Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune by Kristin Ross (review)

Kristin Ross thinks that our era is particularly well situated to understand the radical Paris Commune as it imagined what it would mean to "live differently" (3). The result is a compelling tour through the imaginations of both the Communards and fellow travelers such as William Morris and Petr Kropotkin. Central to this imaginary was the phrase that forms the book's title, "communal luxury," where material plenitude and individual freedom spring from the end of the wage-labor system, private property, and human beings' enslavement to these systems: "equality in abundance" (63), in a phrase.

Particularly good is Ross's side-by-side analyses of shoemaker Napoleon Gaillard and William Morris, both of whose aesthetics fused form with function, bringing art into the everyday and the everyday into art. Freedom requires the time and space to reflect on what one creates and on creation as such (48). For the Communard imagination, what do we get when the condition of freedom is obtained? Life that is filled with meaning and comfortable shoes, among other things.

Gaillard's shoes illustrate an additional and fascinating theme in Communal Luxury. The Communard political imaginary was simultaneously committed to what later Russian radicals would call zhiznetvorchestvo (life creation) and to art as a reflection of life. On the one hand, Gaillard's shoes take their form from the given reality of the human foot (56–57). On the other hand, the "project of making art lived" opens up a realm of pure possibility. As for the late-nineteenth-century Russian avant-garde, that which is envisioned thereby comes into existence.

As fellow travelers, the Russian radicals figure prominently in Communal Luxury. Looming particularly large are Elizabeth Dimitrieff, Nikolai Chernyshevskii, and Kropotkin, for example. The account of Russian-French "theoretical cross-fertilization" is an interesting one, as the imaginary universe of what is to be done? is transmitted to the Paris Commune via Dimitrieff, the organizer of the "Women's Union" (26–27). That said, Ross's treatment of the Russian context and influence seems unnecessarily selective. It is not obvious, for instance, why Chernyshevskii's Fourierism is relevant, but not Dmitrii Pisarev's infamous comment that a good pair of boots was worth more than Pushkin, particularly in light of the sections on Gaillard the shoemaker. Likewise, how can the central importance of the faraway Chernyshevskii, but total absence of Petr Lavrov, who was actually in and around Paris during and after the Commune, be explained?

While this is a book about the imaginary, Ross resists the notion that the Communard imagination had no practical effects, pointing to the creation of the Women's Union, for instance (27). This is all to the good. Surely, however, it was worth pointing out that Russian radical hopes for the revolutionary potential of the obshchina (peasant commune) were wildly in error (Herzen's collaborator, Ogarev, appears to have been one of the few who knew much about the Russian peasantry beyond what everyone got from the traveler Haxthausen). So when Ross discusses the debates over the obshchina between Russian Populists (Lavrov is again oddly absent) and Marxists (82–83), it seems relevant that none of the participants had a particularly realistic understanding of the commune. Radical hopes for the obshchina were bound to be disappointed, or "successful" only to the extent which radicals could themselves create the conditions in which their theses were true.

Uneven use of the Russian context aside, Communal Luxury succeeds at liberating the imaginary universe of the Commune from the historiographical confines of French Republican and "state-communist" (4) narratives, choosing instead to show how, in its rejection of the artificial division between mental and physical work (42), it proposed paths not taken. As a relatively young person with no interest whatsoever in "hedge-fund management" or smart phones (3), this reader can only concur with Ross's judgment: there is much worth contemporary consideration in the debates of...