tenure as the U.N. secretary gen- a military operation against some Saharawi civilians who the international law and the lives of Saharawis. ern Algeria with his family who fled from Western Sa-
DER TO LEGITIMIZE eral’s special representative to Western Sahara, the list of were protesting in the buffer zone of the Guerguerat region, hara during the war in 1975. He graduated from Chlef
ITS DE FACTO OCCU-
PATION. MEANWHILE, eligible voters was finalized and the voters were ready to thus violating the ceasefire agreement and causing the war As a Saharawi who spent most of my life living in refugee University with a Master degree in international rela-
THE INDIGENOUS cast their votes in the referendum ballot boxes. Fearing to break out again in Western Sahara, despite 29 years of camps in exile southwest of Algeria, I have always felt that tions. He has done extensive work and collaboration
SAHARAWIS LIVE IN
EXTREME POVERTY
an overwhelming vote in favor of independence, Morocco truce between Saharawi and Moroccan armies. Never- our struggle is linked to other struggles against injustice in advocacy and humanitarian work with OXFAM.
EITHER IN REFUGEE began setting up a series of obstacles, in order to abort theless, Morocco still denies the war for political and eco- and occupation around the world, such as in Palestine
CAMPS THAT ARE
DEPENDENT ON
all attempts to hold the promised referendum. nomic reasons, such as concerns around uprisings in the and West Papua. There are many similarities between
HUMANITARIAN AID occupied territories, also fears that the dozens of foreign the two causes of Palestine and Western Sahara, and al- “AS A SAHARAWI WHO SPENT
OR IN THE OCCUPIED
The Polisario then decided to self-proclaim its republic in companies operating illegally in Western Sahara will leave. though the occupation in Western Sahara draws consider- MOST OF MY LIFE LIVING IN REFU-
TERRITORIES UNDER
GEE CAMPS IN EXILE SOUTHWEST
BRUTAL OPPRESSION 1976, known as the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic ably less attention than the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Left. Anti personnel
OF ALGERIA, I HAVE ALWAYS FELT
landmine in liberated
AND BLOCKADE.” (SADR), declared in order to fill the political vacuum after The situation in Western Sahara under the Moroccan these two causes have much in common. This is in spite THAT OUR STRUGGLE IS LINKED
territories of Western
the Spain withdrawal. The SADR now enjoys full member- occupation has always been vehemently criticized by of the tireless attempts by Morocco to paint the Saharawi TO OTHER STRUGGLES AGAINST
Sahara (2015). /
INJUSTICE AND OCCUPATION
human rights organizations and public demonstrations, Courtesy of Saharawi
ship within the African Union and is widely supported by struggle as a separate issue, whilst proclaiming support AROUND THE WORLD...”
Voice. Right. The Berm
countries that endured the atrocities of European colonial- which are generally being led by Saharawi women. These for Palestine (see Rana B.Khoury, Western Sahara and (Moroccan militarized
ism and anti-communist Cold War attempts of destabili- forms of dissent have always been met with Morocco’s Palestine: A comparative study of occupation, colonialism wall) in occupied West-
ern Sahara. / Photo by
zation, who had fought back with their own anti-colonial police brutality, trying with all means to keep the territory Askelaadden (2005).
movements, such as South Africa, Algeria, Venezuela, closed in front of journalists and international observers.
Cuba, and others. Moreover, the MINURSO is one of few U.N. missions in
the world that does not have the mandate of monitor-
Despite its fight for self-determination, Western Sahara ing and reporting human rights violations. This is due
does not often make the world media headlines. Howev- to the role played by France within the security council,
er, on December 10, 2020, the issue of Western Sahara to obstruct any action that may harm Morocco’s image.
has gained a lot more international media coverage after France’s complicity, therefore, leaves the Saharawis un-
Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would recognize der the mercy of Moroccan occupier forces.
Moroccan sovereignty over the country in exchange for
Morocco normalizing its relationship with Israel. The people of Western Sahara have been divided for more
than 40 years. Whilst some continue to live in the occupied
Western Sahara’s wealth of natural resources has turned territories as a minority amongst a majority of Moroccan
from a blessing to a target for imperialist extraction: these settlers who flooded their country after the military inva-
include phosphate mines, fishing resources as well as sion, the other portion of Saharawis are scattered between

6 THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// NEWS FROM THE FRONTS THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 7
NEWS FROM TRANSFORMATIVE SOLIDARITY IN
THE FRONTS
TIMES OF SUBAERIAL WARFARE FROM
THE CAUCASUS TO THE LEVANT “The proposed public reprimand of an ally in the course Yet, in a countermove under Stalinist policies, not so long
of a war would be an act which is unprecedented in his- after the Caucasian republics join the newly formed Union
tory. Our only aim is to keep Turkey on our side until the of Socialist Soviet Republics, Stalin steers the USSR in a
PANOS APRAHAMIAN AND JESSIKA KHAZRIK end of the war, no matter whether as a result Armenians rightward turn and relinquishes Kars to Turkey, Nakhiche-
do perish or not. If the war continues much longer, we will van and Artsakh to Azerbaijan, in an attempt to please the
need the Turks even more.” (Chancellor of the German neighboring Ataturk regime. The same history has persisted
Empire Bethmann-Hollweg) with imperial powers drawing arbitrary borders, displacing
Considered at that time as the populations, and then collapsing. This process that always
largest rally in the history of the We are now in the past century, in the early 1920s. The already begins and concludes with new extractions, military
USSR, this protest on February
20, 1988 in Yerevan brought Great War and the Armenian Genocide are drawing to alliances and global flows of capital, nurtures ethnic strife,
together hundreds thousands an end. As the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire begins to solidifies national identities and enhances paranoia.
in demand of the unification of
Nagorno-Karabakh with Arme- reterritorialize itself into the modern Turkish ethnostate
nia. The collectively held banner through genocide, the Qajar dynasty in Persia is re- We are now in the late 1980s and we are fast approach-
reads in Russian, “Armenians
are not extremists! Extremists are
placed by the Pahlavis. Concurrently, the Russian Em- ing the collapse of the Soviet Empire. A time of massive
not us!”. On that day, the NKAO pire withdraws from the Southern Caucasus post-Bol- change across the Eastern Bloc as the Soviet Order and its
Supreme Council in Stepanakert
shevik Revolution, and many of the region’s populations satellite states start to dissolve. Nationalism and ethnic strife
issued a request to transfer
the region to Soviet Armenia. clash in ethnic skirmishes while each tries to create its return with a vengeance, (re-)drowning Eastern Europe, the
One week after this protest, the own independent republic. The violence at the core of Balkans, and the Caucasus in blood. The Armenian pop-
Sumgait pogrom began with
mobs of Azerbaijanis forming into the racist, suppressive, militarist and exclusionary order ulation of Artsakh, which had previously held a successful
fractions, assaulting and mur- of the nation-state makes itself visible. referendum for local autonomy that was later overturned by
dering thousands of Armenians
on the streets, breaking into their bigger regional powers, finds itself being invaded by the “AS WE REALIZE ONCE
AGAIN THAT WAR
apartments, setting them on fire We are now specifically on November 30, 1920, one Azerbaijani armed forces after a series of anti-Armenian CANNOT BE PUT TO
and stealing furniture. A lack of
concern from local police depart-
hundred years after the most recent eruptive war. We are pogroms take place in Sumgait, Baku, and other areas with AN END WITHOUT THE
TRANSFORMATION
ments, and in many cases secret reading in the December 7, 1920 issue of Armenian news- considerable Armenian communities. Despite this authori-
OF THE ECONOMY, I.E.
support from them, allowed the
paper Communist, the “Declaration of the Revolutionary tarian overturn of democratic will from the seats of power in WITHOUT PUTTING AN
pogrom to continue for three
END TO CAPITALISM
days. As protection, many Azer- Committee of the Azerbaijan SSR on the Recognition of Moscow and Baku, the Armenians of Artsakh succeed at
AND MILITARIZATION,
baijani friends, neighbors, and the of Nagorno Karabagh, Zanghezour and Nakhichevan keeping the invading armies at bay and establish an auton- WE SEEK TO COLLEC-
even strangers secretly hosted
Armenians into their houses or as Integral Part of the Armenian SSR.” Five years after the omous republic that remained officially unrecognized. TIVELY REMEMBER
AND CONFRONT HOW,
drove them out of the city. classical militarist position of chancellor, we find hope in IN AN ATTEMPT TO
the following statement issued by the chairman of the rev- This indigenous land preservation was made possible with CARVE OUT A SAFE
ZONE IN THE FACE
olutionary committee of Azerbaijan: the support of voluntary brigades from Artsakh, Armenia, OF ONSLAUGHT, THE
A few months after the Turkish-backed Azeri invasion extermination through genocide and rape. Their houses, and the Diaspora, as well as the post-Soviet remnants of the NASCENT BRIGADE
REPRODUCED THE
of Artsakh, we wanted to reflect on the question of sol- communal spaces, and immovables were plundered November 30, 1920 Armenian military. As we realize once again that war cannot
VIOLENCE OF ETHNIC
idarity with the Armenian people, or the lack thereof. and destroyed in order to prevent any possible return. To ALL, ALL, ALL! be put to an end without the transformation of the economy, CLEANSING IT SOUGHT
TO ESCAPE AND
Panos Aprahamian and Jessika Khazrik ask what does i.e. without putting an end to capitalism and militarization,
KILLED MANY OF THE
this solidarity look like for those whose “subaerial” sky Time and time again and with every manned displace- On behalf of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan, we we seek to collectively remember and confront how, in an AZERI AND KURDISH
is filled with the same terrifying sound of Israeli-built ment, we have learned that borders emerge out of the in- declare to the Armenian people the decision of the Revcom attempt to carve out a safe zone in the face of onslaught, the POPULATION LIVING
BETWEEN ARMENIA
drones in Gaza, Beirut, Artsakh, and Armenia. vasive and taxonomic (dis-)order of war. While searching [Revolutionary Committee] of Azerbaijan of November 30: nascent brigade reproduced the violence of ethnic cleans- AND ARTSAKH.”
for a transformative solidarity with the power to disrupt, we ing it sought to escape and killed many of the Azeri and
At the advent of the past century, as most of our ter- continue to witness and re-learn how war is not a sudden The Workers-Peasants Government of Azerbaijan, hav- Kurdish population living between Armenia and Artsakh.
ritories were being reconfigured into the exclusionary and temporary paroxysm of violence that begins and ends ing received the message on the declaration of the Sovi-
order of the nation-state, millions of our ancestors were within a finite period of time. War cannot be but inherently et Socialist Republic in Armenia on behalf of the rebelling We are now in 2020 and fascism, decades in the making,
pogrommed from home. Our Armenian ancestors na- toxic and extremely high-cost. It stays and seeps into our peasantry, welcomes the victory of the brotherly people. has fully taken over Turkey at a time when a frail democracy
tive to Eastern Anatolia, the Southern Caucasus, and everyday environment, economy, infrastructure, and tech- From this day on, the former borders between Armenia and began to blossom in Armenia. Along with the Republic of
Iranian Azerbaijan, found themselves divided between no-politics. As we face today, through capitalism’s ecocid- Azerbaijan are announced abrogated. Nagorno-Karabagh, Artsakh, these two models of democratic self-governance
three regional empires (Ottoman, Persian, and Rus- al practices, the threat of genocide on a planetary-scale, Zangezour and Nakhichevan are recognized as an integral and local autonomy cannot be assented by such modes of
sian) while facing the greatest systematic extermination the dispossessive mechanisms of genocide and ecocide, part of the Armenian Socialist Republic. national and military alliance in the Caucasus, as it is filled
campaign in our tragic history. Concurrently, in Seyfo or experienced through war and its extractivist incentives and with separatist movements. Artsakh and the new demo-
Assyrian Genocide, our Chaldean ancestors, Assyrian, devastations, continue to loom over our communities. Long live brotherhood and union of the workers and peas- cratic order in Armenia need to be punished so things
and Aramean neighbors, indigenous to Eastern Anato- ants of Soviet Armenia and Azerbaijan! can indefinitely go on as they are. Now, President Recep
lia, Upper Mesopotamia and Northwestern Iran, and in We are now in December 7, 1915, we read the following Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey wants to revive the born-out-of-
the Anatolian Greek Genocide, our Ottoman and Pontic from the chancellor of Germany around the Armenian N. Narimanov, Genocide settler-colonial entity he now oversees as the
Greek neighbors native to Anatolia, faced systematic Genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire: Chairman of the Revcom of Azerbaijan Guseinov. sole necropolitical sovereign over the Southern Caucasus,

8 THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// NEWS FROM THE FRONTS THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 9
 Western Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Balkans.
Necropolitics, the politics of death, grants the sovereign the
ultimate power to decide who gets to live and who gets to
die on its territory. Some of the regional populations reject-
ing that fate have resorted to armed resistance. Some cre-
ated minuscule and landlocked republics, others formed
semi-autonomous regions with, in some cases, unprec-
edented models of local self-governance and democrat-
“WE ARE PHYSICALLY
FAR FROM ARTSAKH, ic confederalism. This renders the Western narrative that
BUT THE MERE
wants to see in the non-Western Other nothing but a victim
REALIZATION THAT
THE DRONES WE to sympathize with or delineate, uncomfortable.
HEAR FROM BEIRUT
AND THOSE HEARD IN
ARMENIA, ARTSAKH, Now Turkey’s revived fascist expansionism has pushed
AND GAZA ARE PRO- the Aliyev regime of Azerbaijan towards a full-scale as-
DUCED BY THE SAME
ISRAELI POWERS,
sault, backed by the second-largest NATO army — as in
STRIDENTLY SIGNAL Turkey itself, Israeli high-tech unmanned death machines,
TO US THAT WE LIVE
and a plethora of international Jihadis and mercenaries
UNDER THE SAME
EMPIRES OF WAR.” from Syria. This now full-fledged conflict between two so-
called standing armies, unprecedented in the 21st century,
reproduces itself as asymmetric warfare between an un-
der-equipped military and voluntary international brigades
versus a nomadic war-machine reigning fire from the skies
by both manned and unmanned vehicles and on both mil-
itary and civilian targets. High-tech military equipment pro-
vided by Azerbaijan’s two settler-colonial allies, Turkey and
Israel. This exterminating air-raid is aided on the ground by
the Azeri army of course but also by Turkish special forces,
as well as Arab soldiers of fortunes and Azerbaijani minori-
ties thrown at the forefront as cannon-fodder. Despite the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict resembling traditional warfare,
given that it is a clash between two national armies, the
situation on the ground rather resembles forms of conflict
produced out of aerial extermination administered against
a native population by invading armies or on separatist re-
gions on the receiving end of collective punishment by oc-
cupying forces and fascist national projects.
While searching for a transformative solidarity with Artsakh
and with all anti-colonial struggles for self-determination,
“WE TRY TO GRASP
WHAT THE UN-
we hear, from what is left of our homes in Beirut, the violent
MANNED VEHICLES occupation of our subaerial skies. For nearly a year now,
ARE SAYING. THE
they literally drone over our heads in an audible placement
DRONES BLARE,
‘BATTLE TESTED’ IN in the sky. So far, they do not fire, but their sibilant frequen-
PALESTINE. ‘BATTLE cy transports us to the war and now occupation of Na-
TESTED’ IN ARMENIA
AND ARTSAKH. THEIR gorno-Karabagh and its surroundings, to Armenia. This
PRICE SOARS. ‘BAT- sonic warfare reminds us of our comrades in Palestine.
TLE TESTED’ IN OUR
EARS AND IN OUR
We remember that in this deadly global economy of war,
FAMILIES’ AND COM- Israel adds an imperial, empirical and deadly surplus value
RADES’ BLOOD.”
to the arms it produces, fires and trades. We try to grasp
what the unmanned vehicles are saying. The drones blare,
“battle tested” in Palestine. “Battle tested” in Armenia and
Artsakh. Their price soars. “Battle tested” in our ears and in
our families’ and comrades’ blood. We continue searching
10
for a transformative solidarity that devalues war and cap-
italism.Multiple narratives arise with different political,
cultural and ideological backgrounds. This includes the
misleading and ahistorical “both sides” discourse often
used to discredit the resistance from Palestine to Ireland
and beyond. Despite the centenary distance, indigenous
Armenians are still being depopulated from their homes.
Once more, in October and November 2020, our people
in Artsakh had to choose again between genocide and
the imperial loss of their homes, communal spaces and
millennia-old heritage. We are physically far from Artsakh,
but the mere realization that the drones we hear from Bei-
rut and those heard in Armenia, Artsakh, and Gaza are
produced by the same Israeli powers, stridently signal to
us that we live under the same empires of war.
We cannot face the forces of occupation, their toxic alli-
ances, and imminent extractions without an internation-
alist, anti-militarist strategy for a solidarity that transforms
and disrupts the capitalist economy of war and falsifica-
tion. No military can truly disrupt the economy it protects,
and no place can be de-militarized alone. De-miltariza-
tion cannot but work in a transnational endeavor that first
and foremost guarantees it will not place vulnerable pop-
ulations under further danger stripping them from their
meager means to protect themselves and their homes.
Only anti-militarist residents and workers from all sorts of
fields, alliances, and cyphersciphers, can pervasively do
so when the disruption is concurrent, multiple, and recog-
nisant not only of our history of genocide but also of our
history of revolutionary kinship, anti-colonial resistance,
anti-militarist feminisms, and anti-extractivist indigenous
struggles for self-determination. ■
Panos Aprahamian writes, teaches, and makes films
and videos. His practice explores ethnographic fic-
THE PARIS COMMUNE
tion, temporal disjunctions, nonhuman agency, lost
futures, and live-action role-play. He studied the re-
producible image at the Lebanese Academy of Fine
Arts and at the University of the Arts London as a
AND THE WORLD
Caspian Arts Scholar. He is currently an instructor at
the American University of Beirut.
Jessika Khazrik is an interdisciplinary artist, tech-
THE FUNAMBULIST Nº34
nologist, electronic music producer and writer. By
investigating the correlation between the produc-
tion of space and the production of knowledge and
their influence on dwelling and the techno-politics LÉOPOLD LAMBERT, JACQUELINE COUTI, TINGS CHAK, LEILA AL-SHAMI,
of the everyday, she seeks to explore and chal- JOACHIM BEN YAKOUB, GEO MAHER, IRMGARD EMMELHAINZ,
lenge how disciplines manufacture myth, delin- CHARLOTTE GRACE, MOGNISS H. ABDALLAH & HAJER BEN BOUBAKER.
eation and particular modes of attestation. She
works with The Society of False Witnesses.
Barricades of the Paris Commune, April 1871. / Photo by Pierre-Ambroise Richebourg.
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// NEWS FROM THE FRONTS THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD Chinese stamps for the 90th anniversary of the Paris Commune11(1961).
ARTICLES
Chrono-cartography of the
1871 Paris Commune. The
black dotted line indicates the
former outline of the limit of
Paris until 1860. The darker ave-
nues indicate the radical urban
transformations of Haussmann.
The black rectangles indicate
the Commune’s barricades.
The white path and arrows indi-
cate the course of the Versailles
army during the Bloody Week
(May 21-28). The hatched grey
areas indicate blocks where
buildings have been put on
fire, either by the Versailles
bombardment or by arson
from the Communards. / Map
by Léopold Lambert (2014,
updated in 2021).
12
THE PARIS COMMUNE
AND THE WORLD: INTRODUCTION
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT
Welcome to the 34th issue of The Funambulist. For it,
we have decided to celebrate the 150th anniversary of
the Paris Commune. If you live in France, you will know
that we’re far from being the only ones to have this idea:
many new books are being published and events being
organized. What might make our proposition original,
besides the fact that our texts are published in English,
is the sidestep we decided to make. Indeed, we wanted
to associate the months of March, April, and May 1871
in Paris to other space-time — whether they have been
explicitly influenced by the Paris Commune or not — to
decenter not just France from the Commune but also,
to some degree, Paris itself. None of our nine contribu-
tors are specialists of the Paris Commune. Yet, they have
generously accepted to share with us how they perceive
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
some aspects of it — its political function, its spatiality,
its relationship to women, its destruction of monuments,
etc. — through their own expertise on these other space-
time with which we wanted to associate the Commune.
First things first though. What is the Paris Commune?
This introduction will merely synthesize some aspects of
it — drawing from the countless publications that have
been written about it from Karl Marx’s Civil War in France
(1871), all the way to the wave of new books published
for its 150th anniversary. On September 2, 1870, the Em-
peror Napoléon III was made captive by the Prussian
army in Sedan, France, after two months of war. Two
days later, Parisians invaded the Parliament and forced
the declaration of the Third Republic — which ended
70 years later with the Nazi occupation and the active
collaboration of the Vichy Regime. Two weeks later, when
the news was announced in the Carribean colony of Mar-
tinique, an insurrection began in the South of the island,
led by those who were still enslaved by the French Em-
pire 22 years earlier (see Jacqueline Couti’s article in this
issue). Meanwhile, the German army was besieging the
city of Paris, where food and resources are starting to
lack. Despite four months of extreme hardship, Parisians
nevertheless interpreted the surrendering treatise signed
by the French government on March 1, 1871 as treason.
Ten days later, the Prime Minister Adolphe Thiers or-
dered to move the French capital from Paris to Versailles
fearing a proletarian insurrection — a common fear for
the authorities throughout the 19th century. On March
18, the National Guard was prevented by a crowd led
by women from capturing the 227 canons financed by
Parisians themselves. The Guard refused to obey orders
and, instead, fraternized with the people of Paris, joining
them. It was the beginning of two months and ten days
of a proletarian rule over a city detached from the French
nation state: the Paris Commune.
Among the Commune’s immediate decisions were:
the separation of church and state, the implementation
of compulsory, secular, free schooling for children, the
transformation of factories abandoned by their owners
into workers-owned companies, etc. But, as Marx him-
self pointed out, “the greatest achievement of the Paris
Commune was its actual working existence.” Indeed, the
Commune transformed the very form of sovereignty by
creating hyper-local forms of government (to the scale
of the neighborhood, of the arrondissement…) that take
precedence over the centralized form of power. This
model (which precedes the Commune, of course) thus
instils what we may call an “archipelagic sovereignty” in
which each island operates a territorialized form of gov-
ernment, which also belongs to a larger communal iden-
tity (see the interview with Geo Maher about Venezuelan
communes in this issue). If the Commune would have
succeeded in perpetuating its existence at a bigger scale
of time, it would have surely integrated rural islands, as
well as other communes (other cities in France, such as
Toulouse, Marseille or Saint Etienne also attempted to
create their communal existence).
The relationship of the Commune to space, architecture,
and monuments is important to present here. When the
Commune was declared, Paris had just experienced
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
17 years of radical transformations of its urban fabric fol-
lowing the design of Napoléon III and Georges Eugène
Haussmann. Working-class neighborhoods had been
gutted by large avenues, forcing thousands to move out
from them. While the newly built bourgeois buildings en-
sured the replacement of population, the avenues pierce
proletarian neighborhoods, preventing their insurrection-
al defense while maximizing the movement of the count-
er-revolutionary troops and its artillery. This weaponized
urbanism proved deadly during the “Bloody Week” (May
21-28, 1871) as shown on the map on the left page.
The space of the neighborhoods themselves was nec-
essarily affected by this other paradigm of sovereignty:
arrondissement town halls were made available to the
resident associations, neighborhood political and festive
gatherings were frequent if not daily and, when the time of
defense came, each street was defended by its own bar-
ricade — a strategy that will prove its limits during the final
assault by the Versailles army as Charlotte Grace explains
in her contribution. The prolific dimension of this delibera-
tive, constructive, and defensive space is well depicted in
Peter Watkins’ 6-hour-long movie soberly called La Com- “THIS MODEL
(WHICH PRE-
mune (Paris, 1871). But the architecture of the Commune
CEDES THE
consists often less in an architecture of addition than one COMMUNE, OF
of subtraction. This is what the Situationnists (who were COURSE) THUS
INSTILS WHAT
never afraid of superlatives) called “positive holes,” which, WE MAY CALL AN
according to them, allows to characterize the Commune “ARCHIPELAGIC
SOVEREIGNTY”
as “the only realization of a revolutionary urbanism” (Inter- IN WHICH EACH
nationale Situationniste, 1962). ISLAND OPERATES
A TERRITORIAL-
IZED FORM OF
One most spectacular instance of such architectural sub- GOVERNMENT,
WHICH ALSO
traction from the empire’s enforcement is the ceremoni-
BELONGS TO A
alization of the destruction of the Vendôme Column on LARGER COMMU-
NAL IDENTITY...”
