The Arcades Project - Operi

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[Social Movement]
Reveal to these depraved,
o Republic, by foiling their plots,
Yo ur great Medusa face
Ringed by red lightning.
-French workers' song around 1850, cited in Adolf Stahr, ,zwei
Monale in Paris (Oldenburg, 1851), vol. 2, p. 199
Rabble of the faithless, the soulless, the rootless,
Who want to wipe out every art and industry,
To crush underfoot the cult of the Cross,
And drown in an ocean of blood and flames
-Its waves have risen round the flanks of Paris­
Te mples, palaces, priests, peoples, and kings!
-Edouard d'Anglemont, L'/ntemationale (Paris, 1871), p. 7
Palermo has Etna; Paris, fa pensee.
-Victor Hugo, Paris [Lilterature et philosophic melie (paris, 1867),
pp. 466-467], cited in Georges Batault, Le Pontfei de fa demagogic:
Victor Hugo (Paris, 1934), p. 203
"Since the Surrealists constantly confuse moral nonconformism with proletarian
revolution, they attempt, instead of following the course of the modern world, to
relocate themselves to a historical moment when this confusion was still possible,
a moment anterior to the Congress of Tours, anterior even to the development of
Marxism: the period of the 1820s, '30s and '40s:' Emmanuel Berl, "Premier
Pamphlet;' Europe, 75 (March 15, 1929), p. 402. And that is certainly no accident.
For, on the one hand, we have here elements-anthropological materialism,
hostility toward progress-which are refractory to Marxism, while, on the other
hand, the will to apocatastasis speaks here, the resolve to gather again, in revolutionary
action and in revolutionary thinking, precisely the elements of the "too
early" and the "too late," of the first beginning and the final decay. [a1,IJ
It is really imperative tllat we understand, in precisely its polemical bearing, the
apotheosis of organization and of rationalism which the Communist party has to