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

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.