Reclaiming thelegacy of the Paris Commune for the twenty-first century

Kristin Ross's new work on the thought and culture of the Communard uprising of 1871 resonates with the motivations and actions of contemporary protest, which has found its most powerful expression in the reclamation of public space. Today's concerns-internationalism, education, the future of labor, the status of art, and ecological theory and practice-frame and inform her carefully researched restaging of the words and actions of individual Communards. This original analysis of an event and its centrifugal effects brings to life the workers in Paris who became revolutionaries, the significance they attributed to their struggle, and the elaboration and continuation of their thought in the encounters that transpired between the insurrection's survivors and supporters like Marx, Kropotkin, and William Morris.

The Paris Commune was a laboratory of political invention, important simply and above all for, as Marx reminds us, its own 'working existence.' Communal Luxury allows readers to revisit the intricate workings of an extraordinary experiment.

"No work specifies more fully Marx's claim that, the greatest achievement of the Paris Commune was its 'actual working existence.'" - Jacobin

"Ross is the perfect guide for such a journey: few critics are more attuned to how words and images can travel . [she] has an acute eye for this juxtaposition of the pastoral and the political, how the vines of nature can overtake the monuments of empire, how revolutionary events can interrupt the silence of the countryside." - Salon

"Although this is a book of ideas, it is neither dry nor overburdened by scholarly references. Ross's vision of the Commune extends beyond the 72 days, and beyond the space of Paris (and indeed of France), to encompass its echoes throughout the rest of the 19th century ... For Ross, the story of the Commune is not a tragedy, because it is not finished." - Financial Times.

"In Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune Kristin Ross argues that the spirit of the Commune is alive today among ... the Indignados in Spain and inside the Occupy movement. Ross discusses the 'political imaginary' that fuelled and outlived the Commune." - London Review of Books

"A timely and fecund work that should stimulate anarchist thought and action on the relevance of the Commune to the contemporary politics of occupation, resistance, and prefiguration." - Anarchist Studies

"Ross evokes the exhilaration of art freed from the museum and being lived as something 'vital and indispensable to the community'" - Marx & Philosophy

"An essential resource for all those on the Left." - Art & the Public Sphere