Takeaways - The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life by Kristin Ross
Written in a compact, treatise style, in The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life, Kristin Ross introduces us to the notion of the commune form, going back first to the Paris Commune in 1871, meandering through the “long 1960s” and 1970s in France, accounting for uprisings relating to land designated for an aiport in Japan, and, finally, taking us to the Cop City protests in Atlanta, Georgia in 2020.
Karl Marx, as Ross notes, was entranced by the success of the Communards in Paris in the 1870s. He and other thinkers saw this moment in a specific time and place as the emancipation of labor. And while Marx saw the Communards as “smashing the state,” Ross insists they were doing something quite different. She writes, “There was a kind of step-by-step dismantling (3).” They were living and operating in a new way, organizing time and space according to their needs and wants in their neighborhoods. Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, who authored La Grande Révolution (The Great French Revolution), argued that “Governmental centralization came later, but the Revolution began by creating the Commune (4).” Thus, according to Kropotkin, the commune had deep roots in the democratic seeds of France’s birth during the French Revolution after it had languished for centuries under a monarchy.
The commune form is also intimately tied, as noted above, to time and place. It allows those actively participating in its formation to be involved in a radical present (my terminology), who are creating the conditions for living together cooperatively. Furthermore, time and place are the nexus of the quotidien. The time of everyday life on a commune is reclaimed in a specific locale. When it relates to land, which Ross delves into with the paysan,* for example, in France, this reclamation leads to cyclical relations regarding how that land is cultivated; it stands outside of routinized, mechanized forms of capitalist time.
Land is also important for the purpose of action. In these cases, when land is at stake, a commune can develop, flourish, and act. Those in the commune do not act through resistance, however. Instead, they act defensively. Ross explains, “Resistance responds to the hope of getting by when the enemy, it seems, holds all the cards. Defense, on the other hand, begins elsewhere — not with the state and its power, but rather with what it is that we hold dear: what we already have, a positivity, a thing worth fighting for. And, in fighting together for it or in defending it, a more powerful solidarity is woven than can be created through resistance (63).”
Attunement to the land is also entwined with ecosocialism, according to Ross and the tradition in which she sees her work embedded (Marx, Henri Lefebvre, Maria Mies, etc.). Marx was keenly aware of the degradation of the land (he discussed at length soil exhaustion with the Global North shifting to depriving resources in the Global South).** Ross also quotes Marx describing capitalist agriculture as being “not only progress in the looting of the worker, but also the art of looting the soil (47).” Not surprisingly, the ecological movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and today, are driven by a concern for the degradation of the land. As Ross notes, “Movements like Les Soulèvement de Terre (Uprising of the Earth) [in France] or Stop Cop City reorient the horizon of political struggle toward the protection and conservation of the living (57).”
This reorientation of political struggle toward protection and conservation entails a return to traditional practices of the land. The bocage becomes fertile ground for farming in the cooperative sense. Cows need tending, fences need mending, and everyone must play a specific role in these everyday life practices (things don’t, after all, “fix” themselves on their own.) To some of the armchair theorizers, this type of communal living probably sounds tedious and banal, but for those on the commune, it defies capitalist modes of production via everyday life action. And who’s to say that milking a cow or bailing hay isn’t radical?
Capital is also at war with autonomy, something the commune form offers. But these communes are not seizing land (that’s what capitalists do). Instead, they seek restitution of the land on the periphery. Again, it is neither a seizure of property nor a nationalization of it, but instead a reclamation of that which has been discarded or, in some cases, threatened by capitalist infrastructure (for example, the building of large international airports). For Lefebvre, reclamation includes a return to older agrarian practices. While many know his work on urban space, he critiqued the modern world by using models of “pre-capitalist, pre-modern societies (78),” with particular focus on the peasant.
As Ross explains:
In an extraordinary chapter of the first volume of Critique de la vie quotidienne (Critique of Everyday Life), Lefebvre evokes the human fulfillment of the medieval past: “In peasant celebrations, each member of the community went beyond himself, so to speak, and in one fell swoop drew all that was energetic, pleasurable from nature, food, social life and his own body and mind.” The peasant celebration was not an exceptional moment in an otherwise-drab existence; it was nothing more (and nothing less) than the intensification of plentitude, the fulfillment of everyday life itself: “Festival differed from everyday life only in the explosion of forces which had been slowly accumulated in and via everyday life itself (80).”
This type of fulfillment, Ross goes on to elucidate, is based upon Marx’s “human fulfillment.” Human fulfillment of this kind leads to dis-alienation, something which Lefebvre pursued as a project, along with reconquest, in his works. He went on to call this “appropriation,” a term he took from Marx (80). (Incidentally, alienation as well as the lack of being whole are both givens for humans under capitalism.) Furthermore, “appropriated space” is different than “dominated space,” two distinctions that Lefebvre articulates at length in The Production of Space. Appropriated space is intended for use, whereas dominated space is property (there is sole ownership) and intended for the accumulation of capital.
Appropriated space allows for social transformation, freeing those from the constraints of the ideology of property ownersip and providing them the ability to envisage communal living. Ross continues:
We might think of it as an open project, one that orients us and moves us toward a horizon beyond capital and beyond state bureaucracy. The transmutability of the form has everything to do with the particular people who make each commune, and who, in so doing, outline a way of life, a subsistence in accordance with the commune’s site, its location, and its location’s history. Equally importantly, they devise a way of life in acccordance with what the people making the commune decide their own political emancipation will look like. Each commune is built in a way particular to its specific space — to its subject, its geography, to the history of its conflicts and achievements, its attributes and its challenges, as well as the challenges to come (95).
Since each commune is made up of particular people, one may wonder: what are their aims? This, too, naturally, differs depending upon location, time, history, geography, and so forth. Groups in each commune are formed out of a multitude of people. Since they are diverse, they also rely upon “complementarity practices” of action (some adhere to non-violence methods; others do not). A new “kind of solidarity” is forged, Ross writes, “one where the unity of experience counts more than the divergence of opinions, and one that amplifies . . . that solidarity is not an ethics or a moral sentiment but, rather, a revolutionary strategy [my emphasis], and perhaps the most important one of all (103).” It is also defense against a shared enemy. As Ross notes, “We make our community by defending it (67).”
The commune is praxis now. It is not predicated on the concept of the total collapse of capitalism in the near or distant future. It does not theorize about a utopia in the beyond. It is boots on the ground. It is milking the cows. It is the upkeep of the bathrooms. It is conflict resolution in the moment. To be sure, the commune and its transformation of everyday life does not lack in imagination or creativity. Seeing beyond the above list of banal and necessary chores, one also sees — within the commune form — the miraculous possibilities of a world beyond capitalism, one that is based upon cooperation, mutual respect, and reverence for nature.
Notes:
*Although the term paysan in French translates to “peasant” in English, Ross uses it instead of farmer. In fact, in French, it has a different connotation. She explains, “The term ‘farmer’ does not distinguish between a smallholding cultivator (paysan) and an industrial farmer associated with agri-business (agriculteur) (12).”
**There is a great deal of literature on Marx being an ecosocialist v. a Promethean productivist, something I will not discuss in this short essay.