May 16, 1871. In front of a gathered crowd, the cylindrical
monument dedicated to the Napoleonic conquests and
at the top of it, the first Emperor himself, fell dramatical-
ly into a pile of manure (see Joachim Ben Yakoub’s text
in this issue for more). But “positive holes” go beyond
the symbolic, and fierce debates occurred within the
Commune when it came to dismantle the imperial and
theocratic infrastructure of the city. For example, the No-
tre-Dame Cathedral, promised to a prophetic fire, was
finally spared by the artists of the Commune. In the final
week of the Commune, some buildings were the target of
strategic arson. The imperial residence, the Palais des Tu-
ileries, was methodically set on fire, followed by the Coun-
cil of State, the Ministry of Finances, the Court of Audit,
the City Hall, the High Court, and the Prefecture of Police.
13

Top. Portraits and official order of
deportation to Kanaky of Communarde
Louise Michel and Kabyle anti-colonial
insurgent Boumzrag el Mokrani (brother
of the Sheikh el Mokrani who initiated
the rebellion). Bottom. Bus stop on the
east coast of Kanaky’s Great Earth. The
painting represents the Great Chief Ataï,
who led the 1878 indigenous Kanak
insurrection against the French occupation.
Communards and Algerians were asked to
fight with the counter-revolutionary colonial
forces. / Photo by Léopold Lambert (2018).
“...JUST TWO
DAYS BEFORE THE
BEGINNING OF THE
PARIS COMMUNE, THE
KABYLE CHEIKH EL
MOKRANI AND THE
SUFI BROTHERHOOD
RAHMANIYYA INITIAT-
ED AN ANTI-COLONIAL
INSURRECTION IN
ALGERIA.”
14
After the Versailles army conquered Paris during the Bloody Week, massacring between
6,000 and 30,000 Communards, all but the Palais des Tuileries was rebuilt. The famous
Sacré-Coeur Basilica was also subsequently constructed on top of the Montmartre hill
to formalize the divine return of “moral order.” Ninety years later, the rebuilt Prefecture of
Police will be one of the sites of another massacre at the core of Paris: the October 17,
1961 police murders of over 200 Algerians demonstrating against a racist curfew taken
against them by the infamous Prefect of police Maurice Papon towards the end of the
Algerian Revolution.
This intensive spatial reading of the city of Paris, reading the geological layers of history,
in particular its colonial history — as we propose to do with Mogniss H. Abdallah and
Hajer Ben Boubaker in this issue — is however insufficient as merely an account of the
many ways through which coloniality is taking place in the Commune’s neighborhoods.
We need to go further and observe how the Commune is itself taking place in a worldwide
colonial continuum. I briefly mentioned the insurrection of Southern Martinique preceding
the Commune of a few months. The news of the formation of the Third Republic also trig-
gered large revolts in Algiers but, in this case, from the lower classes of European settlers,
who formed what would later be called “the Algiers Commune.” The fact that the colonial
status of this “Commune” never seems to be addressed is indicative of the striking blind-
spot of Communards who, for most of them, do not think of their conditions and political
project in opposition to the French colonial empire.
Yet the opportunity for such solidarities however, has always been in reach. Indeed, just
two days before the beginning of the Paris Commune, the Kabyle Cheikh El Mokrani
and the Sufi brotherhood Rahmaniyya initiated an anti-colonial insurrection in Algeria.
For nine months, the Kabyle rebels challenged the occupation of Northern Algeria by
the French State. Their fate ended up being the same as the Communards. Thousands
were executed and the tribes that participated in the great revolt are fined, pushing them
into decades of poverty. Prisoners are judged and, like Communards, are deported to
the two French penal colonies built on Indigenous lands in South America (Guiana) and
Oceania (Kanaky, aka New Caledonia). The few forms of fraternization between Com-
munards and Algerians happened much too late, and on the terms of the colonial au-
thorities. Worse, in 1878 Kanaky, both groups of detainees were offered by the colonial
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
authorities to join the counter-revolutionary effort against
the Indigenous Kanak revolt led by the Great Chief Ataï;
the biggest since the French invasion of the Melanesian
archipelago 25 years earlier. Those who accepted were
given a piece of stolen Indigenous land and became
settlers. Only a few of them refused the deal and ex-
pressed their solidarity with the Kanak fight — among
these few, the anarchist Communarde teacher Louise
Michel. One of the first Kanak independence organiza-
tions created in 1969 is named as a tribute to her: the
Foulards Rouges (Red Scarves) refers to the scarves
that Louise Michel had offered to her Kanak comrades
in the 1870s. In 1975, the other main independence or-
ganization of the time, the Groupe 1878 (named in refer-
ence to the great revolt), published a text in homage to
the Paris Commune under the title “Once Upon a Time,
There was a Great City” (Nouvelles 1878 no. 27).
Indeed, these three seemingly disparate groups of revo-
lutionaries had met in one of the folds of the French co-
lonial continuum. As the participation of most deported
Communards and Kabyles to the settler colonial count-
er-revolution against Kanak fighters has proven, this
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
The result of the French colonial
continuum’s “folds”: deported
Algerians were made settlers in
Kanaky and formed a Muslim
community in Bourail (west coast
of Kanaky’s Great Earth), which
still exists today. Mosque and
Muslim cemetary of Nessadiou
outside Bourail. / Photos by
Léopold Lambert (2019).
type of encounter rarely brings retrospective fantasies of
internationalist solidarity that we would want to see ma- “...THE TIES CRE-
terialized. Similarly, the anti-colonial aspirations of Com- ATED THROUGH-
OUT THE PAGES
munards are too scarce to represent anything else than
OF THIS ISSUE
individual virtuous exceptions. This issue’s aim is not to CONSTITUTE AT-
TEMPTS TO CRE-
convince anyone otherwise or to invent a genealogy be-
ATE A DIALOGUE
tween the Commune and revolutionary constructions in THAT PLACES THE
PARIS COMMUNE
Syria, Mexico, or Tunisia. Rather, the ties created through-
OUTSIDE OF THE
out the pages of this issue constitute attempts to create TRADITIONAL
a dialogue that places the Paris Commune outside of the WHITE EUROCEN-
TRIC LEFT, WHERE
traditional white eurocentric left, where it is usually con- IT IS USUALLY
fined. Instead, we would like to make the Commune one CONFINED.”
of many productive space-times contained within inter-
nationalist imaginaries, toolboxes, and pantheons. With
this in mind, I wish you an excellent read. ■
Léopold Lambert is the editor-in-chief of The Fu-
nambulist. He is a trained architect living in Paris
and the author of three books about the inherent
violence of architecture, in particular in Palestine.
His next book is entitled States of Emergency: A
Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum
(Premiers Matins de Novembre, 2021).
15
ARTICLES FIRESTARTERS: INSURGENT
WOMEN IN THE INSURRECTION
OF SOUTHERN MARTINIQUE working conditions, and social justice erases their Creole
AND THE PARIS COMMUNE identity. In the early days of the French Third Republic,
Martinican women were the first to embrace insurrection-
ist militancy and the grassroots movement against op-
pression. In fact, the idea of the Pétroleuse also flattens
the different experiences of women from the elite and the
JACQUELINE COUTI proletariat who participated in the Paris Commune (March
18–May 28, 1871), whose detractors wielded that term as
a slur to demonize Communardes as unruly and a men-
ace to society, and to minimize their political engagement.
Comparing the rhetoric labelling insurrectionists as unruly
“viragoes” and rejects from both sides of the Atlantic reveals
Martinique to be a magnifying glass that amplifies not only
French oppression and racism but also misogyny and clas-
sism. The interplay of gender, race, and class in colonial re-
pression of women in the aftermath of the 1870 Insurrection
foreshadowed the reactionary backlash that followed the
1871 Paris Commune. The present text calls attention to an
intriguing process of othering and dehumanization which
at fleeting moments becomes visible in the expression of
a masculine suspicion of women that hides a deep-seated
fear and hatred. This misogynistic leeriness, which can be
found both among Martinican men and Frenchmen from
the continent, is integral to the French state. This mistrust
hides a controlling set of bourgeois biases that restrict wom-
en to the roles of submissive mother and wife for the greater
good of the nation. Women who dare to break free from the
shackles of their purported gender roles generate a visceral
hatred — what can be termed a national misogyny — that
always demands retribution for perceived transgressions.
Rambam Hospital.
Technion Institute
Faculty of Medicine The 1870 Insurrection of Southern Martinique:
Studies Building in
Haifa, where Osama The Firestarters ///
Tanous works. / Two events led to the civil unrest that took place in Marti-
Photo by Magiore-
Stock (2019).
nique between September 22 and October 1, 1870, with
the political turmoil in mainland France due to the Fran-
co-Prussian War of 1870-1871 as the backdrop. In Febru-
“Lumina Sophie ary 1870, Léopold Lubin, a Black resident of Le Marin (a
being tried by the War
village in the south of Martinique) and member of a family
Council.” / Artwork
by Bruno Dulthéo for Six months before the Paris Commune, Black people Martinican countryside took to the streets (and fields) to of entrepreneurs, had two violent altercations with Augier
the 150th anniversary of South Martinique revolted against the newly creat- revolt against the bourgeois status quo and profiteering, de Maintenon, a young European (French born off the
of the Insurrection of
South (2020). ed Third Republic’s colonialism. Jacqueline Couti de- crying out for equality, respect, and true democracy. island) commissioner of naval aid. Lubin ended up in
scribes the two revolts on both sides of the Atlantic Martinican women stood at the forefront with their fel- court facing deportation to the penal colony in French
through the specific concept of state misogyny that low insurgents, not only daring to dream of a better and Guiana. One member of the jury that presided over Lu-
murdered, criminalized and deported women of the more just world, but demanding it. bin’s trial, the white Creole (French born on the island)
Commune and the South Insurrection. plantation owner Cleo Codé, known for his reactionary
In her 2000 play Lumina Sophie dite Surprise, about Mar- and racist opinions, publicly boasted of his intention to
A few months before the Paris Commune of Spring tinican women’s participation in the 1870 Insurrection of have the accused convicted. A movement of solidarity
1871, a challenge to the French Empire-turned-Third Southern Martinique, Suzanne Dracius calls the women developed among the rural population already angered
Republic came not from its European heart but, rather, “Pétroleuses of the South.” The anachronistic use of the by socioeconomic disparities and racial discrimination.
from one of its oldest colonies: Martinique. On Septem- term Pétroleuse (female arsonist and pyromaniac), for ru- Many Martinicans in the South, still reeling from their
ber 22, 1870, oppressed working-class citizens in the ral women of African descent fighting for equality, better disappointment in the aftermath of the 1848 abolition of
16 THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
slavery, which had not lived up to their expectations, saw
Lubin’s plight as yet another racial injustice and turned
violent on September 22, after the governor announced
the proclamation of the Third Republic. Codé was the
only casualty among the white elites, but insurrectionists
(including women) followed their enslaved ancestors’
ways of hurting the white elite and set several plantations
on fire and destroyed much property. Thousands of in-
surgents understood the change of regime as a sign that
racial, social, and economic discrimination against them
would finally disappear. The army’s and militia’s respons-
es were swift and brutal. Many insurgents died; others
were arrested and tried in war councils (military trials sim-
ilar to court martials).
Among the insurgents, 38 women were arrested, out of
whom 14 were convicted. Eight of the convicts who were
sentenced to deportation were particularly vilified as unde-
sirable rejects. In the war council proceedings, men from
mainland France deplored the unruliness of these wom- “WOMEN WHO
en, their lack of respect for the law (patriarchal and colo- DARE TO BREAK
FREE FROM THE
nial orders) in general and men (both white and Black) in SHACKLES OF
particular. Even their lawyers depicted them not as leaders, THEIR PURPORT-
ED GENDER
but rather as disparaging, timeless stereotypes of work- ROLES GENER-
ing-class Black women: noisy, hysterical, belligerent. The ATE A VISCERAL
HATRED — WHAT
court documents and the few essays published at the time
CAN BE TERMED
call attention to the layers of prejudice surrounding sex, A NATIONAL MI-
race, and class that condemned these insurrectionists from SOGYNY — THAT
ALWAYS DEMANDS
the outset as “viragoes” and “monsters.” In his 1871 essay RETRIBUTION
Insurrection de la Martinique, the former governor of Marti- FOR PERCEIVED
TRANSGRES-
nique Charles Menche de Loisne portrays the insurgents as SIONS.”
“bloodthirsty.” His text reveals that the revolt was motivated
by political and racial considerations, facts that the military
trials minimized. Like Martinique’s white Creoles and bour-
geoisie, Menche de Loisne denounced the excessive be-
havior and ferocity of the insurgent women whom he finds
“crueler than men.” He especially vilifies the seamstress
and field-worker Lumina Sophie, also known as Surprise.
For her detractors, who accused her of arson and blasphe-
my, the pregnant 21-year-old insurrectionist was an aberra-
tion. Colonial officials took her newborn son from her, and
he died shortly after she was deported to French Guiana.
This vilification of female insurrectionists as monstrous
finds an odd echo in the condemnation that shrouds the
Communardes in infamy.
Women in the Paris Commune
Beyond the Myth of the Pétroleuses ///
The Paris Commune constituted both a reaction to the
French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and the
Prussian siege of Paris, and a manifestation of the oppo-
sition between the republican Paris (favorable to direct
democracy) and the National Assembly with a monarchist
17
 majority that defended representative democracy. For
many women, though, particularly women from the work-
ing class, the insurrection period offered an opportunity
to demand equal rights and promote an inclusive idea of
democracy that would erase gender and class inequali-
ties and discrimination. They were especially against the
exploitation of working-class women.
Women had played a crucial role since the beginning of
the Commune, including during the temporary govern-
ment, in various organizations, clubs, and newspapers.
They could not vote or be a part of the official government
as they could not run for office. And yet, they put their
lives on the line to go on the battlefields as nurses and/
“THE SAME KIND or cooks. Women were present from the beginning of the
OF MISOGYNIS-
hostilities. On March 18, 1871, they used their bodies as
TIC DISCOURSES
shields, putting themselves between soldiers and can-
CHARACTERIZE
THE DEPICTIONS nons to prevent them from removing the artillery that had
OF BLACK WOMEN
INSURGENTS OF been placed in their neighborhood. They also facilitated
MARTINIQUE. IN the erection of barricades throughout Paris and defended
MARTINIQUE, THE
MILITARY TRIALS the city alongside men in the final battle against the Ver-
PROCEEDINGS, sailles army. During the “Bloody Week” (May 21-28, 1871)
TEXTS, AND
DISCOURSES OF
that killed over 20,000 Communards, many women were
THE 1870S MADE killed. The army arrested about 1,000 women; 138 were
IT CLEAR THAT
eventually convicted and punished.
THESE WOMEN
WERE BARBARIC
DEVIANTS; THEY
Contrary to the insurgents in Martinique, who were most-
DID NOT RESPECT
THE MORAL AND ly from the working class, a number of Communardes
SOCIETAL CODES were writers, journalists, and essayists, and were very
AND AS SUCH
COULD BARELY BE active and vocal about their political engagement before,
CONSIDERED AS during, and after the Commune. André Léo edited the
HUMAN.”
newspaper La Sociale; Elizabeth Dmietrieff co-founded
the organization L’union des femmes pour la défenses de
Paris et les soins aux blessés (Women’s Union to Defend
Paris and Care for the Wounded); Paule Mink was a polit-
ical organizer, guest speaker, and leader of political and
anticlerical clubs for working-class Communardes. They
all escaped repression and lived in exile in other Euro-
pean countries. The famous Louise Michel, who was a
teacher deported to the penal colony of New Caledonia,
was eventually granted a pardon. On her return to France,
she was able to write her memoir and share the horror of
the Communardes’ repression. But despite their efforts,
even these elite women were rarely in control of the nar-
rative of their lives and activism. This was particularly true
for the impoverished Communardes who were not lead-
ers and were killed or deported to penitentiary colonies,
reduced to Pétroleuses. Their stories still need to be told.
If the memory of the insurgent women of Martinique fell
into oblivion, the same is not true of the Communardes.
Male French novelists, journalists, and essayists have
disseminated distorted representations of the Commu-
nardes as more evil, more cruel, and more ferocious
18
than men, as “viragoes,” “madwomen,” “prostitutes,” and
“rabid dogs,” since 1870, feeding the mythology that re-
duced the women to deviant Pétroleuses. This mythifica-
tion that fed the French imaginary highlights the power of
literature in the repression of women. Women insurgents
were disciplined not simply through the implementation
of laws, but also at the symbolic level through the con-
struction of a particular imaginary that demonized them
and, in some cases, even erased their existence.
The same kind of misogynistic discourses characterize
the depictions of Black women insurgents of Martinique.
In Martinique, the military trials proceedings, texts, and
discourses of the 1870s made it clear that these women
were barbaric deviants; they did not respect the moral
and societal codes and as such could barely be consid-
ered as human. They did not behave the way they were
supposed to as women and colonized individuals. Some
women were punished more than others, though. While
French military judges were unforgiving to poor and un-
educated women without representation or family con-
nections, Black women had it even worse.
Political Regimes May Change,
but the National Misogyny Remains ///
Looking at the way the French state punished insurrec-
tionists reveals the continuity between the Second Em-
pire and the Third Republic as far gender and class are
concerned. In the 1850s, the Second Empire instituted
deportation for both men and women to the penal colo-
nies of French Guiana on the South American continent
and New Caledonia in the Pacific. Influenced by the Brit-
ish model of penitentiaries in Australia, the French model
had three objectives:
1. To empty coastal penitentiaries on French soil because
the population was not happy about them.
2. To get rid of political opponents of the French state, and
then to get rid of all criminals, (including women).
3. To use convicts as a type of free labor to repopulate
settler colonies such as French Guiana, which was not
doing well after the 1848 abolition of slavery.
The goal of deporting women was to force them to be
useful to society. They would first work off their inden-
tures in some kind of sweatshop; once free, they would
marry other former convicts and be allocated some land
taken from Indigenous Guianese or Kanak. The objec-
tives were very patriarchal in nature; the state wanted to
create families able to produce children to populate the
colonies. In 1869, though, the penitentiaries of French
Guiana were closed to Europeans and restricted to co-
lonials due to the insalubrious conditions and various
hardships causing a high mortality rate among white
women. However, the Third Republic transported seven
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
Pétroleuses to French Guiana in 1873.  Female convicts
continued to be sent to French Guiana until 1883. These
women, who were never able to go back, seem to have
been stripped not only of their Frenchness and citizen-
ship, but also of their whiteness.
Insurgents on both sides of the Atlantic went through mili-
tary trials that sealed their fate as unworthy members of the
French state and forced them to undergo a dehumanizing
process of Othering, transforming them into rejects. How-
ever, there is a distinction to be made between the Com-
munardes sent to New Caledonia but who could some-
times go back to the mère-patrie (mother/fatherland), and
the convicts unofficially labelled Pétroleuses who were sent
to French Guiana. The latter usually had heavier sentences,
often condemned to penal labor for life or a death sentence
commuted to labor for life. In the case of the Pétroleuses,
the state decided that they should go to the worst colony
and almost certain death. Thus we see the inequality be-
tween the female convicts; the ones sent to New Caledonia
had slightly better lives than the ones sent to French Gui-
ana. Far from being sites of rehabilitation, the penitentiaries
in French Guiana were places where the women’s othering
was permanent; no return to France was possible.
Looking at the brutal repression of women in the colonies
following the 1870 Insurrection in Martinique can help us
better understand what happened in France following the
1871 Commune, as far as institutionalized misogyny is
concerned. Brutality, like enlightenment, is ingrained in the
French fabric. Examining the violent repression that quashed
Martinican insurgents and the way in which the army,
as the hand of the state, crushed any type of dissension
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
“The Boulevard
Saint-Germain Pétro-
leuses being tried by
the 4th War Council in
1871.” / Drawings for
Univers Illustré.
allows us to see that the military authoritarianism endorsed
by the French state already forewarned the horrors of the
Bloody Week of 1871. This approach also manifests how
conflictive ideas of the Nation around repression and disci-
pline, equality of rights as well as justice (and particularly of
excluding unwanted elements) often manifested in the col- “INSURGENTS ON
BOTH SIDES OF
onies first. This process of othering fueled by a virulent na- THE ATLANTIC
tional misogyny illustrates how the state decided to strip in- WENT THROUGH
MILITARY TRIALS
dividuals of their Frenchness and/or whiteness. Looking at THAT SEALED
the Insurrection of the South allows us to perceive the sex- THEIR FATE AS
UNWORTHY
ist, gendered, and racist prejudices in French nationalism MEMBERS OF THE
— a gruesome reminder that sexism and racism are often FRENCH STATE
AND FORCED
tightly connected. The oppression of Martinican insurgents
THEM TO UNDER-
and the Communardes demonstrated the Third Republic’s GO A DEHUMANIZ-
exclusionary characteristics. In fact, the new regime, like its ING PROCESS OF
OTHERING”
predecessor, betrayed the French motto “Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity.” Even at its inception, the French Third Republic
was already failing French citizens thirsting for equality and
justice on both sides of the Atlantic. ■
Jacqueline Couti received her Ph.D. from the Uni-
versity of Virginia in the area of French and Franco-
phone Studies and New World/Transatlantic Stud-
ies. She taught at several institutions, including the
University of Virginia and the University of Kentucky.
At Rice University, she is a core faculty member of
the French Studies and the European Studies pro-
grams. She is the author of Dangerous Creole Li-
aisons (2016) and her current book project is enti-
tled Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in
French Caribbean Discourses 1924-1948. She is also
co-editor for a special issue on Afroféminisme for
the Essays in French Literature and Culture (2019).
19
ARTICLES GUANGZHOU 1927:
THE PARIS COMMUNE
OF THE EAST
TINGS CHAK
“Commemorate the
100th anniversary of
the Paris Commune.”
/ Poster from 1971. Some of the parallels made with the Paris Com-
mune in this issue are not necessarily explicitly ge-
nealogical. As Tings Chak explains in this text, the
1927 Guangzhou Commune, on the other hand,
claims such a direct genealogy between the Pari-
sian and Cantonese uprisings.
It was in the Russian autumn of 1920 when Qu Qiubai first
heard L’Internationale, the socialist anthem born of the 1871
Paris Commune. Eugène Pottier, author of the song’s lyr-
ics, was a Communard and elected member of the work-
ers’ state that lasted 72 days in the French capital. Though
written nearly half a century earlier, that song had been ad-
opted only recently as the anthem of the Bolshevik Party.
20
Until today, this song is one of the most translated and
sung anthems of the oppressed around the world. Qu was
attending the third anniversary celebration of the October
Revolution, having traveled through Harbin (China’s north-
ernmost provincial capital) to reach Russia. Fluent in French
and Russian, he was sent to be a correspondent in Mos-
cow for the Beijing Morning News (晨报), covering the early
years of the Bolshevik Revolution.
In 1920, the communist movement in China had barely
begun, but the nation was hungry for its ideas. The colo-
nial plunders of two Opium Wars marked the beginning of
the “century of humiliation,” which saw the ceding of Hong
Kong to the British and the sacking of the Old Summer
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
Palace by Anglo-French forces. The Qing dynasty fell in
1911 only to be succeeded by a puppet Republican gov-
ernment. The country was divided, feudalism and war-
lordism were rampant. The Chinese people were hungry
— physically and spiritually — for its nation to be set free.
