Chapter 13 - Communes to Come

Section Notes¶

Functioning of the Commune¶

• 200-500 people living together

• Collectivizing social reproductive labor

• Not self-sufficient agricultural communities or isolated units struggling to survive in a market economy

• Centralized buildings site of canteens, meeting halls, laundries, creches

• Needs deliberate practices to accommodate disability, neurodiversity, mental illness

Dangers to the Commune¶

• Family households most resistant to self-abolition

  • Will likely continually attempt reestablishment of private household

  • Force of counterrevolution seeking to reestablish class society

    • Private households cannot persist without class society

• Religious, social homogeneity

• Internal class stratifications

  • What if some communes achieve better standards of living than others?

Fourier and the Commune¶

• Committing to social form and guaranteeing social minimum

• Center for new forms of communist sociality, art, expression, community, sex, and love

• Cross-generational friendship

Children of the Commune¶

• Co-parenting with one or more adults

  • Not as an economic unit

• Child could choose other housing arrangements

  • Pass through multiple arrangements as they grow up

• Protection from harm vs. having autonomy

Quotes¶

“This is not the commune as it exists under capitalism or settler colonialism; it is made possible only in the midst of mass communization. It is through the form of the revolutionary commune that communist social reproduction becomes possible, embedded in the broader expansion of communist society. Just as the communal kitchen has arisen in past insurgencies, the commune as the prevalent mode of social reproduction could arise under a wider condition of communization. There could be a spontaneous, general tendency toward the formation of the commune as a primary unit of domestic life. Communes are answers to the essential question that will arise in a revolutionary process: How can we take care of each other?” (pp. 221)

“The communes must work around an internal committment to fostering a culture of mutual respect across lines of difference. Though individuals can harbor whatever beliefs they choose, their relations with others would be subject to public challenge and political struggle, including with children. People within the commune could challenge examples of abuse and harm they see in each other. Even disliked or harmful people must be able to find a home in a commune.” (pp. 222-223)