Overthrown, but not conquered, the Commune in our days is born again. It is no longer a dream of the vanquished, caressing in imagination the lovely mirage of hope. No! the ‘commune’ of today is becoming the visible and definite aim of the revolution rumbling beneath our feet.”

Thus wrote Peter Kropotkin in his reflections on the Paris Commune, ten years after the fact. The words might as well have been written today, nearly a century and a half later. At a time when capitalism and the state are both visibly struggling to reproduce themselves as the core of a stable social order, deregulating their own governance structures just as they disorganize the opposition, it is no coincidence that the commune arises once more as the horizon of a new cycle of struggles, imprinting itself upon the present as the definite aim of the 21st century revolution.

It is clear by now that the global financial crisis has forced a rupture in established conceptions of emancipatory politics. In a landscape littered with the debris of social democracy, in which an entire generation comes of age with life prospects incomparably more bleak than those of their parents, a radical space is opening up—from below and to the left—that could offer much-needed common ground for the divided and disoriented opposition to converge and organize upon. After decades of sectarianism and strife, the time has come to close the rift and chart a collective way forward.

In this light, the revival of the commune provides an opportunity to infuse the left with a shared project and a clear-eyed sense of purpose. But just as the renascent communal imaginary generates a whole new field of possibility, so it raises a host of long-standing practical and theoretical questions. To begin with: “What is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalizing to the bourgeois mind?”

What Is the Commune?

Historically speaking, communal ways of organizing social life long precede the development of the modern state, and humanity on the whole has spent far more time living communally than it has under capitalism.

To an extent, historical experience therefore lends credence to the proposition that, in the long run, the commune-form might secure a far more stable social order than the state-form, whose contradictory unity with crisis-prone finance capital renders it increasingly vulnerable to social conflict and systemic chaos, not to mention ecological catastrophe. On this point, indigenous communities and peasant communes may hold some important clues for the identification of alternative developmental pathways—which helps explain why theorists like Marx and Kropotkin spent many years studying such pre-capitalist societies.

Nevertheless, there are clearly important differences between these ancient communal forms and the type of revolutionary commune of which we are speaking here, not least in terms of the latter’s emancipatory, future-oriented and internationalist horizon. Crucially, the modern commune fully embraces the expansiveness and universality of the socialist ideal. To paraphrase Subcomandante Marcos, whose Zapatista movement has formed its own indigenous communes in southern Mexico, the revolutionary commune is “not a dream from the past [or] something that came from our ancestors. It comes to us from the future; it is the next step that we have to take.”

This understanding of the commune as the political form of the future first emerged in the working-class sections of Paris during the French Revolution of 1789, but only really began to take shape in the workers’ reunions of Second Empire Paris, as a new idea that departed not only from the parochialism of isolated pre-capitalist communities and the romanticism of marginal Utopian mini-societies, but also from the bourgeois revolutions of the modern era. In this context, the commune initially took the form of a slogan whose “emotion and affective charge,” Kristin Ross writes, “far exceeded any of the meanings associated with the word.” Its unifying power effectively “melted divergences between left factions, enabling solidarity, alliance, and a shared project.”

When the revolutionary communal ideal finally took on a concrete form in the uprising of March 18, 1871, its radical potential once again overflowed any prior meanings attached to the concept. Ross cites the Communard Arthur Arnould on this point, who insisted that “the Paris Commune was something more and something other than an uprising. It was the advent of a principle, the affirmation of a politics. In a word, it was not only one more revolution, it was a new revolution, carrying in the folds of its flag a wholly original and characteristic program.”

Perhaps the most characteristic element of this program, Ross notes, is the fact that it was not based on any theoretical blueprints. Rather, it was the open-ended outcome of a collective process of struggle and experimentation in which the Commune constituted itself as a “laboratory of political innovation” whose “great social measure,” in Marx’s words, “was its own working existence.”

There are important resonances here with contemporary experience. When Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzellini refer to the square occupations of 2011 as “laboratories for democracy”, or Manuela Zechner speaks of Spain’s municipal platforms as “laboratories of social intelligence”, they are essentially observing the redeployment of the Commune’s experimental politics in our time.

But just as the Paris Commune was something more than an uprising, so it was something more than a political laboratory. Ultimately, it was a concrete manifestation of substantive freedom and real democracy—in the ancient Greek sense of the word—as the power of the people. In the short space of just two months, the Communards managed to liberate and organize a vast urban space in one of Europe’s largest metropolitan areas, establishing a direct democratic form of popular self-government that—in George Katsiaficas’ words—saw “hundreds of thousands of people creat[ing] popular organs of political power that efficiently replaced traditional forms of government.”

The Commune and the State

This unprecedented experience in popular autonomy immediately raised the theoretical and practical question of the Commune’s relation to the existing state apparatus. For the anarchists, who had long argued and fought for the abolition of the centralized state and its substitution with a confederation of freely associating communes, the experience of 1871 was a real-life affirmation of the revolutionary ideal. Bakunin, for one, saw in the Commune “a bold, clearly formulated negation of the state.” Kropotkin held that, “by proclaiming the free Commune, the people of Paris proclaimed an essential anarchist principle, which was the breakdown of the state.”

Marx and Engels—who in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 had still called for greater state centralization after the revolution—reached a remarkably similar conclusion as their anarchist counterparts. The spontaneous insurrection of the Parisian proletariat and the living experience of the Commune had informed Marx’s thinking on the matter, compelling him to recognize that “this program has in some details become antiquated.” And so, in 1872, he added a crucial revision to the preface of the manifesto’s third German edition, noting that: “One thing especially was proved by the Commune, [namely], that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes’.” As Engels would later write:

From the outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against itself [replacing the army with the people-in-arms], and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment.

The fact that subsequent generations of Marxists overlooked, obscured and in many cases actively distorted these important lessons from the Commune will forever stand as a testament to the tragedies of 20th century state socialism, both in its authoritarian and in its social-democratic forms. The historical fact remains that, starting on March 18, 1871, the Communards immediately set out to dismantle the existing state apparatus—a move that was enthusiastically applauded by Marx and his anarchist critics alike.

The Commune’s stance on the national question was equally characteristic as its stance on the state. Citing the extension of citizenship rights to immigrants and the election of a number of foreigners to the council, Kristin Ross highlights the Communards’ unwavering commitment to a radical working-class internationalism: “The Communal imagination,” she writes, “operated on the preferred scale of the local autonomous unit within an internationalist horizon.” This sentiment was powerfully expressed in the celebrated slogan that “the flag of the Commune is the flag of the World Republic.”

As for the rest of France, the political form of the commune was to become the building block of the whole territory—all cities, towns, villages and “even the smallest country hamlet” were to be reorganized as autonomous communes, which would elect recallable delegates to their own local and regional councils, which would in turn send recallable delegates to Paris. As Marx stressed: “the unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power.” From there on out, France would freely associate itself with other nations to form a global confederation of communes.

All of this rightly led Marx to conclude that the Commune was a “thoroughly expansive political form, while all the previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. It’s true secret,” Marx argued, “was this: it was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.”