Like the thousands of young radicals of the time, Qu was
politicized in the May Fourth Movement of 1919. The Par-
is Peace Conference at the end of World War I saw the
ultimate betrayal of China’s interests — instead of having
its territories returned, the Western Allies would agree to
transfer Shandong Province from the colonial hands of
Japan to Germany. In response, a national movement
led by students in Beijing was born, anchored in anti-im-
perialist, anti-feudal and anti-patriarchal politics. This
awakening gave birth to the New Culture Movement —
with New Youth as its key publication — and an open-
ing for new ideas to guide the country’s transformation.
Among its leaders were Beijing University professors,
Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, who were pivotal in bring-
ing Marxist ideas into China. They both helped found the
Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1921.
The betrayal by Western Allies was felt all the more af-
ter the contributions that the Chinese people made to
the Great War. To meet their growing labor shortages,
French and British states relied heavily on the colonies
across Africa, Indochina and China. 140,000 Chinese
people — mostly peasants — joined the French and Brit-
ish war efforts, while another 200,000 fought on the East-
ern Front with the Russian Red Army. The Chinese Labor
Corps did every task but bear arms: they dug trenches,
worked in munition factories, repaired equipment on the
frontlines, buried the dead. Thousands died, though this
part of history is little told in the West. Around that same
time, there was another group of young Chinese people
heading to France. Originally initiated by Chinese anar-
chists in 1908, the program became formalized into the
Diligent Work-Frugal Study program in 1919 that brought
2000 Chinese workers and peasants to Paris: they would
work in factories in return for their Western education. The
poor living and working conditions politicized many of
these students. On February 28, 1921, 400 Chinese work-
study students demonstrated against further reductions
in bursaries. Events like this one brought the movement
closer to the World War I generation workers as they be-
gan organizing together in the Renault factories from the
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
industrial banlieues (suburbs) of Boulogne-Billancourt
and La Garenne-Colombes. It was from the factory floors
and in the university halls where Marxism would enter the “THOUGH THE
PARIS COMMUNE
Chinese revolutionary thought. Among the students were WAS LARGELY
Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, founders of the European UNKNOWN TO THE
CHINESE PUBLIC
branch of the CPC. Zhou Enlai would serve as Premier UP UNTIL THAT
for 26 years and Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who POINT, THESE EX-
CHANGES AMONG
succeeded Mao Zedong upon the founding of the Peo- WORKERS AND
ple’s Republic of China (PRC). INTELLECTUALS
IN FRANCE, AND
THE IDEOLOGICAL
Bright Flower, Happy Fruit /// OPENING THAT
Though the Paris Commune was largely unknown to THE MAY FOURTH
MOVEMENT
the Chinese public up until that point, these exchanges CREATED, HELPED
among workers and intellectuals in France, and the ideo- BRING THAT HIS-
TORY FORWARD.”
logical opening that the May Fourth Movement created,
helped bring that history forward. Several early commu-
nist leaders studied, wrote and popularized the history of
the workers’ state. In 1920, Li Da, one of the 12 found-
ing members of the CPC, wrote about the need for the
Chinese Revolution to take the path of armed struggle. In
1922, Zhou Enlai wrote in New Youth (新靑年) about the
“short-lived flower” of the Paris Commune and its contin-
uation in the October Revolution. The following year, in the
50th anniversary edition of Shen Bao (申報) — one of Chi-
na’s first modern newspapers — Li Dazhao first explained
the concept of the “commune” to a Chinese public. First
transliterated as kangmiaoen (康妙恩), the revolutionary
concept gained its own form in the Chinese language,
gongshe (公社): a workers’ republic.
“ORIGINALLY INITI-
ATED BY CHINESE
Qu Qiubai was among the communists who not only trans- ANARCHISTS IN
lated essential texts on the Commune’s history but was 1908, THE PRO-
GRAM BECAME
also the first to translate L’Internationale into Chinese, three FORMALIZED INTO
years after he first heard it in Russia. While playing the or- THE DILIGENT
WORK-FRUGAL
gan, he painstakingly revised the lyrics to find a translation
STUDY PRO-
of the word “international” — which only has two syllables GRAM IN 1919
in Chinese (国际) — that could suit the melody. He finally THAT BROUGHT
2000 CHINESE
settled on the transliterated ying te na xiong nai er (英特 WORKERS AND
纳雄耐尔) to keep true to the cadence of the song, which PEASANTS TO
PARIS: THEY
remains in the officially adopted version until today. WOULD WORK
IN FACTORIES
IN RETURN FOR
By this time, Qu had already joined the CPC, upon the THEIR WESTERN
invitation of Zhang Tailei in 1922. A year earlier, Qu also EDUCATION.”
met the Bolshevik leader Lenin, who had studied intimate-
ly the lessons of the Paris Commune. Just months before
leading his own country to revolution, Lenin dedicates a
chapter on it in The State and Revolution (1917):
21
 “The Commune is the first attempt by a proletarian revo-
lution to smash the bourgeois state machine; and it is the
political form “at last discovered,” by which the smashed
state machine can and must be replaced.
We shall see further on that the Russian revolutions of
1905 and 1917, in different circumstances and under dif-
ferent conditions, continue the work of the Commune and
confirm Marx’s brilliant historical analysis.”
In some short months after its publication, the October
Revolution would indeed continue the work of the Com-
mune and confirm Marx’s analysis. In this tradition, the Chi-
nese communists would also carry on these the legacy of
these two revolutionary experiences.
On March 18, 1926, the first mass commemoration of
“THE 1927 COM-
MEMORATION OF the 55th anniversary of the Paris Commune took place
THE PARIS COM- in China. Ten thousands people gathered in the south-
MUNE BALLOONED
IN SIZE, DRAWING ern capital of Guangzhou. They sang L’Internationale and
UP TO ONE MIL- chanted “Vive la Commune de Paris!,” despite the rain. On
LION WORKERS
AND PEASANTS this occasion Mao Zedong writes, if the Paris Commune
ACROSS THE was a “bright flower,” then the October Revolution was the
COUNTRY.”
“happy fruit,” from which more fruits could be born. On the
Commune’s ultimate defeat, Mao points to two reasons:
the lack of a unified and centralized party to lead the work-
ers, and the compromise of showing too much mercy to
the enemy. In his keynote speech at the celebration, the
Cantonese leader, Zhang Tailei, pointed to the concrete ex-
perience that the Paris Commune gave for Chinese work-
ers to take power — a foreshadowing of what would come
in the following year.
From the City to the Countryside ///
The 1920s saw a rapid expansion of the urban working
class: trade unions multiplied, strikes were frequent, and
the CPC’s ranks grew with the organization of the mass-
es. In the industrial centre of Shanghai alone, 1926 saw
169 strikes affecting 165 factories involving over 200,000
workers. In Guangdong, the Seamen’s Strike of 1922
was victorious and the Guangzhou-Hong Kong General
Strike of 1925 lasted 16 months and garnered unprec-
edented mass support from domestic workers, dock-
workers, rickshaw drivers and so-called “coolies.” These
experiences showed how organized labor could threaten
colonial life and capitalist order.
Despite industrialization, China was still an overwhelmingly
peasant society. In his 1926 Analysis of Classes in Chinese
Society, Mao studied the composition of China’s 450 mil-
lion population. The urban proletariat, however quickly it
was growing, still only totalled two million people — the vast
majority of Chinese people were peasants. Mao estimated
22
400 million people were “semi-proletariat” who farmed their
own land, but also earned wages as tenant farmers or wage
laborers: he called them “our closest friends” (Analysis of
the Classes in Chinese Society, 1926).
In this foreboding text, Mao also warned that the national
bourgeoisie forces could not be trusted. At that histori-
cal moment, the CPC was in an alliance with the national
bourgeoisie led by the Nationalist Party (KMT) in a “Unit-
ed Front” against warlordism and imperialism. That piv-
otal year would see an abrupt end to this alliance and
the subsequent “White Terror” of mass killings of com-
munists at the hands of the nationalists and their hired
hands. The mass insurrections of 1927 were attempts at
transforming the symbol of the Paris Commune into a liv-
ing practice in China, and necessitated a strategic shift in
the revolutionary process.
The 1927 commemoration of the Paris Commune bal-
looned in size, drawing up to one million workers and
peasants across the country. At the Wuhan celebration,
labor leader Liu Shaoqi called on the workers to carry on
the spirit of the Paris Commune jointly with the struggle
against imperialism and warlordism. Three days later,
800,000 workers led by Zhou Enlai launched a general
strike in Shanghai that overthrew the warlord-controlled
government and established a Provisional Municipal
Government. Shanghai became the first large city under
the leadership of the CPC. But on April 12, defying the
United Front strategy, the KMT under Chiang Kaishek
would stage a coup and order the slaughter and disap-
pearance of thousands of Communists with the aid of
police of the foreign-occupied areas and criminal orga-
nizations. The CPC-KMT alliance was over. The subse-
quent communist-led urban uprisings from Nanchang (1
August) to Hunan (7 September), and finally to Guang-
zhou (11 December), would all be brutally crushed.
“All Power to the Workers’,
Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Soviets!” ///
At 3:30 am on December 11, 1927, the first attack began at
the police stations. It was led by commander Zhang Tailei,
who was killed in an ambush the following day — he was
29 years-old. A series of coordinated actions took over the
city. Their demands were: “Rice for the workers, land for
the peasants!” “Down with militarist wars!” “All power to the
Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Soviets!” Behind this mo-
bilization was the Guangzhou Soviet, covering an area of
half a million peasants working in conjunction with the urban
workers unions. A war council with a 10:3:3 ratio of workers,
soldiers and peasants, respectively, led the uprising that
lasted three days. Upon taking the city, this body issued
a series of eight decrees, mass printed and distributed.
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
The first three focused on the establishment of Soviet pow-
er, arming of the people and retaliation against counter-rev-
olutionaries. The fourth secured an eight-hour working day
and rights for the waged and unemployed. The fifth dealt
with the economy and the nationalization of industry. The
sixth demand looked at the property of the bourgeoisie.
The seventh to the army wages and restructuring. The
eighth and final demanded the reorganization of trade
unions. At that moment, however, the military organization
of the bourgeoisie was still too strong. Had they held the
city long enough for the peasant reinforcements — a six-
day march away — history may have turned out different-
ly. Ralph Fox, British journalist and communist later killed
fighting in the Spanish Civil War, wrote on the significance
of the “Guangzhou Commune”:
“For three days a great city in an eastern country dominat-
ed by imperialism was seized and held by the oppressed
classes ruling through their Soviet. Technical and military
errors there were, but, politically, no mistakes were made.
The Communist Party of China, which led and organized
the revolt, has reason to be proud of its application of
Lenin’s teachings in the difficult circumstances of China.
The work of the Party in the insurrection showed not only
that it had the closest contacts with workers, peasants,
petty bourgeoisie and soldiers, but that it understood
how to rally the widest masses of all these classes to the
support of the revolution by correct slogans and a sure
political line.” (The Commune of Canton, 1928)
1927 was a turning point for the Chinese Revolution. That
the uprisings were brutally repressed was pivotal in the
CPC’s strategic shift from the cities to the countryside —
towards the creation of a people’s army and towards the
peasantry — “our closest friends”. In Lessons of the Com-
mune (1908), Lenin writes, “And although these magnificent
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
uprisings of the working class were crushed, there will be
another uprising, in face of which the forces of the ene-
mies of the proletariat will prove ineffective, and from which
the socialist proletariat will emerge completely victorious.”
Something similar could be said of the Chinese uprisings.
After that year of White Terror, at the Sixth Congress of the
CPC in 1928, December 11 was officially marked as the
anniversary of the Guangzhou Uprising, which “not only
opened a new chapter for the Chinese Revolution but also
has great significance in the history of world revolution,
with the same value as the great Paris Commune.” Holding
true to this, the Guangzhou Commune has indeed been
remembered, studied and honored since.
2020 was the 93rd anniversary of the Guangzhou Upris-
ing, which became known as the “Paris Commune of the
East.” For this occasion a new “red drama” was produced
in conjunction with an exhibition at the Guangzhou Up-
rising Memorial Hall. The late-Qing dynasty building was
once used as a Police Academy before being transformed
into the seat of the Guangzhou Soviet. In 1987, this site
was turned into an official memorial. At the December 12
commemoration event, students from the People’s Libera-
tion Army school recited the tale of Zhang Tailei, a puppet
show told the story of the Uprising’s female leaders and
“WHEN QU QIUBAI
the great granddaughter of hero Yang Yin tied a red ribbon FIRST HEARD THIS
around a student’s collar — the symbolic passing on of a SONG IN RUSSIA
A CENTURY AGO,
revolutionary legacy from one generation to the next. HE PROBABLY HAD
LITTLE IDEA WHAT
ROLE HE WOULD
Up until the anniversary, the immersive drama was per- PLAY IN BRINGING
formed four times a week. Actors and audience members THIS ANTHEM
FROM THE
alike jointly reenact the uprising, donning costumes and
“BRIGHT FLOWER”
taking up weapon props, all the while singing L’Interna- OF THE PARIS
tionale. When Qu Qiubai first heard this song in Russia a COMMUNE TO
THE GUANGZHOU
century ago, he probably had little idea what role he would COMMUNE.”
play in bringing this anthem from the “bright flower” of the
Paris Commune to the Guangzhou Commune. He never
lived to see the “happy fruit” in the establishment of PRC
in 1949, nor the centenary of the founding of the CPC on
July 1st of this year. In 1935, he was captured, tortured
and executed by KMT forces. It is said that he sang L’Inter-
nationale until his last breath. ■
Tings Chak is an artist, writer, and organizer whose
work contributes to popular struggles across the
Global South. Her current research focuses on the
art of national liberation struggles. She received
her Master of Architecture from the University of
Toronto and is the author and illustrator of Undoc-
umented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention
(2017). She leads the Art Department of Triconti-
nental: Institute for Social Research, and is cur-
rently based in Shanghai.
23
ARTICLES BUILDING ALTERNATIVE FUTURES
IN THE PRESENT: THE CASE
OF SYRIA’S COMMUNES
LEILA AL-SHAMI
Protest in Damas-
cus’ Ruken al-Din
The Paris Commune is 150 years old and the Syrian
neighborhood on
September 10, revolution against the Assad regime, 10 years old.
2012. / Anonymous
Leila Al-Shami uses the link made between the two
photographer.
by assassinated Syrian intellectual Omar Aziz to de-
scribe the Communes of Syria and to question the
lack of solidarity from the Western left.
“We are no less than the Paris commune workers: they
resisted for 70 days and we are still going on for a year
and a half.” Omar Aziz, 2012
On 18 March, 2021, people around the globe will be com-
memorating the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune.
On this date 150 years ago, ordinary men and women
claimed power for themselves, took control of their city
and ran their own affairs independently from the state
24
for over two months before being crushed in a Bloody
Week by the French government in Versailles. The Com-
munards’ experiment in autonomous, democratic self-or-
ganization, as a means to both resist state tyranny and to
create a radical alternative to it, holds an important place
in the collective imaginary and has provided inspiration
for generations of revolutionaries.
On March 18, another anniversary will pass, but surely to
much less acclaim worldwide. On this date a decade ago,
large scale protests were held in the southern Syrian city
of Dera’a in response to the arrest and torture of a group
of school children who had painted anti-government graf-
fiti on a wall. Security forces opened fire on the protesters,
killing at least four, provoking wide-spread public anger.
Over the next few days protests spread across the country,
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
transforming into a revolutionary movement demanding
freedom from the four-decade dictatorship of the Assad
regime. In the following years, as people took up arms and
forced the state to retreat from their communities, Syrians
engaged in remarkable experiments in autonomous self-or-
ganization despite the brutality of the counter-revolution un-
leashed upon them. As early as 2012, Omar Aziz, a Syrian
economist, public intellectual and anarchist dissident, com-
pared the first of these experiments to the Paris Commune.
Omar Aziz was not a mere bystander to the events under-
way in Syria. Living and working in exile, he returned to his
native Damascus in 2011, at the age of 63, to participate in
the insurrection against the regime. He became involved
in revolutionary organizing and providing assistance to
families displaced from the Damascus suburbs under re-
gime assault. Aziz was inspired by the movement’s level
of self-organization in its resistance to the regime. In towns
and neighborhoods across the country, revolutionaries
had formed local coordinating committees. These were
horizontally organized forums through which they would
plan protests and share information regarding both the ac-
complishments of the revolution and the brutal repression
the movement faced. They promoted non-violent civil dis-
obedience and were inclusive to women and men from all
social, religious, and ethnic groups. Revolutionaries were
also organizing the provision of food baskets to those in
need and setting up medical centres to tend to injured pro-
testers who feared going to hospitals due to risk of arrest.
Aziz believed that whilst such activities were an important
means to resist the regime and had indeed challenged its
authority, they did not go far enough. Through their orga-
nization, revolutionaries were developing new relationships
independently of the state based on solidarity, cooperation
and mutual aid, yet were still dependent on the state for most
of their needs, including employment, food, education, and
healthcare. This reality enabled the regime to maintain its
legitimacy and perpetuate its power despite people’s wide-
spread opposition to it. In two papers published in Octo-
ber 2011 and February 2012, when the revolution was still
largely peaceful and most of the Syrian territory remained
under regime-control, Aziz began advocating for the es-
tablishment of Local Councils. He saw these as grassroots
forums through which people could collaborate collectively
to address their needs, gain full autonomy from the state,
and achieve individual and community freedom from struc-
tures of domination. He believed that building autonomous,
self-governing communes, linked regionally and nationally
through a network of cooperation and mutual aid, was the
path towards social revolution. According to Aziz, “the more
self-organizing is able to spread [...] the more the revolution
will have laid the groundwork for victory.”
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
Aziz was not concerned with seizing state power and did
not advocate for a vanguard party to lead the revolution.
Like the Communards, he believed in the innate ability
of people to govern themselves without the need for co-
ercive authority. In his view the new self-organized social “OMAR AZIZ WAS
formations that were emerging would “allow people to NOT A MERE
BYSTANDER TO
take autonomous control over their own lives, to demon- THE EVENTS
strate that this autonomy is what freedom is made of.” UNDERWAY IN
SYRIA. LIVING AND
(“The Formation of Local Councils,” October 2011). Aziz WORKING IN EX-
envisaged that the role of the Local Councils would be to ILE, HE RETURNED
TO HIS NATIVE DA-
support and deepen this process of independence from
MASCUS IN 2011,
state institutions. Their priority would be working togeth- AT THE AGE OF 63,
er with other popular initiatives to ensure the fulfilment of TO PARTICIPATE
IN THE INSURREC-
basic needs such as access to housing, education and TION AGAINST THE
healthcare; collecting information on the fate of detain- REGIME.”
ees and providing support to their families; coordinating
with humanitarian organizations; defending land from
expropriation by the state; supporting and developing
economic and social activities; and coordinating with re-
cently formed Free Army militias to ensure security and
community defence. For Aziz, the most powerful form of
resistance to the state was a refusal to collaborate with
it through building alternatives in the present that prefig-
ured an emancipatory future.
In November 2012, much like so many of Syria’s revolu-
tionaries, Omar Aziz was arrested and died in prison a
short while later. Yet, before his arrest, he helped found
four local councils in the working class suburbs of Da-
mascus. The first was in Zabadani, an agricultural and
touristic town surrounded by mountains, some 50 kilo-
meters from the capital. The town was quick to join the
uprising in March 2011, holding regular demonstrations
calling for freedom and the release of detainees. By
June, young men and women had formed a local coordi-
nation committee to organize demonstrations and carry “LIKE THE FEMALE
out media work to communicate what was happening in COMMUNARDS
OF PARIS, THE
the town to the outside world. Like the female Commu-
WOMEN OF
nards of Paris, the women of Zabadani also created their ZABADANI ALSO
own forums. In mid-2011, the Collective of Zabadani Fe- CREATED THEIR
OWN FORUMS.
male Revolutionaries was formed. They participated in IN MID-2011, THE
demonstrations in huge numbers and called for peace- COLLECTIVE OF
ZABADANI FEMALE
ful civil disobedience. They played a leading role in the REVOLUTIONARIES
Dignity Strike in December 2011, a nation-wide general WAS FORMED.”
strike that attempted to place economic pressure on the
regime. In January 2012 they established Oxygen Maga-
zine, a bi-monthly printed magazine providing analyses
of the revolution and promoting peaceful resistance. The
group later evolved into the Damma women’s network,
which continues to work to support women to build re-
silience and alleviate the impact of violence in conflict
affected communities, as well as providing education
and psychological support for children.
25

Defaced portrait of
Bashar al-Assad in
Raqqa. / Photo by
Beshr Abdulhadi
(April 2013).
Zabadani was liberated by local Free Army militias in
January 2012. Barricades were set up and the town was
brought under the control of its residents. A local council
“HUNDREDS OF
LOCAL COUNCILS was established to fill the vacuum created by the regime’s
WERE ESTAB- departure. The town’s Sunni and Christian residents came
LISHED IN THE
NEWLY CREATED together to elect the council’s 28 members from respected
AUTONOMOUS individuals within the community and to choose a presi-
ZONES PROVID-
ING ESSENTIAL
dent. This was Syria’s first experience of democracy in de-
PUBLIC SERVICES cades. The council established a number of departments
SUCH AS WATER
to administer daily civil life, including for healthcare and
AND ELECTRICITY
SUPPLIES, RUB- humanitarian assistance, as well as a political committee
BISH COLLECTION, involved in negotiating with the regime, and a court to re-
AND SUPPORTING
SCHOOLS AND solve local conflicts. A military committee supervised the
HOSPITALS TO Free Army battalions to ensure security. Whilst the council
KEEP OPERATING.
IN SOME AREAS representatives were all men, the Collective of Zabadani
THEY GREW AND Female Revolutionaries played an important role in sup-
DISTRIBUTED
FOOD.”
porting the Council’s activities. Like the Communards of
Paris, the people of Zabadani, who dreamt of a free and
just society, managed to creatively self-organize their com-
munity independently from centralized state control.
Local autonomy and grassroots democracy was seen
by the regime as its greatest threat. As the government of
Versailles, which had refused to fight against the Prussians,
turned their weapons on the Communards, so the Syrian re-
gime directed all of its might against the people of Zabadani.
The town was subjected to a siege, enforced by the regime
and its ally the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, and daily bomb-
ing led to a dramatic worsening of humanitarian conditions.
Inside the town, revolutionaries also faced challenges from
extremist Islamist battalions which gained in prominence
over time and finally wrested control from the local council in
2014. After a number of failed cease-fire agreements the re-
gime regained control of Zabadani in April 2017, after which
many of its residents were forcibly evacuated.
The experience of Zabadani was remarkable, but not
unique. Over the course of the Syrian revolution, land
was liberated to such an extent that, by 2013, the regime
26
had lost control of around four-fifths of the national ter-
ritory. In the absence of the state, it was people’s self
organization that kept communities functioning and al-
lowed them to resist the regime, in some cases for years.
Hundreds of local councils were established in the newly
created autonomous zones providing essential public
services such as water and electricity supplies, rubbish
collection, and supporting schools and hospitals to keep
operating. In some areas they grew and distributed food.
People also worked together to set up humanitarian or-
ganizations, human rights monitoring centers, and in-
dependent media associations. Women’s centres were
founded to encourage women to be politically and eco-
nomically active and to challenge patriarchal mores. One
example is the Mazaya center in Kafranbel, Idlib, which
taught vocational skills to women, held discussions on
women rights issues, and challenged the threats posed
by extremist Islamist groups. Unions were established for
students, journalists and health workers. In the northern
city of Manbij, revolutionaries established Syria’s first free
trade union, which campaigned for better wages. Cul-
tural activities flourished, including independent film col-
lectives, art galleries and theater groups. In the liberated
town of Daraya, close to Damascus, revolutionaries built
an underground library from books they salvaged from
people’s destroyed homes.
