The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life

The Commune Form

First published by Verso 2024

© Kristin Ross 2024

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217

versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-80429-531-1

ISBN-13: 978-1-80429-533-5 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-80429-532-8 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ross, Kristin, author.

Title: The commune form : the transformation of everyday life / Kristin Ross.

Description: London ; New York : Verso, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024009332 (print) | LCCN 2024009333 (ebook) | ISBN 9781804295311 (paperback) | ISBN 9781804295335 (US ebook) | ISBN 9781804295328 (UK ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Communal living. | Government, Resistance to.

Classification: LCC HQ970 .R67 2024 (print) | LCC HQ970 (ebook) | DDC 307.77/4--dc23/eng/20240528

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024009332

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024009333

Typeset in Fournier MT by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

CONTENTS

Introduction

1.Nantes, not Nanterre

2.A Tale of Three Airports

3.Defense, Appropriation, Composition, Restitution

Conclusion

Afterword

INTRODUCTION

The form was simple like all great things.

—Karl Marx, The Civil War in France¹

When Marx, from his vantage point in London, read reports of what was occurring in the streets of Paris in the spring of 1871, there is every indication he began envisaging, for the first time in his life, what ordinary working people look like when they conduct themselves as owners of their lives rather than as wage slaves. In The Civil War in France, Marx duly notes the legislative achievements of the Communards. But it was the form their lives were taking, the art and management of their daily lives, that held his attention and that would change the path of his own research and writing in the last decade of his life. The issues he addressed in the later years, the materials he selected, and the wider intellectual, political, and geographic landscapes he mapped for himself all underwent substantial alterations due to his encounter with the commune form. Communard ideals in 1871, lofty as they might have been, did not concern him. Rather, it was Communard practices—the Commune’s own actual working existence, as he put it—that counted. Marx’s curiosity and wonder were reserved for the discovery and implementation by ordinary people, at long last, of a form: The political form under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor.²

The economic emancipation of labor, it turns out, was not an aspirational goal or a reward for good behavior. In the living, breathing shape of people leading unscripted lives based on cooperation and association, in their impassioned collaboration—the phrase is Fourier’s—that emancipation was already materially underway. Workers wanted to organize their own social life according to principles of association and cooperation. They gave this desire the name commune, echoing the slogan that had begun resounding in workers’ meetings and clubs across the city at the end of the Second Empire.

The Paris Commune was a pragmatic intervention in the here and now. The commune form is first and foremost about people living differently and changing their circumstances by working within the conditions available in the present. In this sense, the form as form was indistinguishable from the specific people who were changing their lives, living differently, at that moment in time and in the space—the neighborhoods—in which they were doing so.

In another of his well-cited formulations, Marx writes of the Communards smashing the State.³ Yet, in the daily activities of the Communards, there was less smashing going on, as I see it, than there was a kind of step-by-step dismantling. The dismantling of any number of state hierarchies and functions was underway, and most importantly the one that makes of politics a specialized activity sequestered away for the ponderous few operating behind closed doors.

Where Marx saw in the Paris Commune of 1871 the momentous discovery of a form, Peter Kropotkin, it seems, saw rather the form’s rediscovery. Thus, one of the more interesting among Kropotkin’s many meditations on the commune form occurs not in his writings on the 1871 insurrection but, rather, in the course of his long history of another French uprising—the big one, as he called it in the title of his book La Grande Révolution, or The Great French Revolution. The soul of the French Revolution of 1789, its only vigor, he writes, consisted of the sixty-some districts issuing directly from popular movements and not separating themselves from the people, the districts that made of the city of Paris a vast insurrectional Commune: The something new which was introduced [by the French people] into the life of France was the popular Commune. Governmental centralization came later, but the Revolution began by creating the Commune.⁴

Of equal importance to the neighborhood districts of the capital, Kropotkin makes clear, were the peasant communes in the countryside. Successive peasant insurrections played the generally underestimated but decisive role in radicalizing the revolutionary process between 1789 and 1794. It was these latter forces from the countryside that demanded the abolition of feudal rights and the return of feudal lands that lords and clergy had seized from the villages from the seventeenth century onward. After all, as Kropotkin reminds us, the principal instrument of the exploitation of human labor at that time was not the factory, which barely existed, but rather land. It was toward the possession of land in common that eighteenth-century revolutionary thought was focused. (The same, I might add, could be said of our own time.) The uprising of the village communes in the countryside, he writes, is the very essence, the foundation of the great Revolution.⁵ At the same time, Paris preferred to organize itself into a huge insurgent commune, and this commune, like a commune of the Middle Ages, took all the necessary measures of defense against the King.⁶ It was Paris as Commune that overturned the king, that became the weapon of the sansculottes against the royalty and the conspirators, and that undertook the leveling of fortunes. The Parisian districts were to hold the revolutionary initiative for nearly two years. Not only were the districts the real center and the real power of the Revolution, but, when they died, the revolution itself ended, as a centralized government began to solidify.⁷

For both Marx and Kropotkin, revolution is indistinguishable from the direct democracy of the commune form, and that democracy is an uprising in excess of the political forms currently in place. This is what Marx meant when he referred to the Paris Commune as a thoroughly expansive political form. The commune form, for both Marx and Kropotkin, is at once the context and content of the revolution, or, in Kropotkin’s words, the necessary setting for revolution and the means of bringing it about.⁸

The name Commune, as such, stands in for and encompasses what Kropotkin (and most historians) understand to be the most radically democratic force at work in the French Revolution. But Kropotkin is saying something more than this. Revolution, in his view, is nothing more than the conflict between the state on the one hand and the communes on the other. The contradiction is not between the state and anarchy but between the state and another organization of political life, an alternative kind of political intelligence, a different kind of community. To the extent that the state recedes, the communes and their way of life flourish. If the role of the state is in fact to manage all aspects of societies while it dominates them and perpetuates them, then perhaps it would be better for us not to view the state form as something final, something accomplished. We may be better off seeing it as a tendency, an orientation. The same, then, would be true for the commune form: better to think it not as something accomplished but rather as a tendency, an orientation.

The observations made by Marx and Kropotkin about the commune form in French revolutionary history can help us isolate some recurrent, recognizable threads or components of the political form in question. The space-time of the commune form is anchored in the art and organization of everyday life and in a collective and individual responsibility taken for the means of subsistence. It thus necessarily entails a highly pragmatic intervention into the here and now and a commitment to working with the ingredients of the present moment. It presupposes a setting that is local, neighborhood-based, or circumscribed. The distinct spatial dimensions and temporality of the commune form unfold alongside of—or within the context of—a distant, dismantled, or dismantling state, or a state whose services have been rendered redundant by a group of people who have taken up the management of their own concerns themselves.

My goal in these brief reflections is not to provide a definition of a form that in its contingency, lack of abstraction, and ongoing, unfinished nature could hardly lend itself to such a task. The commune form, as form, does not lend itself to a static definition, unalterable through time; it does not unfold in the same way everywhere