COMMUNAL LUXURY by Kristin Ross

Excerpts from Kristen Ross’s Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune

Demolition of the Victory Column on Place Vendome, May 18, 1871.

Introduction

72 days in the spring of 1871 - both lived and conceptual

“I have not been concerned with weighing the Commune’s successes or failures, nor with ascertaining in any direct way the lessons it might have provided or might continue to provide for the movements, insurrections, and revolutions that have come in its wake. It is not at all clear to me that the past actually gives lessons. Like Walter Benjamin, though, I believe that there are moments when a particular event or struggle enters vividly into the figurability of the present, and this seems to me to tbe the case with the Commune today.” (p. 2)

“The Communal imagination operated on the preferred scale of the local autonomous unit within an internationalist horizon.” (p. 5)

Beyond the “Cellular Regime of Nationality”

The flag of the Universal Republic - “an audacious act of internationalism”

“Under the Commune Paris wanted to be not the capital of France but an autonomous collective in a universal federation of people. It did not wish to be a state but rather an element, a unit in a federation of communes that was ultimately international in scale.” (p. 12)

Starting not with the state, but with the popular reunions and clubs at the end of the Empire - “But if we begin with the state, we end with the state.” (p. 14) — “At the same time the nightly evening meetings had, in effect, replaced the theaters that has been shut down by the government since before the Siege…” (pp. 17-18).

“The phrase ‘universal republic’ gained prominence during the Siege in the clubs, in the committee movements, and among members of the International, who used it interchangeably with La République des Travailleurs. The phrase alluded to a set of desires, identifications, and practices that could not be contained or defined by the territory of the state or circumscribed by the nation, and vividly differentiated its users in this way from parliamentary or liberal republicans who believed in the preservation of a strong, centralized state authority as guarantor of social order.” (p. 22)

[ READ MORE ON Elisabeth Dmitrieff]

“Founded on April 11 at the height of the Commune, the Women’s Union for the Defense of Paris and Aid to the Wounded grew rapidly, installing committees that met daily in almost all the arrondissements of Paris. It became the Commune’s largest and most effective organization.” (p. 27)

“The Universal Republic envisioned and to a certain extent lived during the Commune was not only very different from the Republic that came to be, it was conceived in opposition to the French Republic timidly birthed in 1870, and even more to the one that was stabilized on the dead bodies of the Communards. For it was the massacre of the Commune — the extraordinary attempt to eliminate, one by one and en bloc, one’s class enemy — that in fact founded the Third Republic. Today, there is a certain fashionability, desperate in nature, in trying to resurrect the Commune and insert it into the national republican history by pointing to some of its social accomplishments - the crèches, for example, or the instituting of free, secular, mandatory public education - accomplishments later picked up and embraced in some form by the Third Republic, as a bid for integrating (“saving”) the Commune for the national history and the national fiction. The Commune is thus assimilated into either a patriotic movement or a struggle for republican freedoms, and can then be seen as, in effect, “saving” the Republic. The attempt to reintegrate the event into national history has been aided by the unmooring of the Commune after 1989 form the starring role it played in the long successive chain of events, moving magically from one point to the next, that makes up official state-communist historiography. Freed from its role in that historiography, it has been available once more to play a part in the liberal Republican national story.” (p. 37)

Communal Luxury

Manifesto of the Paris Commune’s Federation of Artists
Translated by Jeff Skinner
See: Documents of the Paris Commune

Individual initiative

The committee invites all citizens to send it all proposals, projects, reports, and opinions having the progress of art, the moral or intellectual emancipation of artists, or the material improvement of their lot as a goal.

It will give an account of this to the Commune and lend its moral support and its collaboration to everything it judges feasible.

It calls public opinion to sanction all attempts at progress, giving these proposals the publicity of Officiel des arts.

Lastly, by the word, by the pen, by the pencil, through popular reproduction of masterpieces, and through intelligent and edifying images that can be spread in profusion and displayed in the town halls of the most humble villages in France, the committee will work towards our regeneration, the inauguration of communal wealth, the splendors of the future and the Universal Republic.

