Towards an ecological understanding of revolution: The Paris Commune of 1871 and contemporary social movements

Abstract

In the wake of the assembly movements that emerged from 2011 onwards, a lively academic and activist debate developed around the question of organization. Various political theorists have proposed an ‘ecological’ approach to social movements, which allows us to perceive them as contingent combinations between various activist repertoires and organizational forms. Rather than prioritizing either a ‘horizontalist’ or ‘verticalist’ logic of organization, both are often at play within a social movement, where they compete with or complement each other. This article contributes to this ‘ecological turn’ in social movement studies by adding a historical perspective. We argue that a key revolutionary event – the Paris Commune of 1871 – could be read as a ‘distributed ecology’. This historical application allows us to better recognize the merits of an ecological approach for contemporary radical-democratic theory and practices and helps us to appreciate the significance and radical potential of recent social movements.

Introduction

In the course of the past decade, the emergence of public assembly movements such as Occupy Wall Street, the 15-M movement, the Gezi Park protests and Nuit Debout has given rise to a lively debate among political theorists as well as activists on the question of social movement organization and mobilization. Initially, these movements were widely celebrated as the harbingers of a new democratic paradigm. Their ‘horizontalist’ forms of organization and direct-democratic decision-making techniques would pose a viable alternative to the existing electoral-representative institutions and procedures, many of which have become deficient and illegitimate (Butler, 2015; Hardt and Negri, 2012; Lorey 2022; Sitrin and Azzellini 2014; Tormey 2015). At the same time, critics denounced precisely this perceived refusal to assume a representative role and to engage with existing public institutions. It is argued that political representation and charismatic leadership are elementary if one is to acquire discursive hegemony (Mouffe 2013; 77; 2018: 70), and that these movements’ horizontalist structures and focus on consensus-based decision making betrayed an individualistic disposition (Dean, 2016: 4), What these various accounts have in common is that they all seek to place recent assembly movements on one side of a dividing line between two mutually exclusive principles. This division is phrased in a variety of ways: as an opposition between ‘verticality’ and ‘horizontality’; between representative and participatory democracy; between organization and spontaneity; between strategy and prefiguration; between leadership and leaderlessness.

In more recent years, however, there has been a significant shift in this debate. It is increasingly argued that these assembly movements were never purely horizontalist or presentist to begin with. Paolo Gerbaudo asserts that they precisely merged participatory democratic practices with ‘a populist drive to construct new forms of representation that could channel popular demands into the state’ (2017: 223). Cristina Flesher Fominaya has shown that the Spanish 15-M movement by no means refuted representative democracy per se, but instead sought to ‘actively reclaim democracy and its institutions for the citizens’ (2020: 80). In their more recent Assembly, Hardt and Negri have also come to the conclusion that this dichotomy is ultimately a false one:

[A] century and a half has passed since the victory and defeat of the Paris Commune, and still, when discussing the dilemmas of progressive and revolutionary political organization, we hear repeated denunciations of both those who naively refuse leadership and, on the contrary, those who fall back into centralized, hierarchical structures. But the idea that these are our only options has lasted much too long. (Hardt and Negri, 2017: 4)

But what other options do we have, besides a one-sidedly horizontalist and a strictly verticalist one? A number of political theorists of the radical left – most notably Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (2015), Graham Jones (2018) and Rodrigo Nunes (2014; 2021) – have articulated an ‘ecological’ approach to social movements. This perspective revolves around the idea that such movements always encompass a variety of practices and organizational forms and structures that combine, complement, compete, or conflict with each other in a variety of ways. Political change, they argue, is never achieved by a single organization, but always results from a distribution of tasks and influence over a broader organizational ecology.

We wish to contribute a historical perspective to this ‘ecological turn’ in social movement studies. Our objective in this paper is twofold. First, we aim to show the merits of this recent development in contemporary social movement theory for the historical analysis of revolutions and uprisings. To this end, we employ this emerging ecological approach to one of the most important revolutionary events of past centuries: the Paris Commune of 1871. In the spring of that year, the people of Paris took power and organized their city as a democratic commune for two months. Second, and in return, by applying recent findings to this historical case we aim to contribute to a better appreciation of contemporary social movements and their potential significance. We thus argue that precisely the institutional or organizational indefiniteness of such moments may be productive from a radical-democratic point of view. An ecological understanding of historical revolutionary events can enrich democratic theory and may help to better comprehend and organize protest movements today.

This article is structured as follows. In the following section, we reconstruct an ecological approach to social movements as it has emerged in recent debates. In the subsequent section we give a brief overview of dominant historical interpretations of the Commune – such as an anarchist and a Marxist one. We then continue to apply a more contemporary, ecological perspective to the Paris Commune in order to revisit the revolutionary potential of this democratic experiment and the role of various (sometimes conflicting) organizations and initiatives that it comprised. Finally, we ask how such historical applications of an ecological approach may contribute to contemporary debates on radical democracy and social movement politics.

