Ragpicking Through History: Class Memory, Class Struggle and its Archivists
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- Published on Wednesday, 31 May 2017 22:30
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1424 .... June 1, 2017
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Ragpicking Through History: Class Memory, Class Struggle and its Archivists
Tithi Bhattacharya
In 1990, I watched the Polish film maker Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Blind Chance (1981/1987) without registering the paralyzing potential of a particular scene.
The protagonist, Witek, meets an old Communist by chance on a train. As a result of that meeting Witek decides to join the Communist Party. Later, again by sheer chance, he runs into an ex-partner, also his first love. A beautiful, tender and fierce sex scene follows. In the calm of the after, Witek, almost absentmindedly, whistles the Internationale. His partner murmurs something approvingly. And then Witek says "How would you like it if I sang this everyday?" The young woman recoils. She knows he has joined ‘The Party’. She... leaves the room and his life.
For many years that scene haunted me and it is only recently that I am beginning to understand the contours of my unease with and attraction to it. The woman approved of the Internationale but recoiled from the organization that claimed to embody its spirit -- the Party. There is a traumatic split here between the history qua memory of the working class and the organization of the working class, which is supposed to be the guardian of that memory. I am of course aware that in Kieślowski’s native Poland, the Party and the bourgeois State were braided in a particular relationship that does not apply to our times.
Yet, our current conjuncture invites a renewed rethinking of two historical imaginaries: first, what is class memory? To ask this question is really to reopen a discussion on what is class struggle -- and, more specifically, how does our collective memorialization of struggles past inform our relationship to struggle in the present. Second, and relatedly, who can be this struggle’s archivist? And this is a question of organizational form: what form can emerge out of such struggle, and try -- or fail -- to shape it.
