The Commune Form

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.” 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 Charles 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.” 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.

Discovery and Rediscovery

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: 1789–1793, or The Great French Revolution: 1789–1793.

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.”

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.” 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.”

It was Paris as Commune that overturned the king, that became the weapon of the sans-culottes 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.

Direct Democracy

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.”

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 — 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.

Defining Struggles

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 around the world.

In fact, it is inseparable from its various historical instantiations, from what Marx might have called its various “working existences,” each of which engages with the particular conditions of the present, in a particular situation. And so it is to history that we must look, to the history of actual material struggles, to find such moments of alternative creations and restage, as best we can, with related initiatives and experiments in our own time, not only their own particular “working existences” but the complex echoes they entertain.

These are local experiments that refuse to be defined by a localist chauvinism. Only by recreating past situations — re-situating what are in fact site-specific battles — may we begin to perceive their relation to other experiences elsewhere in time and elsewhere geographically.

In the last few years, dynamic territorial struggles like the ZAD (which stands for “Zone to Defend”) near the rural village of Notre-Dame-des-Landes in western France, or the pipeline occupations in North America, have revived aspects of the commune form and made it their own. Movements like the defense of the Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta (Stop Cop City) are creating powerful interventions into the ever-accelerating destruction of the lived environment transpiring everywhere around us.

The existence of these movements today — the very fact of them — has also had a secondary but, to my mind, no less dramatic effect: they alter what is perceptible about the recent past, and especially the 1960s and ’70s. The ecological preoccupations of today awaken new echoes from the recent past that in turn alter our understanding of what counts now.

Contemporary land-based struggles help us refashion a new sense of the principal lines of conflict of the second half of the twentieth century up to our own time. They change our understanding of what mattered then and what matters (or what is useful to us) now. Long-term battles fought in the 1970s by farmers and their allies in southern France and outside of Tokyo to prevent the seizure of their land for infrastructural development or the military become visible as what we can now see them to be — the defining struggles of the era.

In the light of contemporary movements, the recent theoretical landscape finds itself reconfigured as well. The 1970s anti-productivist Marxism of a thinker like Henri Lefebvre, largely ignored at the time in France (though not in the Americas), takes on a new resonance, in large part because of Lefebvre’s preoccupation with the question so central to the commune form of everyday life: its discontents and its alternatives. His and other texts from the 1970s become newly available for our use in efforts to overcome capitalist logic in the here and now through the reconquest of lived time and space.