The ‘ecological turn’ in social movement theory

What do we mean when we speak of an ecological approach towards social movements? The idea that social movements can be compared with – or even unmetaphorically understood as – ecologies stems from a longer tradition in social movement and organizational studies. Organizational ecology does not focus on individual organizations or organization sets, but instead studies ‘the organizational field created by a number of organizations whose interrelations compose a system at the level of the whole field. The character of this overall field, as a system, now becomes the object of inquiry’ (Trist, 1977: 162). This ‘field’ may be understood in spatial terms (in which case ‘ecology’ refers to the use, distribution and symbolical investment of space by and between social movements) or in social terms. Emphasis then lies on the concrete interactions and interdependencies between organizations (Zhang and Zhao, 2018). Ecological studies of social movements scrutinize various interconnections between different organizations or practices within a social movement, such as the effect of environmental conditions and organizational diversity on the development of new organizational forms (Hannan and Freeman, 1977), the emergence of hybrid forms of organization (Minkoff, 2002) and the consequences of competition and tactical overlap between different organizations and social movements (Olzak and Uhrig, 2001). This ecological approach has mostly served a descriptive purpose. The issue at stake is not what kind of strategies or organizational forms should be employed in the pursuit of societal change, or even what an ideal organizational form or structure might look like. Rather, the aim is to understand how different organizations and qualitative forms of organization relate to each other within a specific field, how they mutually influence or limit each other, and how social movement practices give rise to new forms of mobilization and organization.

In the wake of recent assembly movements such as Occupy Wall Street, the term ‘ecology’ was taken up and further developed by political theorists who seek to revive the political Left. Although this ‘ecological turn’ departs from a similar descriptive analysis of social movements as assemblages of different organizational forms and practices, the difference from previous accounts is its more explicit normative and strategic investment. On the one hand, it is acknowledged that by organizing in general assemblies and employing consensus-oriented decision-making techniques, these assembly movements catered to a widespread desire for democratic engagement. For these activists, horizontality served mostly as an important regulative principle, and their prefigurative practices had a significant mobilizing potential and were of great experiential meaning to those immediately involved (Nunes, 2014: 39; Monticelli, 2021). But, on the other hand, these assembly movements also had a tendency to ‘fetishise’ their own horizontalist form and direct-democratic practices (Srnicek and Williams, 2015: 162). They often refused to engage in electoral-representative politics in order to have a more durable political impact. Srnicek and Williams argue that this has significantly limited their ability to establish political change in the long term, since ‘[e]very successful movement has been the result, not of a single organisational type, but of a broad ecology of organisations’ (Srnicek and Williams, 2015: 163). In his recent book Neither Vertical nor Horizontal Nunes (2021) further develops this concept of an ‘ecology of organisations’, arguing for a greater variety of organizational forms and distributions of leadership within a social movement.

Before engaging with the normative and strategic consequences of this recent ecological turn, let us first flesh out a number of assumptions that underpin it at a descriptive level. To begin with, an ecological approach rejects overly rationalist or causalist conceptions of social movement politics (Zhang and Zhao, 2018: 103). Seen from an ecological perspective, activist practices hardly ever follow from the implementation of a predefined plan. In consequence, no social or revolutionary movement has ever been the product of a single, coherent programme or ideology. An ecology ‘is not intentional: it does not have agreed-upon boundaries, it is not constituted by an act of will, and one does not have to be aware of it in order to be a part’ (Nunes, 2021: 174). One can take recent assembly movements as an example here: Occupy Wall Street and the Spanish 15-M movement were significant not in spite of their strategic diversity, but precisely because they brought together activists of different political backgrounds and orientations (Juris, 2012; Gerbaudo, 2017; Flesher Fominaya, 2020; Flesher Fominaya and Feenstra, 2023). An ecological approach seeks to understand this internal diversity as a strength of such movements, rather than a weakness.

At the same time, as much as radical political practices do not follow from a theoretical or strategic design, they also do not emerge out of nothing. The idea that resistance simply ‘erupts’ and spreads without organization or coordination is widespread in contemporary radical theory as well as many activist practices (Holloway, 2010; Invisible Committee, 2009). Nunes strongly criticizes anarchists for believing that, when push comes to shove, revolutionaries will spontaneously know what to do (Nunes, 2021: 138). Even if new forms and practices may indeed take shape in a relatively spontaneous fashion on the local or minimal scale, Srnicek and Williams argue, it is wishful thinking to believe that they will organically transverse from the local to a global, or from a temporary to a permanent level (Srnicek and Williams, 2015: 35). But this does not mean that spontaneity plays no role of significance. Quite the opposite: spontaneity and organization are ultimately two sides of the same coin, and one is always a condition for the other to appear. ‘It is only by organising itself in however makeshift a way that any kind of spontaneous initiative can produce effects,’ Nunes argues, ‘yet it is only because an inclination to do something already exists that there is anything to reproduce’ (2021: 156). If we renounce teleological views of radical political change, and thus assume that spontaneity or contingency inevitably play a role, then at least some coordinated, collective capacity is required to act upon such unforeseen developments.

