Until a few years ago, France’s Loire-Atlantique department was a designated site for a future international airport. First proposed in the late 1960s, planners had chosen the rural location of Notre-Dame-des-Landes to buffer the nearby city of Nantes from noise pollution: something unavoidable given the powerful jet engines then coming into service. The planned airport’s two massive runways were to be testaments to state-led modernization.
The airport was never built. Farmers in the region refused to sell their land. Out of their refusal emerged a decades-long struggle, articulate and committed: a manifestation of a long-standing agrarian left that has never received the attention it deserves in France or the United States. In 2009, the struggle radicalized when squatters, naturalists, sympathetic visitors, and left-wing organizers heeded the remaining farmers’ call to defend the land by occupying it. Their coordinated and continuous habitation transformed this “zone d’aménagement différé”—or ZAD, the French state’s acronym for a land parcel caught in developmental limbo—into a different ZAD: a zone à défendre, or “zone to defend,” comprising all the farms, wooden structures, and people who defended the land by inhabiting it.
Defend it they did. In April 2018, Emmanuel Macron launched the largest French police action since May ’68 when he sicced armored tanks, helicopters, and bulldozers to evict these modern-day communards, at the cost of 400,000 euros a day. Officials conceded the airport would never be built, but they made sure the ZAD’s occupiers suffered anyway; 2,500 gendarmes blasted stun grenades and tear gas with abandon. The troops even singled out the most “radical” occupiers, a sign that something momentous had emerged over the decade.
Before the assault, the ZAD at Notre-Dame-des-Landes had been an intentional community. Occupiers lived on the land instead of enclosing it. They welcomed visitors and transient organizers to share in a polemical life, one set to a rhythm other than the metronome of a clock’s tick. Things came up; disputes had to be resolved. Bread had to be baked, wine procured to wash it down. This wasn’t prehistoric life. There was, in addition to herb gardens, a rap-recording studio and a radio station. But that was precisely the point. However much life in the ZAD seemed to lag behind surrounding suburbs, inhabitants’ investment in the social reproduction of life, land, and labor challenged the state’s vision of modernization in the here and now.
That was what Macron and Édouard Philippe, then prime minister, found so odious about it. Tragic statesmen that they were, hands somehow always forced by circumstances they did not choose, Macron and Philippe had no option during 2018’s eviction but to permit 10,000 tear gas cannisters to burst.
The ZAD is a premier example of what Kristin Ross calls “the commune form” in her latest book, The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life. Published in French translation last year by La Fabrique but now, with Verso, in English, the book beautifully renders the ZAD’s experimental life and gives it pride of place—but not because it is a special case. Indeed, the book flanks the ZAD at Notre-Dame-des-Landes with two other astonishing examples that, Ross suggests, share its historical plane. In the second half of the 1960s, farmers outside of Tokyo, assisted by the far-left national student union, protested the construction of the future Narita International Airport. Like its proposed counterpart outside Nantes, Narita would exact extraordinary public and ecological costs for the sake of improvement.
Ross describes the ensuing clashes between the farmer-student alliance and the Japanese state as “well-nigh Homeric battles,” not only because the battles were protracted, but also because of the stakes: life and land. Those stakes were not lost on other militants of the age. Documented in film, the “Sanrizuka struggle” became a touchstone on the far side of the world: for French student radicals in May ’68.
The historical plane extends even farther. Around the same time, the Canadian government announced its own plans to build the largest airport in the world outside of Montréal, the Mirabel International Airport. Resistance was fierce; even after its opening in November 1975, the airport was a catastrophic failure. Poorly connected, it was always under-utilized and discontinued commercial flight operations in 2004. Ross recalls the true cost of le scandale Mirabel: “Seventy-five percent of the land seized was agricultural, much of it of very high quality; forests and multigenerational farms were razed, and entire communities and villages demolished.”
If demolishing communities to make way for glitzy airport arcades produces a dim recollection of Haussmannisation before the 1871 Paris Commune, it should. This is the basic gambit of The Commune Form: this “tale of three airports” should be seen as part of a historical constellation, one that encompasses the 1871 Commune and extends to the defensive battles at Standing Rock in 2016–17 and today’s “Stop Cop City” battles in the Weelaunee Forest outside of Atlanta.
