The Commune Form: A Conversation

The form of the commune “is as at once a political movement and a shared territory, a tactic and a community-in-the-making.”1 It is not the fulfillment of a preordained revolutionary program, nor one that is modeled on idealist or romantic models of totality, but a dynamic process responding to present and local conditions. It reemerges during spatial struggles like the decentralized movement to Stop Cop City in Atlanta (and across the world, as Joy James reminds us, since many cities are cop cities in and of themselves) and at the ZAD in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, France, where farmers, anarchists, and other participants were able to halt a sixty-year-old plan to build a new airport, notwithstanding brutal state repression.2 Movements in the same country mobilizing to stop the hoarding of water by agricultural capital in mega-basins present a new terrain of this struggle, waged today by collectives like Soulèvements de la Terre. The following is a conversation between Kristin Ross and Andreas Petrossiants that was held at e-flux in October 2024. It has been edited for clarity.

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Andreas Petrossiants: You begin The Commune Form with Marx and Kropotkin’s notions of the Paris Commune as demonstrating a “form” of action rather than a singular static event—the “art and management of daily life.” Contrary to arguments made by people like Karl Korsch, this form is not incidental or irrelevant as compared with the Commune’s content. Why did you turn to this framing as a way to discuss territorial urban and rural struggles since 1968?

Kristin Ross: I have been writing about the Paris Commune for many years, but I began to think of the “commune form” when I was invited in 2015 to an ongoing occupation at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, which was an attempt to block the building of an international airport in farmland. It was the longest-lasting social movement in postwar France and went through a lot of different phases. When I was invited there, they wanted me to talk about what possible continuities and discontinuities existed between what they were doing and what the urban communards were doing in Paris in the nineteenth century. So, I was forced, in a way, to think about a shared political form and the limits of the comparison. There, at the ZAD (“zone à defendre”), I saw something in the vicinity of the actual creation of a different world, a collective creation of a world apart. It brought to mind how Mikhail Bakhtin talks about fiction’s temporalities, what he called “chronotopes”: distinct space-times. The ZAD was its own distinct temporality, its own distinct space—but it wasn’t fictional.

When Marx talks about the Paris commune, he says, “The form was simple, like all great things.” And I’ve spent a lot of time trying to think about that and other pithy yet amazing kinds of statements that either he or Kropotkin and a few other fellow travelers of the insurrection made about the Commune. Kropotkin says, “It’s the setting for revolution and the means of bringing it about.” So, it’s both the context and the substance. And Marx’s reflections are not very different. Marx is at his most anarchist when he’s talking about the Commune. I began to think about when it is that communes flourish. Well, they flourish whenever the state withdraws. When the state is disabled or when it takes a nap. In the case of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the state actually forgot, for about twenty years, that it was intent on building an airport in that area. So, it was a long nap. And during that time, the people in the occupation were able to make a lot of progress in developing the capacity of working together, which is the main thing that people now have to relearn. So, occupations like the ZAD are a political movement, but they are also the collective elaboration of a desired way of life. As such, the commune form is always linked to a particular territory. It’s not an abstraction. It’s not a concept. It’s something that is built and anchored in a particular territory, neighborhood, region.

AP: In terms of territory, this reminds me of when you write that for many farmers in France, May ’68 was experienced less as a “distinct event” than as one moment in larger struggles against enclosure. You cite Bernard Lambert’s Les Paysans dans la lutte des classes, which you say was the “first work to place farmers and workers in the same structural situation vis-à-vis capitalist modernity.” I’m also reminded of Eric Hobsbawm’s remark that for much of the world, the Middle Ages ended suddenly in the 1950s. Your writing on the ZAD and other nonhierarchical movements to defend territory against statist and capitalist enclosure refers to these land-based struggles and non-urban or non-proletarian subjects that are often overlooked.

KR: Lefebvre pointed out way back in the seventies that any struggle over land necessarily involves alliances between the most diverse kinds of people. It necessarily brings together people who have completely different political codes, who are not in the same ideological boats. It’s a dramatic mix of people. This was evident at the ZAD. Occupiers there ended up coming up with a term to talk about what they were doing in trying to hold these various segments and groups together long enough to block the airport: “composition,” or solidarity across extreme diversity. They had general assemblies that went on forever because this was the work necessary for bringing together groups that might include participants as diverse as old, very conservative dairy farmers (those who refused to sell their land initially when the airport was first announced), anarchists, nuns, black blocks, lesbian separatists, farmers who didn’t believe in animal protein, naturalists who didn’t even believe in farming, and so on. And what intrigues me the most now about composition is how effective it is. Because when you put those groups together, you also bring different knowledges and experiences into the mix: the scientific knowledge of the naturalists; the practical knowledge of the anarchists, like building and maintaining squats; the creative, spontaneous, improvisational energy of the punks; the skills of those with legal backgrounds who were able to work the courts to delay and stall construction. The state can’t attack all of these different groups at once. You can think about it as a united front. But if you want to be less militaristic, you could talk about it using a musical analogy, as in a symphony where at certain points the horns are loud and the violins are recessive, and then it changes and another part of the orchestra moves to the forefront. Composition shows that it’s actually very desirable to work with people who don’t share your same political codes because they bring different things to the struggle. It’s a kind of massive investment in working together to have an influence on our future in a way that doesn’t involve some of the old sectarianisms of the left or the exclusions based on identity or ideology that the left has historically found itself caught up in.