An ecological view of organization thus also implies a different appreciation of leadership in social movements. Whereas recent assembly movements were often perceived, not least by themselves, as ‘leaderless’ movements, this evidently does not mean that they were indeed devoid of any form of leadership. As Occupy Wall Street organizer Jonathan Smucker argues, the movement's cult of leaderlessness was counterproductive as it precluded its members from taking initiative and developing the necessary skills to make their movement more durable in the long run (Smucker, 2017: 184–185). It also meant that de facto existing leadership within the movement often went unrecognized – and thus became invisible (Smucker, 2017: 107). Rather than denying actual forms of leadership, it may have been more productive for these movements to understand themselves as leaderfull (Smucker, 2017: 186). Leadership roles can be, and often are, distributed across a social movement, depending on its needs and the skills of individual agents. This is what Nunes (2021: 180) calls ‘distributed leadership’ – the idea that formal as well as informal leadership roles precede and exist alongside processes of autonomous decision making. No general assembly emerges out of nothing: initially, someone (singular or plural) needs to call for it (Nunes, 2014: 36). Paolo Gerbaudo (2012) has established the metaphor of choreography to describe how seemingly ‘spontaneous’ protest actions and public gatherings are often initiated and ‘scripted’ by influential (online) activists. Hence, the question is not whether a social movement can at all be leaderless, but how leadership and practices of collective self-organization may effectively support and complement each other (Nunes, 2021: 203).

Leadership in its various kinds and forms not only plays an important practical role in the establishment of organizational ecologies, but also an important discursive and symbolic one. Leaders and leaderful organizations often fulfil an important articulatory function in that they give shape to the agenda and shared discourse of a social movement. Some of them are endowed with a formal mandate to speak on behalf of a constituency or support base, whilst others first need to be acknowledged by a specific support base as its legitimate representative. Michael Saward (2010) argues that such non-mandated leaders make a ‘representative claim’ through which they present themselves as the spokespersons of a particular social or political group. They are effective to the extent, and as long as, such claims are being recognized. This allows us to understand how representative roles are not limited to political parties and elected politicians, but can also be fulfilled by activists and action groups, NGOs, media pundits and other informal leaders (Brito Vieira, 2015). Rather than claiming that assembly movements such as Occupy Wall Street herald the end of representative democracy, it may be more accurate to conclude that ‘the ecology of representation is changing, becoming more complex and more dispersed’ (Feenstra et al., 2017: 96).

What is more, representatives often do not merely convey the opinions or interests of an already existing, more or less static constituency or support base, they are also co-constitutive of the very social groups for which they claim to stand (Nunes, 2021: 209). For instance, before the emergence of Occupy Wall Street and its slogan ‘We are the 99%’, the concept of a ‘99%’ had never been used. Since then, it has continued to be a source of class identification in the US and beyond. Occupy Wall Street's representative claim to ‘the 99%’ thus gave rise to its own referent – which, in turn, validated its claim by acknowledging this movement as a legitimate representative of the disenfranchised. This illustrates how political representation is always a ‘two-way process: a movement from represented to representative, and a correlative one from representative to represented’ (Laclau, 2005: 158). An ecological approach helps to understand how any social field is criss-crossed by a variety of such representative claims, some of which remain unrecognized or inaudible, whereas others are widely accepted or even penetrate to the core of a hegemonic political discourse.

In short, an ecological approach to social movement organization neither denies the relevance of spontaneous mass action and grassroots organization from below upward, nor does it refute the role of formal and informal leadership and political representation within such movements. It rather seeks to cater to all of these aspects or tendencies, which may occur in various forms and compositions – sometimes in tandem and sometimes in competition with one another. ‘[S]uccessful processes of social change’, Nunes argues, ‘are never wholly centralised or dispersed, they are always distributed, even if we may perceive them as being more centralised or dispersed compared to one another or to themselves at different points in time’ (2021: 34). In this respect, an ecological approach seems to resonate with other conceptualizations that focus on the complex interrelatedness and internal diversity of social movements, such as assembly theory (Rodríguez-Giralt et al., 2018) or social systems theory (Kusche, 2016). Like these similar approaches, the ecological turn takes plurality and dispersion as a given. Yet, it puts more emphasis on the conflicts that arise in consequence of such international divisions. To think ecologically, Nunes (2021, 48) argues, implies that one does not simply affirm or aestheticize the diversity of organizations, structures, forms, functions and practices within a social movement. Rather, the central challenge is to make them ‘compatible with one another, [make] them compossible’ (Nunes, 2021: 49). This requires not only an accurate descriptive understanding of social movements as ecologies but also ‘an ethos of acting ecologically’ (Nunes, 2021: 199). Participants in a social movement should take an interest not merely in their own organization or activist practices, but in maintaining the more encompassing and diverse ecology in which they partake. As Jones (2018: 109) argues in even more strongly normative terms, ‘[t]he focus is on how to work better together, how to become more resilient and collectively effective over a longer period of time. There should be no place in the ecology for self-serving, competitive, parasitic or uncharitable behaviour.’ In short, we are speaking of an ‘ecological turn’ in recent debates as a richer and more complex understanding of social movements and their composition has led political theorists to develop a stronger normative and strategic argument for diversity of (at times conflicting) strategies and organizational forms.

