Why not The Autumn of the Communes? By * http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/why-not-the-autumn-of-the-communes/
[...]
No amount of wishful thinking will bring back the days of heaven and hell, though. Now there is only hell, bleak and disastrous, but no longer quite so meaningless or exclusive. Capitalism has been failing since the late 1960s, when its previous temporary fix—the rapid modernization of production in advanced economies, coupled with reasonably generous social welfare—stopped doing the trick. If the welfare state beckons on the horizons of Zuccotti Park, it can only be a mirage, a trick of the light playing on the shields of the riot police. I’m not arguing that the occupiers pack up and go home, though—far from it. For if anything about OWS is encouraging, it’s that in the first days of the present wave of occupations, veritable communes were set up in literally dozens of American cities, distributing food, shelter, and first aid freely and to all comers. Whatever else the second-wave occupiers believe about their movement, they’ve already begun to do what we at the UC couldn’t quite pull off, at least not until now—creating living breathing communism in some of the least communal places imaginable. A movement that began as a political response to economic injustice has become an economic response to capitalism. To the extent that OWS has a future qua class struggle, it will be as communes or as nothing. Forget your demands, in other words—welcome to the autumn of the communes.
Critics will say that while these small acts of communism are well and good, they will never be able to provide for the millions who depend on capitalism for daily bread (Doug Henwood said something to that effect on last week’s Behind the News). Two months ago, though, these same critics would have said that organizing even a single commune was an impossibility, that communes inherently fracture and fail, and would in any event be too geographically isolated to matter. Clearly the mayors and police departments of the occupied cities see things differently. In any event, the communes exist and can’t be wished away. They’ve already begun to attract the jobless and homeless and underemployed and will continue to do so for as long as the occupations keep going. And this, after all, is the economic function of communes relative to capitalism: not to liberate people in the abstract, but to lay the groundwork for a retreat from the wage system. It has always been a desideratum of capitalism that such refuges should be destroyed, whether to flush people into the labor market (primitive accumulation) or to prevent alternatives to the wage system from materializing. It should come as no surprise that the first groups to join the occupations have been those who are at present excluded from the system—the homeless, the wageless, the debt-stricken and the underemployed—and that the police force called on to oppress them are well-paid suburbanites. As the movement of the communes pushes forward, these divisions, between the waged and wageless, the self-policing professionals and the communards, will only widen. This split must not be construed as external or opposed to the movement; it is the movement’s clearest form of expression.
[...]