William Morris wouldn’t call the Commune a failure. Author Kristin Ross has quotes from him. Marx said what mattered most about the Commune was its “working existence” rather than its specific goals. Marx first cautioned them to wait, then soon turned 180̊, because it was that important. For this installment of Anti-Capitalist Meetup I’ve written a report about a book I think my comrades will appreciate:
Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, by Kristin Ross. 160 pages, Verso, April 2015, 9781781688410. First published as L’Imaginaire de la Commune, La Fabrique 2015
My essay isn't about the history of the Commune. There's a lot written & I've not read much. The book is about an aspect of the Commune that is more concerning beliefs and lived experience of some people in that moment rather than describing the historical event. Ross foregrounds how it felt to selected people who achieved that short-lived triumph, and what they were hoping to make. She also writes about some of their contemporaries, including Marx & Morris, who became connected to the Commune story. Coming up on Covid Winter 2, in the context of a so-call labor “shortage” because workers are increasingly refusing underpaid & dangerous work – now is exactly the right time for me to revisit this singular book and to talk about the Commune.
As I reread and took notes for this report (& future review) there was more of Commune history than I remembered. Not a a surprise: since I haven’t studied French history, what stuck with me were the emotional discussions. On the other hand, when I took a glance at Wikipedia’s history with a day-by-day timeline, I’m returning to my original impression. What historical context Ross includes in her book seems to be those stories that relate Commune Time with our current experiences. This book has a narrow focus, but it's wider than those 72 days.
It is a striking fact that, amidst the voluminous quantity of political analysis the Commune has inspired, Communard thought has historically received little attention, even from writers and scholars politically sympathetic to the event's memory.
I have not been concerned with weighing the Commune's successes or failures, nor with ascertaining in any direct way the lessons it might have provided or might continue to provide for the movements, insurrections, and revolutions that have come in its wake. It is not at all clear to me that the past actually gives lessons. Like Walter Benjamin, though, I believe that there are moments when a particular event or struggle enters vividly into the figurability of the present, and this seems to me to be the case with the Commune today.
... [The 2011 situation] bears more than a passing resemblance to the working conditions of the laborers and artisans of the nineteenth century who made the Commune, most of whom spent most of their time not working but looking for work ... that the world of the Communards is in fact much closer to us than is the world of our parents.
... To explore what is meant by "communal luxury" I have had to expand the chronological and geographical frame of the event beyond the seventy-two Parisian days ... I begin the event within the fever that erupted in working-class reunions and clubs in the final years of the Empire. And I end it with an extensive examination of the thought that was produced in the 1870s and 1880s when Communard refugees and exiles in England and Switzerland .. met up with and collaborated with a number of their supporters and fellow travelers – people like Marx, Kropotkin, and William Morris. [Hence the lovely cover]
[from introduction]
She did her own translation. It’s interesting that the respective titles are different, French & English; or maybe that was marketing.
Her approach is useful. It matters to the strength of the story what the Communards preparations were, what they talked and dreaming about before they seized their moment, and what survivors did afterward. What did it do to the soul to have had a taste of utopia which was then torn away with so much blood? There also is the reality that when people are in the midst of doing things are going to be more rough-hewn than someone analyzing and writing theory.
She also wanted to reclaim the Commune story to be as it should be. French historiography is even more remote from my usual; but it seems clear from her comments there are those in France who seek to rewrite its history for nationalistic purposes, while – for the Communards — they were emphatically internationalist. They were against nations and nation-states.
Communal Luxury
The world is divided between those who can and those who cannot afford the luxury of playing with words or images. When that division is overcome, as it was under the Commune, or as it is conveyed in the phrase “communal luxury,” what matters more than any images conveyed, laws passed, or institutions founded are the capacities set in motion. You do not have to start at the beginning—you can start anywhere.
[from chapter 2]
There’s quite a lot about different goals that were pursued during those weeks. It’s hard summarize. Mostly the structure was that different groups of people, such as Elisée Reclus, were picking what they wanted to work on. The survivors continued on their projects after they escaped. One theme throughout is need for smaller cities and attention to agriculture. Since I’m a city girl, I can appreciate the importance, though I’m glad I’m not dealing with dirt. There is also discussion about socialist communities: Those withdrawing from the rest of the world, those experiments have all failed, they were vulnerable to outside attack. Communities should be in voluntary federations, Reclus was emphatic about this. The solidarity will give strength. Likewise, there’s an examination of the usual “each according to their needs” idea – better to augment it to be in consideration of the needs of all.
