Communal Luxury

Book cover of Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Communal Luxury as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Jonathan Beecher

Author

This book is both an attempt to reclaim the legacy of the Paris Commune for our time and a rich and stimulating investigation of the Commune as “a working laboratory of political invention.” The focus is not on the traditional narrative culminating with the slaughter of Bloody Week. It is on the efforts of individuals—some far removed from the Communards’ Paris—to imagine a world marked by the inversion of longstanding hierarchies and divisions.

What makes the book especially compelling is Ross’s ability to “think with” both Communards like Elisabeth Dmitrieff and Elisée Reclus and outsiders like Kropotkin and Marx as…

From Jonathan's list on writers and artists in 1848 and the Paris commune.

Anitra Nelson

Author

The best historians and anthropologists either draw you into a subject as if you were living it or they directly connect their topic to life in the here and now.

Kristin Ross does both in Communal Luxury which crystalizes a radical imaginary drawn from a vividly reproduced past and posits it as a contemporary manifesto. An irresistible re-reading of the Paris Commune and all it stands for in the present and, more particularly, for our joint futures.

From Anitra's list on anti-capitalist struggles for a postcapitalism.