After 2011, before the counter-revolution ground them
down, communities across Syria lived in freedom from
the tyranny of the regime. Power was brought down to
the local level and people worked together for their mutu-
al benefit, often in extremely challenging circumstances,
to build a pluralistic, diverse, inclusive and democratic
society that was the very antithesis of the state’s totali-
tarianism. They were not motivated by any grand ide-
ologies, nor led by any one faction or party: they were
driven by necessity. Their very existence challenged the
myth propagated by the state that its survival was neces-
sary to ensure the fulfilment of basic needs and stability.
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
Syrians showed that they were more than capable of organizing their communities in the
absence of centralized, coercive authority by building egalitarian social structures and rec-
reating social bonds of solidarity, cooperation and mutual respect. There was no one model
or blueprint. Each community organized in accordance with its own needs, unique local
circumstances and values — the very essence of self-determination — essential in a country
which is as socially and culturally diverse as Syria. What they shared was a desire for autono-
my from the regime and a commitment to decentralized, self-managed forms of organization.
“WHILST THE EX-
PERIENCE OF THE
Whilst the experience of the Paris Commune is well known and celebrated in the West, we PARIS COMMUNE
IS WELL KNOWN
must ask why similar experiments happening in our own time in Syria are not. Why have AND CELEBRAT-
they usually failed to attract even the most basic forms of solidarity? Whilst much radical ED IN THE WEST,
WE MUST ASK
theory holds pretensions to universalism, it often pays little attention to other, non-Western WHY SIMILAR
contexts or cultures. When leftists in the West think of Syria, they often think of foreign state EXPERIMENTS
HAPPENING IN
intervention, extremist Islamist groups, and numerous armed brigades jostling and com- OUR OWN TIME IN
peting for power and territory. Little attention is given to ordinary men and women and their SYRIA ARE NOT.
WHY HAVE THEY
courageous acts of defiance against a tyrannical, genocidal regime. These people formed
USUALLY FAILED
the backbone of Syria’s civil resistance. They not only resisted the regime but built a viable, TO ATTRACT EVEN
beautiful alternative to it. Their struggle became multi-faceted. They defended their hard- THE MOST BASIC
FORMS OF SOLI-
won autonomy from the regime and later numerous foreign forces and extremist groups DARITY?”
that saw their existence as the greatest threat. They were shunned and often slandered by
the international community, including by people who consider themselves part of the an-
ti-imperialist left. Their existence became an inconvenience to the grand narratives people
wanted to indulge in regarding Syria’s revolution and counter-revolutionary war. Epistemo-
logical imperialism left little room for Syrian’s lived realities.
As with the Paris Commune, there is much to be learnt from Syria’s revolutionary experience.
In times of insurrection or at times of crisis, new ways of organizing often emerge, which pro-
vide alternatives to the hierarchical, coercive, and exploitative systems practiced by both cap-
italism and the state. Through decentralized self-organization, without the need for leaders or
bosses, but through voluntary association, cooperation and the sharing of resources, people
can transform social relations and effect radical social change. They show us that emancipa-
tory futures can be built in the here and now, even in the shadow of the state. ■
All quotes are taken from Omar Aziz’s two papers on “The Formation of Local
Councils” (2011) as translated by Bordered by Silence, except for the introductory
quote which came from Twitter, now deleted.
Leila Al-Shami is a British-Syrian activist and writer. She is co-author of Burn-
Syrian revolution flag
ing Country: Syrians in Revolution and War (Pluto Press, 2016). She is currently covering the walls of
active with the “100 Faces of the Syrian Revolution” Campaign. a street in Raqqa. /
Photo by Beshr Ab-
dulhadi (April 2013).
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD 27
 RE-ANIMATING THE MONUMENTAL
ARTICLES
SPIRIT OF SOLIDARITY OF THE
PARIS COMMUNE FROM TUNIS
TO RÉUNION ISLAND
JOACHIM BEN YAKOUB
“Paris during the
Commune. Fall of the
Vendôme Column.” In the wake of a plethora of colonial and imperial mon-
/ Drawing by J.
Gaildrau (1871).
ument ceremonialized destructions, the demolition of
the Vendôme Column by the Paris Commune appears
as paradigmatic. Joachim Ben Yakoub reflects on this
key event, and on three recent artworks inspired by it.
In 2021, we are not only commemorating 150 years of the
Paris Commune, but also 10 years of re-emerging planetary
revolts. In the same way the story of Communards cannot
properly be told without mentioning the fall of the Vendôme
Column, the tale of the most recent upsurges of revolt can-
not properly be told without mentioning the intensification
of what Bhakti Shringarpure called a “rage against monu-
ments” (Warscapes, 2012). An archipelago of decolonial
rage is spontaneously bursting out worldwide, targeting
public statues that until today glorify the legacy of slavery, im-
perialism and colonization. From the settler colonial states of
South Africa, the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia
to the heart of the Empire in France, Belgium, and England,
recent protests broke the polis in two. The national heroes
28
sculpted in bronze revered by some, seem to represent
contempt, injustice, oppression and clear cut genocide for
others, rendering visible a deep societal antagonism, going
beyond the classical “left-right” binary opposition.
It is in this light paramount to question, what is still left of the
left and how to reconstruct from this monumental debris
new caring forms of planetary alliances, solidarities that
could prefigure new ways of inhabiting the world in free-
dom and dignity. As we will see, finding answers to this
urgent question will require a decisive dose of what Houria
Bouteldja calls “revolutionary love” (2016). To understand
what is at stake when implicitly criticizing the coloniality of
the left, we will look at the various ways present-day visual
artists are returning to the orchestrated fall of the Column
exalting Napoleonic imperialism during the Paris Com-
mune, rearticulating international solidarity into possible
forms of translocal solidarity. We will do so by speaking
nearby Édouard Glissant, as he recurrently stated that
each one of us needs the memory of the other in the lucid
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
process of what he called Relation, or in his own words “if
we want to share the beauty of the world, if we want to be
in solidarity with its sufferings, we must learn to remember
together” (Une nouvelle région du monde, 2006).
But let us first start by contrasting the internationalist spirit
of the Paris Commune with a very sharp but loving critique
by one of the main political philosophers of the anti-colonial
struggle: Frantz Fanon. After the Vendôme Column was top-
pled in Paris in May 1871, official Communards cheerfully
announced the celebrating crowd “Vendôme Square”will
henceforth be named “International Square.” This short lived
toponymic reversal marked a rupture from the inheritance
of the French Revolution towards a real working-class inter-
nationalism. As reminded by Kristin Ross in her remarkable
book Communal Luxury (2015), according to Communard
Benoît Malon, the destruction of the Vendôme Column fun-
damentally questioned the supposed inevitability of imperial
wars. It promoted a spirit of anti-nationalism and internation-
al fraternity. The Paris Commune was more apt to relate to an
international constellation of insurgency than to a nationalist
imaginary, including the Indian revolt against British racial
capitalism, the uprisings during Black Reconstruction in
North America, rebellions in Ireland, Hungary, Poland, and
the freedom struggle of the serfs in Russia, or the simultane-
ous Kabyle uprising in Algeria.
Let us also not forget that the combative words of L’Interna-
tionale were initially written during the bloody executions of
the overpowered Communards by influential poet, transport
worker and founding member of the Artists’ Federation, Eu-
gène Pottier. Communard Pottier indeed wrote the poem
L’Internationale, which became the International Working-
men’s Association hymn before it was adopted by the Sec-
ond International as its official anthem and consequently
translated and chanted in many different languages. Almost
100 years later, Fanon adopted the by then famed first line of
‘The Internationale’ as the title of his ground-breaking book
Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth) as a
sharp but loving gesture, critiquing the universalist pretens-
es of the European working class movements. From its on-
set the labor movement encountered difficulties to relate to
different slave revolts overseas, but also to the anti-colonial
and anti-imperialist movements, and the following planetary
wave of decolonial revolts. When Fanon, proposed to turn
our back to Europe, he proposed to also turn our back to the
European working class and its self-proclaimed internation-
alism, as he said: “in general, the workers of Europe have not
replied to these calls; for the workers believe, too, that they
are part of the prodigious adventure of the European spirit.”
Despite its historical longevity and the countless reitera-
tions of this Fanonian critique, different present-day visual
artists are revisiting the orchestrated fall of the imperial Col-
umn during the Paris Commune, all the while reanimating
its internationalist spirit. South African architect Roanne
Moodley, U.S. historian and architect David Gissen, and
Tunisian artist Nidhal Chamekh, excavate, each in their
own way, the fall of the Vendôme Column so central in the
storytelling of the Paris Commune, all along connecting
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
this event to its imperial and colonial reverse tracing routes
to the African continent, more specifically the Maghreb in
general, Tunisia in particular, as well as Réunion island.
“FOLLOWING THE
Following the routes of these three artists, an impression ROUTES OF THESE
will be drawn of what Glissant called a Tout-Monde, relating THREE ARTISTS,
AN IMPRESSION
different temporalities across continents in the subversion
WILL BE DRAWN
of a shared modernist monumental landscape. OF WHAT GLIS-
SANT CALLED A
TOUT-MONDE, RE-
In what follows the attempts to overthrow the Vendôme Col- LATING DIFFERENT
umn by the Communards in 1871 in Paris, the November- TEMPORALITIES
ACROSS CON-
ist Clock Tower in Tunis in 2011, and the Victory Column in TINENTS IN THE
Réunion will therefore be excavated from the perspective SUBVERSION OF A
SHARED MODERN-
of radical simultaneity. This perspective of coevalness pre-
empts anachronistic comparisons underpinning the bigoted
IST MONUMENTAL
LANDSCAPE.”
idea that Arabs, Blacks, Imazighen, Creole, Muslims, and
Maroons would be late or backward, and are only now catch-
ing up with the train of History. It is indispensable to underline,
that while France lost the 1870-1871 war with Prussia and
the Communards were fighting the bourgeois in Paris, the
massive Mokrani Revolt against the French colonial project
was gaining momentum in Algeria and people were resisting
colonial competition between France, England, and Italy, as
they all wished to settle in Tunisia. It is also key to emphasize
that, while Tunisians were revolting against the postcolonial
authoritarian regime of Ben Ali, they were revolting against
a regime economically and politically fully supported by a
still very imperialist French government. It is equally vital to
remember, that while in 2011 Tunisia, the people were de-
manding to overthrow the regime, in France the masses also
occupied the squares, stood up day and night with the work-
ers in yellow vests against neo-liberal austerity, together with
a resurgence of anti-racism activism against police violence.
Let us not forget either that Réunion island, together with Gua-
deloupe, Guiana, Martinique, and Mayotte, is today still a so-
called “overseas department” and “prefecture” of the French
Republic. Even if the current French president stated that the
Republic will not erase any trace or name from its history, nor
unbolt any of its statue, two statues of French politician Victor
Schœlcher and the already beheaded statue of Napoléon’s
wife, Empress Joséphine de Beauharnais were recently top-
pled in Martinique. While those of Colbert, Gallieni, Bugeaud,
Faidherbe, or Mangin were contested in France, people in
Réunion were simultaneously trying to get rid of their statue
of François Mahé de La Bourdonnais. Nobody could prevent
the planetary puncturing of the prevailing consent of a shared “DESPITE ITS
HISTORICAL
history of slavery, colonialism and racism. LONGEVITY AND
THE COUNTLESS
REITERATIONS OF
Retracing a planetary constellation of decolonial rage as an THIS FANONIAN
answer to the slow degeneration of the contemporary white CRITIQUE, DIFFER-
ENT PRESENT-DAY
neoliberal world, suggests a deep engagement with the
VISUAL ARTISTS
political possibility of what Houria Bouteldja following Chela ARE REVISITING
Sandoval, calls “revolutionary love.” It is from the possibility THE ORCHESTRAT-
ED FALL OF THE
of revolutionary love that political differences between the IMPERIAL COLUMN
debris of the left and a new emerging decolonial constituen- DURING THE
PARIS COMMUNE,
cy can be transcended. From this possibility, it is imaginable ALL THE WHILE
to remember both the recent decade of revolt, together with REANIMATING ITS
INTERNATIONAL-
the sesquicentennial of the Paris Commune. Desirable soli- IST SPIRIT.”
darities between what is left of the left after it is broken in two
and what is spontaneously emerging from the backdoor of
history of decolonization are reshaping our understanding
29
 of intersectionality. Re-animating the spirit of the Combahee
River Collective and as repeatedly underlined by Angela
Davis, the meaning of intersectionality shifts from an intri-
cate understanding of layered forms of oppression, to the
necessity of incessant labor on the intersections of a shared
struggle against various intersecting racial capitalist forma-
“OVERTHINKING THE tions, symbolized by the fall of upright phallic monuments. In
CONSTRUCTIVE SIDE the light of revolutionary love, intersecting oppressions trans-
OF THE ANTICIPATED
DESTRUCTION OF
form into intersecting struggles. Overthinking the construc-
THESE MONUMENTS tive side of the anticipated destruction of these monuments
AND INCESSANTLY
and incessantly asking questions while walking, are then
ASKING QUESTIONS
WHILE WALKING, ARE the conditions of possibility to see one of the many possible
THEN THE CONDI-
ways towards another more sustainable and just world, to-
TIONS OF POSSIBIL-
ITY TO SEE ONE OF wards a world in which many worlds fit.
THE MANY POSSIBLE
WAYS TOWARDS
ANOTHER MORE SUS- The Twin Transcripts by Roanne Moodley ///
TAINABLE AND JUST With The Twin Transcripts (2018), Durban-based architect
WORLD, TOWARDS
A WORLD IN WHICH
Roanne Moodley re-imagines the French “Fête Nationale,”
MANY WORLDS FIT.” also known as “Bastille Day,” through a provocative and
speculative design of a reconciliatory monumental ex-
change. Twinning the French town of Montreuil, a banlieue
on the fringes of Paris where different African diasporic
communities live, to Saint-Denis, the Creole capital of
Réunion Island, she makes space to question very pres-
ent colonial relationalities traversing France and its tropical
“overseas prefecture” off the east coast of the African con-
tinent. Through processes of ghosting, reflecting, altering,
and transplanting in the finely drawn graphic short fiction,
Moodley imagines a monumental gift exchange between
the Vendôme Column and Réunion’s Victory Column. By
importing the Creole Festival of Mixed Freedom to the
banlieue of Montreuil in the French capital, she not only
creates the right event and setting for this rather uncanny
gift exchange, but also disrupts the coinciding imperial
The Vendome military parade memorializing the mythical birth of the Re-
Column is buried
publican Nation on both sides of the ocean, with the too
in Saint-Denis, La
Réunion. / Artwork often silenced memory of the struggle against the massive
from The Twin Tran- enslavement enforced by the French East India Company.
scripts (2018) by
Roanne Moodley.
30
The (white) elephant in the room here is Napoléon Bona-
parte, as one of the main formal differences between the
Vendôme and the Victory Column. The Vendôme Column
was erected at Napoléon’s direction as a potent symbol of
France victory over Prussia in Austerlitz in 1805. The bronze
statue of Bonaparte at the top of the original Vendôme Col-
umn in 1810, sculpted by Antoine-Denis Chaudet, depicts
the French statesman and military leader dressed in Roman
attire, bare-headed and crowned with laurels, holding a
sword in his right hand and a globe surmounted with a stat-
ue of the roman goddess Victory in his left hand. Whereas
on top of the erectile pole of the Victory Column in Réunion,
the triumphant roman goddess stands alone, to form with
its pedestal a cenotaph commemorating and honoring the
Reunionese soldiers who died during World War I. Let’s not
forget Réunion was shortly re-named “Bonaparte Island,”
before it was seized by the British during the Napoleonic
Wars. The planned “re-erection” of the Column is for Mood-
ley then an “anti-erection” or a form of subversion, as only
the small Caesarian statue of Napoléon (without the 34
meter high tower) would be exposed on the street level of
Réunionese Rue de Paris. To paraphrase Ariella Aïsha Azou-
lay, the “overseas prefecture” of Réunion might in itself be
imagined as a monument that must fall, an imaginative act
of potential history.
The Mound Vendôme by David Gissen ///
The Mound of Vendôme (2014) is an installation by historian
and architect David Gissen that documents the failed peti-
tioned proposition to reconstruct the heap of dirt built by the
Paris Commune to break the fall of the Vendôme Column in
1871. It also showcases a series of important archival pho-
tographs and engravings documenting the urban square
before and after the orchestrated demolition of the Column.
The installation returns to the key moment, when on April
12, 1871, the Commune voted on a decree written by Félix
Pyat proposing to demolish the imperial Column. The de-
cree stated that it symbolizes barbarism, brutal force, and
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
false glory as it is an affirmation of militarism and a negation
of international law. It was seen as a permanent insult and
a perpetual attack on the republican principle of fraternity.
The demolition was planned for Napoléon’s death anniver-
sary on May 5, but had to be delayed to meet all the re-
quired preparations, as we will see in more detail below. The
Communards assembled a bed of fascines of hay, sand,
and manure along the axis of the Rue de la Paix on both
sides for more than 10 meters to cushion the Column’s fall
and dampen its vibrations. All the surrounding storefronts
and neighboring buildings on the square were closed, and
the windows covered. Even with all the precautions, peo-
ple were afraid that the Column would crash into the sur-
rounding houses in the square or would cause the Opera
House sewers to collapse. Instead of echoing the reiterated
demand to destroy again the reconstructed Column, Gis-
sen designed collage images and launched a petition to
imagine and materialize again the mound of hay, sand, and
manure at the foot of the Column. The petition circulated
among architects, architectural historians, theorists, and
students of architecture throughout the United States and
Europe, and was delivered to the director of the Paris Her-
itage and Architecture Services — with no avail. With this
project Gissen intended what he calls a form of “radical
reconstruction,” relating histories of social movements, to
propose the resurgence of political histories through pro-
cesses of architectural and urban reconstruction. The failed
proposition indeed shows the contemporary reluctance to
re-invent revolutionary symbols, and the refusal of the pub-
lic to be inspired by the Communards’ ingenious ways to
carefully reshape the modern urban fabric.
The Anti-Clock Project by Nidhal Chamekh ///
Inspired by the ingenious destruction of the Vendôme
Column, visual artist Nidhal Chamekh proposes in the An-
ti-Clock Project (2015) to demolish the infamous Mongela,
also known as the November 7 Clock tower in the center
of Tunis during the most recent uprisings in 2011. All the
references to November 7 and others references to the
numerological cult of the Ben Ali regime in public space
were destroyed by the revolting masses, with the excep-
tion of the master signifier of the authoritarian landscape.
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
Photomontages
One of the eleven graphite drawings, extending Chame- from The Mound of
Vendôme (2014).
kh’s 3D printed cartographic installation, renders visible / Artwork by David
the detailed demolition plan of the Commune’s responsi- Gissen.
ble engineer Jules Iribe. To avoid any collateral damage
to the fabric of the Vendôme Square, Iribe had foreseen to
attach a triple rope to the top of the Column, connecting it
to a capstan held on the ground by an anchor. Monitored
closely by an astronomical telescope, the efforts of half a
dozen men made the capstan turn and the three cables
tighten and slowly come together. By operating the cap-
stan, the Column had to give way to its base where it was “BY OPERATING
THE CAPSTAN,
sawn horizontally a little above the pedestal, and eventu- THE COLUMN HAD
ally fell on the bed of fascines. TO GIVE WAY TO
ITS BASE WHERE
IT WAS SAWN
The German poet Heinrich Heine anticipated 30 years ear- HORIZONTALLY A
LITTLE ABOVE THE
lier the imperial Column and its “Iron Man” could again be PEDESTAL, AND
overthrown by the “rage of radical equality.” Karl Marx too EVENTUALLY FELL
ON THE BED OF
sensed the coming fall of the Vendôme Column in his 1852
FASCINES.”
political essay The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The
repetition of history as a farce would inevitably mean that
the revolutionary working class could eventually annihilate
Bonapartism. Or in his own words “if the Imperial mantle fi-
nally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze
statue of Napoléon will fall from the height of the Vendôme
Column.” In the wake of the battle of Sedan, and the de-
feat of Louis-Napoléon in the Franco-Prussian War in Sep-
tember 1870, the symbols of the Bonapartist regime were
purged out of the body politic. The painter Gustave Courbet,
president of the Federation of Artists and elected member
of the Commune, launched a petition to disassembled this
monument “devoid of all artistic value” and move it to the
Hôtel des Invalides next to other artefacts dealing with the
military history of France, as the implicit sarcasm of an im-
perial monument venerating the ideals of war and conquest
located on Rue de la Paix became untenable.
Alas, contrary to the premonitions of Heine, Marx, and the
petitioned proposal of Courbet, Chamekh his visionary
proposition to demolish the November 7 Clock and subvert
it as a new memorial site of the Tunisian revolution did not
materialize, yet. The 37-meter high tower, still stands today
on January 14 Square, forming the last layer of a colonial
31
Graphite drawings
for The Anti-Clock
Project (2015) by
Nidhal Chamekh palimpsest that started taking shape during the inaugura-
Left. Burning obelisk. tion of Jules Ferry Square in 1911. The Mongela is indeed
Anniversary of the
islamic Revolution. erected on exactly the same place where once a monu-
Iran, 2011. Right. ment stood in honor of Jules Ferry. During the inaugural cer-
Egyptian revolution-
emony, the sculpture was saluted as the first statue raised
aries carrying an obe-
lisk with the martyr’s in Tunisia since the fall of the Roman Empire, comparing
names. Tahrir square, Jules Ferry to a Roman consul. Whereas, in Tunis, Jules
Egypt, 2012.
Ferry was venerated by the French as the man that embod-
ies the idea of civilization behind the first overseas thrust
of the Third Republic and pushed for the establishment of
the French Protectorate in Tunisia in 1881. In the Paris of the
Communard he was despised as “Ferry-Famine” or “Ferry
the Starver,” as in the wake of the defeat of Louis-Napoléon
in the Prussian War, he did not manage, as member of the
government of National Defense, to ensure enough food
supply as the capital was besieged by the Prussian army.
He was nevertheless appointed mayor of Paris, but from
the first day of the Communal insurrection, he instantly fled
“AFTER IMPERIAL OR
COLONIAL STATUES
the city. The depiction of “Ferry the Starver” as a cowardly
ARE UNBOLTED, imperialist republican, would have certainly resonated really
BREAKING THE POLIS
well with the ideas many Tunisians did not dare to speak
IN TWO, IT SEEMS IN-
CUMBENT TO GATHER out loud during the French colonial protectorate. Eventually
IN THE MONUMENTAL the statue of Ferry was unbolted, but later replaced by an
DEBRIS WHAT IS STILL
USEFUL, TO CAREFUL- equestrian statue of “El Moujahid El Akbar” Habib Bour-
LY DELIBERATE WHAT guiba, and eventually followed by the Novemberist Clock
COULD STILL BE
VALUABLE TO RELATE
Tower as both stand today in the capital.
WITH AND WHAT IS
NOT.”
After imperial or colonial statues are unbolted, break-
ing the polis in two, it seems incumbent to gather in the
monumental debris what is still useful, to carefully delib-
erate what could still be valuable to relate with and what
is not. Today, as much as it was 150 years ago, laboring
the intersections, the nodes between different struggles
so communalities become intelligible remains inevitable
and vital. But imperialist and colonial monuments appear
to be stubborn and resilient edifices. Fanon might have
proposed to turn our back to Europe, including its work-
ing class and its self-proclaimed internationalism, as they
are part of the prodigious Universalist spirit anti-colonial
movements are fighting against. He nevertheless over-
saw the secular illusion or the impossibility to separate
the entangled worlds in the lived experience of diasporic
or creolized subjectivities. Abdelkabir Khatibi by contrast
engages in his seminal book Maghreb Pluriel (1983) in a
thorough questioning of the conception of this European
game that for Fanon has apparently definitively ended. As
that European game inhabits Khatibi’s most intimate be-
ing — not as an absolute and devastating exteriority but
as a conglomerate of difference — he reclaims an inalien-
able right to this difference. It is hard work. But the insep-
arability of entangled worlds in the lived experience of di-
asporic or creolized subjectivities, can then be mobilized
in a productive and critical way. This is made clear in the
provocative reversal central in Moodley’s Twin Transcripts,
to re-animate new forms of solidarity and fundamentally
rethink obsolete historical forms of internationalism from
below, re-articulating them in translocal solidarities to by-
pass any form of nationalism.