G. COURBET, MOULINET, STEPHEN MARTIN, ALEXANDRE JOUSSE, ROSZEZENCH, TRICHON, DALOU, JULES HÉREAU, C. CHABERT, H. DUBOIS, A. FALEYNIÈRE, EUGÈNE POTTIER, PERRIN, A. MOUILLIARD.

communal wealth/luxury

“The most general formulation of the goals of Communal education can be found in a poster pasted on the walls of the fourth arrondissement and sighed by Gustave Lefrançais and Arthur Arnould among others: “To teach the child to love and respect others; to inspire in him the love of justice; to teach him as well that his instruction is undertaken in view of the interests of everyone: these are the moral principles on which henceforth communal education will be based.” (p. 42)

Joseph Jacotot - educational philosopher “everything is in everything”

“His [Jacotot’s] methods attacked the underlying principles of French republicanism as it was being consolidated at the time. A pedagogical vision of politics underwrites French republicanism, from the end of the eighteenth century through its consolidation after the demise of the Commune in the Third Republic, all the way up to its panicked reiteration in recent years in the face of schoolgirls in scary headscarves. The pedagogical vision of politics works, broadly speaking, in two ways: first, it conceives of teaching as forming the society of the future. And second, it conceives of politics as the way to instruct the world (part of which, as we are repeatedly told, “are not ready for democracy”). The right to education is though throughout to be the condition for the formation of political judgment. One learns to become a citizen. A system of education must be established whose task is essentially one of uplift and integration thorough knowledge: the worker or peasant is raised to the status of sovereign citizen — raised, that is, he or she possesses by right not in fact. The peasant must be uprooted from the provincial soil just as in our own time the new arrivals, the immigrants or the newly poor, must be separated from their social or cultural difference by offering them the keys to the country: political access through education. Modern society demands that inequalities be a little reduced, and that there be a minimum of community between those at the top and those at the bottom. Education puts everyone in their place while assuring that some minimal community of shared knowledge exists. Inequality is a slow, lagging start from which, with a little effort and the right instruction, one can certainly catch up.
For Jacotot, though, equality was not abstract, or a topic of discussion, or a reward for good performance in the classroom. Jacotot’s great accomplishment, as Rancière makes clear, was to separate the logic of emancipation from the logic of the institution. Emancipating oneself was an individual affair; there could be no mass institutional application of his “method.” The logic of emancipation concerned concrete relations between individuals. The logic of the institution, on the other hand, is alway nothing more than the indefinite reproduction of itself. Emancipation is not the result but condition of instruction.
In one of this earliest essays, Rancière suggests that what the poetry written by workers like Pottier, stealing time in the late night hours of their schedules allowed them, was not a means of revindication—neither the form nor the thematic content of the poetry were what mattered. “It is not through its decriptive content nor its revindications that worker poetry becomes a social oeuvre, but rather through its pure act of existing.” The poetry illustrates neither the misery of the worker’s conditions nor the heroism of the struggle—what it says, rather, is aesthetic capacity, the transgression of the division of assigns to some manual work and to others the activity of thinking. It is the proof that one participates in another life. When Marx says that the greatest accomplishment of the Paris Commune was “its own working existence” he is saying much the same thing. More important than any laws the Communards were able to enact was simply the way in which their daily working inverted entrenched hierarchies and divisions—first and foremost among these the division between manual and artistic or intellectual labor. The world is divided between those who can and those who cannot afford the luxury of playing with words or images. When that division is overcome, as it was under the Commune, or as it is conveyed in the phrase “communal luxury,” what matters more than any images conveyed, laws passed, or institutions founded are the capacities set in motion. You do not have to start at the beginning—you can start anywhere.” (pp. 49-50)

