KR

I am happy that you chose the word “resource” rather than the word “lesson.” Usually people insist that the past provide us with lessons or that it teach us what mistakes to avoid. The literature surrounding the Commune is filled with second-guessing, back-seat driving, and a delight in the listing of errors: if only the Communards had done this or that, taken the money from the bank, marched on Versailles, made peace with Versailles, been better organized. Then they might have succeeded!

To my mind, this kind of after-the-fact theoretical superiority is both inane and profoundly ahistorical. Our world is not the world of the Communards. Once we have truly understood that this is the case, it becomes easier to see the ways in which their world is, in fact, very close to ours — closer, perhaps, than is the world of our parents.

The way people, particularly young people, live now resembles in its economic instability the situation of the nineteenth century workers and artisans who made the Commune, most of whom spent most of their time not working but looking for work.

After 2011, with the return virtually everywhere of a political strategy grounded in taking up space, seizing places and territories, turning cities — from Istanbul to Madrid, from Montreal to Oakland — into theaters for strategic operations, the Paris Commune has become newly illuminated or visible, it has entered once again into the figurability of the present.

Its forms of political invention have become newly available to us not as lessons but as resources, or as what Andrew Ross, speaking about my book, called “a useable archive.” The Commune becomes the figure for a history, and perhaps of a future, different from the course taken by capitalist modernization, on the one hand, and utilitarian state socialism, on the other.

This is a project that I think many people today share, and the Communal imaginary is central to that project. For this reason I’ve tried in the book to think about the Commune as both behind us, as belonging to the past, and as a kind of opening up, in the midst of our current struggles, of the field of possible futures.