Working Existence

On Kristin Ross’s The Commune Form

Patrick Lyons
 
 

The first page of Kristin Ross’s The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life begins with a curious note on form by Marx. Drawn from the first draft of The Civil War in France, it reads, “The form was simple like all great things.” The form in question is the 1871 Paris Commune, the period of over two months when the people of Paris took control of their city after Louis Napoleon’s surrender to Prussia. Under the Commune, Paris was reorganized into a revolutionary direct democracy before ultimately falling during the “Semaine Sanglante,” when Versailles troops stormed Paris and massacred thousands of France’s own citizens.

There’s something paradoxical about Marx’s phrasing here. As he himself was well aware, the Paris Commune was anything but simple. It entailed nothing short of the wholesale reordering of a society under siege. And this of course involved endless deliberation, an effusion of councils, and the constant collective negotiation of the conflicting needs and desires of a politically diverse capital city. Ross knows this too. She has spent her academic career considering this “simple form,” from The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (1988), to Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (2015), and now, albeit in a more indirect way, The Commune Form.

Whereas her previous works invited readers to sink deep into aspects of the “working existence” of the Paris Commune, The Commune Form identifies a set of theoretical parameters—“recurrent, recognizable threads or components”—that link the Commune to both earlier and later collective anti-state experiments. In other words, it is the search for a formal paradigm, or as Ross puts it, “a tendency, an orientation” that might illuminate new radical genealogies across time and space. As readers will learn, nothing about Ross’s subject matter could be called simple—each instantiation of the commune form brings with it a new host of social problems—but her project is to locate the deeper simplicity in what appears infinitely complex.

I, like many in my field and generation, was first exposed to Ross’s work with Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (1995), a book that charts the socio-cultural history of the twinned processes of the end of the official French empire abroad in the 1950s and 1960s, and the displacement of colonial logic onto a sanitized culture of spectacle in the rapidly modernizing hexagon. The consistency of Ross’s critical materialist reading of French culture and society has offered a blueprint for how one might invest seriously in literary and cinematic texts as aesthetic and historical artifacts, without losing sight of history itself. Readers unfamiliar with Ross’s work might start with her recently published The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life, a career-spanning essay collection that situates many of the themes, influences, and theoretical preoccupations that implicitly populate The Commune Form: the matter of everyday life, drawn from the work of Henri Lefebvre; the insistent egalitarian wager found throughout Jacques Rancière’s writings; and most recently, the first incursions into theorizing the commune form.

In The Commune Form, again, Ross begins with Marx, who famously celebrated the “working existence” of the Paris Commune for its enactment of “the political form under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor.” She then shifts to Kropotkin, whose The Great French Revolution offers earlier, incipient examples of the form. Kropotkin’s emphasis on the central role of urban and peasant communes as early spearheads of the French Revolution adds a crucial element: the contradiction between the commune form and the state, or “between the state and another organization of political life, an alternative kind of political intelligence, a different kind of community.” In the case of the early Revolution, this meant communes against the King, but as later chapters demonstrate, the same oppositional structure reverberates well into the present.

Drawing on Marx and Kropotkin, Ross’s notion of the commune form is aligned not with any pre-established, static model, but with an oppositional process, a working out against a shared enemy or threat. It is also to be analyzed on the level of immanent transformation, as Ross puts it, as “a pragmatic intervention in the here and now.” In the case of the Paris Commune, it “was indistinguishable from the specific people who were changing their lives.” Finally, it is intensely situational. As a form, “it does not lend itself to a static definition, unalterable through time; it does not unfold in the same way everywhere around the world. It is not a concept.” In other words, studying the various iterations of the commune form across time and place allows Ross to trace both a new genealogy of its historical appearances and its variations as a “working existence” in context.

Accordingly, Ross quickly shifts from theoretical reflections into the historical case studies themselves. Kropotkin’s revolutionary communes and the Paris Commune offer clues, but these function more as heuristic criteria that each historical scene bends in its own directions according to action on the ground. The Commune Form’s three main chapters explore a variety of primarily Francophone case studies (with several exceptions like Cop City, Standing Rock, and the struggle against the construction of the Narita International Airport outside of Tokyo), each tweaking and enriching the meaning of the commune form while maintaining its deeper characteristics of the collective realization of an alternative direct-democratic way of life in the shadow of a rapacious and extractive capitalist state.

