Composition

Composition

At once a mobilization and a territory shared in common, the commune form is a political movement that is also the collective elaboration of a desired way of life—the means becoming the end. As such, it is perhaps the only rational medium for people to recognize and organize their own forces as social forces: in Marx’s words, “a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life.”1

As a form, it is both specific, that is, recognizable, and infinitely transmutable; it transforms itself easily to thrive in different times and places. What Kropotkin said of anarchist society might well be said of the commune form: “It is not crystallized into a certain unchangeable form, but will continually modify its aspect.”2 And what that modified aspect might look like can only be ascertained in the act of its being realized, since the commune must be formed or composed—it must take shape, it must be built. Always situated in a particular place, a territory, a neighborhood, a forest, a specific milieu, the commune form is about “producing” space, as Lefebvre put it: building spaces and places in the most literal, pragmatic sense of the term, and attending to their daily workings. “‘Change life!’ ‘Transform society!’ These precepts mean nothing if there is not the production of an appropriated space.”3

This pragmatic, daily attention to collectively managing common concerns is what the word “commune,” it seems, in its earliest historical usages, most consistently evoked. Medieval historian Charles Petit-Dutaillis writes, “In short, the word commune evokes above all the idea not of a free government but of a group that has formed itself to manage collective interests.” In his study of the usages of the word during the Middle Ages, Petit-Dutaillis discovered that “more or less directly, but almost constantly, the word refers to the efforts of a collectivity to better protect its moral and material interests.”4 The sense of a collective management or administration of everyday life is reinforced, he maintains, by the etymology of the word. Disputing recent etymologies that trace the meaning of the word to a juridical connotation (the commune as the set of laws governing a community), Petit-Dutaillis shows the derivation of the word from the Latin communio, signifying simply “association.” In everyday usage during the twelfth century, he maintains, the word “commune” signified a union of people sharing interests in common, an association.

Petit-Dutaillis’s championing of an administrative sense of the word over a governmental one finds a forceful echo in the writings of Parisian communard Jules Andrieu. In charge of communal administration of the city of Paris during the Commune of 1871, Andrieu took care of the everyday management of the workings of the city and the material survival of its people. For Andrieu, the most “satanic” aspect of then president Adolphe Thiers’s battle plan was the sudden cessation of public services and the effect that such an abrupt set of stoppages would have on daily life in the city. In a mere day or two, chaos would reign: corpses lying unburied in the cemeteries, public fountains dried up, waste piling up in the streets, sewers overflowing. As Andrieu saw it, the Commune ’s project was to distinguish at all times between the municipal level and the national level; the idea was to administer Paris and the everyday needs of its inhabitants and avoid anything that seemed to partake of the national government: “The idea at the origin of the March 18th movement … [was] that the Paris Commune renounced governing France.”5 Andrieu saw his role to be that of immersing himself in the most basic dimensions of the city’s workings—from food distribution to sewage, from lighting and water access to cemetery management—and ignoring, for the most part, the verbal pyrotechnics and perhaps high-rhetorical grandstanding going on among some of his colleagues across the city in the Hotel de Ville. The Commune was not something that could be proclaimed; it had to be built from the ground up. “The commune,” he subsequently wrote, “needed administrators; it was crawling with governors.”6 “Governors,” for Andrieu, were those who passed decrees without taking responsibility for their execution, who postured in view of the future instead of speaking in and to the present moment: “It’s old-fashioned, it’s theatrical, it’s Jacobin.” Administrators, on the other hand, were those who responded every day to daily necessities, and who took responsibility for meeting those needs as best they could: “During a revolution,” Andrieu proclaimed, “I believe that everything that is not useful is harmful.”7

Bruno Braquehais, Statue of Napoleon I after the Fall of the Vendôme Column, 1871. Source: World Digital Library Collection.