AP: This notion of composition has helped me think through several questions I have been posing while studying operaismo’s (workerism’s) notion of “class composition.” Theoretically speaking, they use the term to describe the dialectical relationship between technical composition (the labor process) and political composition (class struggle). But a much simpler way to think about their perspective on capitalist development is that workers only come to exist in the moment of struggle to abolish class relations. On this note, you distinguish resistance—as in liberal resistance to conservatism, for one example, which contains the implication that the battle is already over—and defense, which is instead grounded in a temporality and a set of priorities generated by the local community-in-the-making. The latter seems closer to a process of abolishing the reproductive relations key to the capitalist division of labor, as in the notion of class composition.

KR: Unlike resistance, defense starts with something that you already have, something you love, that you cherish. So, it begins with love, and the notion that there is something that you value that is worth defending. This sets up a different kind of temporality because you’re not following the state’s agenda or terms. What is really striking, especially in these movements that extend over a long duration, is that they have to reinvent themselves and figure out new, creative ways of inhabiting the struggle, sometimes over years. And so, what you’re defending necessarily changes over time. You might begin by defending, say, some agricultural land or an unpolluted area or a Black neighborhood, but over time, the main thing that you’re defending is the set of non-accumulative social relations that have developed over the course of the defense.

Tag “No Bassaran” in Nantes (slogan of the Bassines Non Merci movement, against megabassins, a play on words between the Spanish Republicans’ slogan “No pasaran” and “bassines”). On the right, the logo of Soulèvements de la Terre has been drawn. 2023.License: CC BY-SA 4.0.

AP: Right! This gets at another phrasing you’ve put forward that I find very generative: the “transvaluation of values,” which I think is a very helpful framework for thinking about the problem of “abolishing value,” which of course comes to the fore in a lot of postwar Marxist currents, chiefly value-form theory and communization. As you say, throughout the course of a struggle, the goal is not just to devalorize or abolish existing accumulated wealth, but also to defend new social values that emerged from non-accumulative social relations.

KR: Well, I’m not talking about it like a value theorist, that’s for sure. My thinking about it comes from the earlier work that I did on the Paris Communards and a little phrase that I found in the manifesto that the artists of the commune put together, artists who were mostly decorative artists by the way, skilled artisans.3 The main thing that they decided was that there was really only one single artistic gesture, and it was one that both fine artists and artisans shared. And so, artists and artisans were, in effect, federating. And this might not sound like much now, but during the Second Empire, it was simply illegal for a decorative artist or an artisan to sign their work. They could not aspire to either the status or the financial rewards that sculptors or painters possessed. So, this federation was the overcoming of the most rigid social division in art under the Second Empire. Artists and artisans together wrote a manifesto where they described how all artistic intelligence is one. And in the final sentence of their manifesto, they wrote: “We work … for communal luxury.” An amazing phrase—for isn’t luxury only for the few? For them, it seems that everyone had the right to live and work in a pleasing environment. Luxury is not the private accumulation of stuff but the flourishing of beauty in all common spaces; in the end, of course, “communal luxury” presupposes the end of luxury based on class division. Now, if you push that idea, as William Morris did for example, it means changing every single aspect of our relationship to art, to labor, to the environment, to the natural world, according to a transformation of what it is that a society values. What is important to us? What do we care about? And that’s what I mean by a transvaluation of value.

AP: I’m reminded of a photograph that you reproduce in your earlier book on the Commune, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, of Napoleon Gaillard, the barricade artist of the Commune, where he’s shown next to the barricades he helped build, proud, as though next to his own artwork.

KR: It’s just that. He was a shoemaker, and a drunk. But he insisted on always being called an “artist shoemaker.” He also wrote a whole treatise on the foot and invented numerous shoes, including the first rubber galoshes. So, he was a very talented man. He was also in charge of barricade construction and began to make more and more ornate barricades. Anti-Communards made fun of him for thinking of his barricades as works of art and luxury, which was indeed the case. This reminds me of one of my visits to the ZAD, when I learned that they were busy building a lighthouse out in the middle of a field with the sea nowhere in sight. “Why are you building a lighthouse?” I asked. “Is it defensive? Are you worried about being able to see the cops when they come in?” And someone said, “No, it’s communal luxury. It’s the seventh wonder of the ZAD.”