This ecological turn in social movements theory also has a number of important consequences at the normative and strategic level. First, since ecologies are never based on a preset design, an ecological view on social movements and radical practices implies that they can never be legitimized from the outset. Legitimacy is something that follows from, rather than precedes, political action (Nunes, 2021: 194–195). Second, one should not think of distributed leadership as a temporary or transitory stage that should eventually lead to a more harmonious or horizontal democratic order in which conflict and strife have been done away with. There will always be attempts to articulate new agendas, discourses and structures. In consequence, new contingent combinations of top-down leadership and bottom-up mobilization will continue to emerge (Nunes, 2021: 187). Third, since different initiatives work towards a shared political goal or horizon, the exact outcomes of an ecology can and should never be foretold or controlled (Nunes, 2021: 172). This implies that social movement agents cannot and should not try to acquire full control over the agenda and course of an entire movement. But as Nunes (2021: 199) admits, there are no strong safeguards to prevent individuals, organizations, or parties within a distributed ecology from prioritizing their own interests or imposing their own will, which would put the precarious balance of any ecology at stake. This is arguably one of the weaker elements of the ecological turn. One may argue, however, that viewing their movement through an ecological lens may already help social movement actors to better recognize such vulnerabilities and act upon it.

Another strategic insight that can be gained from this ecological approach and the idea of distributed leadership is that political parties and formal electoral-representative institutions may have a specific, limited role to play in social movement politics. At least since the late 1960s and 1970s, many social movements have denounced the party form as being inherently counterproductive or historically outdated (Srnicek and Williams, 2015: 16). This is not without good reason. Political parties traditionally have a ‘winner-takes-all’ mentality ­– a tendency to dominate the political field and instrumentalize social movements for their own end (Nunes, 2021: 169). However, when perceived as a part of a more encompassing and diverse organizational ecology, parties may fulfil an important role by mediating between the streets and the level of the state. A party can bring together various tendencies and groups within a social movement under one banner, thus giving it more public visibility and a more focused message or agenda (Srnicek and Williams, 2015: 168). Seen from an ecological perspective, parties and their electoral-representative strategies may be complementary to social movement politics (Nunes, 2021: 231; Teivainen, 2016). This is on condition that they avoid laying claim to their organizational ecology as a whole, and that they do not enforce their own strategy, agenda, or organizational structure onto a broader social movement. As stated above, our aim is to apply these findings to a historical revolutionary event. This has two purposes. On the one hand, we wish to show that there is essentially nothing new under the sun: if new insights can indeed be drawn from employing this contemporary approach in historical cases, then this arguably serves to support and further develop this ecological reading of social movements. Second, and the other way around, if historical uprisings as significant as the Paris Commune can indeed be understood as organizational ecologies, this may pose a challenge to overly pessimistic readings of more recent assembly movements and serve to illustrate their potential significance. Let us therefore turn to our historical case study: the Paris Commune.

The Paris Commune and its many afterlives

On 18 March 1871, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war, the Parisians took control of their own city and declared it a ‘commune’. They initiated various social reforms, established new political institutions and sought to establish a federation of communes throughout France. Their experiment lasted only a few months – on 21 May the French state army invaded the city and committed a massacre among the Parisian population. Tens of thousands of citizens were killed in battle, summarily executed, or imprisoned and deported to French overseas colonies. Those who managed to escape state repression had no choice but to flee abroad.

