WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Where once solidarity referred to a workers’ movement against authoritarian controls by the state and capitalist economies and the shared sense of identity that Labor gave in the struggle against class hierarchies, today’s movements against oppression require envisioning and committing to new ways to share the political strength to stand up and say NO.
Today, show producer Bradi Heaberlin speaks with Kristin Ross, Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, about her work defining those ways. One way is what Ross calls the “luxury” of the commune – a luxury of shared action and shared living, of shared becoming – in the Paris Commune of 1871, but she finds others in new movements that have formed in France like that of the gilets jaunes or yellow vests, and what was the occupational attempt to block the construction of an international airport in farmland in western France: the ZAD, or the Zone to Defend, outside of Notre-Dame-des-Landes.
We begin in the reactionary 1980s with what Ross calls the intentional “disappearance” of the revolutionary tradition in scholarship and her work in opposition to this.
GUEST
Kristin Ross is the author of several books, among them are, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune; The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune; and most recently, she’s translated and written a preface to The Zad and NoTav: Territorial Struggles and the Making of a New Political Intelligence published by Verso last year.
RELATED
The Meaning of the Paris Commune, an interview with Kristin Ross
Essential Paris Commune Reading List
ZAD: The State of Play by S.G. and G.K., translated from the French by Janet Koenig
French mayors ban glyphosate weedkiller, defying government
MUSIC – Matt Otto
“Forces and Relations”
“Transformations”
“Paris Commune”
“Work Day”
“Revolution (for John Zorn)”
CREDITS
Host: Doug Storm
Producer: Interchange Collective
Episode Producer: Bradi Heaberlin
Audio Engineer: Sean Milligan
Executive Producer: Kade Young