Each of these battles are territorial in form and defensive in nature. Each solicits new patterns of association, activates half-forgotten political capacities, puts into motion the intelligence of ordinary people, and binds them together with something other than ideology: an actual place. Above all, each threatens to render the state a vestigial organ—something redundant, and maybe a bit repellant, too.
This is the commune form that Ross wants to put before our attention. She herself notices it in much the same way a person falls into a poem: Catch sight of this one word, just once, and somehow the poem reappears all over again, but this time from just the right angle, at just the right time. If you caught sight of Notre-Dame-des-Landes in 2016, Ross seems to say, you’d see flit before your mind’s eye other airport battles from the ’60s, from Narita to Mirabel, faint after-images now reappearing with unsolicited intensity. And those old battles might drag in tow other images of struggle, onward and outward, all according to the “unscheduled workings of political memory.”
In this way, the commune form is not a transcendent concept, like the good or the right, apprehended first in outline and only later in punctilious detail. The commune form comes at us—out of history—as we wrestle with state troopers in front of our noses. We notice the commune form whenever and wherever people grasp, against all odds, that what matters is life: its confiscation by the depletion of our natural and built environments, and its preservation by those who, on site and in accordance with their location’s idiosyncrasies, refuse to surrender. “We make our community,” Ross insists, “by defending it.”
That she does not live in New York City is a fact of some importance to understanding Kristin Ross. Her long teaching career at New York University makes the choice noteworthy, as does the tendency of American intellectuals to live in the city. She is a known figure of the intellectual left, an author, a translator, a marcher in rallies, a radical historian who hails from literary studies. Less well appreciated is that, for more than two decades, she has also lived in the Hudson Valley, the rural region sited north of the city and stretching up to Albany. I learned this after moving to the area in the summer of 2016 to assume my first full-time teaching post.
The Hudson Valley consists of small hamlets, Dutch houses and postwar bungalows encircling a main street and encircled by farmland. It is beautiful, and—thanks to Thomas Cole and the Hudson River Valley School of painters—quite literally the picture of the American pastoral. Yet even in 1836, Cole forewarned the region’s fate: to be “desecrated by what is called improvement.” Improvement came, and it went. During the 1970s, the region’s towns suffered enormously from the same deindustrialization that hollowed out larger counterparts in upstate New York and, indeed, across the country’s rust belt. Like the melancholic Gilded Age estates overlooking the Hudson River, these towns sagged, their facades unloved and streets unkept. Processes like improvement are cyclical; and so, in the 2010s, after decades of decay, embourgeoisement came once more for the region’s towns.
The commune form comes at us—out of history—as we wrestle with state troopers in front of our noses.
Kingston, where I live, is one of these towns. At the beginning of the COVID pandemic in 2019, Kingston was among the nation’s top ten zip codes to benefit from postal service address-change requests, its affordable farmland and old homes resettled by the rich. Unsurprisingly, embourgeoisement has brought a higher quality of life, even while ensuring far fewer people have access to that life. Local organizations like For the Many are fighting to mitigate the damage, but it remains an uphill battle. “Renewal” came so quickly that the process was experienced, even by relative newcomers like me, as a discrete event. Before, Kingston was not cool. Then, it was cool, and I was living at the knife’s edge of cool.
Today, the Hudson Valley is a case study in discordance. Poughkeepsie, home to wealthy Vassar College and a Metro-North train stop, is only 20 minutes south (by car) of Kingston. Yet it has not been blessed with the luxury “concept stores” and art gallery vitrines that have made Kingston into a delightful escape for New York city homeowners tired of being at home. Poughkeepsie lags behind Kingston though it is still the year 2024 there. This unevenness of urban space, according to Henri Lefebvre, is among the clearest ways we experience the contradictions of capitalist modernization. Different forms of life that we imagine following sequentially are, in truth, spatially juxtaposed and contemporaneous. Imagine, he asks in the second volume of Critique of Everyday Life, a place where “small farmers would continue to work the land by hand and go hungry while an ‘elite’ of technicians and managers would be exploring outer space.” Variable cadences of urban-rural life are not a sign of uneven modernization but of modernization’s stipulation of uneven development.
