The Political, Cultural, and Ecological Challenges Posed by the Paris Commune

Communal Luxury can be thought of as a companion volume to two earlier works of cultural history by Professor Ross: The Emergence of Social Space, which examined Arthur Rimbaud’s relationship to the Paris Commune, and May ‘68 and Its Afterlives, which exposed the ways what actually transpired in France in the spring of 1968 was quickly erased or distorted in retrospective accounts of it by the conservative French media. This book combines an abiding interest in the Paris Commune of 1871 with a new focus on its theoretical afterlives—on what Ross calls the “centrifugal effects” (2) of that momentous historical event as they register in the thought of those who participated or were closely associated with it. Agreeing with Marx (among others) that the Communards had “no ideals to realize . . . no ready-made utopias to introduce” but were struggling in the heat of the moment to “work out their own emancipation” by “improvising the free organization of . . . social life” (1), she proposes in one striking formulation that “actions produce dreams and ideas, and not the reverse” (7; see also 25). So her focus here will be on the dreams and ideas produced by the myriad actions that comprised the Commune, on the “[political] imaginary that fueled and outlived the event” (1). While Ross declares her “structuring themes” to be “internationalis[m], . . . the future of education, labor and . . . art, [and] the commune form and its relation to ecological theory and practice” (3), the book’s chapters follow a distinctly centrifugal pattern: chapter 1 treats the prehistory and emergence of the Commune; chapter 2 recounts aspects of its enactment; chapter 3 examines the echoes of the Commune form that Kropotkin, Morris, and Marx discovered in popular culture and rural social forms from Finland, Iceland, and Russia, respectively, later in 1871 and 1872; chapter 4 examines the further development of Commune-inspired thought during the 1870s and 1880s among Communards exiled in London and Geneva; chapter 5 addresses the expansion of the principle of solidarity from the urban space of the Commune to include not just the agricultural sector in the countryside and humanity as a whole, but also nature itself and on a global scale.

Selecting a moment or point of origin for a historical event like the Commune may be largely arbitrary, but Ross’s warning against the standard historical account, which sees the Commune as originating with the French state’s failed attempt on March 18 to confiscate the cannons belonging to the Parisian National Guard, is important: for “if we begin with the state, we end with the state” (14), and it is crucial to understand the Commune not as a response to the state, but as an out-and-out alternative to it. As a contemporary participant put it, as soon as the French government left Paris for Bordeaux (following the victory of Prussian forces in 1870), “the Commune already in fact existed” (cited 21, emphasis in original). This claim can be sustained in light of the growing impact, during the last two years of the Second Empire, of social reunions and political clubs, part of whose popularity was due, ironically enough, to the kind of politically charged entertainment they provided when the state closed down the theaters themselves for being too seditious. In another irony noted by Ross, the state’s ban on discussing explicitly political events and topics led popular orators to question broader principles, such as private property and popular sovereignty. Fully two years before the Commune was officially declared in late March 1871, then, “Vive la Commune” had already become a rallying-cry common in many of the political clubs in Paris, loosely federated because of the impact of the “ambulatory orators” who circulated among them. A practically identical structure—“a kind of decentralized federation of local, independent worker-based committees organized by arrondissement” (19)—would characterize both the Paris section of the International and the Parisian National Guard by the time the official French government abandoned Paris, leaving...