Commune

"Commune" has three related meanings in political history.

1. The self-governing town or municipality. In medieval Europe, the commune was a sworn association of townspeople that won rights of self-government from lords and bishops. In France, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and elsewhere, commune or comune is still the name of the basic unit of local government.
2. The revolutionary commune. The Paris Commune of 1871 gave the word a radical meaning: a city governed by elected, recallable delegates of its citizens, combining legislative and executive functions and seen by socialists and anarchists as a model for a society without a centralised state.
3. The communal settlement. A community in which property, labour and often daily life are shared, from religious communities to kibbutzim, hippie communes and state-organised collective farms such as the Chinese people's communes.

What links these meanings is the idea that the local community, rather than the nation-state or the market, is the primary unit of political and economic life.

Communal theory has many sources.

• Municipal liberty. Medieval communes embodied self-government by citizens organised in guilds, councils and assemblies, a tradition later celebrated by Tocqueville in his praise of local liberty.
• Socialist and anarchist theory. Marx described the Paris Commune in The Civil War in France as "the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor". Proudhon and Kropotkin imagined a federation of free communes replacing the state. Murray Bookchin's communalism and libertarian municipalism called for popular assemblies in neighbourhoods and towns, federated through recallable delegates, an idea taken up by democratic confederalism.
• Utopian and religious communities. Owenites, Fourierists and religious groups such as the Hutterites built communes to live according to principles of cooperation and shared property.
• State-led collectivisation. Twentieth-century communist states organised rural populations into collective farms and communes to mobilise labour and extract surplus for industrialisation, a radically different use of the communal idea.

Communal forms compared

• Italian communes. From the late eleventh century, cities such as Pisa, Genoa, Milan and Florence formed communes governed by consuls and councils, which later evolved into city-republics or fell under signorial rule.
• Paris Commune (1871). After France's defeat by Prussia, Parisian radicals and the National Guard took control of the city on 18 March 1871. The elected Commune Council introduced measures including the separation of church and state and the abolition of night work in bakeries before the French army crushed it in the "Bloody Week" of late May, with thousands killed.
• Kibbutzim. From Degania (1910), Israeli kibbutzim practised collective ownership, communal child-rearing and direct democracy in general assemblies; most have since been privatised to varying degrees.
• Chinese people's communes (1958–1984). During the Great Leap Forward, rural China was reorganised into large communes that controlled land, labour and food. Justin Yifu Lin argued that removing households' right to exit collectives undermined incentives and contributed to the agricultural collapse of 1959–1961, which was accompanied by famine with tens of millions of deaths. Communes were dismantled in the early 1980s, and Lin found that the household responsibility system accounted for much of the subsequent growth in agricultural output.
• Revolutionary Catalonia and Marinaleda. Anarchist collectives in Catalonia and Aragon in 1936–1939, and the Andalusian town of Marinaleda since the late 1970s, show communal economics combined with assembly government.
• Venezuela. A 2010 law created comunas, groupings of community councils intended to exercise local self-government; critics argue they have depended on state funding and political patronage.

• Scale. Assembly-based communal self-government is difficult beyond a few thousand people; federations of communes face familiar problems of coordination and representation.
• Coercion versus voluntarism. The record of state-imposed communes, in China, the Soviet Union and Tanzania's villagisation, is one of coercion, falling productivity and in some cases famine. Voluntary communes avoid this but are often short-lived.
• Incentives. Shared property can weaken individual incentives unless offset by strong norms, monitoring or the right to exit.
• Conformity. Intense communal life can pressure dissenters and limit privacy.
• Military vulnerability. Revolutionary communes, from Paris to Catalonia, were typically crushed by better-organised states.

As municipalities, communes are among the most stable institutions in Europe, and the principle of local self-government they embody is protected by instruments such as the European Charter of Local Self-Government. As revolutionary projects, communes have been brief but influential, inspiring socialist, anarchist and municipalist movements. As economic units, voluntary communes have shown that shared ownership can endure for generations under specific conditions, as with the kibbutzim and the Hutterites, while state-imposed communes produced some of the worst policy disasters of the twentieth century. The lesson for designers is that the right of exit, voluntary membership and manageable scale are decisive.

• Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871), Marxists Internet Archive
• Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (Verso, 2015)
• Justin Yifu Lin, "Collectivization and China's Agricultural Crisis in 1959–1961", Journal of Political Economy 98(6) (1990)
• Justin Yifu Lin, "Rural Reforms and Agricultural Growth in China", American Economic Review 82(1) (1992)
• Daniel Waley and Trevor Dean, The Italian City-Republics (4th ed., 2010)