On March 18, 1871, artisans and communists, laborers and anarchists, took over the city of Paris and established the Commune. That radical experiment in socialist self-government lasted seventy-two days, before being crushed in a brutal massacre that established France’s Third Republic. But socialists, anarchists, and Marxists have been debating its meaning ever since.

Kristin Ross, in her powerful new book, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, clear-cuts the accumulated polemics regarding the Commune, which she says have calcified into false polarities: anarchism versus Marxism, peasant versus worker, Jacobin revolutionary terror versus anarcho-syndicalism, and so on.

Now that the Cold War is over and French Republicanism is exhausted, Ross argues, we can free the Commune from such sclerosis. Such an emancipation can, in turn, revitalize the contemporary left to act and think about the challenges of today. No work specifies more fully Marx’s claim that, the greatest achievement of the Paris Commune was its “actual working existence.”