AP: They also had a floating rap studio, which is so cool! You’ve also thought with Maria Mies and Veonika Bennholdt-Thomsen’s writing on the “subsistence perspective.” As you write: “A movement’s duration plainly depends on its ability to involve itself directly in the means of subsistence.” Here, it becomes clear that subsistence isn’t just about surviving, but about flourishing.

KR: The subsistence perspective isn’t really an elaborated theory. Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen insist that it is rather a perspective, an orientation. It’s the point of view of subsistence. Today in France, 50 percent of the land is agricultural, and 50 percent of that land is going to change hands in the next ten years, as farmers retire. So that means that a great deal of land is either going to be subsumed into the large holdings of agribusiness, or paved over. The war in the countryside right now is the one between agroindustry and something we can still call subsistence, which might just be a non-accumulative, non-productivist kind of agriculture that’s attentive to all the questions surrounding growing: What do we want to grow? How much do we want to grow? How do we want to grow it? And I think it’s a good way of thinking about this war in the countryside because what some of us are now calling the agro-industrial complex can include everything from seeds and seed patents to farm equipment, to supermarkets, to the distribution of food, to research, to the whole bureaucracy determining who has access to land and who doesn’t. Capital’s real war is against subsistence because subsistence means a qualitatively different economy. It means people living differently according to different concepts of what constitutes wealth and what constitutes deprivation. It is oriented toward the intrinsic value and interest of small producers, artisans, and paysans. It involves the gradual creation of a fabric of lived solidarities and a social life built through exchanges of services, informal cooperatives, cooperation and association—the two guiding words of the Paris Commune. It seeks to expand the spheres of activity in which economic rationality does not prevail. It means a life that is not molded and shaped by the world market. These are the outlines of the commune form.

Bruno Braquehais, Barricade in a street 1871 France - Paris Commune Coll. Jacques Chevallier. License: Public Domain.

AP: In 2022, we published communiques from autonomous collectives and groups that were organizing collective forms of food production, agriculture, and cultivation. One of the pieces came from people defending the forest in Atlanta from the construction of a massive police training facility known as “Cop City,” which has sadly been built (though the fight against it continues).4 Running from a police helicopter, the trees of this huge forest, which are now gone, protected them from the eyes of the police. They even stop under a mulberry tree to have a snack. In this case, subsistence and defense are rooted in a completely different set of (use) values, made material in collective defense against an expanding, racialized carceral apparatus.

KR: Exactly. I was also struck by the point from Mies that in Germany, where she grew up, most farming was subsistence farming up until around the 1970s. So, all of this is a very, very recent transition. From this perspective, the intellectual production of the seventies becomes much more interesting. You have people like Murray Bookchin, Ivan Ilitch, Andre Gorz, Henri Lefebvre, Mies, Silvia Federici, Francoise d’Eaubonne, Félix Guattari, and so on who were essentially coming into an ecological perspective. And they were doing so because the transformation of their own everyday lives was so dramatic.

AP: I’m reminded also of Nanni Balestrini’s novel We Want Everything, which dramatizes the Fiat workers’ revolts in Torino in 1969, which was led primarily by migrant workers from the South of Italy. There’s a scene where the protagonist returns to the South to find that the tomatoes grown in the village garden were no longer shared communal goods—the enclosure of the commons continued. It’s heartbreaking, but it’s also a shocking scene in the book because much of it takes place at the epicenter of the mass industrialization of the country in the postwar period. Speaking of farming, I wanted to ask you about the relationship between creativity and the commune form. As you write, the commune form may not only be the most rational way for people in our historical moment to organize their own forces and social forces, but also the most pleasurable as well.

KR: That brings us back to communal luxury. I guess what amazes me the most is the panic that the state exhibits in the face of these sort of occupations. The French government keeps announcing that it will never again allow a ZAD to emerge on French land. But they keep happening. Right now, there’s a movement outside of Toulouse to block the construction of a highway which would pass through farmland and old forests, which would all be destroyed. Once again, like the proposed airports I describe in The Commune Form, the highway is redundant. There’s already a highway between these two towns, and the new proposed one would only cut the commute time by eleven minutes. The minister of transportation, Clément Beaune, was recently quoted as saying that a ZAD was not a festival or a joyful gathering, but rather a violation of the elementary rules of private property and public space. Now, the second half of his statement is undoubtedly true. But I think that what M. Beaune was really worried about is revealed in the ressentiment oozing out of the first part of his statement. The state’s fear has to do with the fact that there might exist some kind of pleasure associated with these movements that is not, you know, state sanctioned. A kind of conviviality outside, say, of the society of consumption and the programmed pleasures of next-day delivery. When you look at educated young people today, how many of them truly want to be app designers or hedge fund managers or any of these kinds of joyless activities? And then there are the uneducated, many of whom who are just sort of adrift in the Uber-ization of labor everywhere, in a kind of abject isolation. Given the complete loss of being able to work with other people to have some kind of influence on our future, it’s no wonder the conviviality and pragmatism of the ZAD appears threatening to the state.