So, if the commune form is less about governing than it is about meeting common concerns, then the form implies an ongoing commitment precisely not to establish relationships and institutions in a definitive, hidebound form but to build with a continuing supple openness to collective improvisation and to creative and practical confrontations with the situation immediately at hand. We might think it as an open project, one that orients us and moves us toward a horizon beyond capitalism 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 accordance 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 subjects, its geography, to the history of its conflicts and achievements, its attributes and its challenges, as well as the challenges to come.

But who are those actors, those subjects “producing” a physical space they appropriate for themselves? At the end of The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre muses, again in a very prescient way, about one of the main characteristics of spatial battles:

There should therefore be no cause for surprise when a space-related issue spurs collaboration … between very different kinds of people, between those who “react”—reactionaries, in a traditional political parlance—and “liberals” or “radicals,” progressives, “advanced” democrats, and even revolutionaries. Such coalitions around some particular counter-project or counter-plan, promoting a counter-space in opposition to the one embodied in the strategies of power, occur all over the world, as easily in Boston, New York or Toronto as in English or Japanese cities. Typically the first group—the “reactors”—oppose a particular project in order to protect their own privileged space, their gardens and parks, their nature, their greenery, sometimes their comfortable old homes—or sometimes, just as likely, their familiar shacks. The second group—the “liberals” or “radicals”—will meanwhile oppose the same project on the grounds that it represents a seizure of the space concerned by capitalism in a general sense, or by specific financial interests, or by a particular developer. The ambiguity of such concepts as that of ecology, for example … facilitates the formation of the most unlikely alliances … the diversity of the coalitions just mentioned explains the suspicious attitude of the traditional political parties towards the issues of space.8

In the early 1970s, when Lefebvre was writing, it was already apparent to him that the ecological, land-based struggles to come would spur, as he puts it, “collaboration” and “unlikely”—even “the most unlikely”—“alliances.” What he is pointing to is a situational unity (an impassioned collaboration) that is neither ideological nor identitarian. Though he locates the creation of “counter-spaces” in urban settings in the passage just cited, Lefebvre might well have been writing the future history of the ZAD (zone à défendre) at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, noting what was, along with defense, perhaps its most salient characteristic. This is its construction of solidarity in extreme diversity. When the historic farmers sought to defend their land and way of life by not selling out to the government in the 1970s, they were initially successful, but thanks mostly to the government’s own inertia or its strategy of simply waiting them out. The state then more or less forgot the project for many years. But when the airport idea was revived (under the Socialist government) in the early 2000s, farmers called for help and occupiers arrived, creating a conflict-prone graft of at least three very distinct groups—farmers, occupiers, townspeople—who began sharing a territory and a movement.

This kind of coalition is already quite singular when we compare it to similar land-based movements in Australia, for example, or the United States, Canada, and other settler-based former colonies. Most land-based struggles in the Americas, like Chiapas, Standing Rock in the Dakotas, or any of the many pipeline blockades in Canada are largely Indigenously peopled and Indigenously led. Non-Indigenous supporters, of course, join in, but the dynamics of the movement are necessarily conjugated through the troubled history of Native peoples’ relationship to their lands. For example, at the origin of what remains the largest of the recent US territorial struggles—the movement against the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline—was the invitation issued in spring 2016 by the Standing Rock Sioux to anyone who would stand with them to protect water, land, and future generations to travel to the site threatened by imminent pipeline construction. By late summer, some ten thousand people had answered the call, and an occupation took shape under the clearly identified leadership of a seven-tribe council of elders. A similar dynamic prevailed in the Larzac movement in France when the 103 farm families who had signed a pledge not to sell their land to the government called for help. While the groups and individuals who came to support the farmers were of a diversity never before seen in France—Maoists, Occitan separatists, pacifists, revolutionaries committed to the overthrow of the government, nuns—it was the farmers, the original families who held the reins of the movement, who made the decisions. At the ZAD, on the other hand, with its improbable assortment of different components made up of old or historic farmers, younger and more radical farmers from the area, petty-bourgeois shopkeepers in nearby villages, elected officials, anarchist occupiers, and naturalists who do not even believe in farming, no one group was in a leadership position. This created a different kind of territorial movement than Larzac or Standing Rock, as well as a sharp divergence from those ideologically based or identitarian struggles familiar to us in the history of the left. As one ZAD dweller put it, the need to find a way to hold together the diverse but equal components that make it up requires “more tact than tactics.”9

ZAD at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, 2012.
 