Like Kropotkin, Ross looks away from the city for her examples of the commune form. Accordingly, the first chapter, “Nantes, Not Nanterre,” decisively shifts away from the urban landscape of the Paris Commune, drawing the reader out of the city and into France’s more rural areas during May ’68. While most accounts of ’68 focus on the student demonstrations and urban protests in Paris, it was in Nantes that the general strike led to the organization of an anti-state “parallel administration” that drew on residual forms of pre-capitalist agricultural knowledge to sustain the city. During the strike, smallholding farmers (paysans) organized systems of food distribution to support the broader community and thus “fed the insurrection.” By beginning here, rather than in Paris, Ross opens an alternative genealogical approach to 20th-century collective struggle in France. Instead of turning to the usual political protagonists of the time such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit or the figures of French Maoism, she begins with the militant paysan, Bernard Lambert, a key figure in “Nantes ’68,” author of the seminal Les Paysans dans la lutte des classes (1970) and originary figure of the Paysans-Travailleurs movement.


“For Ross, like Lefebvre, ecological, land-based struggles offer a unique nexus point for this form of composition. And why shouldn’t they, given the land’s direct relationship to everyday life and subsistence?”

Lambert is among the important, yet untranslated, figures that anglophone readers will likely discover for the first time in The Commune Form. His story (and others) allows Ross to center the rural–urban divide that has often frustrated militant movements. As one farmer active in the “Nantes Commune” recalls, “workers thought the paysans were smallproperty owning bosses, and paysans thought that workers were always on strike . . . Nobody ever got together. No one understood anyone else.” In other words, iterative experiments with the commune form provided an experimental space for these two atomized labor sectors to find common cause—one exploited in the factories, and the other increasingly threatened by the industrial and finance capital creeping into agriculture. As the same farmer puts it, they understood “that the best weapon the bourgeoisie had against workers of all kinds was corporatism.”

A similar—and perhaps more unlikely—rapprochement is staged in one of Ross’s central, contemporary examples of the commune form: the autonomous community established at Notre-Dame-des-Lands to block the construction of the logistically superfluous international airport just outside, again, of Nantes. In 1974, the French government selected a roughly 4000-acre area of farmland for the site of the future airport and asked its current occupiers to sell their land and farms to the state. Faced with a lack of enthusiasm from the farmers, the project was deferred in hopes of “waiting them out”—until they retired or bequeathed their farms to children who might be more likely to sell. The area was thus labeled a “zone d’aménagement differé” (zone of deferred development) or “ZAD,” and remained in limbo for the next 30 years or so. In the early 2000s, as Ross puts it, the state seemed to “reawaken from its nap,” and construction plans were rekindled. But the state wasn’t the only one to awaken to the situation at Notre-Dame-des-Lands. Around the same time, the ZAD saw a wave of new arrivals: radical leftist squatters intent on helping the farmers defend their land from the encroaching government.

Ross was invited to Notre-Dame-des-Lands for the first time in 2016 to speak about her book Communal Luxury. By this time, government assaults on the ZAD—now rebaptized as the “Zone à défendre” by its occupiers—had escalated, and the defensive element of everyday life had taken on a more urgent character. Ross’s observations of life at Notre- Dame-des-Lands provide the most practical study of how the commune form might take shape out of the constant, deliberative renegotiation of the conditions of collective struggle and existence—“the collective elaboration of a desired way of life”—not without its share of disagreements. If the “Nantes Commune” necessitated the rapprochement of paysans and workers in 1968, the survival of the ZAD beyond 1974 entailed the “conflict-prone graft of at least three very distinct groups—farmers, occupiers, townspeople—who began sharing a territory and a movement.”

