Quantum Facility and Environmental Justice Campaign led by Southside Together in Chicago, IL. Photography by Matthew Kaplan.
When you think about communism in the US, if you think about it at all, you are likely to conjure imagery from the “red decade” of the 1930s: when unions led mass strikes that riled every industry in the US, when the most prominent artists and writers of the day were members of the Communist Party, when a proliferating list of acronyms acted as household shorthand for communist-aligned institutions. This image of communism has had remarkable staying power. While for many on the Left the organizational motifs of this highwater mark—the party, the union, the strike—have continued to structure our understanding of what it means and looks like to be a communist, that mark may finally be starting to fade.
Within the last decade, events like the George Floyd Uprisings, movements such as Stop Cop City, and organizations such as the French eco-radicals Les Soulèvements de la Terre are starting to sketch out an alternative vision for revolutionary action that is not rooted in the dominant political forms of the 1930s. The actions of these collectives have not been structured by parties or unions; their aims and tactics differ from those of the labor movements of the 30s and 40s. Alain Badiou appears to have been correct when he claimed in 2008 that while the “communist hypothesis” was making a comeback, it would likely not be anchored by the traditional reference points of the 20th-century. Yet, far from being historically detached, current revolutionary praxis is informed by an alternative set of historical touchpoints. Instead of Leninism and the Comintern of the “red” decade, current movements are taking pages from periods both preceding and succeeding that conjuncture, whether 1871, 1917, or 1968.
Two recent books give compelling accounts of this historical realignment. In The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life (Verso, 2024), Kristen Ross draws a throughline from the Paris Commune of 1871 to several ecological and land-based radical movements today. Also taking 1871 as a starting point, Jasper Bernes’s The Future of Revolutions: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising (Verso, 2025) figures the workers’ council as a connecting piece between the Commune and contemporary mass insurrections. In both cases, the historical political form of choice—whether the commune or the workers’ council—had its respective heyday in 1871 or 1917, went dormant during the mid-twentieth century, and was reawakened and recuperated in the 1960s. Today, as Ross and Bernes’ books attest, these political forms are once again of increasing relevance.
By tracing the histories of the commune and the workers’ council from 1871 to 1917 and to 1968, Ross and Bernes have lifted out a compelling genealogy for two salient aspects of contemporary radicalism. Both the commune and the workers’ council are historical versions of proletarian self-organization, a characteristic that sets each apart from capital-C Communism à la the 1930s Comintern, with its focus on institutions and hewing the “party line.” Rather than being mediated by parties or trade unions, self-organized movements are led by those on the ground, with an absence of hierarchical leadership structures: the doer decides. In addition, the commune and workers’ councils both necessarily entail the occupation of physical space. Whether factory takeovers in the city or peasant uprisings in the country, these groups defend and fight for the land itself, along with the means of production or subsistence it provides.
While differing somewhat in their emphasis, Ross and Bernes both show that these features—land-based self-organization—are the defining characteristics not only of the historic forms of the commune and workers’ council but of the front lines of revolutionary action today. While some may celebrate or lament contemporary radicals’ abandonment of the communism of previous generations, this genealogy suggests not a severing of ties but rather the identification of a common ancestor.
For both Ross and Bernes, that ancestor is the Paris Commune of 1871. In March of that year, the workers and soldiers of Paris suppressed and expelled the national French armed forces and created a revolutionary government. The Paris Commune was unique in its organizational structure; it didn’t have leaders as much as administrators, elected from the workers and “immediately revocable,” such that the masses retained actual political power. The result was a radically democratic mode of administrating the needs of everyday life. Two months after it began, the Commune came to an abrupt end when the national French army retook the city, massacring the communards in what became known as the “bloody week.”
The idea of the Paris Commune outlived its relatively short duration as an existing political formation. Ross herself has written several books on the history of the Paris Commune and its influence on the work of contemporaneous revolutionary thinkers such as Marx and Kropotkin and artists such as William Morris. Bernes, meanwhile, traces the influence of the Paris Commune to another lesser-known political form of proletarian self-organization, the workers’ council.
The workers’ council—or soviet, in Russian—originated during the 1905 Russian Revolution. Inspired by the tactics of the Paris Commune, workers’ councils comprised factory workers who organized within the workplace and took direct control over those workplaces, supplanting owners and managers. Decisions around production, rather than being made by professional business managers, were made by workers. Profits, rather than being extracted and handed over to the owners, were retained among those who produced the goods. While the soviets were born during the general strike of 1905, their tactics differ from the strike. Instead of leveraging the threat of work stoppage in negotiations with management, the workers’ councils kept the factories running yet sought direct control over their operations, including what and how much was produced, to whom it was sold and for how much, and how revenue was distributed.