None of this I appreciated when, in March 2018 and as a brand-new professor, I invited Ross—long a close reader of Lefebvre—to give a talk. I had never met or spoken to her before, but I figured she was in the neighborhood. Why not? Those lucky few who teach at liberal arts colleges know that when you invite a speaker, you also invite your classes to attend. By invite, I mean compel: attendance is mandatory. This ensures an audience, since liberal arts colleges boast a miniscule faculty and no graduate students. This, too, I did not know, and with disastrous consequences. Ross delivered her talk in an auditorium with 80 seats. Only five or six souls filled them. Memories of the humiliation still corner me from time to time.
Even so, Ross talked to our groupuscule about territorial defense, communal luxury, and the threat rural autonomy poses to state elites and development mega-projects. To my surprise, the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes was the talk’s centerpiece. I had never heard about the commune, even though Ross was hard at work making its political thought available to wider audiences. The lecture’s themes echoed Lefebvre, but the arguments were quintessentially hers. I still recall the talk’s enigmatic title. The advertising posters featured a photograph of people dancing around a burning wooden structure, as if in a Goya print; set above it was “THE SEVENTH WONDER OF THE ZAD.”
At the time, I thought Ross was talking about France. But now, after reading The Commune Form, I see how badly I had missed the point. Even back in 2018, Ross was talking about us, too: all of us who lived in the Hudson Valley and places like it. Wasn’t upstate New York a bit like Notre-Dame-des-Landes or the Chiba prefecture where Narita airport was built? Might our home share the same historical plane as the ZAD or the resistance to Mirabel International?
The Hudson Valley provides farm produce for New York City, but not only that. The Catskill watersheds also host the Ashokan and Rondout reservoirs, which are just a few miles from Kingston. These reservoirs source the city’s fresh water. Hundreds of miles of aqueducts carry water to the boroughs, maintained by the city’s Department of Environmental Protection. If you jog or bicycle around the reservoirs, you will spot city employees pacing the perimeter, 70 miles from Manhattan.
The stewardship of land and water in the Hudson Valley cannot be the sole task of local farmers, since its integrity concerns everyone in the city and beyond. Ross emphasizes that the ZAD brought together farmers and urban radicals into a mosaic “composition,” their daily management of common life producing a distinct space—a commune—despite conflicting social bases. The same can be said of the Hudson Valley. When it comes to land, city and countryside can be on the same side, when the battle line is correctly understood to lie elsewhere. The real battle is not between urban dwellers and smallholding farmers—as capitalist social conflict or cheap populism would render it—but between those who fight for life’s maintenance and those who accept the alienation of the land.
Labor-oriented students at my college, many of whom grew up in the city, volunteered with United Farm Workers or contributed to food justice initiatives, like the Worker Justice Center of New York. Their alliances with farmworkers, however fleeting, echo the momentous coalition of farmers, students, and factory workers in the southwest of France in the 1980s, the Paysans-Travailleurs movement, whose dreams Ross believes the ZAD is fulfilling in the present. Then as now, battles over land tend to draw lines of solidarity differently than battles over abstract ideas.
To read The Commune Form, six years after hearing “The Seventh Wonder of the ZAD,” is to catch sight of the Hudson Valley as a fourth segment to Ross’s “tale of three airports.” Rural life here promises an escape from city living; but that promise hides the fact that it is city living.
Any movement to protect shared life in the region, therefore, will not be defined by ideological doctrines but by common enemies: major agribusiness, mega-developers, land and housing speculators. As such, it will require an alliance of different social classes that might seem impossible to unify. And yet, such an alliance can coalesce, because, as in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, something tangible is at stake.
Afficionados of Ross’s work will recognize arguments in The Commune Form that have come before. In fact, it’s hard to avoid the impression that the book should be read as a manifesto. It compresses a lifetime of work on agrarian radicalism, everyday life, and revolutionary culture stretching back to the ’80s.
Consider the book’s insistence that, for revolutions to happen, they must unfold at a scale people can actually experience. Look at the ’60s, whether the ZAD occupiers in Nantes or the Black Panther Party in Oakland, Ross says, and pay attention to the provisioning of real needs: food and drink, pleasure and leisure, education and art. By situating the management of daily needs at the center of political struggle, these ’60s radicals “were making revolution on a scale that people could recognize.”