“Artists must be entrusted to manage their own interests. The first basis for the Federation’s existence was ‘the free expression of art, released from all government supervision and all privilege’…Liberty for the arts was thus in part a demand for artists’ control over museum administration, curators, and the organization of the local, national, and international exhibits taking place in Paris—events in which, the Federation’s manifesto stipulated no awards would be given.” (p. 52)

“Senseless luxury, which [William] Morris knew cannot exist without slavery of some kind, would be replaced by communal luxury, or equality in abundance…Morris saw an art that was not external to the everyday or, as is supposed, elevated above it and vainly trying to enter it.” (p. 63)

The Literature of the North

[See Peter Kropotkin’s memoirs, E.P. Thompson’s biography of William Morris, David Harvey’s Space of Hope, Marx and Engels, Writings on the Paris Commune]

“The countryside is only allowed to look on Paris through the Versailles camera obscura.” - K. Marx

The Seeds Beneath the Snow

“Imprisoned in Russia four years later, Kropotkin was ecstatic to me moved to a new prison where he could tap on the walls all day long undisturbed; in this way he devised a means of relation to a young neighbor in the adjoining cell the history of the Commune from beginning to end. It took, however, a whole weeks tapping.” (p. 98)

Solidarity

“From Morris’s communities small enough for all inhabitants to be absorbed in their inner workings, to Kropotkin’s belief in efficiency and creativity of informal planning in small-scale industries, a compelling case can be made that to arrive at a world where basic decisions about production and consumption are made by associations of free laborers means the inevitable dismantling of large-scale bureaucracies and corporate monoliths. But it would be wrong to view this dismantling as a fetishism of the small scale—it is rather an acute attention to calibrating production and community life at an appropriate scale…reworking the scale and texture of how we live is the principal goal.” (p. 123)

“Recall that the second major step taken by anarchist communism in its break with “collectivist” anarchist was to eliminate the wage system by making access to resources and goods no longer dependent on labor performed. The products of work cannot be strictly proportionate to work performed because they result from everyone’s labor—even and especially, Reclus adds, the labor of previous generations. It was thus impossible, pragmatically or theoretically, to measure the exact value of an individual’s labor.” (p. 125)

Kropotkin’s question: “How then, shall we estimate the share of each in the riches which all contribute to amass?” How indeed? If individual labor cannot be measured, and distribution is no longer dependent on labor performed, how might distribution be organized? The logical conclusion that springs immediately to mind is the time-worn phrase, “to each according to his or her need.” But in Reclus’s thinking this idea did not go far enough. The distribution of goods and resources could not more be made according to individual need than individual labor could be isolated from the labor that preceded it. It was not possible to isolate one’s individual needs from the needs of others. Individual need can, in fact, only be measured by taking the needs of others into account. One then partakes in the common stock according to one principle only: the solidarity of interests and the mutual respect of associates.” (p. 126)

Reclus: “It would be absurd, moreover, to fear scarcity, since the enormous loss of products caused by the current wastefulness of commerce and private appropriation will have finally come to an end…Fear is always a bad advisor. Let us not be afraid to call ourselves communists, because that is what we are in reality.” (pp. 126-27)

EQUALITY IN ABUNDANCE = COMMUNAL LUXURY

“Environmental sustainability is not a technical problem but a question of what a society values, what is considers wealth…When labor time ceases to be the measure of work and work the measure of wealth, then wealth will no longer be measurable in terms of exchange value. Just as for each of these thinkers true individualism was only possible under communism, which needs and values the contribution of each individual to the common good, so true luxury could only be communal luxury.” (p. 142)

William Morris: “Wealth is what Nature gives us and what a reasonable man can make out of the gifts of Nature for his reasonable use. The sunlight, the fresh air, the unspoiled face of the earth, food, raiment and housing necessary and decent; the storing up of knowledge of all kinds, and the power of disseminating it; means of free communication between man and man; works of art, the beauty which man creates when he is most a man, most aspiring and thoughtful—all things which serve the pleasure of people, free, manly, and uncorrupted. This is wealth.”