From this hybrid understanding of our subjectivities it is
clear that we inhabit the manifold Manichean binaries
proper to racial capitalism, and that we just cannot turn
our back to the internationalist spirit of the Paris Com-
mune. As shown in the drawing of Chamekh’s Anti-Clock
Project, these binary contradictions, whether in Paris in
1871 or Tunis in 2011 can only be undone and disentan-
gled through relational and collective forms of ingenious
labor, unbolting a monument after all implies meticulous-
ly engineered preparations. The measurements have
moreover necessarily to take into account the materiality
of that monument. Panafrorevolutionary collective Cas-
es Rebelles reminds us that the intensified demands to
dismantle imperial monuments venerating these pre-
supposed national heroes, are not merely symbolic de-
mands, but demands for justice, tightly linked to infra-
structural demands of reparations (see The Funambulist
30 Reparations, 2020).
It might be too messy or speculative to include the monu-
mental contestation of the Paris Commune in the denom-
ination of decolonial rage. The abstract expression and
universal condemnation of colonialism and imperialism
is after all something fundamentally different than forging
real relations of solidarity and care with anti-imperial and
anti-colonial struggles on the ground. But let this messy
speculation be part of a larger necessary exercise in revolu-
tionary love. Both the survivors of the defeated Mokrani re-
volt in Algeria and the defeated Commune were in the end
Left. Destruction
of the Vendôme’s
Column upon order
and after all both sitting side by side, both dispossessed of Gustave Courbet
and incarcerated in the same French prison in New Cale- during the Paris
Commune, 1871.
donia on Kanak land, thinking of their loved ones alike and Right. U.S. marines
their vanished dream of liberty and dignity. As we learned destroying the statue
of Saddam Hussein
from Gissen’s petitioned proposal of radical reconstruction
at Firdos square in
in The Mound of Vendôme, we can anticipate the demoli- Baghdad. Iraq, 2003.
tion of monuments, and carefully prepare the bed on which
it would fall to preserve the urban fabric to be damaged.
Overthinking collectively the possible erasure of monu-
ments is then a condition to see and feel the horizon. Exca-
vating overlapping and interconnected monumental histo-
ries, might inspire a renewed breath of revolutionary love,
so necessary in this time of generalized suffocation and
internal fragmentation. This archeological exercise might
inspire possible new translocal solidarities, more caring
forms of planetary alliances, that could prefigure new ways
of inhabiting another world in freedom and dignity, a world
where many different worlds fit. ■
Joachim Ben Yakoub is a writer, researcher and lec-
turer operating on the border of different art schools
and institutions. He is affiliated to the MENARG and
S:PAM research group of Ghent University, where
he is conducting research on the aesthetics of re-
volt somewhere in between Tunisia and Belgium. He
is guest professor at LUCA school of Arts Brussels
and lecturer at Sint-Lucas School of Arts Antwerp,
where he is also promotor of the collective action
research The Archives of the Tout-Monde.

32 THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD 33
INTERVEWS AN ARCHIPELAGIC FORM OF
SOVEREIGNTY: BUILDING
THE VENEZUELAN COMMUNES
A CONVERSATION WITH GEO MAHER
Communal Council
in Santa Rosa
(region of Lara). /
Photo by Tamara In 2016, Geo Maher published a book entitled Build-
Pearson (2010). ing the Commune (Verso & Jacobin) that describes
the last ten years of communal councils’ existence
in Venezuela during Hugo Chávez’s presidency. In-
spired both by the Paris Commune and Indigenous
and Maroon praxes, the Venezuelan communes con-
stitute a key example of the political formations we
are trying to analyse throughout this issue.
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: I would like to start this con-
versation by evoking the possible ties between the
Venezuelan Communes and the Paris Commune —
perhaps I should say the several communes that were
initiated in 1871 in France and were meant to work to-
gether a bit like an archipelago. I know that there are
probably more differences than common things, but
I’m particularly thinking of the way these communes
are fundamentally related to space, and in particular
34
how they embody what you call “a territorial socialism.”
Could you tell us more about this concept in relation to
both space and time?
GEO MAHER: That’s a great question, and I think fram-
ing it around the question of time and space is essential.
The resonances of the Paris Commune in Latin America
and in Venezuela were crucial. And yet, on some level,
the same kind of displacement that’s required to grasp
the Paris Commune itself, its trajectory, is required on
a grander scale to think about communes across the
world. Paris was not simply Paris; it was part of a broad-
er archipelago of communal experiences: territorially,
spatially, geographically. So we have to understand that
the communal experience doesn’t have a single cen-
ter, but many centers, many small islands of communal
activity in the way that these are connected in histori-
cal, dialectical, territorial chains. And we need to grasp
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
these prehistories, these tiny dialectics that generated
the experience of the Paris Commune, and bound it to
later experiences, and to Lenin and others theorizing
what the commune means and looks like.
The same is true of Latin America in general and in Ven-
ezuela in particular. You can begin to look back from the
Venezuelan experience of today, the history of the rev-
olutionary communes, and see Paris as one reference
point, but also Yugoslavia more recently, as well as many
experiences that came long before the Paris Commune
— long histories of indigenous communalism and Af-
ro-Venezuelan cumbes, communal structures developed
in runaway slave or Maroon communities. These all form
part of a broader communal fabric, and methodologically
speaking, we need to not only always understand these
experiences in connection to one another, temporally and
spatially, but we also need to decolonize this concept of
the commune a bit, by which I mean, decentering Paris
and grasping how these histories and trajectories existed
in reality and continue to inspire what is a very complex
but inspiring communal project today.
In Venezuela today, you have a still very overlooked expe-
rience of direct democratic community participation. On
the one hand, these emerged from above, from projects
developed by the state under President Hugo Chávez:
first, what were called communal councils in the mid-
2000s, and later, toward the end of the decade, what
were more explicitly called communes. The communal
councils were an instance of political participation on the
community level, which allowed people to come together
in their neighborhood and make directly democratic and
binding decisions about development projects where
they live. But while councils could request state funds
for development projects, one limitation of the councils
was that the political was still separated from the eco-
nomic, and mediated by the state. In this sense, and be-
yond their larger scale, the breakthrough the communes
represent was that along with bringing communal coun-
cils together, they also incorporated production through
what are called social property enterprises. So in the
communes, a communal parliament makes decisions
about what the community needs, how to produce it,
who’s going to work, how many hours they’re going to
work, how much they’re going to be paid, and how to dis-
tribute the surplus within the community and reinvest it in
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
community development. In other words, the communes
are an attempt to create a truly democratic and socialist
local economy and society, and as I said, one part of this
push came from above.
At the same time, a major task of Venezuelan history (and
all revolutionary history) is to grasp the relationship be-
tween the “from-above” and the “from-below,” the much
longer history of grassroots participation. So communal
councils established from above were built on the foun-
dations laid by spontaneous grassroots revolutionary or-
ganizing in the 1980s and 1990s, and specifically what
were called barrio assemblies. There’s a complexity here:
something is always inevitably lost when popular power
is incorporated from above. But at the same time it was
an important step forward, and speaks to the broader
question of the many sources of the commune and even
what’s called the “communal state.” This was a phrase
that Chávez introduced, and when he said Venezuela was
moving toward the communal state, we need to be abso-
lutely clear that what he meant was no more and no less “...WE ALSO NEED TO
DECOLONIZE THIS
than the disintegration of the centralized Venezuelan state CONCEPT OF THE
and its replacement by a society of council power. COMMUNE A BIT,
BY WHICH I MEAN,
DECENTERING PARIS
That was the vision and it remains for many the vision to- AND GRASPING HOW
THESE HISTORIES
day, no matter how much it has been erased by events
AND TRAJECTORIES
and by the conscious effort of some. But the phrase “com- EXISTED IN REALITY
munal state” was actually drawn from Kléber Ramírez Ro- AND CONTINUE TO
INSPIRE WHAT IS
jas — one of the most important guerrilla comandantes of A VERY COMPLEX
the armed struggle in the 1970s, but who then collaborat- BUT INSPIRING
COMMUNAL PROJECT
ed with Chávez in underground clandestine organizing in TODAY.”
the 1980s and 1990s. Ramírez was involved in Chávez’s
failed 1992 coup which, had it been successful, would
have established what he called a “communero society,”
a confederated grassroots democracy of producers — in
other words, a truly revolutionary communism.
LL: I think that was a fantastic prologue to everything
we’re going to talk about. Perhaps we can now back up
a little bit. Each of the communal experiences is very
specific to the political context in which it emerges.
Could you please tell us about the Venezuelan one, from
its inception in 1989 to its realization in 2010? Of course
Chávez is central to this context, but interestingly, be-
sides him, the Venezuelan state seems to be more inter-
ested in controlling the Communes than really “betting
on them” to use your words. Is that right?
35
 GM: So in the in the most direct terms, the Bolivarian Rev-
olution did not begin when Chávez was elected in 1998,
or even when he tried to storm the gates of power in 1992,
but a few years before that, in a mass rebellion against
neoliberalism in 1989 known as the Caracazo. This was a
mass revolt, a week-long riot, in which poor people took
over the wealthy areas of the cities, scaring the shit out
of elites and making it perfectly clear that things couldn’t
go on as they were. But while the Caracazo represented
the breaking point of Venezuelan history, we need to rec-
ognize that there were decades of organizing, decades
of armed struggle that led to this point — even the con-
cept of a “Bolivarian Revolution” was born from the armed
struggle. It was this organizing and these demands that
created Chávez, but the Caracazo was the moment that
inaugurated the Bolivarian process by destroying the old
political parties and creating a breach into which some-
one like Chávez could then step. Chávez was a soldier,
but he was wearing two hats through his direct contact
“SO YOU HAVE ON with the revolutionary underground, and during the upris-
THE ONE HAND,
CHÁVEZ’S ROLE AS
ing in 1989 many military recruits just like him were sent
NOT THE ONLY BUT into the barrios to slaughter thousands who looked just
REALLY THE MOST
like them. This is why his failed 1992 coup was initially
CRUCIAL FULCRUM
FOR COMMUNAL scheduled to coincide with the anniversary of that mass
POWER WITHIN THE popular revolt and the violent repression that quelled it.
STATE, BUT YOU ALSO
HAVE A LOW SCALE
WAR BETWEEN THE This point of no return and the space of possibility
GRASSROOTS AND
opened by the insurrection created the possibility for the
PARTY ELITES.”
rapid growth of the broader revolutionary movement,
and a grassroots framework that was then picked up by
radical organizers as a model for organizing. From the
very beginning, there’s controversy over the role of the
Insurgents flip over a
bus at the Guarenas
Terminal during the
Caracazo revolts on
February 27, 1989. /
Photo by Jheremycg.
36
grassroots, and there are — in some senses, justifiably
— different frameworks for understanding the transition to
socialism. Bolivarian leadership has always been divided
between those who truly trust the grassroots and those
who see building socialism as more of a top down pro-
cess, one that sees in the Cuban model the need to keep
a very tight rein on revolutionary forces to seize and sta-
bilize power. That dynamic and that tension persist today.
In Building the Commune, I tell the story of one of the most
successful communes in central-west Venezuela called
El Maizal, which produces tons of corn. El Maizal was
born of a grassroots struggle to seize privately owned
land that had fallen into disuse, demanding the govern-
ment intervene and nationalize and communize it. But
those ended up being two different steps. So Chávez
initially intervened, showing up and giving a speech an-
nouncing that the lands would be nationalized. But what
happened was they were simply taken over by the ag-
ricultural corporation and remained just as underused
and under-productive as they were in private hands. So
the revolutionary grassroots had to organize and strug-
gle again, to demand that those lands be handed over
directly to the communal parliament to be managed dem-
ocratically. And so you have on the one hand, Chávez’s
role as not the only but really the most crucial fulcrum for
communal power within the state, but you also have a low
scale war between the grassroots and party elites.
We shouldn’t overly simplify this or use it to wash away
some of the very real tensions confronted by the Vene-
zuelan revolution. But if you ask grassroots leaders at
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
El Maizal, they would say, “Listen, so-called socialists
are our biggest enemies in practice, we confront them
every day, they don’t want our power to grow because
it’s a threat to their power.” And so this tension continues
up to the very present, and of course the past few years
have been incredibly difficult. The communal project
has been challenged, has been put on the back-foot,
has seen dramatic funding cuts as a result of the eco-
nomic crisis itself. But in the context of that crisis the
communes have also seen a rollback, in the sense that
some party elites want to embrace a pragmatic alliance
with the private sector and with national capitalism as a
path forward — that path has never worked.
And so I have been among those who really want to insist
that the only path out of the economic crisis today is the
path of the communes. It’s the only path that envisions
forging a different kind of economy, that thinks about a
Venezuela that is not fully dependent on oil extraction
to fund imported goods, but instead thinks about what
needs to be produced locally and how to produce those
things democratically. And that resolves the tensions of
the oil economy not by embracing the global economy or
by cutting itself off from it, but by developing these grass-
roots democratic alternatives.
LL: You wrote that Venezuela is one the most urban
countries in Latin America with over 93% of its population
living in cities. A whole chapter of your book is dedicated
to the forms of self organization of the barrios, including
the skyscraper barrio that the Torre de David has em-
bodied for several years — I’m sparing you my anger at
Western architects for fetishizing it. But as you also write,
the Communes mostly emerged in the countryside.
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
Views of the
Caracazo revolts on
February 27, 1989. /
Prensa Presidencial.
These two aspects make me think of the way Marx him-
self was perceiving the project that the Paris Commune
was supposed to embody with its neighboring rural
communities. Could you please tell us about the relation
about these two spaces?
GM: Absolutely, and of course I’d love to hear at some
point your thoughts on reactionary architects, because
there’s this sort of fascination not only with the appear-
ance of the poor in the center of the city and the fear
that that provokes, but also with the architect or urban
planner as heroic savior. And that’s very much present
“...THE QUESTION OF
in Venezuela and also in the fascination that Venezu- SPACE AND TERRITORI-
ela’s urban movements provoke elsewhere. But the ALITY IS ESSENTIAL TO
NOT ONLY GRASPING
question of space and territoriality is essential to not THE COMMUNE PER SE,
only grasping the Commune per se, but also grasping BUT ALSO GRASP-
ING ITS PARTICULAR
its particular manifestation in Venezuela and the proj- MANIFESTATION IN
ect of Venezuelan socialism. VENEZUELA AND THE
PROJECT OF VENEZUE-
LAN SOCIALISM.”
So when I talk about connecting the Paris Commune
with these other communal experiences within this
broad fabric, each requires its own historicization con-
textualization to allow us to think through the particular
contours, parameters, and — crucially for Venezuela —
spatiality. I’ve done this sort of analysis of the dialec-
tics of urban space in Caracas, which is really just one
key pressure point, or pressure cooker really, of a much
broader process. I refer to the broader process of urban-
ization in Venezuela, as a direct result of the oil econo-
my. Venezuela would have urbanized in the 20th century
regardless, as many other Latin American countries did
for similar reasons. But the discovery of oil over a centu-
ry ago accelerated and amplified this process and the
economic distortions it reflected and contributed to.
37

Torre de David in
Caracas’ financial dis-
trict. The skyscraper
under construction
This had as much to do with government policy as
was never achieved anything else. For decades, a series of oil-fueled gov-
and was the home of
ernments abandoned the countryside and the agricul-
thousands of people
for over a decade. / tural sector, providing no support whatsoever for rural
Photos by EneasMx campesinos. And as oil wealth pulled people toward
(2017), Wilfredor
(2014), and Saúl the cities, they were also pushed off the land by the
Briceño (2013). owners of large latifundios, with the government look-
ing on passively when it wasn’t siding openly with the
landowners. This urbanization proceeded apace in
the 1960s and the 1970s, and the result was a country
that produces a great deal of oil, which can be worth
a great deal on the global market, but very little food
and almost nothing else. This oil economy is complete-
“THIS URBANIZATION ly designed around and embedded within the global
PROCEEDED APACE
market, and persists to this day.
IN THE 1960S AND
THE 1970S, AND THE
RESULT WAS A COUN-
At the very least, Chavismo arrived in power with a theory
TRY THAT PRODUCES
A GREAT DEAL OF of the oil economy and took some steps to counteract
OIL, WHICH CAN BE it, even if these were a drop in the bucket. Interestingly
WORTH A GREAT
DEAL ON THE GLOBAL enough, this theorization also developed within the armed
MARKET, BUT VERY struggle, as guerrilla intellectuals in the 1970s developed
LITTLE FOOD AND AL-
MOST NOTHING ELSE.
an alternative understanding of the oil economy and how
THIS OIL ECONOMY to engage in what later came to be called “endogenous
IS COMPLETELY DE-
SIGNED AROUND AND
development” — using oil to fund economic develop-
EMBEDDED WITHIN ment based on internal needs rather than the demands
THE GLOBAL MARKET,
of the global economy. What this all means for the com-
AND PERSISTS TO
THIS DAY.” mune is a great deal of tension and contradiction.
On the one hand, a truly communal economy wouldn’t
depend so heavily on the global market, and much less
for something as destructive as oil. But it also involves the
incredibly difficult task of reversing a century of territorial
and demographic processes. It means redistributing the
population spatially, reversing what Frantz Fanon, in The
Wretched of the Earth (1961), called “urban macroceph-
aly,” and debunking “the myth of the capital.” And this
is a specifically colonial model of development, right?
38
The capital is the interface point for extracting resources
and exporting them to the global economy. Rolling back
this kind of process is incredibly difficult, which is why
Chavismo has struggled to do so and why the neoliberal
Venezuelan opposition today offers no alternative what-
soever to this pattern of development.
If you don’t grapple with this deep historical architecture
of the Venezuelan economy, territory, and society, then
you really can’t even begin to get to the heart of the prob-
lem. What this means in terms of building Venezuelan
socialism is of course, complex as well. So in Building
the Commune, I speak in terms of small islands of so-
cialism spread all across Venezuela, about these small
experiments, some some large, some small. This com-
munal network is still but a small part of the economy as
a whole, but the challenge is precisely to develop and
extend threads to one another and to weave the broad-
er fabric of a communal economy. So that you have
communal axes, for example, especially in central-west
Venezuela, producing coffee, plantains, and corn, and
exchanging these directly with one another outside of the
capitalist market.
In the history of socialist literature, there has been a great
deal of conversation about the impossibility of small is-
lands of socialism. And part of what I argued in Building
the Commune is that, I mean, you can say that it’s impos-
sible, but it’s also the reality of where we find ourselves. So
how can we start to think spatially about weaving this com-
munal fabric, connecting these disparate territories into a
broader project that’s able to become a project of power?
LL: I’m very glad to hear you talking about islands be-
cause that has also been my favorite metaphor to talk
about an alternative paradigm of sovereignty — very
much influenced by Édouard Glissant’s vision of islands
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
and the archipelago. It is the contention of this issue to
think of the Commune as a different paradigm of sov-
ereignty going through the intensities of governance in
the reverse order than the one the nation state impos-
es. It goes from the neighborhood, to the municipality,
to the province, to the nation, and perhaps even to the
coalition of nations. Could you tell us how the Venezu-
ela Communes embody this paradigm, and whether it
could possibly be applicable in incremental ways that
we could start in other contexts?
GM: Certainly, and I think that the point you’re making is a
crucial one, which is that the idea that isolated islands of
socialism is impossible was a reaction to socialism in one
country, or to the Third World strategy of autarky — cut-
ting oneself off entirely from global capitalism. But tragic
as it may be, this is our starting point, and moreover once
we grasp this reality it can also lead us to a very different
vision for the commune, a vision for how communal pow-
er scales up. If I take your point, this is certainly true of the
contemporary Venezuelan experience, but also of its his-
tory, and speaks to the decolonization of the commune
I mentioned, which draws not only from Paris but seizes
on local and indigenous sources and conc Maduro epts
from across Latin America.
Specifically, the concept that many grassroots orga-
nizers are drawn to in Venezuela, comes from one of
Simón Bolívar’s teachers, Simón Rodríguez, who spoke
of what he called “toparchy” (la toparquía). Toparchy re-
fers to the very same kind of small islands of what for
Rodríguez was kind of republican sovereignty, or in fact
a displacement of a centralized and colonial view of sov-
ereignty based on the recognition that building states on
the European model was going to be a disaster. In oth-
er words, there needed to develop in Venezuela some
form of decentralized power, and this is precisely why
people have picked up on this idea of toparchy. I visited
a commune in southeast Caracas, where there was a
small dog running around, and when I asked what the
dog’s name was they said it was “El Topo.” Chávez, in
his everyday ideological work, was incredibly effective at
popularizing these kinds of ideas, turning profound po-
litical theoretical concepts into weapons of struggle and
for rethinking how to build a new world, to the point that
here you had this small little commune feeling inspired
by the idea that, while maybe they are but one small is-
land, they can also connect with something much larger.
In practice there have been attempts to do this, both
from below and from above. From below, I can speak
to the tireless work by grassroots organizers who them-
selves simply go around advising people on how to es-
tablish small socialist enterprises, how to connect these
to a nearby commune, which maybe is a few miles away,
or 20 miles away, how to trade or exchange their goods,
and how to build themselves into this broader process.
From above, it looked like the attempt to really establish
a confederated structure of communes, so communes
would elect state level communal assemblies, which
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
would then elect and send representatives to what was
called the Presidential Council, which would interface
directly with president Nicolás Maduro.
This points to a longstanding tension, which is of course
incredibly controversial for more liberal voices in Vene-
zuela. This is the fact that the communal structure has
existed outside of the liberal democratic apparatus, not
only in terms of Chávez’s own direct intervention to ex-
propriate property and help to establish communes,
but also in the fact that these communes don’t answer “...WHAT APPEARS AS
to elected officials — or I should say, officials elected A CONTRADICTION FOR
LIBERAL DEMOCRACY
through the liberal democratic process: local mayors,
IS IN FACT THE WHOLE
state governors, or even the national government. But FUCKING POINT WHEN
what appears as a contradiction for liberal democracy IT COMES TO THE
COMMUNAL PROJECT,
is in fact the whole fucking point when it comes to the WHICH IS NOT TO
communal project, which is not to work within liberal de- WORK WITHIN LIBERAL
DEMOCRACY AND
mocracy and centralized state sovereignty, but to build CENTRALIZED STATE
something entirely different. SOVEREIGNTY, BUT TO
BUILD SOMETHING EN-
TIRELY DIFFERENT.”
So in Venezuela you have two kinds of state and a con-
flict between two different visions of sovereignty. These
sort of contaminate and interpenetrate one another, of
course, since there’s participation built into the liberal
democratic constitution of 1999 and also a sort of impo-
tence and limitation that has never fully been overcome
when it comes to these communal structures. They in-
terface with Maduro, who was after all elected through
the existing liberal democratic structure, but they’re not
yet fully themselves. But at the very least, what we have
is a living, breathing example of a war between two very
different kinds of powers, something which I’ve concep-
tualized in the past in terms of Lenin’s concept of dual
power, which was precisely a concept of the commune, “TOPARCHY REFERS
TO THE VERY SAME
if we think about it. But in Venezuela this has been an
KIND OF SMALL
extended, drawn-out war of position that is raging today ISLANDS OF WHAT
in Venezuela in an incredibly complex and painful way. FOR RODRÍGUEZ WAS
KIND OF REPUBLICAN
SOVEREIGNTY, OR IN
LL: We talked about production in the most literal sense, FACT A DISPLACE-
MENT OF A CENTRAL-
but one of your interviewee in your research told you that IZED AND COLONIAL
what also needed to be produced is the commune itself. VIEW OF SOVEREIGN-
TY BASED ON THE
This brought me back to Marx and his affirmation that the
RECOGNITION THAT
greatest achievement of the Paris Commune was its “ac- BUILDING STATES ON
THE EUROPEAN MOD-
tual working existence” itself. Could you address that?