The soviets were integral to the success of Russia’s October Revolution in 1917 and the Soviet Union was intended to be just that, a union of soviets, each enacting direct proletarian control over their workplaces, and through them the economy writ large. In a drama thoroughly rehashed by historians of the Left, and to the lament of those supporting the soviets, the councils did not retain power, even as they had provided the engine for the revolution. In the months following October, Lenin, wholly engaged in the immediate project of defeating an externally supported counterrevolution, demanded centralized control over the economy and “unity of will” among the workers. The phrase “all power to the soviets,” which Lenin himself had touted only months before, he now considered “dangerous” and “childish,” evidence of irresponsible “ultra-leftism.” To make a long story very short, Lenin suppressed the workers’ councils, defeated the counterrevolutionaries, and allowed power to ossify within the bureaucratic state. Outside of Russia, workers’ councils or factory occupations popped up during the Spartacist revolts in Germany and again in Italy in 1920. Unlike in Russia, though, these movements did not lead to revolution and were defeated by the owners backed by the capitalist state. In both cases—the “successful” Russian example and the short-lived instances elsewhere—lasting proletarian control failed to materialize. It is this failure that would be reexamined by the New Left in the latter half of the twentieth century.
In the meantime, from the 1920s to the 1960s, workers’ councils weren’t much heard from. Despite dissent coming from Trotskyist and anarchist corners, the dominant global leftist agenda was set by the bureaucratic state communism of the Comintern. Thus the protagonist of the dramas of proletarian struggle of the 1930s and ‘40s was not the revolutionary workers’ council but its reformist antagonist, the union. Its main tactic was not the factory takeover but the strike. Direction came not from spontaneous proletarian action but from the party.
As a rationale for their suppression, Lenin had critiqued workers’ councils as insufficient for producing a communist alternative to capitalism. After WWII, when the Comintern’s own failures to produce a liberatory alternative were becoming increasingly known, various leftist groups began to explore the idea of workers’ councils once again. In the 1950s, C. L. R. James developed, alongside Raya Dunayevskaya, the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a theoretical approach emphasizing the direct experience of workers and promoting the publication of what they called “workers’ correspondence.” In the decade that followed, Guy Debord and the Situationist International amassed global popularity advocating for, among other things, the retrospective exploration and promotion of workers’ councils.
This renewed interest in workers’ councils in the ‘50s and ‘60s produced a school of thought called council communism. As the name suggests, council communists advocated for direct proletarian action such as workers’ councils. Also embedded in the name, however, is the insistence that the end goal is not insurrection itself, but the production of a communist alternative, thus taking seriously Lenin’s critique of the workers’ councils’ insufficiency. These groups theorized communization, or the process of harnessing mass insurgency, such as the global ‘68 protests, into an alternative organization of society. And importantly, they asked how this communization could occur without replicating the fossilization of bureaucratic state power.
In The Future of Revolutions, Bernes revives this conversation and brings it into the present. If council communism, as it solidified into a theoretical paradigm in the late 1960s, was “a retroactive reconstruction” of the theory of the workers’ councils earlier in the century, “1918 as seen by 1968,” Bernes gives us a view of both 1918 and 1968 as seen by 2025. Council communism insists on theory’s responsivity to praxis, and in this way, is not only a theory but a meta-theory, a posited relationship between theory and practice, between theory and history. It is descriptive rather than prescriptive, insisting that proletarian self-organization comes first, after which its history can be described, analyzed, and theorized.
Bernes uses the lens of council communism to ask a series of incisive questions about our most recent global insurrectionary movement, the George Floyd Uprising in the summer of 2020. What did we learn? What worked? Where did the movement fail? Why didn’t communism ensue? At what specific moments were decisions made that led to the retrenchment of the capitalist status quo? Bernes asserts that answering these questions is the work that the revolutionary Left needs to be doing now, in our current non-revolutionary conjuncture. More than a call for further study, though, Bernes’s book actually models what the work of answering some of these questions can look like. We learned, for example, that starting fires can be an effective insurrectionary tool, spreading police so thin as to be unable to respond to multiple sites of action. And we can isolate moments of self-policing, as when an informal militia dissuaded the crowd from burning the surrendered police station in Seattle’s Capitol Hill, diffusing momentum and allowing the police to more quickly retake control of the neighborhood. Council communism calls for the continued study of the tactics and pivotal moments of recent revolutionary events to increase the chances of the next one succeeding.
While Bernes demonstrates the ongoing relevance of council communism as an intellectual project, the political form upon which it is based—the workers’ council—has been largely relegated to history. Even in 1968, Bernes notes, when interest in the workers’ councils by intellectuals like James and Debord was at its peak, actually existing workers’ councils were scant.
Conversely, the story of proletarian self-organization told by Kristen Ross focuses on the commune as a political form very much alive today. The setting for this story is necessarily rural rather than urban, and its protagonists are not factory workers but peasants, or paysans. Ross turns to the commune not as a historical event but as a mode of organizing the everyday, a mode which, while short lived in Paris in 1871, gained global notoriety in the 1960s and ‘70s and which she compellingly claims will have increased traction in our current age of climate catastrophe.
