Communal luxury - Kristin Ross

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.