To continue from my previous post, the second thing I wanted to write about reading Communal Luxury is actually about the title. In one of the very rare points in the book where she engages with the parallel between the Occupy movement and the Paris Commune, Ross says that part of what she sees in the newer movements was something that was also part of the lived experience of the Communards, the sense of reaching towards a specific redefinition of luxury. Our current conceptualization of luxury is always about the individual; there's a sense in which, even if you're not thinking about it, what makes something luxurious is that it's something not everyone has. It makes the idea of communal luxury seem like something of an oxymoron, unless you compare the luxury within the community to the non-luxury without. But to the Communards (and this is really the intellectually explosive part to me), true luxury can only be communal, and that's because true luxury relies on getting rid of the politics of scarcity that is the engine of capitalism. Luxury, after all, is about having an abundance. But how can you truly enjoy that abundance if you don't know that it will last, if you don't know the abundance is forever and for everybody? This is not some kind of religious creed or belief in human goodness--of course, you can enjoy things even if you know they will run out and even if you know not everyone has them (in some cases, one might say, because you know not everyone has them). And the Communards knew that. But to them, that kind of enjoyment was a pale copy, a sham version of true luxury, where you can experience and anticipate the meaning of a life that's not governed in any way by scarcity or the fear of scarcity. Where you are secure in being able to appreciate the beauties of the world and of work and of thought without the sense that they are vanishing or might vanish at any time. That's luxury, and far from being hampered by sharing, it can only happen in community. Because, said Communards like Peter Kropotkin, you can only be ensured that luxury by living in a sustainable way. You have to make sure that you respect the capacity of the natural resources and the earth that you use so they will always be there. You have to work in cooperation with other people because that's how you create a sustainable network where you know that, independent of any individual's particular capacity, everyone will be provided for. (Part of true luxury, in this case, is freedom from the worry of what would happen to your family and loved ones if something happened to you.) Anything else you experience is an impoverished version of what you could experience in a world where everyone always had enough.

This makes me think about a lot of things...but one of the things is about the terms of conversation and how we accept dominant modes of thought even when we battle them. Even for people who do social justice work, there's often this sense that doing it is selfless (self-less) because you're working for something that will benefit others but not you. At the heart of that is always a dilemma, because you're giving something up (time, effort, a feeling that the world is a trustworthy place) so that someone else can have something. On a broader level, that dilemma is one of the biggest forces that works against social justice, because we do operate on this assumption (which has been dictated by capitalism and its missionaries) that there's only a certain amount to go around. Most people don't like to be heroic--if the only way to work for social justice is to give up what you yourself have, most people will not work for social justice even if in theory they would like for it to exist. You can see this, for example, in the debate around public schooling...even if you are a white, middle class parent who believes strongly in integration and supporting public schools, you will not send your white kid to a school where he or she will be in the minority. You will not send your kid to a public school if it is not a "good" one, even if you might be able to make it better. Like I said, most people don't want to be heroes. We want good things for ourselves and our kids. We have individual concerns.  But here come the Communards, and they say, not that what we're doing is immoral, as some might say, but that when we accept the politics of scarcity and try to make ourselves comfortable, individual lives within it, we're cheating ourselves. Because if we acted communally, if we refused the premise that the only way to satisfy individual concerns is to battle each other for resources, we could have so much more. Even for those of us who are lucky enough to be comfortable now, our lives are less than we have the capacity to make them; the pleasure we experience is far less than we have the capacity to feel.

Communards like Peter Kropotkin believed that when capitalism, with its manipulation of the world's products to control prices and its endless creation of variations on consumer goods for the wealthy, ended, there would be enough resources in the world for everyone to have enough. That is to say, we've accepted a state of affairs we don't have to accept. There could be another way.