EL WAS GOING TO BE
A DISASTER.”
GM: Certainly, and I think we need to understand how
Marx himself was a product of these tensions. Here
was someone who spent much of his life organizing
and writing a critique of political economy, and then
the Paris Commune happens, right? This has a huge
impact on him, so when he says, for example, that the
commune is “the political form at last discovered under
which to work out the economic emancipation of labor,”
this is part of self criticism. He’s saying, “Listen, Paris
showed us what we should have been doing, showed
us a form, showed us a way to concretely organize and
arrange society, that is communist. We who have been
speaking of communism for so long had to discover
this form through the practical activity of the class and
its aspiration to self government.”
39
 And I think this writ large is what we’re talking about in
Venezuela, in these tensions, in these ways that different
theories can be drawn in, but also in the way that prac-
tice is a huge part of the process. For example, at the
same time that you had the Ministry of Communes at-
tempting to establish a framework for what would count
as a commune, to then count the communes and work
to build them from above, you had activists who had
been working in the ministry resigning to form a different
kind of network of communes, in part because they felt
that the definition should not come before the experi-
ence of the commune, and that the two need to exist in a
“NOW, TO YOUR QUES- far more dynamic relationship. I think these relationships
TION. IN VENEZUELA,
between the theoretical and the practical and the from-
PRECISELY DUE TO
THIS COLONIAL AND above and the from-below are crucial and constant re-
EXTRACTIVIST HISTO- minders of these dynamics.
RY I DISCUSSED AND
ITS IMPLICATIONS
FOR GEOGRAPHY Now, to your question. In Venezuela, precisely due to
AND TERRITORY, ONE
OF THE CENTRAL
this colonial and extractivist history I discussed and
QUESTIONS IS THE its implications for geography and territory, one of the
QUESTION OF PRO-
DUCTION.”
central questions is the question of production. There’s
really no way around it. And all of the, let’s say, slightly
more European anti-work theories are provocative and
interesting, but they don’t help us to deal with the fact of
what happens in an economy where there aren’t enough
things being made. This puts Venezuela in a very differ-
ent position when it comes to Marx’s conceptualization
of the communism of the future as a communism of
“...THE OIL ECONOMY
IS NO LONGER ABLE abundance and of the absence of scarcity. This is es-
TO PROVIDE WHAT sential to the crisis that’s playing out in Venezuela today.
PEOPLE NEED AND
SO COMMUNES HAVE
BEEN STEPPING UP Many communes were established in the more radical
TO DO WHAT THEY
CAN, DEVELOPING
Chavista barrios around the urban areas, which con-
ALTERNATIVE STRUC- tains huge numbers of people but also importantly the
TURES AND ALTERNA-
TIVE DISTRIBUTION
political spearhead that brought Chavismo to power
NETWORKS.” through mass rebellion. And yet these are territories
where nothing is produced, territories that don’t make
anything, and in which people live and circulate to work
in the city — where often they aren’t producing anything,
either, but working in services or simple distribution.
By contrast, the communes that have been built in the
countryside are far more productive. They produce what
is necessary, and many even produce more than they
need, so one of the tasks has been to create conveyor
belts of political relationships and economic production
that can connect these communal experiences in the
cities and in the countryside.
But it also means thinking differently about production
itself. Again, this only takes us so far in a country where
things really do need to be made, where people really do
need food, and where today there isn’t enough oil money
to import enough for people to eat. But we also need to
40
think about how, as the former communes minister Rein-
aldo Iturriza put it, the commune is also something that
is produced. This is what Chávez called the spirit of the
commune, a new way of being together. One of the exam-
ples I like to give is a small commune in southern Caracas
founded by a bunch of young dudes in an area with no real
economic production. The first concrete product of their
commune, however, was a gang truce, something that’s
very immaterial in some sense, but that allows for a differ-
ent material relationship with the local territory and allows
for a greater political consolidation of consciousness and
power. This is what is being produced in neighborhoods
that don’t concretely produce anything, but the tension of
production remains at the very heart of the crisis today.
On the other hand, in its productive aspect, the commune
remains the only possible solution to the contemporary
and historical crisis of Venezuelan oil dependence. Even
in the context of this crisis, and in some ways precisely be-
cause of the crisis, there’s really no alternative to the com-
mune. Food imports have collapsed, and it’s an absolute
humanitarian tragedy that has been amplified by Obama
and Trump’s sanctions. Tens of thousands of people, if
not hundreds of thousands, have died as a result of U.S.
sanctions. But at the same time, the oil economy is no lon-
ger able to provide what people need and so communes
have been stepping up to do what they can, developing
alternative structures and alternative distribution networks.
While this is not certainly not enough, and while we need Mural in Venezuela.
to be fully dedicated to the task of lifting sanctions and / Photo by Wilfredor
(December, 2013).
allowing Venezuelans to breathe and to eat and to live as general Alberto Müller Rojas, who sadly died a decade ago. What Müller Rojas was es-
a precondition for them building this communal vision, the sentially insisting was that Chavismo means abolishing the traditional military hierarchy
communes are also the solution to this economic crisis. and arming the whole people as the best way to defend not only the revolutionary nature
of the internal process — the communes against the state, as it were — but also against
LL: As a concluding question I wanted to evoke the failed the external threat of foreign intervention and invasion. “YOU HAVE EVERYDAY
U.S.-backed coup from 2019. Right now, the Venezuelan PEOPLE WHO ARE IN-
TERVENING TO RESIST
state is still very centralized, which makes it vulnerable to And this is absolutely true. You have grassroots militias in the furthest reaches of what is FOREIGN INVASION,
this kind of imperial effort. Couldn’t we say that the com- an incredibly porous Colombian border that have been fighting for years against para- AS IN THE CASE OF
THE U.S.-BACKED
munal state, in addition to embodying this alternative military infiltration and violence at the same time that they fight for local self-government. MERCENARIES WHO
paradigm of sovereignty, is also a good defense mecha- You have everyday people who are intervening to resist foreign invasion, as in the case ATTEMPTED A REALLY
HAM-FISTED INVASION
nism against interventions like the U.S. one? of the U.S.-backed mercenaries who attempted a really ham-fisted invasion last year,
LAST YEAR...”
hubristically named “Operation Gideon,” landing on Venezuela’s Caribbean coast. Who
GM: Absolutely. On the one hand, Chavismo has al- caught them? Some fucking armed fishermen. Everyday people, revolutionary grassroots
ways embraced what Lenin, in reference to the Paris Chavistas. This speaks directly to the question of how we understand sovereignty, how we
Commune, called “the direct arming of the whole peo- understand power. And it speaks to the question of communal power as a serious alterna-
ple” in the form of mass militias of the everyday people, tive, through which we can begin to build not only movements, but also different forms of
which again were modeled on grassroots self-defense local self government that are far more powerful than what exists today. ■
organizations. But on the other hand, these horizontal
structures coexist with the traditional, vertical military hi- Geo Maher is a Philadelphia-based writer, organizer, and educator. He is the
erarchy and chain of command. This coexistence of two author of three books: We Created Chávez (Duke, 2013), Building the Commune
visions of the military runs directly parallel to the political (Verso, 2016), and Decolonizing Dialectics (2017). In 2021, he will publish three
question of the coexistence of two states. But a while more: A World Without Police (Verso), Spirals of Revolt (Common Notions), and
back an open debate broke out sparked by the retired The Cunning of Decolonization (University of California).
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD 41
ARTICLES FROM THE COMMUNE’S
PÉTROLEUSES TO MEXICO’S
MORRAS: WOMEN’S POLITICAL the central concern of female emancipation with divergent
approaches on how to achieve it. In spite of the fact that
STRUGGLE FOR SYSTEMIC CHANGE Dmitrieff founded the Union des Femmes with the goal of
creating a new social order founded on equality, solidarity
and freedom, by the end of the Bloody Week (May 21-28,
1871), women were denied entrance into French politics.
Accused of burning down Paris, Communardes were im-
IRMGARD EMMELHAINZ mortalized in the archetype of the wild and menacing Pé-
troleuse. By having embraced violence, women were seen
to have stepped outside the role of femininity and the social
order. This gave birth to the imaginary of the Pétroleuse as
a negative female allegory, a dangerous woman out of con-
trol in an upside-down world. Communardes were vilified,
persecuted and exiled upon the downfall of the Commune
at the hands of the Versailles government.
150 years later, in a moment of increasing and relentless
mass forced disappearance, machista violence and fe-
micide (the murder of women or girls by men on account
of gender) and in the context of a neoliberal war, Mexico
has seen the emergence of an unprecedented rebellion
against state indolence before violence against women,
originary and vulnerable populations. In 2020, the count
of registered femicides was 5,074, more than double the
previous year. By September 2020, 57,000 emergency
calls related to gender violence had been registered in the
country. And only three of every 100 femicides are perse-
cuted. According to Silvia Federici and other feminists like
Rita Segato and Raquel Gutiérrez, we are living an escala-
tion of violence against women because “globalization is
a process of political recolonization intended to give cap-
ital uncontested control over the world’s natural wealth
and human labor, and this cannot be achieved without
attacking women, who are directly responsible for the re-
production of their communities” (Witches, Witch-Hunting
and Women, 2018). In other words, brutalizing (generally
working class, mestizo or indigenous) women is function-
Top. Protest against al to paving the way for the land grabs, privatizations, dis-
police sexual abuse
couraging union organization, the precarization of labor,
on August 12, 2019:
“They do not look Communardes were depicted by the French bourgeoi- different ways. They formed political clubs for which they the exploitation of reproductive labor, what is know as ex-
after me, they rape
sie as “Pétroleuses” (Female arsonists), guilty of hav- occupied churches and state buildings to speak against tractivism, the political economy based on extracting the
me.” Bottom. Dec
10, 2020 visit to the ing burnt Paris. Irmgard Emmelhainz draws parallels social and gender hierarchies, they created a labor and commons to sell them in the global market, the necro-po-
occupied Human
between this misogynist trope and the recent char- defense association, wrote political tracts and distributed litical alliance of colonial heteropatriarchy.
Rights Commission
building in Republica acterizations of Mexico’s Morras who have sworn to newspapers, demonstrated on the streets, fought on the
de Cuba Street. not leave the heteropatriachal state alone, as long as battlefield. They also built barricades and set buildings The numbers of femicides in Mexico and their gruesome
House and Black
Block protesters ask- women would be attacked and killed. ablaze. By taking over the streets, state and church spaces, appearance of femicide images in mass and social media,
ing donations from Communarde women challenged gender roles, class priv- are intrinsically related to the recent waves of explosions of
passers by. All photos
*For Dani López Guerrero and Frida Esquivel ilege, the authority of the catholic Church, and evidenced women’s rage, a tsunami manifested in marches, demon-
by Frida Esquivel.
the interlinking of women’s oppressions. In their practices, strations, acts of vandalism against official monuments,
The French Commune is a series of events that led to the the Communardes embodied what would be later theo- state infrastructure and businesses and, since 2020, the
short-lived revolutionary taking over of an autonomous, so- rized by activists and writers like André Léo, Paula Mink, and occupation of university and state buildings. The massive
cialist government in Paris. The all-male Commune govern- Elisabeth Dmitrieff as “Feminist Socialism.” Communarde feminist wave is fueled by women’s rage, indignation and
ment was only peripherally concerned with gender issues, feminist socialism was by no means a unified movement, fear. Women are gathering to scream out because we are
yet throughout the Commune, women played key roles in but a series of events, attitudes and actions, which shared being murdered, we are revolting against heteropatriarchy,
42 THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
acknowledging collectively the damage, expressing a war
cry that had been a foreboding gasp with the feeling of
death in our guts.
The Mexican feminist tsunami is plural and has no political
demands, only the common signifier of women as victims
of State sanctioned and perpetuated heteropatriarchal
violence. Its origins can be tracked to April 2019, when a
#MeToo movement in Mexico emerged by hyphenating
accusations in realms like #MeToo_Academia, #MeToo_
Cine, #MeToo_Literatura to denounce abuse of power and
sexual harassment. A few months later, news of the rape
of a young woman by police in Mexico City led a consid-
erable group of women to scribble feminist slogans on the
Independence Monument on Reforma Avenue, which leg-
endarily features a winged victory. The women also broke a
bus station and set a police station on fire. When feminists
began to use confrontational direct action: “Fuimos todas”
(“We all did it”), became a slogan.
Then, a group of female students self-denominated Mor-
ras — from the term morra castrosa or young woman who
always has something to complain about; castrosa liter-
ally meaning castrating — occupied the Philosophy and
Literature and Political Sciences Faculties at the National
Autonomous University of Mexico. They were seeking to “...BRUTALIZING
(GENERALLY
achieve the expulsion of sexual predators from campus.
WORKING CLASS,
Thirteen more university buildings were taken, following oc- MESTIZO OR INDIG-
cupations of schools and faculties throughout the country. ENOUS) WOMEN
IS FUNCTIONAL TO
In 2019 the Sonora State Justice Tribunal was arsoned, and PAVING THE WAY
activist leader of the movement against femicide “Ni una FOR THE LAND
GRABS, PRIVATIZA-
menos” (“Not one less”) whose daughter was murdered in TIONS, DISCOUR-
2016, Yesenia Zamudio famously declared: “I have the right AGING UNION
ORGANIZATION,
to burn and break! I will not ask permission from anyone THE PRECARIZA-
because I am doing it for my daughter! Whomever wants to TION OF LABOR,
THE EXPLOITATION
break, go ahead! And whomever wants to burn, go ahead!
OF REPRODUC-
And whomever doesn’t, then don’t!” TIVE LABOR,
WHAT IS KNOW AS
EXTRACTIVISM,
The 20th century Mexican imaginary, figured women’s in- THE POLITICAL
volvement with social struggles as adelitas or coronelas. ECONOMY BASED
ON EXTRACTING
During the 1910 Mexican Revolution, women were kid- THE COMMONS TO
napped from their homes and forced to accompany sol- SELL THEM IN THE
GLOBAL MARKET,
diers to give them pleasure and take care of reproductive THE NECRO-POLIT-
tasks, even bury the dead. Although some adelitas came ICAL ALLIANCE OF
COLONIAL HETERO-
to be respected as generalas (leaders), they were gener-
PATRIARCHY.”
ally perceived as witnesses of masculine achievement
and obstacles in men’s march toward modernity. In the
1960s, as guerrilla movements spawned through Latin
America, women guerrilleras reported that the movement
reproduced heteropatriarchy’s toxic patterns. For militant
women, their gendered condition was lived as a handicap
for their struggle. On their own skins, they lived the funda-
mental incompatibility between revolutionary struggles and
feminism, women’s cause being only secondary, or even
43
 seen as a bourgeois concern distracting militants from
the universal cause of socialism (see Guadalupe Gladys
López Hernandez, Ovarinomio: Yo, guerrillera, 1982). These
are reasons why it might be accurate to draw a parallel be-
tween the Parisian Pétroleuses and the Morras, in as far as
they refused to remain in their domestic and socially pre-
scribed roles, especially in struggle, resorting to violence as
a means to make themselves heard.
In February 2020, marches and violent actions were deto-
nated in Mexico by the femicide and dissemination of im-
ages of Ingrid Escamilla’s mutilated body. On March 8, In-
ternational Women’s Day, collectives of mothers of victims
of femicide and disappeared, groups battling for the legal-
ization of abortion, contingents for sexual rights and anar-
“ON MARCH 8, INTER-
chist baklava-clad Morras gathered on the streets creating a
NATIONAL WOMEN’S
purple and violet mass of hundreds of thousands of feminist
DAY, COLLECTIVES
OF MOTHERS OF
women. Many of them went on productive, reproductive and
VICTIMS OF FEMICIDE
consumer strikes the following day. In spite of the fact that
AND DISAPPEARED,
GROUPS BATTLING buildings and monuments along the march had been forti-
FOR THE LEGALIZA-
TION OF ABORTION, fied, the March 8 demonstration resulted in broken windows,
CONTINGENTS FOR security cameras, and a fire truck; graffitied buildings, a con-
SEXUAL RIGHTS AND
ANARCHIST BAKLA-
frontation with the police, arson to the door to the National
VA-CLAD MORRAS Palace, a bra line at the gates of the Cathedral, and other
GATHERED ON THE
symbolic and direct actions undertaken by masked Morras.
STREETS CREATING A
PURPLE AND VIOLET
MASS OF HUNDREDS
Feminist movements are not new in Mexico. Collectives bat-
OF THOUSANDS OF
FEMINIST WOMEN.” tling against femicide and searching for disappeared wom-
en and their lost bodies fighting for justice emerged in the
1990s in Ciudad Juárez, when Mexico, at the eve of neolib-
eralization, became the cradle of femicide. The recent emer-
gence of the Mexican feminist tsunami has been partly due
to ongoing but now overt state indolence towards women’s
ordeals and demands. In early 2019, in the name of auster-
ity and the re-centralization of semi-private social services,
the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador
shut down state-subsidized day care and eliminated fund-
ing for ONGs operating refuges for gender violence victims.
Instead, the government started giving out a meager bi-
monthly stipend to mothers of children aged between one
and six, and suggested that grandmothers take care of their
grandchildren. For feminists, the measure was considered a
populist policy against women’s interests. Refuges have not
been reinstated. In his daily morning addresses, the Presi-
dent has dismissed the feminist tsunami as provocations or-
chestrated by conservative infiltrators opposing the regime
and by stating: “they victimize themselves and accuse us of
being authoritarian” and in a telling Freudian slip he stated:
“to accept violence is against feminism [/femininity?].”
For the tsunami feminists, however, “The Fatherland” is a
murderer. To vandalize “national patrimony” is to externalize
and retaliate against the violence women are subject to on
a daily basis. “The oppressing State is a rapist macho,” is a
44
line from the chant “Un violador en tu camino” (“A Rapis in
Your Path”), created by the Chilean feminist collective Las
Tesis. The chant points a finger to patriarchal power struc-
tures and the State as its gatekeeper. The song accuses
judges, police, politicians, the President, for committing or
failing to stop rape. The fact that the chant has been per-
formed from Washington to Istanbul, to Delhi, to Paris, sig-
naling government buildings, courtrooms, Trump Towers,
etc. evidences that systemic violence against women is
intensifying throughout the world. 2019, for instance, is the
year in which a problem with domestic violence in France
was collectively recognized, leading to marches throughout
French streets to protest against sexual and sexist violence.
But particular to Mexico are the Morras encapuchadas or
the hooded and balaclavas and all-black-clad women,
who protest destroying public and corporate infrastructure,
chanting to burn all down or throwing Molotov cocktails at
government buildings. Perhaps they are comparable to FE-
MEN’s protests with activists bearing slogans written across
their toppless bodies in the sense that both execute actions
designed to become viral in mass and social media, as acts
of counter-information. Yet, the Morras’ direct action and an-
archist techniques are actually closer to the Communardes.
A crucial difference is that the Communardes were working
class women fighting for an equal society and for women’s
participation in politics, while for the Morras, class is not an
issue and neither are they actively fighting for political partic-
ipation. Rather, they claim that the aggression they express
is proportional to the violence they are exposed to everyday.
As victims of gender violence, their masks and violent acts
empower them. Many of them are younger than 25, are mid-
dle or working class and get around in public transporta-
tion. Losely associated with the Bloque negro (Black Block)
movement, their direct actions are not being supported by
academic and institutional feminists, who do not believe that
they add up to women’s struggle. As Communardes occu-
pied churches, the Morras’ most recent action is the spon-
taneous taking over of the National Human Rights Com-
mission (CNDH) Building on República de Cuba Street in
Mexico City, which spawned similar actions throughout the
country, many of them met with violent repression.
Erika Martínez and Marcela Alemán had met with CNDH
President Rosario Ibarra Piedra on September 2, 2020 to
seek answers about the case of Martínez’s 22 year-old
son murdered last year, and about the sexual assault of
Alemán’s four-year old daughter. As they felt they hadn’t
gotten answers, the two women refused to leave after the
meeting and called activist groups for support. Members
of feminist collectives arrived the next day, amongst them
Bloque Negro, and after writing and reading out a list of 36
demands with the feminist organization Ni Una Menos, they
peacefully entered the building. The occupiers intervened
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
paintings hanging on the walls portraying national heroes,
wrote feminist slogans and painted murals on the walls. Five
months later, about 10 women continue living in the Okupa:
they have renamed it Casa Refugio República de Cuba,
transforming the government building siege into a shelter
for women suffering gender and domestic abuse.
As they have been sidelined by major feminist groups due
to their lack of political experience, strategy and concrete
demands, idealism and disagreements, the Morras of Blo-
que negro, like the Pétroleuses before them, have come to
embody a negative archetype of angry women seeking
agency through destruction. In embracing violence, the
right to be hysterical, dangerous and uncontrollable, as the
Mexican President has pointed out, they have also stepped
outside of the traditional feminine role.
While class was central to the Communardes’ struggle
for participation in political, economic and military French
life as they challenged dominant gender ideologies and
practices, the Morras’ anarchist feminism is devoid of class
consciousness and a political program. Their actions are
centered on and justified by the figure of women as victims
of state and heteropatriarchal violence. While the Pétroleus-
es were mobilized by class antagonism, the Morras’ claim
to represent all Mexican women miss the fact that it is poor
women who are mostly forcibly sterilized, displaced, mur-
dered, and raped, while middle class and upper middle
class women are molested, raped and harassed. While
privileged women may afford therapy and overcome their
ordeals, poor women stand by themselves although no-
body gets justice. The Bloque negro Morras, as do the
collectives organized around demands for justice for their
disappeared beloved ones, reflect the current waning away
of class consciousness, or rather, its transformation into
identitarian resentment. As they identify as furious wounded
women, Morras neutralize class consciousness and posi-
tion. They see themselves as violated individuals and not as
belonging to a class and race.
And yet without a program for structural change and cog-
nitive emancipation from the epistemology of sexual differ-
ence (Paul B. Preciado, Je suis le monstre qui vous parle,
2020), symbolic direct action against national patrimony,
the explosions of rage will lead us nowhere. A further analo-
gy can be drawn to the Communardes: the Morras and the
Communardes are understood as aberrations of femininity,
but while the Pétroleuses were portrayed as sexually immor-
al, what is immoral about the Morras’ actions is vandaliza-
tion of national patrimony.
And while the Refugio República de Cuba founded on the
occupied CNDH building has the potential to become an
autonomous zone, in order for the struggle to continue, a
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
next stage for the Mexican feminist tsunami needs to be
created, centered on making visible and rebelling against
multiple gendered and racialized oppressions. The struggle
needs to be grounded in an understanding of the intensifi-
cation of gender violence as linked to the Neoliberal war. In
other words, the intrinsic relationships between gender vio-
“AS THEY HAVE
lence and land dispossession, the destruction of communi- BEEN SIDELINED
ty relations and family support networks, the intensification BY MAJOR FEMI-
NIST GROUPS DUE
of the exploitation of women’s bodies and labor to enable TO THEIR LACK OF
extractivism need to be at the front of women’s struggle. POLITICAL EXPERI-
ENCE, STRATEGY
AND CONCRETE
The regime we are inserted in, moreover, is dominated by DEMANDS,
IDEALISM AND
sexual difference that validates a patriarco-colonial regime DISAGREEMENTS,
that produces violence. Without a process of political cri- THE MORRAS OF
BLOQUE NEGRO,
tique and without confronting the necro-political alliance of
LIKE THE PÉTRO-
colonial heteropatriarchy, we will be unable to leave the roles LEUSES BEFORE
of the beauty and the victim. Colonial heteropatriarchy is a THEM, HAVE
COME TO EMBODY
regime in which a hierarchy is established amongst diverse A NEGATIVE
beings, executing violence against the bodies of women, ARCHETYPE OF
ANGRY WOMEN
non-white populations and the earth. The power figures of SEEKING AGENCY
DSK and Jeffrey Epstein, brought to trial for sexual offenses THROUGH DE-
STRUCTION.”
evidence that in our contemporary culture power and the
neoliberal structures that sustain our lives are intrinsically tied
to predation not only of female bodies but of the commons.