Inevitably, a variety of interpretations and analyses of the Paris Commune were articulated in the years and decades following these events (Nicholls, 2019). The French state and its elite initially represented the Commune as a drunken orgy of violence and terror (Léonard, 2022), but it was eventually embedded into a broader narrative on French national republicanism and its tradition of laïcité (Fournier, 2013). Its more revolutionary interpretations, however, can roughly be divided into two categories. On the one hand, the Commune is regarded as a spontaneous uprising of the Parisian people, who established a form of democratic self-organization (albeit, perhaps, a short-lived and imperfect one). The Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1974: 199), for instance, presented the Paris Commune as ‘a bold and outspoken negation of the State’. Although most Parisians were by no means conscious revolutionary socialists, Bakunin stresses, they intuitively knew what to do after state authorities withdrew from the city. Their experiences showed that a socialist revolution could not be decreed or organized from above, and that ‘it could not be made or brought to its full development except by the spontaneous and continuous action of the masses, the groups and the associations of the people’ (Bakunin, 1974: 204).

A second interpretation of the Paris Commune does not present it as a short-lived attempt to do away with statism altogether, but rather as the – eventually unsuccessful – attempt to abolish the bourgeois state and establish a new one in its stead. The most prominent exponent of this interpretative tradition is Karl Marx. It was the experience of the Commune that led Marx to revise his view of the state as a revolutionary instrument. He concluded that the working class could not ‘simply lay hold of the readymade state machinery, and wield it for its own purpose’ (2010: 206). Marx praised the communards for taking the first steps towards the establishment of a ‘social republic’. Their Commune was a ‘working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time’. It not only took over the administrative tasks of the state at a municipal level, but ‘the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the state was laid into the hands of the Commune’ (2010: 209). At the same time, however, Marx was also rather critical of the Commune's failures and weaknesses. They failed to march on Versailles immediately after seizing control over the city. They did not lay hold of the National Bank and its gold reserves. And the central committee of the National Guard was too eager to surrender its power to a newly elected communal council (Marx, 2010: 204). In a letter to the Dutch anarchist leader Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, Marx later described the Commune almost dismissively as ‘merely the rising of a town under exceptional conditions’ (Marx, 1881). This somewhat ambiguous reading of the Commune as a failed seizure of power is also echoed in Lenin's State and Revolution. Although many positive lessons could be learned from the communards’ experiences, Lenin insisted, one of the reasons for their eventual defeat is that they did not establish a sufficiently repressive apparatus of their own (Lenin, 1987: 301). Leon Trotsky argued that the communards were too heavily invested in creating federalized or decentralized forms of organization and thus neglected the role and necessity of revolutionary leadership. The Commune made manifest ‘the incapacity of the masses to choose their path, their indecision in the leadership of the movement, [and] their fatal penchant to come to a halt after the first successes’ (Trotsky, 1935: 34).

The tension between these two dominant readings of the Paris Commune interestingly resembles the dichotomy between horizontalism and verticalism that underpins the contemporary debate on social movements. This essentially revolves around the question of revolutionary leadership. Can radical change emerge from the practices and self-organizing potential of the masses, or must this potential be channelled, articulated, represented, or institutionalized in order for it to materialize and sustain? Related to this tension is the question of success or failure: was the Commune first and foremost an intrinsically valuable and liberatory experience to those involved? Or should we put more emphasis on its mistakes and shortcomings, if one is to learn anything from these events? In the next section, we explore how an ecological approach to the Commune could inform a radically different interpretation and appreciation of these events.

Reading 1871 ecologically

What would an ecological reading of the Paris Commune look like? It is evident that some of the most prominent accounts – not least those of Marx and Lenin – merely focus on the practices and policies of two of its institutions or organizational bodies: the central committee of the National Guard, which was elected by its members just a few days before the beginning of the Commune; and the communal council, which was elected by the Parisian citizens on 26 March, one week after they seized control of the French capital. To start with the former: the central committee arguably was the only executive body with some measure of formal legitimacy that pre-existed the Commune, and thus served as a provisional revolutionary government in its initial phase. The composition of the National Guard was complex, and its internal relations strongly influenced by other informal social networks in the Parisian neighbourhoods (Gould, 1991). The central committee soon called elections so as to hand over its power to a more formally mandated representative body – a decision Marx lamented as it precluded the Commune from acting swiftly in response to the withdrawal of the state authorities (Marx, 2010: 204). Although the central committee initially intended to dismantle itself after this transfer of power to the communal council, it eventually decided to maintain itself and exist alongside the council (Merriman, 2014: 55). This second central institution within the Commune, the communal council, was elected on 26 March and inaugurated two days later. Inspired by the federalist ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in part, the original idea was that most power would be relegated to the level of the 20 Parisian arrondissements, where neighbourhood councils would make the most important decisions (Lefrançais, 2018: 188). These local council members would have the right to recall their delegates at the central level (Journal Officiel de la République Française, 25 March 1871; Zaidman, 2008: 73–79). As often, this turned out to be more difficult in practice. Unlike what is sometimes suggested, the communal council was by no means exclusively a workers’ body, since a significant part of its delegates were of middle-class origin and had so-called ‘liberal’ professions (Lissagaray, 2012: 127). The federalists were only a minority among the electees, and many Republican or Jacobin members of the Commune favoured a more centralist approach (Rihs, 1973).