Darwin was a capitalist (or why the view from Siberia is different)
Darwin did his research and writing in the heart of capitalism, and wrote about competition, individuals, and “survival of the fittest” – which is often used by the rich as an excuse for their excesses. Here is other possible description of nature:
Russian scientists and the view from the north uniformly rejected Malthusian competition ... would foreground, not surprisingly, the struggle that pits organisms against a challenging, often brutal environment and the forms of cooperation they develop for their survival, over the gladiatorial combat of the survival of the fittest. Years spent in the bleak polar world of the Siberian wasteland, it seems, may have helped Kropotkin see in the Paris Commune what would later become his privileged example of cooperative effort under conditions of utmost duress.
[from chapter 3]
Being a medievalist, I have a particular fondness for Iceland. Because of the Little Ice Age, Iceland, after it was settled, stopped being the western edge of Europe and was isolated. Therefore, it had no Renaissance. Icelanders can read their sagas in grade school. It's like Norse & Modern run side by side. At least that's my impression. I also like Iceland’s response to USA imperialism in World War II: USA troops arrived and said: we’re building an airfield here, please don’t say “no.” Iceland leveraged cooperation for infrastructure: first airport & roads, then – collectively decided, I believe – fishing fleet. When that became problematical, they switched to industry that could tap into their geothermal energy & highly educated workforce.
Therefore, I was thrilled I was when Iceland entered this book. Ross was explaining the background of William Morris and why he was receptive to the Communards and became one of the people protecting the memory of it’s story though (unlike Marx) he wasn’t involved during the 72 days. Iceland at that time was a very poor country but most communities didn’t have to deal with the social harms of inequality. It was an example of a kind of non-capitalist life. Morris is another one of my buttons. The cover of this book, with the Morris wallpaper as background, was one of the reasons why I stopped to take a look when the publisher was having an ebook sale. A happy chance; one of my favorite impulse purchases.
Marx & the Commune
It’s well known the progress and results of the Commune had an effect on Marx’s writings afterwards: the introduction to the Communist Manifesto was revised and he also wrote an analysis of it in The Civil War in France (German: Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich).
Ross discusses how, after the Commune, he began theorizing there were multiple ways to get to socialism. The specific ideas they tried or would have developed were less important than that they could start building the new society without a full plan, or with everyone agreeing on the same goal. When they tore down institutions they were also dismantling the supporting bureaucracy. Watching what I can of my local government through city council meetings I see a lot of evidence of bureaucratic resistance and obfuscation concerning selected hot-button issues, including complaints from newly elected council members and affected city residents. Bureaucrats have a lot of influence.
(An aside about bureaucrats: in a webinar I watched recently about USA Sanctions and how they are acts of war, one panellist stressed how important it was to stop a sanction from being declared because even if it is later withdrawn there will be bureaucrats that will continue to enforce it.)
Marx wanted to change the world, and the Commune was a concrete example.
Communards
The Bloody Week (May 21-28, 1871) is a concrete example of what the ruling class is capable of doing when they feel their rule is under threat. Thousands of Communards were killed or summarily executed as Paris was retaken, many were executed afterwards, thousands were transported to French colonies. I believe that one reason USA cities tolerate the difficulties of rogue police departments, even if their finances are strained by the cost of payroll, pensions, operations and lawsuit payouts, is that local elites insist on it: they want the “plan B” of spilled blood to short circuit local insurrection or revenge destruction.
At the same time the French government was dealing with rebelling workers in Paris & much shorter insurrections in other towns they were also dealing with trouble in their colonies. The soldiers killing in the Bloody Week had been trained through colonial violence.
One of the effects of the suppression of the Commune Ross details is how it helped to solidify the French nation-state. So there was a contribution from the Communards to republicanism, in a negative sense. Many of the survivors saw the lies being told about them and found time to document the Commune and defend it’s principles even in their struggles to find work and make new homes.
