How the Paris Communards made their lives luxurious
JVL Introduction
Gabriel Levy’s interview with Kristin Ross, author of a path-breaking book on the Paris Commune, was published in 2015 when the book appeared.
It has lost none of its contemporary relevance.
It offers a different way of reflecting on the past, not to “draw lessons” from it and “learn from its defeat” but to help us think differently.
And the Commune is rich in inspiration about remaking education and rethinking cultural production with its ” primacy of arts-and-crafts labour at the centre”.
It was, as Ross, shows, ” an unscripted example of non-capitalist existence.”
This article was originally published by People and Nature on Tue 28 Jul 2015. Read the original here.
How the Paris Communards made their lives luxurious
In her new book Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, Kristin Ross argues that a rich legacy of ideas and practices developed during the Commune – the workers’ democracy that ruled Paris for two-and-a-half months in 1871 before being violently suppressed – needs to be recovered for the twenty-first century.
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In the last photo, you can see young Arthur Rimbaud on the left.