In Valparaíso, Chile, a similar exercise in solidarity among diverse groups achieved a notable victory. At the end of 2017, the Chilean Supreme Court voided the permit to construct an enormous shopping mall that would have covered the entire historic harbor area, a working seafront. The resolution ended another ten-year battle between inhabitants and developers. North American–style shopping malls in Chile, like airports in Spain, have mushroomed throughout the country, ushered in by way of the tried-and-true language of modernization, job creation, and economic growth. But this particular project dwarfed all the others in scale: it was slated to include 162 luxury boutiques, in addition to convention centers and even a theme park. Once more, another unlikely alliance—this one made up principally of dockworkers, artists, urbanists, and students—saw the commercial center clearly for what it was: a space designed not for them but for tourists and visiting business executives, and thus a pillage of the common good. This was another protracted war, but though it took ten years of concerted actions, legal maneuvers, and improvisations, they succeeded in defending their city and its seafront.

Stop Cop City graffiti along the Proctor Creek Greenway Trail near Atlanta, 2023. License: CC BY-SA 4.0.

In April 2021, a movement began to defend the Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta, Georgia, from being leveled and replaced with a $90 million police training complex. “Cop City,” as opponents called the project, would pave over 381 acres of the largest urban forest in North America to construct a terrain where police could train with Israeli commandos, imported for the job, to learn how to handle urban-warfare scenarios. After the standard attempts to pressure the city council into not giving final approval to its $30 million contribution to the project had failed, occupiers took to the trees, building and inhabiting makeshift tree houses, their supplies brought to them by an array of helpers: schoolchildren and their parents, students from Emory University and other nearby colleges, working-class and poor community members from the majority-Black neighborhood adjoining the forest, among those for whom the loss of their cherished nearby green space would surely be more devastating than for other Atlantans. The forest occupation—half festival, half refugee camp—lasted until a brutal eviction in January 2023.10

It is important to underline, as Lefebvre does more generally, the lack of identitarian or ideological unity at the heart of such coalitions. Communal forms of “inhabiting” or “sharing usage”—particularly of the land—are directly political in a way that allows us to break with modalities of ideology and identitarianism. The ZAD was not a little chapel of like-minded followers singing the same hymn. The ZAD collective Mauvaise Troupe gave a name to the process of maintaining tactical diversity in the face of a common enemy—they called it “composition.”

Composition is another name for the collective subject formed out of the many different kinds of people engaged in building and continuing the occupation through all its many metamorphoses. It bears a clear relationship to the relational political subjectivity that characterized earlier movements of the 1960s and ’70s, as in the tripartite coalition discussed earlier that emerged in Nantes 1968 when paysans joined students and striking workers. A relational subjectivity of a similar sort certainly grew out of the encounter between the farmers in the Chiba Prefecture of Japan (who began by defending their way of life and learned along the way what kind of overwhelming violence the state had in store for them), and the urban students and workers (who displaced themselves to join the farmers, and in the process learned for the first time how and where the food they ate was produced). The kind of social base created at the ZAD, though, or at the Stop Cop City occupation in Atlanta, for example, was different—essentially a working alliance, as in the movements of the 1960s and ’70s discussed above, but one that also entails the sharing over time of a physical territory, a living space.

