My research draws on French, German, Russian, and Soviet political theories from the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries.

Boundary Critique: A Political Theory of Commune from Fourier to Krupskaya

Since Marx’s interpretation of the Paris Commune in The Civil War in France, the term commune has been central to socialist philosophy. It has gestured toward utopian politics that seeks to break the conceptual boundaries between political, economic, and familial spheres in capitalist society. The commune aspiration was especially influential for the early Soviet politicians who translated the socialist ideal into the political program of family kommunalizatsiya: politicizing and communalizing individual family work by creating the new infrastructure of public childcare centers, canteens, and libraries. 

Capitalist society, as criticized by Fourier, Proudhon, Marx, Lenin, Kollontai, and Krupskaya, blocks politicization of the spheres of family and economics. People lack the democratic power to make collective decisions about quintessential matters, including decisions about how many hours to work, in what housing to live, or how to raise children. The socialist thinkers argue for expansive democratic politics that would subordinate these privatized questions under popular power.

My dissertation retrieves their forgotten utopian political vision of democratic governance or, in other words, the vision of commune. Against contemporary interpretations of the commune as a non-political community, it shows that the historic socialist theory of commune suggests a political program for the democratic communalization of the capitalist economy.