At the same time, as a symbol of democracy and municipal autonomy, these new communal institutions were of great significance to many Parisians of various political tendencies (Gould, 1995: 144–145). The council also played an elementary role in the establishment of some social policies: it remitted overdue rents (Lefrançais, 2018: 151); it seized workshops that had been closed or abandoned by their former owners and turned them into workers-led cooperatives (Schulkind, 1972: 162–163); it famously banned nightshifts for bakers; it decreed a postponement of all debt obligations, banned rent on debt and closed pawn shops. The communards also secularized the school system and more generally reduced the influence of the church on politics and the public domain (Ross, 2015: 39–43). All in all, and although none of these measures and policies were really revolutionary, Marx (2010: 217) does argue that ‘they could but betoken the tendency of a government of the people by the people’. However, next to these two formal bodies (and their mandated committees), a much broader range of organizations, initiatives, collaborations and institutions emerged well before and during the 72 days of the Paris Commune. During the Prussian siege of 1870, so-called ‘vigilance committees’ had been formed in several arrondissements, at the initiative of the Parisian delegation of the First International. These vigilance committees were federated in a central Delegation of the Twenty Arrondissements, whose initial aim was to form a networked dual power against the central Republican government (Lefrançais, 2018: 46). After the proclamation of the Commune, this Delegation of the Twenty Arrondissements continued to coordinate the various activities of vigilance committees and took part in the election of the communal council. It also continued to give the communal council all kinds of unsolicited advice and critically commented on its policies (Johnson, 1996: 186; Rougerie, 2004: 136–139).

Related to this federation of vigilance committees was a more informal network of revolutionary clubs, which often met in reclaimed churches to discuss public issues and the political course of the Commune. Estimates tend to differ, but by early May at least 30–35 larger clubs were active throughout Paris (Johnson, 1996: 166). Most of these were neighbourhood-based and attracted members from their own arrondissements. Others had a more thematic focus or a shared political orientation and would be frequented by communards from across the city (Johnson, 1996: 171–172). Whereas the formal institutions of the Commune were typically populated by a relatively educated and skilled – and exclusively male – part of the Parisian population, the revolutionary clubs tended to have a less formal and more inclusive character. Having attended one of the daily club meetings, communard Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam described its deliberative atmosphere as follows:

A whole population is discussing serious matters, and for the first time workers can be heard exchanging their views on problems which until now have been broached only by philosophers … a new century has just dawned. (quoted in Edwards, 1971: 283)

At the same time, compared with the Commune’s formal institutions, the clubs nourished a more populist and anti-clerical culture and its speakers would often employ explicitly violent, blasphemous, or foul language (Johnson, 1996: 218). The revolutionary clubs gave a political stage to social groups that were excluded from the Commune's official institutions and procedures, such as women. Prominent female communards such as Louise Michel and Paule Mink frequented these clubs and prominently participated in their debates (Eichner, 2004: 130). In these club meetings, established social relations and hierarchies were explicitly questioned and a more radical view of social egalitarianism was enacted in practice (Eichner, 2022: 39). Rather than to contest their exclusion from the council and its electoral-representative procedures, feminist communardes thus sought to organize their own social revolution within the Commune (Eichner, 2004: 26). The proceedings and reports of club meetings would often be published in journals; more generally, the Paris Commune gave rise to a great number of publications (Merriman, 2014: 67).

In addition to these various committees and clubs, the Paris Commune also saw the establishment of various unions and workers’ cooperatives. The most famous example is the Union des Femmes, which sought to increase the control of women over their own working conditions and environment, and strived to validate unpaid domestic work. This Union des Femmes, which was co-founded by one of Marx's protégés, the Russian socialist Elisabeth Dmitrieff, operated independently from the Commune's countless committees, councils and clubs, but it played a vital role in that it invested the Commune with a distinctively socialist feminist meaning (Muldoon et al., 2023). Next to political organization, the communards also sought to revolutionize their everyday lives and public space (Lefebvre, 2018; Ross, 2015). Paris had a vibrant street life during these 72 days. Concerts and dances, which also served as fund-raisers for family members of fallen combatants, were held on a daily basis (Eichner, 2022: 72–73; Lissagaray, 2012: 244).

To conclude, whereas in most traditional accounts ‘the Commune’ is primarily associated with its formal representative bodies (such as the communal council and the central committee of the National Guard), the Commune in fact encompassed a much larger variety of political organizations and initiatives that at times overlapped or collaborated with each other, but at other times served entirely different purposes. Informal organizations significantly influenced the political agenda and discourse of the Paris Commune, not least because there was also a strong personal overlap between them (Johnson, 1996: 172). At the level of social policy in particular, the revolutionary clubs played a significant role by proposing or petitioning for specific measures.

