Text & photos by Anonymous
Step out of the train station and the smoke blows over you. Meat, corn, nuts, Marlboros, and Dunhills are all for sale. Take a bottle of palm oil, headphones, kicks, SIM cards, fruit, a skewer with sauce, whatever you need. Most everything costs five euros or less. Share a handshake or kiss, warm words in Wolof, Bambara, one or another flavor of Arabic, French, Russian, Italian, English, or Chinese. Sit down for a joint by the canal and watch the tram go by. Above stand old brick workers’ houses, beside new concrete refugee housing. Below trash flows in the gentle emerald waves, the ground poisoned by centuries of industrial revolution.
Cargo boats rumble with sand or dirt or bricks under the bridge. On the corner last night was a Congolese celebration. Today boys from the neighborhood are shooting another rap video. Scooters wheelie and mothers gently steer their kids out of harm’s way. Veils and radiant hats, tunics and tight jeans pass in the street. Some kind soul leaves a can of tuna out for the cats. Evangeline’s parents are home for a visit and offer some pasta in the courtyard. Manuel was supposed to meet up fifteen minutes ago, but he’s late too. Two doors down he’s drinking in the huge squat opened up last week. Almost all the trash has been bagged, still need to change the wallpaper – maybe next weekend?
Within a half-hour's walk there are three squats, three legal collective houses, the university we occupied last year, and the old warehouse converted into a bakery. Kids are crafting with modeling clay there, and friends are busy tossing dough into the oven. Still need to find a good place for the Red Market, because after all the friends and neighbors take whatever food they need, shit’s still left rotting. It’s a bit excessive, shame to throw out good tomatoes just because we can’t eat them right now. Wish Louis would make salsa again.
Tomorrow night the local Yellow Vests will meet to prep for the upcoming Assembly of Assemblies. Still trying to find the right spot to squat for a People’s House where all the Yellow Vests from the suburbs can plan and build. We gotta talk about the police coming through to drive the boys off the corner or wrecking shit at the station. How the fuck do they live with themselves, flipping over shopping-carts-turned-grills and driving people off in fear?
Beyond the beltway, Paris becomes Panama. Colors and cultures swirl in the nightmare of French reaction, The Camp of the Saints. Overdressed lost bourgeois get their bags snatched. The grey market leads from the Seine to the Kings’ tombs. Friends from all over the world come here to live and breathe together. Some come for school, some for asylum, some for the long-haul. It’s far from easy, but it’s infinitely better than facing the world alone. How do the educated find a way out of existential ennui? How do refugees stand tall in a state that demands they bow?
Some work, some can’t, some don’t have to. How do we share?
So what is this commune? A rose grown in the ruins of the failed Communist Party? True, we do profit from the old Left’s struggles, and we defend those gains in the insurrection of the Yellow Vests. But that legacy clearly wasn’t enough. And do we do enough? We put our lives in common, we share, we fight together, we breathe together. But as Rosa Luxemburg wrote at the dawn of the 20th century:
Communism, this community of the consumption of goods, which the early Christians proclaimed, could not be brought into existence without the communal labor of the whole population, on the land, as common property, as well as in the communal workshops… And that is why its efforts to suppress the unequal distribution of consumption goods did not work. The voices of the Fathers of the Church proclaiming Communism found no echo.
How can we avoid this fate? What do we do when friends turn enemies, when love turns to hate, when comrade turns abuser? The only way to know is to keep living and struggling together. Every day we refuse to leave one another, to retreat into the individual role society demands we play, we win a little victory. In the end it’s not enough to live well, to survive – or even thrive – in the shell of this society. We must overcome the world. But that’s not a dream of some far-off future, we’ve already begun.
And just when you think you’ve finished writing, Marcel and Marie from the Yellow Vests walk in. “Do you want to see the village?” What village is that? “Our Yellow Vest village, it’s not far.” Step outside, walk past the guys posted on the corner, past Thomas Sankara Houses, down toward the river. Around the bend there’s a small path between the abandoned factory and some houseboats. A group of friends built a wobbly platform on some trees over the water, they’re having a picnic. Old men fish down the shady path. Keep going, pass the wreckage of a refugee or homeless jungle, under the overpass, there’s a mountain of dirt. “There, that’s where we’ll build the acropolis.”