The priority of everyday life—something Ross has promoted since her 1987 co-edited issue of Yale French Studies on the topic—contrasts dramatically with soaring summons to revolution that begin with abstract ideas, like justice. “What does justice demand?” is a phrase that repeats, like a compulsive tic, in my own academic field whenever political reform is prescribed. Desires for change, political theorists pretend, descend from first principles, just as mana flows from heaven. We used to joke, as students, that philosophers probably imagine themselves helicoptering over towns, dropping flyers with definitions of justice, pleased with themselves—a one-time “gift to the demos,” the theorist Sheldon Wolin called it.
But the image of revolution that comes to mind when reading about the ZAD is not mana from above, but, rather, a stream. In her 2015 book Communal Luxury, Ross writes of the Paris Commune,
The Commune, we might say, is perhaps best figured as having the qualities [the geographer Élisée Reclus] attributes in his book to the mountain stream. Its scale and geography are livable, not sublime. The stream, in his view, was superior to the river because of the unpredictability of its course. The river’s torrents of water barrel down a deep furrow pre-carved by the thousands of gallons that have preceded it; the stream, on the other hand, makes its own way. But for that very reason, the relative strength of the waters of any mountain brook is proportionately greater than that of the Amazon.
When I encountered this image of a stream almost a decade ago, it affected me in ways few images do. “Its scale and geography are livable”—that is a description of the 1871 Commune. It’s not a bad one of the Hudson Valley right now, either. But it also describes the experiences that matter, the ones that can alter the course of a person’s life and awaken them to politics. Revolutionary experiences are not scaled to the universe; they are not the artifacts of a grand philosophy of justice or existence. They are frequent; they are everyday. But for that very reason—like the relative strength of the mountain brook making its own way, at its own pace—these experiences bear proportionately greater force than those of transcendent cogitation.
Lest one by deceived by the image of a creek gently curving, let me be clear: at bottom, The Commune Form is an argument in defense of revolutionary defense. Defense, Ross argues, is what makes a commune. Defending a piece of land, a neighborhood, or a town is what sustains the autonomous self-management of everyday life, the very quality that makes the commune such a distinctive political form.
To some, Ross’s focus on revolutionary defense will be polemical, not least because communes are rendered in the American political imagination according to a different idea: peaceful self-management. We find that sentiment in the communes of the long 1960s. Many of the queerest ones—like Lavender Hill, formed in 1972 outside Ithaca in upstate New York—understood territorial secession and collective self-management as preconditions for sexual freedom. If anything, memories of the ’60s have only strengthened the idea of the commune as a peaceful retreat; many communes, as a matter of fact, drew antiwar activists. (Ithaca’s local brewery pays homage to the region’s history of communes with an IPA-style beer called “Flower Power.”)
There is some truth to this image of communes as peaceful and withdrawn self-management. I’ve always held dear a particular line from the editors of La Sociale, a radical paper during the 1871 Paris Commune: “We want to be masters of ruling—and ruling alone.” The line’s majesty comes from its simplicity. What no state, constitution, or representative allowed these men and women to do was to live life peacefully, as if it actually belonged to them.
This isn’t something Ross would dispute. She is one of the few theorists today who understands, all cynicism aside, it would be better if the young Marx were right. It would be nice to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner. She truly believes a life lived to a different rhythm, a life where subsistence becomes abundance because we are not desperately accumulating—that’s a life worth defending to the teeth. At Notre-Dame-des-Landes, Ross entreats us with attractive vistas of sheep herding. There is dramatized satisfaction of farmwork’s well-earned fatigue, “with crepes and wine to consume outside, beginning around 10:00pm.” But the point of these romantic tropes is simple: they initiate us into a different political intelligence. They help us see what kind of skin we have in the game, what’s worth defending.
Readers must not take the bait of romanticism and, thereby, miss the book’s summons to join a committed war against the modern state and capitalism’s accumulative processes. And not in a pitched battle, either, but in a Maoist-style protracted war. Defending a place requires defenders to assume responsibility for the satisfaction of everyday needs. People need to eat, stay warm, rotate sleep schedules, manage media relations, settle internal conflicts, and dispose of waste.