When people of starkly different backgrounds and beliefs come together pragmatically on an everyday basis to perform the tasks and devise the ever-shifting agendas of a territorial occupation, something like a polemical political community is created. Composition begins when people of different origins, with different ways of thinking, different histories and relations to the land, different skills, and sometimes vastly different risk tolerance decide to act together, under the presumption of equality, to defend a territory. A new collective subject—the result of mutual displacements and dis-identifications and the action of equals as equals—is produced, essentially, through practice, through creative, shared engagement in building, defending, and sustaining the life of the occupation day by day. The product of a massive investment in organizing life in common, composition dispenses with the kinds of exclusions based on ideas, identities, or ideologies so frequently encountered in radical milieus, the whole tired sectarianism of the history of the left. As such, it is a manner of making a world, the weaving together of a new kind of solidarity—one where the unity of experience counts more than the divergence of opinions, and one that amplifies, as well, Kropotkin’s conviction that solidarity is not an ethics or a moral sentiment but, rather, a revolutionary strategy, and perhaps the most important one of all.

A compositional logic is at work as much in an Indigenously led occupation like Standing Rock as it was at Notre-Dame-des-Landes or Atlanta. At the heart of the Standing Rock action was an unprecedented alliance made up of over 350 Indigenous nations, some from as far away as Australia, the Arctic regions, and Central America. But nothing about this impressive display of pan-Indigenism was “natural,” nor could it be presumed: some of the tribal economies of nations supporting the Sioux, for example, were themselves deeply tied to energy extraction, including the Crow (coal) and the Osage (oil).11 Deep divisions separated the Council of Elders (some of whom had more elaborate ties than most to the local, nonnative community) from the younger occupiers of the Red Warrior camp, who favored more subversive militant actions than did the elders. Yet, as winter closed in, it was the initial alliance between Indigenous tribes that inspired the many non-Native protestors—anti-fracking militants, movie actresses, Black Lives Matter militants, religious groups, US Army veterans—to travel to North Dakota and join the ramshackle occupation, as well as the many who supported it from afar.

The constructive process by which such disparate and autonomous forces unite and cooperate with each other is not at all straightforward. It creates a political community far more polemical in nature than does one that strives for consensus. This is not a coalition of subjects who each remain the same throughout, for composition neither builds uniformity nor leaves groups or individuals unchanged. New arrivals at the Standing Rock occupation, for example, would certainly find their identities as, say, white environmentalists, decentered, to say the least. Yet, while composition creates commonality, it does not seek to homogenize the multiple segments of the movement. Cohesion in the face of a common enemy does not result in orthodoxy but, rather, in a continuing working internal eclecticism and diversity of methods. Thus, as Lefebvre remarks, the allergy of political parties to these sorts of land-based movements as well, of course, as the reverse—the feeling is mutual.

The diversity of methods, or “complementarity of practices,” as it has come to be called, is a vital part of the equality assumed between the different components of the movement. Such a diverse makeup allows it to express itself through various kinds of actions; at the ZAD, these included filing legal briefs, building and maintaining communication with distant support groups, graphic design, frontal confrontations with the police, cataloging endangered species on the zone, and sabotaging machinery. No one method was presumed superior to another; neither legality nor illegality, violence nor nonviolence, was fetishized. Proponents of one method refrained from arguing the superiority of their way. As a result, some segments might find themselves making more visible contributions or louder interventions at certain times, while remaining recessive at others; when the latter occurs, as in a musical composition, other instruments are there to take up the melody. The movement never puts all of its eggs in the same basket. Its strength, especially in the face of a state that tries ceaselessly to divide and conquer by pitting one group against another, derives largely from a complementarity of methods.

Eclecticism and the disagreements it can produce are often exhausting, even aggravating. So why make the effort? Because the power of the movement resides in the excess of creating something that is more than just the sum of ourselves.

What the contemporary movements of composition show is that developing strategies in common with people who have different modes of political action and different political vocabularies is not only possible but desirable, on the condition of having a clearly designated enemy in common and on the condition that solidarity, built on the presumption of equality, take effect across all the various components—solidarity not in spite of but because of the diversity of the groups. As a friend I encountered at the ZAD put it quite eloquently, “Our backs are against the wall. All methods are good, provided that there is not just one of them.”12