Alexandra Hoffman

The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, an international labour organization, had a great influence in Canada in the late nineteenth century. The order’s racial policies were unique for their time, as its membership was professed to be open to any worker regardless of “color or race, political or religious belief, or place of birth.”¹ The order was indeed progressive, both in theory and practice, in their inclusion of black workers, but their exclusion of Chinese workers followed the popular trend of the nineteenth century labour movements. There are two possible interpretations to the Order’s double standard. The first interpretation takes the Knights’ promise at face value, claiming that discrimination against Chinese workers was not rooted in racist ideology, but rather in economic considerations. The second interpretation is more critical of the reality of the Knights’ progressive attitudes by pointing out numerous instances when the order was reluctant to fight discrimination (by white members and non-members alike) against Blacks and by emphasizing the racist, rather than economical, rhetoric used to exclude the Oriental worker. Evidence of the Knights’ failure to practice their promise to black workers, and the predominance of racist arguments against Chinese workers, suggests that the second interpretation reflects more accurately the reality of the Knights’ racial policies.

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Спасибо, мой друг.

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Teju Cole

[Editor’s note: Teju Cole will be reading in Ypsilanti in March.]

1

I’ve been reading the later work of Derrida, in which the intensity about language remains but there’s also a turn towards the thorniest questions of ethics. There’s a remarkable passage in “The Gift of Death” (1995) that gets at something the news isn’t touching on:

… because of the structure of the laws of the market that society has instituted and controls, because of the mechanisms of external debt and other comparable inequities, that same “society” puts to death or (but failing to help someone in distress accounts only for a minor difference) allows to die of hunger and disease tens of millions of children … without any moral or legal tribunal ever being considered competent to judge such a sacrifice, the sacrifice of the other to avoid being sacrificed oneself. Not only does such a society participate in this incalculable sacrifice, it actually organizes it.

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Water Street, Ypsilanti

But I was certain this would never happen.

El Kilombo

[Editor’s note: this letter comes, via PL, from comrades in Durham, NC]

On September 1, 2015, the Kilombo Community Center, one of El Kilombo’s many projects, closed its Geer Street doors after 9 years of operation. Over the past several years our rent has steadily increased as our neighborhood became the hottest real estate market in downtown Durham and the trendy spot for a young, mostly white, upper middle class. Last month our already high rent was doubled, making it difficult for us to maintain our presence in the neighborhood. In addition, given that so many of the local residents that used and sustained our community center have also been displaced from the neighborhood, we decided it no longer made sense to use our collective resources to maintain the center at its present location. El Kilombo’s other projects, and our organization as a whole, will continue uninterrupted as our community center transitions to a new physical location.

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Photo by MaQuia Aniase

Kristin Ross

In this book I have tried to piece together the elements of an ima­ginary that fueled and outlived the event known as the Paris Com­mune of 1871—an imaginary to which the Communards and I have given the name “communal luxury.” For seventy-two days in the spring of 1871, a worker-led insurrection transformed the city of Paris into an autonomous Commune and set about improvising the free organization of its social life according to principles of associ­ation and cooperation. Since then, everything that occurred in Par­is that spring—from the shock of ordinary people in a major European capital exercising powers and capacities normally re­served for a ruling elite to the savagery of the state’s retaliation against them—has generated controversy and analysis. The histor­ical landscape of the Commune I sketch here is at once lived and conceptual. By “lived,” I mean that the materials I have used to compose it are the actual words spoken, attitudes adopted, and physical actions performed by the insurgents and some of their fel­low travelers and contemporary supporters nearby. Conceptual, in the sense that these words and actions are themselves productive of a number of logics I have felt compelled to follow through in the pages that follow. I have taken as my starting point the idea that it is only by abiding insistently with the particular nature and context of the actors’ words and inventions that we can arrive at the Com­mune’s more centrifugal effects. It is a striking fact that, amidst the voluminous quantity of political analysis the Commune has in­spired, Communard thought has historically received little atten­tion, even from writers and scholars politically sympathetic to the event’s memory. And yet, much of that thought—what the insur­rectionists did, what they thought and said about what they did, the significance they gave to their actions, the names and words they embraced, imported or disputed—has been readily available, reissued, for example, in France by leftist editor François Maspero during the last period of high visibility of the Commune, the 1960s and ’70s. I have preferred to linger with those voices and actions, rather than with the long chorus of political commentary or analys­is—whether celebratory or critical—that followed. I have not been concerned with weighing the Commune’s successes or failures, nor with ascertaining in any direct way the lessons it might have provided or might continue to provide for the movements, insur­rections, and revolutions that have come in its wake. It is not at all clear to me that the past actually gives lessons. Like Walter Ben­jamin, though, I believe that there are moments when a particular event or struggle enters vividly into the figurability of the present, and this seems to me to be the case with the Commune today.

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