Here is a description Ross quoted from Kropotkin:
I should have retained that despair [from reports of the Bloody Week], had I not seen afterward, in those of the defeated party who had lived through all these horrors, that absence of hatred, that confidence in the final triumph of their ideas, that calm though sad gaze directed toward the future, and that readiness to forget the nightmare of the past, which struck one in Malon, and, in fact, in nearly all the refugees of the Commune whom I met at Geneva,-and which I still see in Louise Michel, Lefrançais, Elisée Reclus, and other friends. [from chapter 4]
Well, that was Kropotkin’s opinion. I can’t call up Louise Michel to verify, but ... thump. (Take a deep breath.) The Commune is a needed story. It’s no wonder the the landLORDS always want to kill our stories. The people who made yearly commemorations of the Commune didn’t consider it a failure. They keep – and we should keep — the story present as a reminder of where we want to be.
I think the the agenda of this book is to have the readers know these people & take their story to heart, that it will be good for their efforts at future solidarity. One more bit of context for the author of this book: Ross was, for a time, at the ZAD at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in France because she was invited to discuss the imaginary of the Commune at that resistance effort, which did ultimately succeed in preventing a huge & unnecessary international airport from being built on that land.
Big Warning
This seems important because I keep running into toxic comments about Socialists (or Marxists or Trots) vs Anarchists, complete with horrible book or article titles.
Ross has a section in chapter 4 called Anarchist Communism, and points out that the people then didn’t go along with the rift-building. I read somewhere (though apparently not in this book) that it wasn’t a circular firing squad – left faction fighting against left faction – that caused the International Workingmen's Association to dissolve (it was renamed in history to “First International”). It’s ending was rather due to attacks by national governments that considered both to be responsible for the attack on their power, so they wanted to exterminate both.
I don’t think I made that up out of a dream. Sure, infighting isn’t good, but I don’t think one side should lecture the other side, expending energy, while the ruling class watches – probably instigates much of it – and applauds. Let’s take Reclus’ & other communards example and only look for causes during no-blame after-action analysis brainstorming. When the times accelerate decades of stuff into weeks things are rough-hewn. Solidarity is key.
PS: the book in outline
Above, I’ve pulled out a handful of examples from different parts of the book, sometime rearranging the order as I added asides. Here’s the outline:
Introduction — Purpose & scope, thought & action of the time.
1 Beyond the “Cellular Regime of Nationality” — “Universal Republic” & why that was important. The 72 days. The horror of the bourgeoisie.
2 Communal Luxury — The principles: education (“integral” or polytechnic education), art (the division between fine & decorative art), William Morris.
3 The Literature of the North — Kropotkin, Morris & Marx, their interactions with commune survivors.
4 The Seeds Beneath the Snow — Communards in exile, battle over the narrative. The false split.
5 Solidarity — Survivors, particularly Reclus. Danger of isolation, solidarity with nature.
Read More
![A University of California Davis police officer pepper-sprays students during their sit-in at an "Occupy UCD" demonstration in Davis, California November 18, 2011. UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi apologized to jeering students on November 21 for police use of pepper spray against campus protesters in a standoff captured by video and widely replayed on television and the Internet. Faculty and student critics of Friday's confrontation, some of whom demanded the chancellor's resignation, said it had damaged the school's image and the climate for free expression at the university. Photo taken November 18, 2011. REUTERS/Brian Nguyen (UNITED STATES - Tags: CIVIL UNREST EDUCATION CRIME LAW TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY)](https://images.dailykos.com/images/573414/story_image/University_of_California_Davis_Pepper_Spray_Incident.jpg?1533330532 "A University of California Davis police officer pepper-sprays students during their sit-in at an "Occupy UCD" demonstration in Davis, California November 18, 2011. UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi apologized to jeering students on November 21 for police use of pepper spray against campus protesters in a standoff captured by video and widely replayed on television and the Internet. Faculty and student critics of Friday's confrontation, some of whom demanded the chancellor's resignation, said it had damaged the school's image and the climate for free expression at the university. Photo taken November 18, 2011. REUTERS/Brian Nguyen (UNITED STATES - Tags: CIVIL UNREST EDUCATION CRIME LAW TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY)")
