1871-2021: from Paris to Chiapas and Kurdistan

The «Commune» as a revolutionary utopia of present immanence

Abstract

This article aims to study the practical validity and political operativity that the Commune-form of organization continues to have among us, today. We will focus on two current and untimely self-emancipatory movements: ‘Zapatism’ and the M.A.R.E.Z. (in Mexico), and ‘Democratic Confederalism’ and the cantons (in Kurdistan). These are two collective movements that, according to the activists involved —and here we will be guided by the texts and materials produced from both movements— deliberately update and renew the ‘Commune’ (and its historical heritage) as a form or mode of organization liberatory and egalitarian, depatriarchal and descolonial type, breaking out as a ‘third way’ in the midst of our patriarchal state and capitalist societies, traversed by all kinds of vertical, dissymmetric, hierarchical, andromorphic and phallocratic divisions. We will begin by defining the most fundamental characteristics of the novelty implied by the Paris Commune in the 19th Century (not from the ‘ideological’ point of view, but from the point of view of the organizational diagram of power relationships). Then, we will see the problem of the ‘commune’ as becoming-minority, proposing that the commune-form produces a differential human subjectivation with respect to state subjectivation. Next, we will study the problem of ‘double combat’ (interior and exterior), showing how the women’s struggle was the greatest vector of self-emancipatory flight (against male companions). And finally, we will study the an-organic consistency of the Commune-form of organization (against the idea of ​​the ‘Organic State’), and we will list its differential features.