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The Paris Commune of 1871: The View from the Left
By investigating flows
of energy, matter
and information during the Siege and Commune of Paris from 1870 to 1871 this analysis attempts to show how human cognition
intersects with its environment
to form self-organizing
, complex adaptive systems. While traditional explanations of the Commune have generally revolved around Marxist analysis, it is possible to analyse the events
of 1871 as transformations
in the urban and cognitive
ecology
of the city. Specifically, utilizing the perspectives of Material Engagement Theory
and distributed cognition
, this paper explores the ways in which cultural materials feedback
into cognitive processes to shape social activity. Changes in Paris’ urban ecology
produced selection mechanisms
which facilitated Parisians organising around different institutional settings. Radical clubs, vigilance committees and worker’s cooperatives were able to provide stability in a rapidly degrading urban environment, and thus a point of departure for new forms of social organisation to emerge. To facilitate this process, Parisians modified their environments, both within and outside of these institutional settings, in ways that altered the flow of information
through the city and provided new ways of engaging in a revolutionary context. Parisians utilised material artefacts
such as rifles, flags and bodily decorations in order to distribute cognition, enabling collective revolutionary action
. This paper shows that the most important feature of urban environments
is the ability to facilitate individual and collective adaptation to ecologies dominated by the physical and cognitive presence of their own species. In this view, cities are understood as selection driven adaptive landscapes, co-evolutionary structures that emerge to facilitate and sustain dense human habitation through the material organization of cognition. The transformations
in Paris’ urban ecology
led to Parisians reconfiguring their cognitive environments, precipitating the development of radical social institutions
. Artefacts, circulating in human ecologies, function to entangle human cognition and behaviour into coherent environmental relationships. Thus, human societies do not fundamentally break from the natural world but are part of a developmental continuum with evolutionary and ecological dynamics.
In terms of where they concentrated their intellectual efforts, Marx and Engels must be regarded primarily as theorists of capitalism, but in contrast to the classical political economists they did not regard it as the natural order. Rather was it one stage of an evolving historical process. The logic of capitalism had to be understood dynamically rather than statically, both in terms of its historical emergence out of European feudalism and its destined submergence and replacement by communism. Capital volume 1 appeared in German in 1867. Although not widely read, it became, largely through the propaganda efforts of Engels,1 quite widely known. Here, it was assumed, Marx had demonstrated scientifically the transitory nature of the capitalist mode of production. As to what the next stage of history would actually be like, Marx and Engels were justifiably circumspect. Within the nineteenth-century socialist tradition such caution was atypical.
A long arc of contention spans the modern area—from the French Revolution through to the alternative globalisation movement. Nineteenth-century radicals were faced with questions as to how best form enduring organisations (with class treated as an important subjective vector). Questions as to whether or not the state presented the surest means of achieving the left’s goals led to a split between anarchists and Marxists. Marxists successfully pursued the capture of state power (after undergoing splits between reformist and insurrectionary currents), but failed to achieve the total transformation of society. By 1968 the “old left” faced sustained challenges from new social movements. Class was rejected. Identity politics prevailed. Anarchism became, again, an influential political ideology—its horizontalist ethos later prevailing within the alternative globalisation movement.
In this chapter, we challenge some of the assertions of Marx’s feminist critics necessitating a synthesis between Marxism and Feminism in order to better understand women’s domestic labour. Although these critics often acknowledge the relevance of Marxian analysis of the original accumulation of capital and absolute surplus value, they claim that “classical Marxism” has ignored women’s domestic labour which the feminists have emphasized.1 Feminist critics of Marx often refer to Marx’s “shortcomings” in terms of his “patriarchal bias.” We have significant reservations concerning such analysis and critique of the “Marxist theory.” To examine such claims, we shall leave aside the “post-Marx Marxists” and exclusively draw upon Marx’s own texts.
This paper examines similarities and differences between the Paris Commune and the Gwangju Uprising. Although separated by more than a century, these two events contained many dynamics in common: the spontaneous emergence of popular organs of democratic decision-making; emergence of armed resistance from below; attenuation of criminal behavior in the cities; existence of genuine solidarity and cooperation among the citizenry; suspension of hierarchies of class, power and status; and appearance of internal divisions among the participants. While in Paris a previously formed group (the National Guard) seized power on March 18, in Gwangju people spontaneously formed the Citizens' Army. The Paris Commune played a role in the Gwangju Uprising through the conscious memory of many participants.
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