At the time of the Commune, women were excluded from
politics differently than today, as women have been sum-
moned to take part in public life, to hold important posts in
government and corporations, to be visible as empowered
voices in the public sphere. Then as now, however, systemic
interwoven oppressions remain unaddressed. While wom-
en now hold governmental positions, women’s concerns
are secondary or supplemental to politics. Seemingly, the vi-
olent outbursts during the Commune and now are attempts
to open up a political space to enact systemic change that
would grant equality and emancipation from sexual differ-
ence. In a time in which the oppression of women has be-
come a permanent death threat, moreover, it is urgent that
we find strategies to rely on each other as opposed to on the
state, to not destroy the existing world — there is already so
much destruction — but to build the future together. ■
Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent transla-
tor, writer, and researcher based in Anahuac Valley
(Mexico City). She is the author of The Tyranny of
Common Sense: Mexico’s Postneoliberal Conver-
sion (2016, forthcoming in English at SUNY Press),
The Sky is Incomplete: Travel Chronicles in Palestine
(Taurus Mexico, 2017), and Jean-Luc Godard’s Polit-
ical Filmmaking (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Her new
book, Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures: Feminist Lives
as Resistance, is forthcoming in the Fall of 2021 with
Vanderbilt University Press. Between 2018-2020 she
was a FONCA fellow in essay writing.
45
ARTICLES BLANQUI AND THE BARRICADE,
THE COSMOS AND THE COMMUNE
CHARLOTTE GRACE
Architectural
instructions to build a
barricade by Auguste
Blanqui in A Manual
for an Armed Uprising
in Paris (1868).
19th-century Paris has seen countless barricades con-
structed by working-class insurgents to defend them-
selves against counter-revolutionary forces — the
1830, 1848, and 1871 revolutions being only the most
well-known of these moments of insurgency. In this text,
Charlotte Grace analyzes the revolutionary architecture
embodied by the barricade and its consecration by the
main figure behind the Commune: Auguste Blanqui.
“You have confiscated the rifles of July — yes. But the bullets
have been fired. Every bullet of the workers of Paris is on its
way round the world.” Auguste Blanqui, 1832
46
On March 17, 1871, just one day before the insurrection
that established the Paris Commune, Auguste Blanqui
was arrested. He had been a lifelong activist in the push for
revolutionary socialism and a prominent advocate of what
came to be known as Blanquism — a strategy for seizing
state power whereby a coup d’etat would be carried out by
a small group of highly organized and secretive conspir-
ators, rather than, say, the masses of the working class,
as Marx and Engels would have had it. He was taken to a
cell in the Fort du Taureau in Northern Brittany, which he
described as “an ellipse-shaped fortified island lying half a
mile outside of the rock shores of Morlaix at a point where,
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
after briefly morphing into the English Channel, the Atlantic
Ocean finally returns to the North Sea.”
Struggling with his detainment from the city and displace-
ment from the struggle, enforced by walls and water, Blan-
qui looked to the sky as his revolutionary horizon. He wrote
about comets, stars and the expansive (im)materiality of
outer-space as liberated from borders and bursting with in-
finite potential. In “Comets and Barricades” (2014), the poet
Sean Bonney connects Blanqui’s fascination with the surg-
ing forces of the cosmos to the relational assemblage of
bodies, channels, and forces that make up the space-time
of the revolutionary moment.
Three years earlier, Blanqui had his feet and eyes on the
ground as he critically combed over the Parisian revolution
of 1848 in A Manual for an Armed Uprising in Paris. He ex-
plored the material of the city — in its volume, matter, to-
pology and assembly — and how this material bore the
potential to either help or hinder insurgent urban warfare.
This analysis led him to look at the indeterminable form
and nature of barricades as the architecture through which
insurgents could hinder state forces whilst simultaneously
helping shelter revolutionary activity.
Blanqui complemented his analysis of the barricade with the
drawing featured on the left page — probably the first de-
sign of its kind. In it, we see a plan and a section that shows
the barricade as two structures, roughly six meters apart.
The front façade of the barricade is a three-meter-high wall
or “rampart,” with the main aim of slowing counter-forces
down. Behind it is a six-meter gap before a second wall,
similarly-built but fortified from behind by an inclined slope.
While Blanqui doesn’t mention the choice of materials, both
formal and informal hatches most-likely refer to the cobble-
stones that were taken up from the street. The difference is
between formally-constructed vertical walls, and the slope
which was likely to be made up of a range of props found
strewn across the city, from park railings to sinks, crates and
wagons, piled loosely and in haste.
What isn’t shown in the drawing is Blanqui’s written recom-
mendation to build the barricades in a convex V-shape, like
military fortifications of the time. The V-shape design meant
that the blow of an opposing cannon or charge would
only serve to knock the barricade back into itself, in some
instances condensing and strengthening the material be-
yond what had been initially thrown together.
Throughout A Manual for an Armed Uprising in Paris, Blan-
qui claimed the insurrectionary success of 1848 as a stroke
of luck, in spite of poor spatial warfare. He claimed that bar-
ricades that were higher, stronger and better constructed
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
— born of a “rudimentary military inspiration” — had attract-
ed defenders but, most crucially, that their placement was
unstrategic: only a handful had effectively blocked junctions “IN ‘COMETS AND
and thoroughfares that were strategically important. He also BARRICADES’
(2014), THE POET
criticized how the barricades were occupied: “each barri- SEAN BONNEY
cade had its own group that varied in size but that was al- CONNECTS BLAN-
QUI’S FASCINA-
ways isolated. Whether a barricade had ten or one hundred TION WITH THE
men, it maintained no form of communication with the other SURGING FORCES
OF THE COSMOS
posts. While the insurgents smoke their pipes behind the
TO THE RELATION-
heaps of paving stones, the enemy successively concen- AL ASSEMBLAGE
trates all its forces on one point, then a second, a third, a OF BODIES,
CHANNELS, AND
fourth, and thereby systematically exterminates the whole FORCES THAT
insurrection.” According to Blanqui, these errors in spatial MAKE UP THE
SPACE-TIME OF
organization and human occupation would make defeat THE REVOLUTION-
inevitable if they were to be repeated, and he advocated ARY MOMENT.”
thinking through the barricade as part of a broader strategy
of urban intervention.
By the time of the Commune, some of the lessons Blan-
qui had put out years before were put to use. Riffing off of
the structural qualities of the V-shape, some barricades
were made of loosely piled cobblestones, rejecting a for-
mally-constructed and brittle form that could crack open
in favor of a more fluid mass, harder to make one’s way
through or over. Some piles were put onto wagons, fortify-
ing barricade facades whilst being mobile enough to move
elsewhere if necessary.
At the urban scale was the move to consolidate energy
and matter to certain strategic locations. The develop-
ment of the boulevard was itself an example of count- “MEANWHILE
er-insurgency endeavors by Parisian urban designers; SOME 900 SMALL-
ER BARRICADES
nevertheless many large, formal barricades were built IN THE NARROW
at key urban junctures such as the monumental Grande STREETS OF
LOCAL NEIGH-
barricade de la Rue de Rivoli near Place de la Concorde, BORHOODS,
which found its own project manager in local shoemak- BUILT IN A HURRY
AS THE ARMY
er Napoléon Gaillard. These tall and complex structures APPROACHED,
were successful in intimidating the Versailles army into di- WERE SLOWLY
BUT SURELY,
verting their counter-revolutionary strategy from these ar-
SYSTEMATICAL-
eas. However, building effectively at this larger scale took LY DESTROYED,
a toll on its smaller counterparts. A strategic preoccupa- ALONGSIDE THE
SMALL GROUPS
tion with the monumental meant that larger barricades, OF INSURGENTS
such as those in the boulevard, were left untouched WHO HAD BUILT
THEM.”
by counterrevolutionary forces. Meanwhile some 900
smaller barricades in the narrow streets of local neigh-
borhoods, built in a hurry as the army approached, were
slowly but surely, systematically destroyed, alongside the
small groups of insurgents who had built them.
The lessons the Commune points to then, relate to the
dispersed investment of resources and communication
between local and urban scale interventions. From this,
we begin to see the barricade as less a singular object,
47
 and more a network of devices that require occupation
and interconnection, less an insurgent architecture than
an insurgent infrastructure.
“ENLISTING THE Infrastructure and the (Cosmic) Social ///
PUBLIC IN THE “All the houses’ blocks belonging to barricaded streets
BUILDING OR
PROCURING OF should be pierced at their perimeter [...] out of sight and
MATERIALS FOR out of reach of the enemy [...] One could open commu-
WHAT INITIALLY
APPEARED TO BE nications between those spaces, usually separated by
A GROUNDED, SET weak walls” (Blanqui, Maintenant il faut des armes, trans.
GOAL WITH A CON-
CEIVABLE END-
Léopold Lambert, 2009)
POINT ENABLED
THE EMERGENCE
One archetype of infrastructure is the tunnel: it is a carved
OF A DIVISION OF
LABOR THROUGH space through an otherwise impenetrable mass, built to
WHICH ROLES AND connect disparate or disconnected locations, often oper-
RESPONSIBILI-
TIES COULD BE ating under the earth’s surface and landmarked by small,
ORGANIZED AND but highly-visible openings.
ENCOURAGED.”
The tunnel was as crucial to the Commune as the barri-
cade. Walls between the bathrooms of neighborhoods’
housing blocks were knocked through in succession,
cutting routes for insurgent bodies and supplies to pass
through. These tunnels also enabled Communards to
shoot from the windows of the blocks from in front and
behind the line of opposing forces as it approached.
Rather than working independently of one another, the
tunnel and the barricade worked together: the line drawn
by the barricade in public space served as distraction
from its permeation in private. This Trojan Horse effect,
weaponizing both hyper-visible and under-the-radar tac-
tics, was key to the Commune’s success.
In an early essay, Léopold Lambert equates barricades with
tunnels by considering the operations involved in their con-
struction. Whether aggregating matter to mark boundaries
or excavating it to transgress them, these operations are
still “seen as acts of creation toward two potentially resistive
architectural typologies” (Log, 2012). This speaks to Lam-
bert’s figure of the insurgent as a subject who “experiences
the city rather than represents it” and who, when experienc-
ing socialized feelings of dissent, starts to see it “as a mass
that can be infiltrated, transgressed, and weaponized.”
In The Insurgent Barricade (2010), Mark Traugott argues
that whilst Blanqui was aware that the human occupation
of the barricade was central to its function, he was limited
in thinking this through in a strictly military sense. Traugott
claims that, in reality, the social construction of the barri-
cades was “more likely to determine the outcome of civil
conflict.” For Traugott, this social power was to be found via
its captivation of outsiders, not just in the spectacle of a “fin-
ished barricade” object — a relatively ineffectual attribute
in the chaotic moments of an insurrection — but through
48
the urgent participatory project of its construction. Enlisting
the public in the building or procuring of materials for what
initially appeared to be a grounded, set goal with a conceiv-
able endpoint enabled the emergence of a division of labor
through which roles and responsibilities could be organized
and encouraged. By creating this space of labor and inter-
action, barricades “allowed these various parties to gauge
the costs and benefits of progressing to the stage of out-
right hostilities” against the state. In other words, they were
escalatory spaces, where the solidarities forged by working
together on the ground could begin to expand towards the
imaginaries of a collective revolutionary horizon.
In making sense of Traugott’s analysis, Lauren Berlant’s
emphasis on “infrastructure” over “structure” is telling. For
Berlant, infrastructure is rather the “lifeworld of structure [...]
defined by use and movement” (“The Commons: Infra-
structures for Troubling Times,” 2015). Ideas around infra-
structure speak to built environments and economic struc-
tures, but also to domains of practice, including religion and
culture. Brian Larkin refers to infrastructure as a “cosmic”
assertion of social life, expressed and maintained by “archi-
tectures of circulation” and connection between places and
situations. These architectures range in form, from identi-
fiable symbols and objects to assumed orders and tem-
poralities. Read in these terms, we could say that Blanqui
reads the barricade as urban structure rather than urban
infrastructure. Failing to note the building of barricades as a
movement and patterning of social form, he overlooks the
“cosmic” sociality inherent to insurgent infrastructure.
May 68: Situationist Spectacle
and Insurgent Aesthetics ///
Nearly a hundred years after the Commune, Paris saw an
uprising that, whilst not quite managing a full-scale politi-
cal revolution, is still hailed as a defining moment through
which social and cultural landscapes across the Western
world were lurched forwards by insurgency.
Anchored in the student movement, the body of which had
been expanded by a wave of educational reforms and ris-
ing youth population, the events of May 1968 comprised
a cross-section of workers, intellectuals, city and province
dwellers. An “encounter between the arms of critique
and the critique of arms” was welcome across the social
stratas of struggle, with the terms of debate ranging from
alienation and work under capitalism to the ideological
structures of religion and the state. The École des Beaux-
Arts, an art and architecture school in the Latin Quarter
of Paris, was occupied and blockaded, becoming an
epicentre from which insurgent activity could evolve and
spread, from meetings to poster-printing to protest-plan-
ning. Over the month of May, around 600 barricades were
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
built across the quarter using cobblestones alongside
uprooted trees, street signs, sidewalk grates and burning
cars. In addition to disrupting the general flow of the city,
another key objective of constructing these barricades
was to evoke the spectacle of insurgency in the minds of
the public by harkening back to the imaginary of the Com-
mune and carrying forth its legacy into the present.
The intellectual underpinnings of May ‘68 centered around
the Situationist International (SI), a collective founded with
the aim of nurturing mass revolutionary sentiment through
the cultural domain. The SI wanted to challenge the rela-
tionship between the commodity and the spectacle, which
they read as reciprocally reproducing consumer society. In
this context, the barricade became a powerful redeploy-
ment of the “spectacular,” a landmark of insurgency built
to capture the imagination as much as to defend an occu-
pation. In 1962, the SI had produced Theses on the Com-
mune alongside socio-spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre. In it,
they praised the Commune as “the only implementation of
a revolutionary urbanism to date.” For the SI, the Commune
proved the need for the construction of “situations” or so-
cio-spatial happenings, in which the conscious construc-
tion of our environments would be thrown into question. At
the same time, the SI strategized the forms of urban warfare
by developing conceptual anchors such as the “swarm,”
whereby unruly and spontaneous intervention was crucial
to prevent opposition forces from learning the rules by
which one moves and operates. These anchors were linked
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
Barricades of the
1871 Paris Com-
mune, including
to their ideas around the dérive, a method of wandering the Place de la
Concorde one, de-
through the city that would nurture a “popular creativity” in signed by Napoléon
and against the disciplinary rigidity of state-regulated urban Gaillard (top left).
space. The dérive itself subverts the wandering of the Flan-
eur, a late 18th century stereotype whose image is one of an
apolitical social subject dealing with the shock of modernity.
“SIMILAR TACTI-
Barricades, then, began to morph into motifs, serving as CAL CONSTEL-
LATIONS HAVE
markers of a multimedia, multi-scalar insurgent aesthetic, COME TO DEFINE
powered by spontaneous movement. As we move towards THE SPACE OF
CIVIL UNREST,
the historical present, where the space of warfare has both FROM STUDENT
accelerated in speed and somewhat dissolved into the (im) OCCUPATIONS TO
ANTI-MOTORWAY
material realm of information, displacement, and surveil-
PROTESTS AND
lance, we can see that many of these qualities have en- POWER-PLANT
dured. Similar tactical constellations have come to define SHUTDOWNS...”
the space of civil unrest, from student occupations to an-
ti-motorway protests and power-plant shutdowns, typified
by the following two recent examples.
Seattle 1999 & Genoa 2001: The Bloc ///
The black bloc is a tactic that uses more or less no ‘‘archi-
tecture’’ per se. It involves the pre-coordination of a large
group of protestors who wear black clothing and/or other
face-concealing and face-protecting items in order to be
indistinguishable during an action. The procurement of
‘‘material’’ consists of packing a spare set of pre-owned
clothes in a bag, though any potentially identifying items
are sometimes swapped between people in the moment.
The bloc as a social construction has no declared leaders,
49
 Hong Kong 2014: The Frame ///
Between September and December of 2014 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong saw sec-
tions of the city centre turned into thousands of protest camps. The city’s construction workers,
who were adept in the use of bamboo for scaffolding structures sometimes up to 50 stories high,
Top. The cobblestones of Paris found themselves procuring and assembling this ready-to-go building material into structural
streets used for May ‘68 barricades.
/ Photo by André Cros. Bottom left. frames capable of blocking entire motorways within minutes. These workers would teach other
Protestors and their shields against protestors the technique of “lashing,” where key joints and bonds are made using cable-ties and
the 2001 G8 in Genova. / Photo by
Ares Ferrari. Bottom right. Bamboo
woven plastic strips, binding together standardized two-inch thick, 12-foot-long poles at incredible
barricades in Hong Kong’s 2014 speed. As these barricades grew, platforms of plywood were nailed for sitting on and protruding
revolts. / Photo by Underbar dk.
poles on the front facade were sharpened with home-made turning tools or pocket knives.

Thinking through its form, the barricade here ceases to be a dense, opaque, immobile mass of
piled objects and, instead, becomes a lightweight, transparent structural skeleton. It can span
long distances and takes on an element of fluidity that can be added to, dismantled and reas-
sembled in another location with ease. Composed of both bodies and matter, the barricade
works as a frame upon which bodies can pass through, climb, and display themselves. This
allows for both human occupation of the barricade for actively defensive purposes, but also
for the show of bodies upon this seemingly-fragile structure to perform a rhetorically defensive
function: state forces cannot so easily destroy a precarious tower of vulnerable bodies for fear
of the sway in public opinion that could result in their physical harm.

followers, or exclusivity as to who can use it at any one
time. It’s moving nodes can lead or follow, meaning that
the coordination of influential “waves” of activity by certain
groups — including undercover cops looking to build fu-
ture evidence of illegal activity — is common.
It could be said that the first black bloc originated in a march
on Wall Street in 1967, a year before May in Paris. Black
Mask, an NYC-based anarchist group affiliated with the Sit-
uationist International and more commonly known as Up
Against the Wall Motherfuckers!, all wore black outfits and
“THE DIRECTION-
ALITY OF THE balaclavas to create the spectacle of a unified and militant
BLACK BLOC identity. Fast forward 30 years and the Zapatista movement
STRIVES, FIRST
AND FOREMOST,
launched on the inauguration of the NAFTA, taking on the
TO SWITCH FROM balaclava as a “rejection of traditional representative politics
THE SPATIALLY
and individual identity in favor of direct democracy, equality
“DEFENSIVE” TO
THE SPATIALLY and to undermine hierarchy and authoritarianism” in their in-
“OFFENSIVE,” digenous fight against state repression, racism, and geno-
SOMEWHAT REDE-
FINING THE SPACE- cide. Interrupting two geopolitically seminal conferences at
TIME OF THE the turn of the millennium, Seattle’s World Trade Organiza-
BATTLEGROUND.”
tion ministerial meeting and Genoa’s G8 summit, protests
saw a large, anonymous swarm of bodies in black blocking
roads, damaging property and fighting police.
In Italy, the G8 protest coincided with the tail-end of the Tute
Bianche movement, in which protestors armed themselves
with foam padding around their bodies before stepping into
large white overalls. Ya Basta!, key protagonists within Tute
Bianche, claimed in a collection of manifesto fragments
called The Age of Clandestiny that “If the struggle aims at
achieving visibility, the color of the fight is white, and the
white garment covers the whole body.” The choice of white
referenced both “invisibilized workers” and the “spectres of
activists” whose organizational spaces were being evicted
across Italy at the time, and were evoked as stalking the
city and haunting state forces. Ya Basta! cross-referenced
the balaclavas of the Zapatista movement, claiming that the
anonymity achieved through mass-disguise could help to
“emerge from the limbo of outdated categories in the or-
ganisation of production.”
The directionality of the black bloc strives, first and fore-
most, to switch from the spatially “defensive” to the spa-
tially “offensive,” somewhat redefining the space-time of
the battleground. Formally, the shelter afforded by the ar-
chitecture of the barricade — a separate, wall-like object
defending a defined space and that contained within or
behind it — is compressed into a flexible and portable
facade that offers little material protection but that screens
insurgents from surveillance. This deflection of individual
identity stretches beyond the moment of the bloc to resist
the retrospective counter-insurgency measures under-
taken by state forces. Underneath this membrane moves
a swarm of mobile, half-coordinated body of bodies that
can assemble and disperse, shape-shift, squeeze, push
and pull as and when necessary.
This teetering between enforcing state violence and preventing reputational damage is, of course,
disproportionately considered depending on the stakes: which bodies find themselves on such
a line, how explicitly state power needs to assert itself, etc. But this logic does play out in other
protest practices, particularly across the Western world, such as the lock-on and the tripod, par-
ticularly common to the defense of land, where protestors place themselves in physical precarity
“THE BARRICADE,
in order to prevent or delay the onset of counter-forces. AS A FRONTIER
BETWEEN BLAN-
QUI’S GROUND
Infrastructure and Revolutionary Space-Time /// AND SKY, GREW
The frame and the bloc are, like the barricade and the tunnel, both counter and comple- IN CONCEPTION
FROM INSURGENT
mentary. The frame reminds us of a social world that wants to be seen by weaponizing an ARCHITECTURE
identification with the vulnerable. The bloc reminds us of what moves under the surface, TO INSURGENT
INFRASTRUCTURE,
weaponizing collective de-identification as a spectacle. Blanqui’s commitment to both the
A SOCIALIZED
poetic, infinite expanse of revolutionary cosmologies and the strategic, physical matter of NETWORK OF
the urban environment began a process of spatial reckoning. The barricade, as a frontier MATERIAL AND IM-
MATERIAL STOPS
between Blanqui’s ground and sky, grew in conception from insurgent architecture to insur- AND STARTS”
gent infrastructure, a socialized network of material and immaterial stops and starts. From
there it began to evolve its relational qualities by way of fluidity, embodiment and spectacle.
It is important to remember that if the barricade is an “infra” as much as a “structure,” its spati-
ality is temporal, too. Composed of the “above,” the “below,” the “onward,” it asks what starts
after the stop. Contemporary readings of revolutionary spacetime follow suit here. In Rojava,
Chiapas, and across feminist and decolonial struggles worldwide, the idea that there consti-
tutes an instant historical moment in which power is disassembled, a pinpoint or object, con-
tained and labelled, is being evermore rejected. Instead, revolution is understood and felt as a
perpetual and ongoing struggle, a landscape strewn with triggers, obstacles and markers, an
emancipatory horizon we orient and hurtle ourselves towards. ■
Charlotte Grace (she/her) is an architectural researcher and educator. Her work
floats around spaces of dissent, logistics, empire, ecology, the culinary, the com-
modity and the market. Having worked for Cooking Sections and muf architec-
ture/art, she now runs the theory modules of City Design and Environmental Ar-
chitecture at the Royal College of Art in London, and is working on a PhD on the
sociospatial dimensions of the revolution in Rojava, Kurdistan.

50 THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD 51
INTERVEWS FROM THE COMMUNE TO TODAY,
THE POLITICAL LAYERS OF PARIS’
WORKING-CLASS NEIGHBORHOODS
A CONVERSATION WITH MOGNISS H. ABDALLAH
AND HAJER BEN BOUBAKER
Mogniss and Hajer,
on Place des Grès,
at the beginning of We conclude this issue by “going back” to Paris, in
our walk. / Photo by the neighborhoods where the last defense of the
Léopold Lambert
(January 22, 2021). Commune against the Versailles army was led. In the
last 150 years, many proletarian and/or immigration
movements continued to add to the political ‘geolog-
ical strata’ of these neighborhoods. On January 22,
2021, Léopold invited Funambulist friends Mogniss
H. Abdallah and Hajer Ben Boubaker to take a stroll
to excavate some of these strata.
