Tuesday, May 24, 2011

A plea for a communist philology

Reading, for the first time, Blanqui's "Instructions pour une prise d'armes," a delightfully detailed -- with very precise drawings of the barricades to be built during the coming insurrection, as well their tactical deployment -- manual of insurrection written in 1866 that analyzes, in terms almost exactly those of Lenin when talking stock of the reasons for the failure of the Paris Commune in 1871, the reasons for the smashing ("like glass") of the 1848 insurrection (they lacked "organization," in a word) and, having done so, lays out, step-by-step, the building of combat formations, their intervention into the urban infrastructure, and the types of weapons and tactics most efficiently deployed under these conditions. What struck me, then, and this in the very first pages, was Blanqui's account of the problems and opportunities, at the level of tactics, of street fighting, by Haussman's reconfiguration of the Parisian urban fabric in the aftermath of the battles of 1848. Anyone who has read a page of Walter Benjamin's account of this strategic rediagramming of the city might assume that these enormous knife cuts through the heart of Paris and its working class quartiers -- I am speaking, first of all, of the "grand" boulevards and their opening up easy circulation of troops between barracks and the points of proletarian aggression as well as their function as perspectival lines that draw together the city into a single look -- spelled the end of an entire epoch of worker struggles and the tactics proper to them. They were meant, after all, to "secure the city" against civil war and, we are told by Benjamin, to make the erection of barricades impossible. But Blanqui sees this reconfiguration of the urban environment as posing advantages to the party of insurrection, that is, dangers to the forces of social order:

"For example, something we should not count as one of the new advantages of the enemy is the strategic thoroughfares which now furrow the city in all the directions. They are feared, but wrongly. There is nothing about them to be worried about. Far from having created a danger for the insurrection, as people think, on the contrary they offer a mixture of disadvantages and advantages for the two parties. If the troops circulate with more ease along them, on the other hand they are also heavily exposed and in the open."

Whether this assessment will turn out to have been correct is another matter. 

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