This is evident from the history of large-scale strikes. In Nantes, during France’s May ’68, strike committees did more than negotiate with factory owners and state officials. They also coordinated basic services during their factory occupations, as if they were a “parallel administration.” That’s why labeling what happens during a work stoppage or workplace occupation “mutual aid” doesn’t capture what’s important. By occupying space over time, and by managing peoples’ daily needs in the process, the state’s inevitability recedes.
This, Ross concludes, is the real meaning of the Marxist adage of the state’s withering away. (“A step-by-step dismantling,” technically speaking.) However small, the Gaza solidarity encampments at North American universities this spring understood this almost instinctively. How do you defend a lawn? You inhabit it, and you manage collective life on it. You demonstrate a vision of everyday life that is protracted. And in so doing, you force everyone to clarify what exactly universities are for.
The Commune Form never lets go of the virtues of revolutionary defense, and it is at pains to distinguish it from small acts of resistance. It is vital the two be distinguished.
For decades, the North American academy used “resistance”—the proverbial throwing of sand in gear, the gumming up of the status quo’s machinery—to pump up political powerlessness as something savvy. The concept was wish-fulfilment for intellectuals who found agency in every nook and cranny when, of course, the damning problem was that agency only seemed to exist in nooks and crannies.
This idea of resistance, Ross emphasizes, begins from the premise that we have nothing, except maybe our bodies: It is a politics for the powerless, for those who have already lost. “Defense,” however, “begins elsewhere.” We defend because we still have something worth protecting. Defense begins with “what we already have, a positivity, a thing worth fighting for. And, in fighting together for it or in defending it, a more powerful solidarity is woven than can be created through resistance.”
Even so, the book’s examples do not neatly abide by this distinction, which it draws with such power. At the height of the ZAD occupation of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the defining activity of the communards was defense. But after 2018, when Macron evicted the most antistatist ZADists, many communards shifted to a new mode of politics, one more like “resistance.” One-time defenders went on to form Les Soulèvements de la Terre (SLT), a radical ecological collective that has been sabotaging monoculture farming and enormous water mega-basins in France. SLT is mobile and dispersed. It engages in defense; but what is being defended is no longer a specific acreage but the logic of life itself. SLT instantiates the commune form for our own day, Ross says. But if that’s true, then right now the line between defense and resistance may not be so clear-cut.
On this land, at this moment, with our perception of the past in sharpened focus, we need to keep our heads cool and common enemies in sight. Shields up.
In any case, the commune form “is not a concept,” the beneficiary of neat definitional boundaries. What matters is the perspective that communes compel us to take. Whether we “defend” a marsh or “resist” new pesticide implementation outside the suburbs, we are taking a stand on what should count in life, what has value.
More than a century ago, the anarchist Emma Goldman argued with passionate violence that “real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surrounding inspiring to live in.” For Goldman, real wealth was precisely what capitalist accumulation precluded. “If man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life,” Goldman said, “there can be no talk of wealth,” only “gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence.” Charles Fourier, the French utopian socialist, had a more compact description of the wealth a commune secures: “The assurance of a splendid minimum.” There is political intelligence at work here, a perception of a luxurious life that comes into view when we choose to value subsistence.
Seen just the right way, at just the right angle, Fourier in 1808 and Goldman in 1910 live on the same historical plane as Les Soulèvements de la Terre or Kingston’s For the Many today. It’s just a matter of noticing them at just the right angle, at just the right time.
These arguments put Ross in an unusual place. They echo those of other degrowth Marxists like Kohei Saito, and indeed Lefebvre is an important figure for degrowth ecological communism. But readers looking for either a pledge of allegiance or a narcissism of differences will be disappointed. Does Ross agree with Saito’s Marx in the Anthropocene or, say, Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life? Where, readers may plead, does she stand on the hypothesis of the metabolic rift? Ross’s book is polemical, but not in this way. The Commune Form is not determined by disputes on the Marxological left. Its voice is refreshing, precisely because it is so unencumbered by this superego.
The book’s polemical force is reserved for its real opponent: those who hold nothing but contempt for agrarian radicalism. This includes the Macrons and Obamas of the world, as well as urban radicals who can’t quite see their own condescension.