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: We have a small itinerary that
will take us to the working-class neighborhoods of Paris’
20th arrondissement where the Commune was particularly
present, and where the last battles against the Versailles
army took place. We will try to do a reading of the historical
and political layers of these neighborhoods from the Com-
mune to the present day. It may seem a little bit disjointed,
as we’re going to jump from one era to another all the time.
However, I think that it will only appear disjointed to peo-
ple who are used to thinking about history through a very
chronological reading. For those who are used to thinking
52
about history through other approaches — in particular
from a spatial point of view — they might be able to follow
this excavation of the various political geological layers of
the spaces that we will cross. A good starting point for this
interview can be a conversation that I had with you, Hajer
one or two years ago. I heard from you, as well as from a
few other anti-racist activists that, despite your families not
living yet in France at the time, you consider the Commune
as the first moment of French history that you are making
yours. Could we start with this?
HAJER BEN BOUBAKER: It’s true, that’s what I said,
and that’s what I still think today. Indeed, my family was not
at all in France at that time. In 1871, they were probably in
Tunisia — and still, I’m not even sure. I think that the Com-
mune’s ideal goes beyond the notions of nation-states and
national belonging, so it really resonates for people who,
like me, do not necessarily find themselves in the pre-es-
tablished categories of the current French nation-state.
The left-wing ideal carried by the Commune echoes for
me, not only because it almost worked, but because it re-
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD 53
Both pages. First
concert of Rock
Against Police on ally proposed a revolutionary vision and a real overhaul of
Place des Grès in
Paris on April 19,
the systems that prevailed and still prevail today. And so,
1980. / Photos ar- inevitably, I recognized something when I discovered the
chives Rock Against
Commune, rather belatedly. Belatedly indeed, since it’s not
Police / Agence
IM’média. really part of the school programs. So it was later, during
adolescence, when I became interested in left-wing move-
ments and started my activist journey, that I discovered the
Commune. It’s also because I come from a neighborhood
— the 18th arrondissement — where certain events had
their importance in the Commune. It’s true that this mem-
ory can be a little more present among young people who
claim to be left-wing. Because the Sacré-Cœur Basilica
is there. Because when one understands the meaning of
Sacré-Coeur, the meaning of its construction by the French
state after the Commune, one wonders about history. And
“THE COMMUNE HAS
GIVEN FULL VALUE TO it may sound a little bit like Parisian pride, but this attach-
LOCAL BELONGING, ment to the Commune also comes from this local belong-
TO LOCAL AUTONOMY,
ACCORDING TO THE
ing. The Commune has given full value to local belonging,
SPECIFICITIES OF THE to local autonomy, according to the specificities of the ter-
TERRITORIES WHERE
ritories where it was deployed. And so it still makes sense
IT WAS DEPLOYED.”
to me today as an ideal that goes beyond the differences
imposed by the state.
LL: What about you Mogniss? What’s your relationship
to the Paris Commune?
MOGNISS H. ABDALLAH: I began to hear about it in
the period after the 1971 centennial. The concomitance
between the revolts of May 1968 and the Commune cen-
tennial meant that the Commune was surrounded by
revolutionary myths and exclusively bringing attention to
self-organizing, communist initiatives. The Commune was
54
really discussed a lot during the 1960s and 1970s, but
again, only through its revolutionary mythification. It was
much later that I understood that it wasn’t as one-sided
as that. In the Commune, there was indeed a self-man-
aging, revolutionary dimension, which we liked. But there
was also a defense side of the French Republic with an
anti-Prussian dimension that would later transform into
an anti-German persistent sentiment. There were even
some quite serious problems of racism. In the 1970s, we
were bathing in triumphant leftism, the wars of liberation,
etc.. There were the revolutionary myths, which were also
fed by the idea that the Commune and the Communards
were, for a good part, the militants of the International.
And, obviously, when we learned that it was a Commu-
nard, Eugène Pottier, who wrote the words of L’Internatio-
nale, we felt great about it. We understood later on that the
foreigners who are often talked about in the Commune are
members of the International, that is agents of the Inter-
national Association of Workers. Many Italians, Germans,
Polish people, of course, workers or intellectuals, but not
so much people from the colonies.
LL: Today’s conversation is hyper situated: we talk about
what we see around us. For the moment, we are on the
Place des Grès in the 20th arrondissement, a few hundred
meters from the “Mur des Fédérés” in the Père Lachaise
cemetery, where most Commune commemorations hap-
pen. This square is quite simply the location of the first
Rock Against Police concert in 1980. Mogniss, you’re one
of the co-founders of this organization, could you please
tell us about it, as well as this first concert that occurred
exactly where we’re standing at the moment?
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
MHA: Yeah, and it’s true that there are some ties to the
Commune. Even though I was personally more active in
the banlieues like in Nanterre and Vitry, there were still
some working-class neighborhoods (quartiers popu-
laires) and important immigrant neighborhoods in Par-
is. The Commune itself was an exaltation of the work-
ing-class neighborhood and the Gavroches and lascars,
who were the rebellious young people who lived there and
enlivened these neighborhoods. At the end of the 1970s,
there were already some concerts, a little improvised, in a
certain number of abandoned houses, squats in Barbès,
Belleville, and Ménilmontant. These squats were a bit po-
liticized, but music more than anything was front and cen-
ter for them. They were in neighborhoods where the resi-
dents were mixed between immigrants and white French
(franchouillards). These guys would call themselves punk
and destroy, which would cause some problems for the
immigrant youth who had different tastes. They’d listen a
lot to James Brown for instance and would dress as well
as they could.
LL: That makes me think of the theater play and film Week-
end à Nanterre, where we see Moustapha Arab and Belka-
cem Lahbaïri dancing on Sex Machine in a vacant lot!
MHA: Yes, exactly, it’s well depicted in the film. So mov-
ing on to the first concert of Rock Against Police. We had
set up a squat, what we called “a political squat” not far
from here, Rue des Pyrénées. This squat was meant to be
a place of convergence of people who lived in Vitry, Nan-
terre, some banlieues in Seine-Saint-Denis, and also in
Paris. At the time, there was no public transportation, no
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
possibility to move from one banlieue to another. Some
youths would even hijack a bus to go, for example, from
Vitry to Nanterre. Otherwise, it was impossible, you had
to go through the center of the city. And so, this is how
we set up this squat, “La Parmentière,” which became a
meeting place for the groups that ultimately formed Rock
Against Police. We started it after the death of Kader, a
15-year-old boy, who was killed on February 16, 1980, by “WE STARTED [ROCK
AGAINST POLICE]
a janitor in the Montagnards estate in Vitry sur Seine. We
AFTER THE DEATH OF
met at “La Parmentière” and started organizing a concert. KADER, A 15-YEAR-OLD
We spotted Place des Grès: these were still old buildings, BOY, WHO WAS KILLED
ON FEBRUARY 16, 1980,
most of them were going to be demolished. There was BY A JANITOR IN THE
a whole wasteland behind. The entrance was over there. MONTAGNARDS ESTATE
IN VITRY SUR SEINE.”
Some of the houses were squatted by punks. The oth-
er day I was looking at a photo of the concerned and I
noticed some white squatters in the background; they
are at the window, not in the crowd and I noticed a blue-
white-red flag. At the time I didn’t even notice but clearly
that was intended by these guys as a “This is our home!”
message towards the audience.
So that’s it, the concert happened on April 19, 1980, and
we played a number of different bands from different
banlieues, starting with the people from Vitry. There was
Lounès Lounis, who composed a song called “Kader
Blues,” which he composed in two parts, one on the spot
and the second part after the trial of Kader’s murderer.
I think that about 3,000 people showed up, it was quite
diverse. We were quite surprised as we did not expect
that many people. Many others, in particular from the left,
could have come but, as it happened, it was the day of
Jean-Paul Sartre’s funerals on the other side of the city!
55
 The last thing I have not said is that Rock Against Police
is a sort of reaction to Rock Against Racism in the U.K.
at the same time. We considered that the notion of “rac-
ism” was not precise enough. There was a form of moral
anti-racism that was only about being outraged at racist
statements or behavior, here or elsewhere — South Africa
for example. And there was political anti-racism. Nowa-
days, that’s understood a little bit more widely, but back
“...FOR US, THE
then, it was the great divide. And for us, the armed branch
ARMED BRANCH
OF THIS POLITICAL of this political racism was the police, hence our choice
RACISM WAS THE for this name: Rock Against Police.
POLICE, HENCE OUR
CHOICE FOR THIS
NAME: ROCK AGAINST LL: Let’s start walking and, while we do, I think that there
POLICE.”
is another thing that allows to create some links between
Maghreb, the Commune and the anti-racist struggle of
the 1980s: the term lascar (rascal). Could you tell us how
these three space-time co-exist in this term?
MHA: Sure. This term, lascar, was spontaneously used
by the Rock Against Police friends: a sort of self-desig-
nation, a bit like that the term Beur (slang for Arab) before
it became co-opted. It was some self-valuing slang in a
quite confusing time for the youth identity. Their genera-
tion was named “the second generation” for lack of a bet-
ter term, and so young people reclaimed this word from
French working-class slang. And we also discovered that
the Communards would also use it. Of course, the Com-
Left. March mune also consisted in a valorization of the working-class
organized by the Vies cultural production and language. So naturally it spoke
Volées collective for
to us too. In Belleville, for instance, there was the Lascars
the 13th anniversary
of Lamine Dieng’s brass band, which would do a yearly pilgrimage to the
police murder. The
Père Lachaise cemetery to pay tribute to the Commu-
photo shows the
police station of the nards who died during the Bloody Week. So this was our
20th arrondissement. common cultural environment and we contributed to it.
Right. Social housing
building in Les Aman- Furthermore, the elders would ask us “Don’t you all think
diers, Ménilmontant that lascar has something to do with ‫( العسكر‬el askar), the
on the day of the
walk. / Both photos soldiers?” And so, after researching this, we realize that
by Léopold Lambert.
56
lascar could also designate off-duty soldiers. Of course,
in contrast, there was also a conservative use of lascar
to mean thug or members of the mob or foreigner… so
there you have it! You take one term and you can see all
the contradictions contained within it.
///
LL: We are still in the working-class neighborhoods
(quartiers populaires) of the 20th arrondissement, where
the last fights of the Commune took place. We are more
specifically in the center of Les Amandiers, which we
can describe as a small neighborhood with several so-
cial housing buildings. In fact, we are at the place where
Lamine Dieng, a 25-year-old Black man, who was killed
by the police in 2007 used to live. The three of us were
already here on June 20, 2020 during a march organized
by the Vie volées (Stolen Lives) collective, which did
something similar to what we were doing today, that is to
say, a march that goes back to the different geographies
of this murder, notably the 20th arrondissement police
station that we passed by earlier. Hajer, could you tell our
readers more about it?
HBB: We are in the Amandiers neighborhood, which is
itself contained within a larger working-class neighbor-
hood called Ménilmontant. Sadly it’s quite gentrified now,
but it still contains pockets of resistance. Lamine was
from here. On June 17, 2007, he was killed by the police.
He died suffocated, killed by nine policemen who literally
threw themselves and kept the pressure of their bodies,
on his body. The police use prone position restraint or
chokehold when they make an arrest, or when one of the
many many ID checks on Black and Arab men to subdue
them, which often prove to be lethal techniques. Person-
ally, I heard about this police murder only one or two years
after it happened, mostly though the Vie volées collective
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
assembled after his death, and in particular through its
spokesperson, Lamine’s sister, Ramata Dieng. She and
other members of the collective, as well as other activists
have fought these two techniques for being deadly, thus
taking place in the history of the immigration struggle,
which has formulated these demands in its fight against
police violence. We can think of what the Mouvement Im-
migration Banlieue (MIB) has been doing for instance.
Lamine Dieng’s family won a form of justice but, alas, it
did not come from French justice, but, rather, from the
European Court of Human Rights, which forced France
to compensate them. This also says a lot about the denial
and complicity of French justice with regard to the death
of citizens — or for that matter, not necessarily French
citizens, but people in France — by racial profiling. It took
13 or 14 years to obtain recognition and compensation,
which was quite symbolic compared to the loss of a
brother, a son, a friend... But once again, the fact that this
was done at the European Court of Human Rights and
not in a French jurisdiction says a lot and, unfortunately,
gives a bit of an overview for families who are confronted
with this judicial system that denies, in the same way as
the police, the right to life and the recognition of the loss
of this right.
LL: Hajer, you just talked about the MIB. Mogniss, could
you talk about it as you know its history very well?
MHA: The MIB is a movement that emerged in 1995 as
a heteroclite movement of convergence of struggle on
the question of the banlieues. The question of relations
with the police and the judicial institution was a central
issue, so they participated in and organized a number
of major campaigns, one of the best known being that
for Aissa and Youssef in Mantes la Jolie, killed in 1991.
The trials did not lead to any condemnation of the police
but the campaign made it possible to put on the agen-
da the presence of a lawyer from the very first hour of
police custody, which ended as some kind of a victory
in the early 2000s. And these struggles also forced both
the State and civil society, anti-racist and human rights
associations to mobilize. This helped to create the Halde,
the High Authority against Discrimination and for Equality,
and today, the Defender of Rights, surprisingly efficient in
its understanding of police violence.
HBB: I want to come back to the spatial dimension, since
it’s the specialty of The Funambulist in its approach of
racism. So now we’re in the middle of Paris. It hasn’t al-
ways been Paris proper as the 20th arrondissement is
one of the last territories attached to the City of Paris — it
was annexed a little before the Commune, as it happens.
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD
Not only we’re in Paris, but now we’re even in something
called the Grand Paris (Greater Paris) and this extension
of the city is causing a lot of damage to the neighboring
municipalities and to the people who live in these ban-
lieues with construction works and real estate specula-
tion that exclude them from their own territory. I’m thinking
of places where they have been established for a very
long time, and notably populations from immigrant back-
grounds, towns in the inner suburbs that are receiving in-
frastructures or the extension of the metro, which increas- “THIS ALSO SAYS A
es the price of rents, etc. LOT ABOUT THE DENI-
AL AND COMPLICITY
OF FRENCH JUSTICE
Ménilmontant, like other Parisian neighborhoods, has WITH REGARD TO THE
DEATH OF CITIZENS
undergone this gentrification process as well. What’s
— OR FOR THAT MAT-
quite surprising even today is to see how few people go TER, NOT NECESSAR-
ILY FRENCH CITIZENS,
through a neighborhood like Les Amandiers. It’s true that
BUT PEOPLE IN
you might only come around here if you know someone. FRANCE — BY RACIAL
Yet, we see very, very, very regularly police officers circu- PROFILING.”
lating in a way that intimidates the young people of the
neighborhood who are hanging out. In contrast, we don’t
see the same police officers in the Rue de Ménilmontant,
which is only a few dozens of meters away. The street
has been gentrified, the rent prices are much higher, and
people in the street, for some of them, are from the white
middle class. I speak about the continuity of racism. I see
it in the systematic erasing of these populations that have
been established for a long time. I am talking as much
about the immigrant population as the white proletarian
population that has been implanted for a very long time
in Paris and the persistence of the colonial treatment of
these populations from the moment the police intervene
in their neighborhoods, just a few meters away from some
people who, in turn, never undergo any police ID check.
Paris is changing to the detriment of its poorest popula-
tions. It has become an extremely bourgeois city. At the
time when my father arrived, in the 1970s, it was not the
case — or not in this uniform way — on its territory.
MHA: Just to extend what Hajer just said in terms of
population change, and to draw a parallel between the
Commune and the current gentrification. It’s important to
recall that the inhabitants of the working-class neighbor-
hoods who took a fundamental part in the Commune, are “IT’S IMPORTANT TO
those who had been displaced from the neighborhoods RECALL THAT THE
INHABITANTS OF THE
demolished by Haussmann. The inhabitants of the work- WORKING-CLASS
ing class neighborhoods that then became the bourgeois NEIGHBORHOODS
WHO TOOK A FUN-
neighborhoods came to settle, especially here in Ménilm- DAMENTAL PART IN
ontant and Belleville. This originally created a kind of class THE COMMUNE, ARE
THOSE WHO HAD BEEN
divide and class consciousness, especially in terms of
DISPLACED FROM THE
habitat and work. This residential displacement can be NEIGHBORHOODS
compared to some degree to the “regeneration” of the DEMOLISHED BY
HAUSSMANN.”
working-class neighborhoods of Paris since the late
1970s, with a tendency to move slightly outwards towards
57
 the banlieues. For example, Les 4000 estate in La Cour-
neuve used to belong to the City of Paris and it was not
devolved to the city of La Courneuve until 1983. So what
does that mean? It means that the City of Paris had one
of the largest housing developments in the banlieues to
displace populations. And that explains why today it is im-
possible to find decent housing in Paris at decent prices.
///
LL: We are still in Ménilmontant, but now in front of the
church of Notre-Dame de la Croix, which is one of the
very first to have been occupied by the revolutionary
“SOME PARISH PRIESTS
LET IMMIGRANT ACTIV-
clubs of the Commune. There have been many others
ISTS SETTLE IN THEIR afterwards, but in addition to being one of the first, this
ADJACENT PREMIS-
church can help us link this era to other stories of the
ES, OFTEN AT THE
CHURCH, TO ORGANIZE struggles, is that right Mogniss?
HUNGER STRIKES
AGAINST DEPORTA-
TION, FOR RESIDENCY MHA: Yes, at the time of the Commune, there was a very
STATUS, ETC. HERE, strong anti-Catholic hierarchy feeling, which ultimately led
IN 1973, THE CHURCH
WAS OCCUPIED BY 55 to the law on the separation of Church and State of 1905.
UNDOCUMENTED AND But in the 1970s, in churches like this one, there was a tra-
MILITANTS OF THE MTA
— THE ARAB WORK-
dition of hospitality, especially towards immigrants, wheth-
ERS’ MOVEMENT.” er it was in Ménilmontant or at the Goutte d’Or. Some
parish priests let immigrant activists settle in their adjacent
premises, often at the church, to organize hunger strikes
against deportation, for residency status, etc. Here, in
1973, the church was occupied by 55 undocumented and
militants of the MTA — the Arab Workers’ Movement. This
strike followed other strikes in other churches, including
the one byanti-racist activist Said Bouziri in 1972 against
“I LIVED THERE AS his expulsion to the St. Bruno Hall, a room adjoining the
A CHILD IN THE
1990S, AT A VERY church of St. Bernard in the Goutte d’Or.
YOUNG AGE, AND I
REALLY REMEMBER
LL: And here, we’re only a few meters away from Rue
BELLEVILLE BEFORE
GENTRIFICATION.” des Maronites, where the headquarters of the activist
press agency you co-founded, IM’média used to be...
MHA: Rue des Maronites, Rue du Liban, Rue de Pales-
tine not too far… surprising isn’t it? [laughs]
///
LL: Last step of our walk: we are in Rue Ramponeau
where the Communard historian Prosper Lissagaray sit-
uated the very last barricade of the Commune. There’s a
whole mythology behind that depicts a single guy who
fights for three hours against the Versaillais. The red flag
falls, he picks it up three times, and continues to fight until
it’s no longer possible and he finally manages to flee.
Now we’re in Belleville. We can talk about a certain num-
ber of things, in particular the many diasporas it has
58
hosted through time. Here, we’re right next to a syna-
gogue, we’re not far from another one, we’re also next to
a public school which features a plaque explaining that
the French police were fully part of the whole infrastruc-
ture of the Shoah and kidnapped Jewish children in this
school as in so many others. This also raises the ques-
tion of selective memorization, because there has been
an incredible effort done by Holocaust survivors and his-
torians to show the responsibility of the French state in
the Holocaust. When it comes to colonialism however,
the efforts of other historians and activists are not paying
off… Hajer, I know that Belleville is a neighborhood close
to your heart, can you tell us about it?
HBB: Indeed, I have a very strong emotional bond with
Belleville, because it is one of the first neighborhoods
where my parents settled, when they arrived in France,
in the early 1970s for my father. They arrived here as this
is the historic neighborhood of the Tunisian community
in Paris. That was really what my father and the elders
explained to me, as being a “landing site” for those who
came either directly from the country or from factories
in the region, especially the Peugeot factory in the east
of France, unlike Renault, which was mostly in the Paris
region. But Tunisians were very present in Peugeot facto-
ries, including my father, in Sochaux, Belfort, Mulhouse....
And many of them ended up leaving because of the very,
very difficult situation of isolation, work rhythms, and they
went up to Paris and settled in Belleville through solidarity Rue Ramponeau in
Belleville, where the
networks of Tunisian immigration. Some Tunisians were MHA: Before talking about the police station, I’d like to LL: One word to the last Communard on his barricade? last barricade of the
already here in the 1950s and 1960s but most arrived in point out that just down the street, we come across the Commune is said
to have stood. The
the 1970s. I lived there as a child in the 1990s, at a very Couronnes subway station. This is where exactly ten years MHA: Did you have any kids? We could have a drink
local police station we
young age, and I really remember Belleville before gen- ago, gatherings in support of the Tunisian revolution hap- with them! [all laughs] ■ evoked is the building
on the right. / Photo-
trification. The neighborhood is important for the history pened. So even today, this symbolic dimension of a place
montage by Léopold
of the Jewish communities in Paris. Early on, there was where Tunisians converge remains. As for the police sta- Mogniss H. Abdallah is a journalist and activist Lambert (2021).
a strong Ashkenazi community and later, when the first tion in front of us, it has a bad reputation in the neighbor- based in Paris. He is the coordinator of agence
Tunisian Jews settled in France, after Tunisia’s indepen- hood for sure. One reason for it might have to do with a IM’média, an independent media network founded
dence or after the Six Day War, they settled in Belleville rather unknown event happening during May-June ‘68: in 1983 addressing migrant struggles and working
and were soon joined by Tunisian Muslims. clashes between Jews and Arabs in Belleville. A certain class neighborhood issues. Former Rock Against
number of brawlers are said to have been picked up in this Police organizer (1980-1983), he was involved in
The neighborhood is really linked to the history of Arab police station before being dispatched elsewhere. During the “Beur” (young Arabs) Movement linked to the
immigration in France. There are many Algerians for sure, the Algeria War, there were also problems like that... March For Equality and Against Racism in 1983,
but Tunisians were the majority. Mogniss was talking and in campaigns against racist murders and po-
about hunger strikes earlier; some of them happened in HBB: That’s why I was talking about the lack of knowledge lice violence in France and elsewhere in Europe.
worker housings in Belleville or in Saint-Maur nearby. This of the Belleville neighborhood about its role in political strug-
history is not that visible anymore today and not really gles. It was in this neighborhood, for example, that someone Hajer Ben Boubaker is a Paris-based researcher
known in the same way that the role played by the neigh- like Mohamed Boudia, a former FLN militant and one of the and a specialist of Arab music and Maghrebi im-
borhood during the Algerian war of liberation. former leaders of the 7th Wilaya [France during the Algeri- migration’s cultural history in France. She is also
an Revolution], co-founded a journal against Houari Bou- the author of several radiophonic documentaries,
LL: Well that gives me a good segue to ask Mogniss mediène and his 1965 coup d’état. In general, this is where including one about Algerian Kabyle singer Tao
about another building on the street that I also wanted to started, after the independence, the first contradictions, con- Amrouche for France Culture (2021), as well as
talk about: the former police station. They recently took testation of the power of the military regime that was estab- those she created as the host of Vintage Arab, a
out the sign, but it was right here. lishing itself in Algeria. This is a quite unknown history. podcast about Arab musical heritage.
THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD THE FUNAMBULIST 34 /// THE PARIS COMMUNE AND THE WORLD 59
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