Almost a century after the massacre of the Paris Commune, the events of May 1968 culminated in France with a nationwide general strike, bringing the country to an economic standstill, and, by some accounts, the verge of revolution. It also left many provincial cities without access to essential public services. The city of Nantes responded by developing its own parallel social administration, which became known as the “Nantes Commune,” answering questions of subsistence “from below” and creating the conditions where “responsibility for feeding one’s family was no longer being posed in terms of the individual family but, rather, framed in terms of the quartier as a whole.” The distribution of food from local farms, the collection of garbage, the caring for children—all of these activities were organized and determined by a coalition of the townspeople of Nantes and the paysans of the surrounding countryside.
While the Nantes Commune existed for only a number of months, another commune arose in nearby Notre-Dame-des-Landes in opposition to a planned international airport, a struggle that would last decades. A few years later, in 1971, paysans on the Larzac plateau, in the French highlands of the Massif Central, acted in opposition to the planned expansion of a military base. While these movements initially comprised the hundreds of paysan landowners who resisted expropriation, they eventually gathered hundreds of thousands of participants—fellow paysans, students, workers, and activists—who collected at the sites. Like the Nantes Commune, these became sites of an alternative administration of the everyday. Fields were tended, cows milked, food distributed, children cared for, latrines built.
The community that was built at Notre-Dame-des-Landes became known as the ZAD, or Zone to Defend, a clever détournement (a rhetorical strategy itself pioneered by Debord’s Situationists), reappropriating an acronym originally used by the state meaning “zone of deferred development.” For Ross, the terminology of “defense” is of particular importance. Resistance, she claims, suggests that the battle has already been lost, that all we can do is try to get by. Defense, on the other hand, centers “that which we hold dear,” the thing we already have and that is worth fighting for. “Resistance,” she writes, “means letting the state set the agenda,” noting as a historical reference the full name of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The ZAD, then, is not simply a site of resistance against “pharaonic, state-imposed infrastructural projects,” but the positive enactment of a form of everyday life—communal and paysan-led—that is worth defending.
After almost six decades, the ZAD at Notre-Dame-des-Landes achieved victory in 2018 when plans for the airport were scrapped (Ross also recounts battles against two other international airports, in Montreal and Japan, that were less successful). The Fight for the Larzac ostensibly won in 1981, only for the military expansion plans to resurface in the 2010s. Today there are more than a dozen sites referred to as Zones to Defend in France. Les Soulèvements de la Terre, founded by former members of the ZAD at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in 2021, have made headlines in recent years for employing a variety of tactics, including sabotage, in opposition to eco-destructive infrastructural projects such as “mega-basins.”
For Ross, contemporary struggles such as Stop Cop City, Standing Rock, and those taken up by Les Soulèvements de la Terre are important in part because they “alter what is perceptible” about struggles in the 1960s and ‘70s, allowing us to see that land-based struggles were not ancillary to the protests of 1968 but rather “the defining struggles of the era.” Beyond reframing the past, however, these movements—to which we could add today’s struggles against data centers, or quantum computing campuses,—suggest that future mass insurrectionary movements will be necessarily tied to land. “From the long 1960s onward,” Ross claims, “the real battle between workers and capital may not have been occurring in the cities, in disputes over the wage demands of unions and salaried labor” but “in the form of the war against the paysannerie all over the world.”
The tension between urban and rural radical movements is not new, and Ross and Bernes’s choice of emphasis play out this dynamic, with Ross focused on ecological movements in agrarian settings and Bernes taking a theory of the industrial proletariat as a lens on urban uprisings. However, rather than emphasizing the disparity of these traditions, reading Ross and Bernes together demonstrates what they have in common: a shared history, rooted in the Paris Commune of 1871 and resurfacing in 1968, a shared model of self-organization, and shared tactics of occupation. In his recent book, the French philosopher Paul Guillibert acknowledges that, in the face of ecological catastrophe, one might question the continued relevance of communism—a theory born in the age of industrialization and arguably steeped in the ideology of productivism. He goes on to insist, however, that today’s eco-radicalism needs communism as much as ever. Bernes and Ross’ books would agree, bringing to the surface communist genealogies for many contemporary radical movements.
It is a communism that departs, as Badiou presaged, from that tradition’s most well-known forms; its model is not the unions and parties of the 1930s, but the self-organized occupations and land-based actions of 1871 and the 1960s. What does this historical realignment tell us about the future of revolution? If we’ve learned anything from revolutionary history, it’s that we won’t know how it will look until it happens. But whatever its inevitable catalyst, whether the ongoing ICE terror campaign in the US or the imminent arrival of the next environmental disaster, Bernes and Ross help us to prepare for future revolutions by offering a lens on the past.
Matthew Beeber received his PhD in English from Northwestern University in 2022. He lives in Chicago and writes on 20th-century left literary culture.