Five Communes

A history of the Paris Commune, which control Paris as a socialist state for 3 months on the spring of 1871

New Pollitics, 2021

The Paris Commune of 1871 only lasted from March 18 to May 28, just 72 days, yet it is one of the most celebrated events in socialist history. It is a legend. Yet, what was it? What is it for us today? A model for socialists? A heroic failure? Negation of the state? Or the first workers’ government? Karl Marx wrote the most famous contemporary account, yet he failed to take up some of the Commune’s serious problems. Why?

1999

Prologue - the episode, 18 March - 28 May 1871 Paris, Bivouac of the Revolution from people's war to people's revolution, June 1870 - March 1871 "the political form at last discovered"? - the commune as government a new revolutionary people? the last struggle consequences, representations and meanings. Appendices: declaration to the French people "L'Internationale" appeal to the women citizens of Paris.

Praktyka Teoretyczna, 2023

Review of the book Commun-Commune: penser la Commune de Paris (1871), published on the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune. The author of the publication aims to reconstruct the entire spectrum of political ideas circulating in "Free Paris" in the spring of 1871. The analysis is carried out from the perspective of the political practices and participants of events. The content of the studied ideas is considered only through the methods of their use and the consequences which influenced history. In the review this is interpreted as a manifestation of thinking close to the theoretical concept of the "social history of ideas". Another important aspect of the reviewed book is the reflections on the politics of memory and legends, i.e. a mythologized approach to the past understood as a source of cognitive errors that hinder the proper understanding of events.

Third Text, 2002

In 1999, exiled British film director Peter Watkins completed La Commune, a 5 hour 45 minute epic reconstruction of the 1871 Paris Commune. In its mixture of steely radicalism and artistic experimentalism, La Commune is arguably the most important European film since the days of the great modernist cinematic provocateurs such as Eisenstein and Vertov. But undoubtedly the single most important figure from that era which informs the film is Bertolt Brecht, who made his only real Brechtian film, Kuhle Wampe, in 1931 with Slatan Dudow. The invocation of such distant modernists seems startling when even a Marxist critic like Fredric Jameson once declared that the kinds of cultural practices advocated by Brecht and Walter Benjamin, are no longer relevant to 'the specific conditions of our time'. 1 With La Commune, Watkins says that his aim was to show 'that there are other ways to recount historical and current events, to relate to space and time, to show the connection between past and present and to give a voice to the public'. And while, as we shall see, Watkins has in mind here dominant and standardised film and television practices whose principles remain largely, if problematically, mimetic, those 'other ways' also challenge the theoretical paradigm of postmodernism. In order to fully understand La Commune we will need to locate it within a number of contexts: the immediate historical context of French politics and cinema from the mid-1990s; the history of the Paris Commune itself; Watkins's pedagogy and-in the spirit of internationalism shown by the Commune itself-the theories and practices of Third Cinema. FRENCH POLITICS AND CINEMA IN THE 1990S The French political scene shifted decisively in 1995. This shift in turn opened up a space for left cultural politics and challenged the dominant critical paradigm through which French cinema has been discussed:

The reference to the Commune of 1871 returns as a reference for contemporary movements, but following a usage that contrasts with those made by the left in the 20th century. It is no longer a question of overcoming the weaknesses of the Commune, but of asking the Commune how to go beyond certain impasses of left-wing traditions, such as left-wing republicanism, Marxism or anarchism. This is the sense of the ongoing construction of a communalist movement, which can find in the Commune of 1871 a set of inspirations - on the substitution of a confederation of communes for the state, the self-institution of a commune that is both democratic and social, and the emancipation of women - and in the work of Murray Bookchin a theoretical contribution to defining the relationship between communalism and ecology. With the development of popular assembly movements and commons around the world, a new communalist left is taking shape.

American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 1973

PT CfP 3/2022 -The communes and other mobile commons Editors, 2020

„From the very beginning, the Commune demonstrated its internationalism. It gave foreigners full right to participate in elections. It placed a German at the head of its department of labor. It had a Pole in charge of its military forces. It pulled down Napoleon’s statue, denounced nationalism and chauvinism, and came out as champion of the workers of the world” – Karl Marx, a German political refugee, wrote from London, closely following the rise and fall of Paris Commune in 1871. The banner of Communards was, from the very start, the symbol of universal republic (Ross 2016), but its universalism was of a special kind. It had nothing to do with the French particularism in the guise of universality, which was typical for Napoleonic imperialism, and has just as little in common with the contemporary variations on statist collectivism (Ross 2016). It constituted rather, as expressed recently by Massimiliano Tomba (2019), the form of „insurgent universality” – radically opened for constant democratization and inclusion of new participants and reluctant to all possible boundaries and borders – be they cultural, sexual, political or geographical. “Everywhere the word ‘commune’ was understood in the largest sense, as referring to a new humanity, made up of free and equal companions, oblivious to the existence of old boundaries, helping each other in peace from one end of the world to the other” (Reclus 1897, in: Ross 2016).

Casey Harison "Louise Michel, the Paris Commune and Icaria: Europe’s Social Question and the Legacy of French Communalism" Paris and its revolutionaries were a long way from Corning, Iowa but female members of the Icarian colony there knew a lot about the best-known among them – Louise Michel. An intuitive utopian and lifelong rebel who became famous during the Commune of 1871, Michel was devoted to the “dream” of revolution and human emancipation. There was in the story of Michel and the Paris Commune a communalist spirit: nascent and unstructured, but apparent to empathetic observers in Iowa. There were many elements that drew the Icariennes to Michel: her experience as a female “soldier” in the Commune’s army; her passion for worker’s and women’s rights; and a bourgeoning communalist spirit. These were all personal embodiments of the “Social Question,” a widely-used phrase that described the gap between the promise of citizenship and improved standard of living coming from the Atlantic and Industrial Revolutions, and the reality of actual conditions of life for most people in nineteenth-century Europe and the Americas. The creation of the first Icarian community in the United States was a response to Europe’s Social Question. The Iowa Icariennes felt an affinity with Louise Michel, though she is not usually included among well-known figures like Cabet, Saint-Simon and Fourier. Yet a case may be made that Michel has a place alongside this group, and that the story of the Commune, Michel’s role in it and the larger Social Question have a salient, though sometimes forgotten role in the history of communalism. This article explores the nineteenth-century European roots of communalism in the Social Question via the role of Louise Michel and the Commune of 1871.

https://planetarycommune.org/Planetary-Commune