We rightly associate the resurgent intellectual left in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis as a return, at last, to taking seriously labor and democracy in the home and workplace. For those of us involved in unionization efforts in the 2010s, this resurgence was a fog finally lifted. On this point, Ross—who was at NYU during the tumultuous and exhilarating organizing drives by GSOC, now UAW-Local 2110—never lost her sight.
At that time, “structuralism” reigned supreme in the United States academy; “star” theorists reaped high salaries by riding its waves to the heights of their professions. And it was precisely then that Ross was attacking this ahistorical body of theory for dashing our eyes out at the very moment when there was so much to see: rising banlieues beyond the périphérique expressway, just as decolonization had come to an end; the global trade in luxury goods exploding, just as the postwar Keynesian settlements entered into terminal decline; the automobile’s conquest of the everyday, its slick clean lines matched only by the all-electric refrigerators lurching families into an amnesiac modern life.
What Ross was highlighting, in other words, was the fact that history was happening. And it was happening just as scholars decided that “the text” had no history, and theorists didn’t need to be historians.
But none of this has made Ross into a ghost of the Third International. The Commune Form is crystal clear: The figure of the future is not the factory worker or the union steward. It’s not the urban student, women, the colonized subject, or the soothsaying poet either. It’s all of these, but composed in a defensive formation led by none other than the paysan.
Yes: the small-scale farmer is probably the figure to whom we should look for a glimpse of the future. Bearers of a way of life judged outmoded, demonized by agribusiness firms, for that very reason paysans knows something others don’t. Beside Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre and Simone de Beauvoir’s La Deuxième Sexe, Ross says we need one more text: the radical farmer Bernard Lambert’s Les Paysans dans la lutte des classes. This, more than anything, is what makes reading The Commune Form so bracing and bewildering. How is this not sheer antiquarianism? How, with ideological spatialization across the urban-rural divide, can alliances be forged with those who frequently want nothing to do with the left?
Ross is at pains to repudiate pastoralism, yet her book raises all the anxieties that surround it. There is no modern pastoralism that has not been predicated on the elimination of the native. Its communitarian halo is a hard edge, cruel to outsiders and even crueler to misfits inside.
I was born and raised in east Tennessee in a county with over 500 farms. Almost half the farmers are over the age of 65, and according to the last US Census, 98.9 percent of them are white. Nothing boils my blood faster than listening to Cambridge, Massachusetts, residents pontificate on anything within 1,000 miles of my hometown; they haven’t earned the right. But for all that, the best I can muster is indecision about Tennessee’s paysannerie. The rebellious pride never shades into love.
Still, as Ross reveals, in the course of history, there is always the possibility of dialectical reversal, of the outmoded becoming futuristic and the reactionary becoming its opposite. This is why Ross suggests the student-worker-farmer alliance in western France in the 1970s—the Paysans-Travailleurs movement—is “at least as interesting to consider, and possibly more so, as any of the solidarities that come to mind when we speak, say, about ‘the Global South.’”
The claim is a stroke of genius. But of all the arguments Ross makes in her book, I suspect the promotion of the paysannerie into a fighting creed and formation will be the one for which she will not be forgiven.
Ross hopes we will believe her in the end because, deep down, we may already know what she says is true. The Commune Form avails itself of a peculiar phrase three times: “communal unconscious.” To wit: “we might speak” of 1970s airport battles “as a moment of awakening, or perhaps rather a reawakening, of a communal unconscious.”
Readers of psychoanalysis know that awakening to something unconscious is not a matter of listening closely, as if with a stethoscope. It is not about making something quiet, loud. Noticing something unconscious depends on reorganizing our experience of the past—its events and the connections between them—so that the past becomes a different kind of object for us (for Freud, neuropathological) in the present. Something about the past appears that is not in the past.
Perhaps historical understanding happens a bit like this. That is what Ross tells us, like Lefebvre and Walter Benjamin before her. We might think that what comes before explains what comes after. But “according to Marx,” Lefebvre writes, we would be wrong: “The study of capitalism sheds light on what preceded it and not vice versa.” Benjamin’s formidable formulation is better known: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ … It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” Events forgotten and practices dismissed in their own day become “available for recall,” according to Benjamin, because of what endangers life now.
