The Paris Commune’s Spirit Is Still Alive

This is an extract from The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life by Kristin Ross, now available from Verso Books.

When Karl Marx, from his vantage point in London, read reports of what was occurring in the streets of Paris in the spring of 1871, there is every indication he began envisaging, for the first time in his life, what ordinary working people look like when they conduct themselves as owners of their lives rather than as wage slaves.

In The Civil War in France, Marx duly notes the legislative achievements of the Communards. But it was the form their lives were taking, the art and management of their daily lives, that held his attention and that would change the path of his own research and writing in the last decade of his life.

The issues he addressed in the later years, the materials he selected, and the wider intellectual, political, and geographic landscapes he mapped for himself all underwent substantial alterations due to his encounter with the commune form. Communard ideals in 1871, lofty as they might have been, did not concern him. Rather, it was Communard practices — the Commune’s own “actual working existence,” as he put it — that counted.

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…