Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury, 2015 ✓

… les gouvernants français ont depuis quarante ans développé chez les soldats de la France cette férocité nécessaire pour accomplir ce que les bourreaux des peuples appellent le rétablissement de l’ordre, en vouant la belle et malheureuse race arabe à la plus révoltante spoliation et à la plus odieuse extermination. En effet, quand ils ont porté pendant quelques années l’incendie dans les villages algériens, le massacre dans les tribus, les soldats sont aptes à ensanglanter les rues de nos villes⁵⁰.

Colonial repression were particularly condemned. Tolain, a member of the International and a jewelry worker, regularly addressed the question or Algeria: “The French have brought to this country not civilization but misery and servitude.” Another speaker: “Africa will flourish only when it administers itself.”⁴⁷

In the years immediately following the demise of the Commune, Marx was primarily engaged in two tasks: preparing what some now count as the definitive edition of Capital — the French edition, the only one he personally supervised into publication — and continuing his study of Chernyshevsky, including his Essays on Communal Ownership of Land, and Russian communal forms. Raya Dunayevskaya points out that one of the principal changes Marx made in the French edition of Capital was an expansion and strengthening of the section on commodity fetishism to emphasize not just the exchange of commodities but also the dual nature inherent in labor.²⁸ What Marx saw enacted in the Commune’s working existence was the actual dissolution of commodity fetishism and the establishment instead of its opposite: social relations as “freely associated labor”. Better than any theorist could have, the creative activity of the Communards disclosed the fetishism of commodities inherent in the very form of the product of labor as commodity — including, especially, labor itself as commodity. What the Communards had made manifest was the opposite of reification in the form of their own “freely associated labor.” Work, of course, remained under the Commune. But it had disappeared in the sense of being forced or constrained wage labor under an asymmetrical contract. Productive labor no longer carried the meaning of salaried labor exchanged against capital. It had taken on the larger meaning of an activity useful to the needs of society as a whole. Or, as Marx put it, “With labor emancipated, every man becomes a working man, and productive labor ceases to be a class attribute.”²⁹

After seeing in the actions of the Communards what freely associated labor might actually look like, Marx was better able to theorize its opposite, the commodity form. But Dunayevskaya takes her argument one step further. The strengthening of his theory was at one and the same time Marx’s break with the very concept of theory. This break, she argues, had its initial beginnings at an earlier moment, when Marx, very late in the various drafts and revisions that went into the writing of Capital, made the decision to include in Volume One the chapter on the working day. What is important about that decision was that Marx was introducing directly into theory the workers’ struggle for shortening the working day. He was in effect (and very materially) saying that in order to understand what is taking place in the market you have to leave the market behind and enter the factory — it is there that relations between men get reified and turned into things. “When does my day begin and when does it end?” — with this question the subject is about neither economics nor philosophy precisely, but about human beings and their daily life, their path. And what is at stake is “history and its process.” The Commune made it all the more clear that the masses shape history and in so doing reshape not just actuality but theory itself. By following the process of actual material struggle, Marx discovers a new world in cognition. His discussions are no longer with Smith and Ricardo, with theorists, be they bourgeois or socialist. His shift from the history of theory to the history of the class struggles at the point of production becomes the theory. He thus moves away from a concept of theory as a debate between theorists, and away from the idea that it is that history that matters, to a concept of theory as the history of production relations.

[…] it is worth remarking that Marx gave to the struggle for the working day the same name that he would later give to the 1871 insurrection in Paris: he called both a “civil war.” The struggle to shorten the working day, he wrote, was a “protracted and more or less concealed civil war between the capitalist class and the working class.”³⁰

Yet absent from most of the effort to explore the ecological sensibility of a Reclus or a Morris in anything more than a token bow to the role played in the development of that sensibility by political experience and the culture of the Commune.

For Kropotkin […] expropriation of both agricultural land and industrial property must occur simultaneously: “All is interdependent in a civilized society; it is impossible to alter any one thing without altering the whole.”⁴²