At the same time, there also appears to have been significant enmity between these different organizational elements of the Commune. As Martin Johnson (1996: 188) argues, ‘by mid-April the Central Committee and the Communal Council were well down the path of mutual hostility and suspicion that would lead in May to threats of arrests and coups d’état on both sides’. In a similar vein, the revolutionary clubs were often significantly more radical than the formal communal council. Johnson narrates how speakers at club meetings would denounce the formal leadership of the Commune as ‘exploiters of the revolution’ (Johnson, 1996: 162). It was stressed that, at the end of the day, ‘The Commune is the people themselves’, not its elected representatives (Johnson, 1996: 162). As tensions between the clubs and the communal council grew in the course of these 72 days, some club members even sought to actively intervene in and disrupt the latter (Edwards, 1971: 294). What is more, similar tensions arose within the formal communal council itself. On 1 May a majority of council members, mostly Jacobins and Blanquists, voted for the establishment of a ‘committee of public safety’ – a direct reference to the infamous committee of the same name that led the reign of terror during the French Revolution (Tombs, 2013: 80–85). This committee of public safety was intended to centralize control over the Commune and its executive committees, placing nearly all authority in the hands of its five members. Fearing this would lead to dictatorship, a critical minority of council members resigned in protest (Lefrançais, 2018: 217–218). However, and in the spirit of their imperative mandate, many of them were subsequently instructed by their electors to retake their seat in the communal council (Zaidman, 2008: 78). Although the council continued to exist after the institution of this new centralist committee of public safety, its establishment significantly disrupted the precarious ecological balance within the Paris Commune (Lissagaray, 2012: 193–196).

All of this suggests that the Paris Commune was much more diverse, and at times more divided, than some established accounts seem to acknowledge. Rather than ‘dual power’, the Commune established a ‘dynamic between powers that reciprocally limit each other’ (Tomba, 2019: 98). In the Commune, unity had ceased to be a political dogma. Complex sets of complementary as well as competing organizations and initiatives emerged without a preset design. This supports Nunes’ point that ‘between extreme centralisation and total dispersion, there are several possible arrangements which are much more fertile than either’ (Nunes, 2021: 286). Some sources suggest that the diffuseness of the Commune was mostly apparent, since there was in fact a high measure of integration and collaboration between its various layers (Johnson, 1996: 131–132; Rougerie, 2004: 165). But perhaps a more accurate conclusion may be that internal divisiveness and strife did not restrain or limit the effectiveness of the Commune, it precisely formed the conditions in which it could emerge in the first place.

Applying an ecological approach today

What, then, does the application of this ecological approach to a historical uprising such as the Paris Commune teach us about social movement politics today? First, it needs to be stressed that this perspective could be applied to a much broader range of historical revolutions. The German Revolution of 1918 may for instance be considered another example of such an ecology. It witnessed a broad and adaptive organizational network of workers’, soldiers’, sailors’ and peasants’ councils, parties, unions, parliaments and senates, embedded in a broader collective aim of the revolutionaries ‘to discuss in the open all topics of their own choice and to organize open street protest to this end’ (Weinhauer, 2017: 295). It is striking, however, that historical events such as the Paris Commune and the German Revolution have often been interpreted as relatively coherent movements, with a strong focus on their ‘official’ institutions and policies. But upon closer inspection, it turns out that they were often much more diverse – at an organizational as well as a substantive level (Arnold, 1985; Hoffrogge, 2015; Kets, 2021). The point of an ecological reading is emphatically not to suggest that (formal) representative institutions and procedures do not have a viable and legitimate role to play in social or revolutionary movements. Instead, it provides an alternative to both principled ‘horizontalist’ and one-sidedly ‘verticalist’ views of political organization, by suggesting that revolutions have often resulted from contingent combinations of these different, and at times conflicting, logics.

At the same time, this ecological approach may also have important implications for our appreciation of more recent assembly movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish 15-M movement, or the Gezi Park protests. Like the Commune and the 1918 revolution in Germany, these assembly movements have been widely dismissed as failures in their immediate aftermaths (Coper, 1955; Flesher Fominaya and Feenstra, 2023; Nicholls, 2019). As for instance Vincent Bevins (2023: 3) argues, they were unsuccessful in that they typically ‘led to the opposite of what they asked for’. However, this widespread view has limited academic and activist interest in these revolutionary events and obscured positive experiences and ideas that can inform our historical and contemporary understanding of transformative politics (Graeber 2013). Reading these movements through an ecological lens teaches us that their significance or meaning cannot be derived from their measure of perceived coherence, unity or even success. For those immediately involved in these movements, the direct experience of engaging in democratic self-organization and public deliberation was arguably as important as their capacity to enforce structural change in the long term (Butler 2015). By offering a view beyond the perceived ‘outcomes’ or ‘results’ of revolutionary moments and social movements, an ecological approach allows us to better appreciate the ‘productive chaos’ that often characterizes such organizational ecosystems (Jones, 2018: 6).