Consider how the land-based struggles of the long 1960s unfolded in rural areas. Farmers led the way, students and wage workers behind them. But compared to the urban uprisings in Oakland or Paris that got all the love, these agrarian skirmishes seemed secondary or siloed, texts without contexts. It is only now in the 21st century—when, as in the Hudson Valley, struggles over land are pressing in from all sides—that we can see that these minor farmers’ struggles may have been the main plot all along. Odd battles fought over airports in southern France or outside of Tokyo have today “become visible as what we can now see them to be—the defining struggles of the era.”
Observers of the new scramble for Africa have been trying madly to squeeze this point back into collective consciousness. Since 2008, land grabs in Africa, East Asia, and Latin America have accelerated, with dire consequences on local residents’ food security. These land grabs are often instigated by major agribusinesses geared to the production of cereals, oil, and beef. These grabs also extend to locations abundant with rare metals, lithium, and other resources strategically significant for global electronics manufacturing.
In all these places, dispossession from land—“the most primitive, primary source of alienation humans have experienced,” Ross says—has severed residents’ connection to their means of subsistence, while reintegrating them within a global market on exploitable terms. This was one of the lessons Indigenous activists were trying to teach during the Dakota Access Pipelines protests in 2016. The culprits of today’s land grabs cannot be scapegoated as the work of “rising powers,” something liberals and conservatives are wont to do. Investors are based in China and India, but also the US, the UK, and Germany.
As I write, enormous land grabs are being organized for the ruins of Gaza by Israeli real estate companies keen on its “waterfront” properties. In the Hudson Valley, property acquisitions by New York City residents on the search for passive incomes have driven up the price of undeveloped farmland by over 60 percent between 2020 and 2022. We are confronting a global class of accumulators—“cumulards,” in ZAD parlance—whose solidarity is international, and who have made the ownership of land a major front of contemporary struggle.
What if the Homeric students and farmers outside of Nantes, Montreal, and Tokyo in the 1970s are our predecessors in this fight? Maybe even more than the famous Lip factory workers in Besançon who, in 1973, occupied their factory under the slogan “It’s possible: we produce, we sell, we pay ourselves”? What if André Leo, the legendary feminist of the Paris Commune, was right, that “socialism must win over the peasant as it has the worker”?
It is these propositions that Ross is asking us to consider. We don’t have to accept this all at once, in one fell swoop. To awaken a communal unconscious, it’s enough to notice just once: yes, the paysannerie might be backward, defunct, reactionary, even anachronistic. But they have also been fighting for everyone’s future. We don’t have to love them to defend them.
“Never again will paysans be on the side of the Versaillais,” Bernard Lambert proclaimed to huge crowds in 1973. But the issue isn’t whether Lambert is correct 50 years later. It’s whether we can turn Lambert’s statement around and see it for what it is today: a call for everyone else to stand beside him and say, Never again will we be on the side of the Versaillais against the paysans, either.
Though Ross never quite puts it this way, it is impossible to read The Commune Form and not entertain a profound hypothesis: Romantic pastoralism may raise dangers for the left; and yet, these dangers are equaled by our refusal to ever be moved by it.
Isn’t there something worth defending in the ZAD’s wooden gazebo? Isn’t the autonomy that is lived in a commune worth protecting, crepes and hay and all? John Frost, the British chartist who once led an armed uprising in Newport in 1839, revealed that reading the romantic poetry of Coleridge and Shelley made him a socialist. Was Frost really so off the mark? When Thomas Cole, at the exact same time, accused “improvement” in the Hudson Valley of bringing “a wantonness and barbarism scarcely credible in a civilized nation,” was there no truth to this, however mythical? “It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness” celebrated by romanticism, Marx wrote in the Grundrisse, “as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end.”
This is a lesson forsworn by today’s left, but it is one we must not repress. So long as international airports are second homes for the bored and bourgeois, there will always be a kernel of truth in a voice that says “no.” We don’t need Narita and Mirabel, because we have something better: the seventh wonder of this whole world.
On this land, at this moment, with our perception of the past in sharpened focus, we need to keep our heads cool and common enemies in sight. Shields up. 