This tendency towards composition—one of four general tendencies, including defense, appropriation, and restitution, ventured in the book’s third chapter—gives the commune form a kind of robust and actionable dynamism. Drawing on Lefebvre, Ross dedicates the pages on “Composition” to thinking through the pragmatics of what she names the “construction of solidarity in extreme diversity.” The term “Composition” itself is drawn from the Mauvaise Troupe Collective, a group of occupiers writing about contemporary autonomous struggles from the ground that Ross encountered at the ZAD. For them, it means “the process of maintaining tactical diversity in the face of a common enemy.” For Ross, it also names the “collective subject,” or a form of relational, political subjectivity that is produced through the diversity of peoples contributing to the occupation as it develops over time. It is, à la Rancière, the result of “mutual displacements and dis-identifications and the action of equals as equals.” For instance, a traditionally right-voting shopkeeper, a politically conflicted farmer, and a militant anarchist might have to put their differences aside in the struggle against a common enemy, or in defense of a territory to which they share deep, personal attachment. Such practical collective negotiation holds the possibility of “making a world” and the “weaving together of a new kind of solidarity—one where the unity of experience counts more than the divergence of opinions.” This insight is particularly timely today, when many in France blamed the far-right success in the 2024 EU elections on “backwards” rural voters, reactivating old stereotypes that threaten to preclude the development of meaningful rural/ urban anti-capitalist alliances.

For Ross, like Lefebvre, ecological, land-based struggles offer a unique nexus point for this form of composition. And why shouldn’t they, given the land’s direct relationship to everyday life and subsistence? “Land and the way it is worked,” Ross argues, “is the most important factor in an alternative ecological society. Capital’s real war is against subsistence, because subsistence means a qualitatively different economy; it means people actually living differently, according to a different concept of what constitutes wealth and what constitutes deprivation.” Marx knew this too, and a direct line might be traced from his early articles on wood-theft in the Rheinische Zeitung and his account of primitive accumulation in Capital to government land grabs and the march of monocultural agribusiness that threaten many of the cases studied in The Commune Form. This is, of course, an ongoing struggle. In the book’s Conclusion and Afterword, Ross puts an indepth account of the Soulèvements de la terre movement’s recent struggle against the construction of mega-basins in the Deux-Sèvres region in western France in dialogue with the Stop Cop City movement and the murder of the young indigenous queer and non-binary militant Tortuguita by Georgia state troopers in 2023.

Ross’s genealogy of land-based struggles is accompanied by a sketch of an alternative ecological-critical tradition as well. At a time when much ecological thinking has taken refuge in high theory and abstraction, the materialist, anti-productivist ecological tradition proposed by Ross in conclusion is particularly useful. Beyond Lefebvre and Lambert, we find Raymond Willams, Silvia Federici, Françoise d’Eaubonne, André Gorz, and others whose theoretical tools prove crucial for the present ecological conjuncture precisely because of their long-standing attention to the relationship between ecology and capitalism.

But again, what of this “simple form”? Let us return to Marx once again, whose own later writings on the Russian peasantry and ethnographic notebooks figure into Ross’s materialist-ecological counter-canon. In Chapter 3 of Capital, Volume 1, he begins a section on “The Metamorphosis of Commodities” with yet another comment on form. Having established that “the exchange of commodities implies contradictory and mutually exclusive conditions,” he argues that “the further development of the commodity does not abolish these contradictions, but rather provides the form within which they have room to move.” Marx is referring to the “commodity form,” wherein “use” and “exchange” paradoxically co-exist, but he quickly broadens the scope of his demonstration. “This,” he continues, “is in general the way in which real contradictions are resolved.” Later on, he will refer to the ellipse as the “form of motion” that illustrates this dynamic. In the first English translation of Capital, this “form” is referred to as developing a “modus vivendi,” meaning a space in which contradictory forces can co-exist and resolve themselves in a “mode of life.” This to me seems a useful way of envisioning the commune form, one which develops out of “continuing supple openness to collective improvisation and to creative and practical confrontations with the situation immediately at hand.” Its site is, appropriately, everyday life.


 
Patrick Lyons

Patrick Lyons is Assistant Professor of French in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Case Western Reserve University.

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