Another important feature of the many revolutionary moments and social movements that the world has witnessed in recent years is that they often tried to prolong or expand themselves as much as possible (van de Sande, 2023). As David Graeber (2013: 43) has argued, the public assembly that laid claim to Zuccotti Park in September 2011 was supposed to be ‘a stepping-stone toward the creation of a whole network of such assemblies’. The Spanish 15-M movement, the Gezi Park movement in Turkey and parts of the Yellow Vest movement in France similarly sought to establish such durable networks of neighbourhood assemblies (Flesher Fominaya, 2020: 118–122; Roos, 2013; Van Outryve, 2023). As we have seen, the same applied to the Paris Commune, which aspired to create a federated network of similar communes across France. An ecological view may help to explain this: seen from its own perspective, the primary aim of an ecological system is to sustain itself over time. This is challenging – not least because such ecologies typically comprise various forms and logics of organization. This renders them flexible, open and productive, but the need to strike a balance between different forms and logics also makes such social movements vulnerable. As is evinced by the emergence of a ‘committee of public safety’ in the Paris Commune, and as Nunes (2021: 199) writes in the context of contemporary assembly movements, ecologies are inherently susceptible to the risk that one group or organization seeks domination over the others. However, an ecological self-understanding may help to increase awareness of the fragility or ecological balance within a social movement and prepare democratic organizations to identify and counter such tendencies.

Finally, we can build on these historical examples of distributive ecologies to counter one-sidedly verticalist and horizontalist readings of contemporary movements. As previously discussed, recent movements such as Occupy and the 15-M movement have been celebrated by some, and criticized by others, for their supposed rejection of political representation and leadership (Sitrin and Azzellini 2014; Lorey 2022; Mouffe 2013; Tormey 2015). Upon closer inspection, however, it turns out that that it was often more complex. Much like the Paris Commune, many of these recent movements combined different forms of organization that are held to be incompatible. Their attempts to prefigure more participatory and horizontal forms of democracy did not necessarily preclude them from also fulfilling a significant representative role – or even from trying to acquire discursive hegemony (Gerbaudo 2017; Van de Sande, 2020). Prominent movement slogans, such as ‘we are the 99%’, effectively functioned as representative claims (Saward 2010). Occupy Wall Street also ended up using more formal elements of representation and delegation after partially replacing its general assembly with a ‘spokescouncil’ system in October 2011 (Bray, 2013: 88–91). And even though these movements were often critical of electoral-representative democracy in its current state, many of them did lead to the establishment of new political parties that ended up running for local and/or national elections (Ordóñez et al., 2018). In short, an ecological approach better caters to ‘the diversity of imaginaries present in the movement, and how these are expressed in myriad combinations and synergies in specific initiatives and experiments’ (Flesher Fominaya and Feenstra, 2023: 291–292).

Conclusion

In this article we reconstructed what we have described as an ‘ecological turn’ in contemporary social movement theory, which offers an alternative descriptive approach to social movements and their internal organization, but also leads to a number of normative and strategic conclusions. It means, first, that social movements are not based on an initial design and hence cannot be legitimized from the outset; second, that social movements will always have some measure of distributed leadership and combined forms of democratic organization and decision making; third, that they cannot be assessed merely on the basis of their perceived outcomes; and finally, that social movements may give rise to a variety of organizational forms and logics that are sometimes complementary, but which can also compete or conflict with each other – for instance, prefigurative experiments with consensus-oriented decision making as well as formal representative structures and political parties that end up pursuing an electoral strategy.

By applying these insights to the historical case of the Paris Commune, we have shown that this movement was by no means as homogeneous as many historical or political accounts of these events seem to suggest. In fact, it appears that the distribution of leadership and diversity of organizations within the Commune has been formative to its radical potential and its lasting transformative legacy. With regard to more contemporary assembly movements, an ecological approach similarly asks us to shift our gaze from the formal, central institutions towards the broader network of organizations and their (often conflictual and elastic) relationship with those institutions. It is in the productive openness of such relationships between organization and spontaneity, and between participation and representation, that contemporary democratic movements might find significance or inspiration. In response to verticalist demands for more centralized organization and unity, one can point to the dispersed and complex composition of the Commune. And in response to the fetishization of horizontalism, the Commune and other past revolutions show how democratic and open relations between different levels of organization and forms of leadership can be part of a fragile ecology, without an inevitable lapse into vanguardism or party dominance. Employing an ecological perspective thus results in a more complex or ‘messy’ image of social movements and their internal organization. But it is exactly in this indeterminate messiness that radical democrats may find inspiration today.