Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster was interviewed by Hoel Le Moal for the September-October 2025 issue of the French journal Cause Commune. The interview has been translated and republished below.
Hoel Le Moal: Marx seems to have been obsessed with the question of communal property throughout his life. In your article “Marx and Communal Society for the July-August 2025 issue of Monthly Review, you quote Marx in his Grundrisse as saying that “as a member of the commune, the individual is the private proprietor” of a “particular plot of land. What did Marx mean by referring to “commune” in pre-capitalist societies? Was it synonymous with “community? (In French, commune versus communauté.)
John Bellamy Foster: The important thing to understand is that Marx did not identify property exclusively with private property, which was only one form of property that became dominant only under capitalism. For almost all of human history, communal or collective property forms had predominated. Moreover, in Marx’s view, all people in all cultures have property, since the very concept of property (as in earlier thinkers such as Locke and Hegel) is identified with the appropriation of nature as the basis of subsistence. Communal property takes a wide variety of forms in pre-capitalist societies, depending on natural and social conditions.
The specific passage from the Grundrisse that you quote had to do with Marx’s understanding of the German Mark. In the view of Marx and Engels, the Mark, as described by Tacitus, was a later development of communal property, as compared to what Caesar had explained in his Gallic Wars, more than a century earlier, in which a purer form of communal society was described. In the Mark, communal organization of property still existed, but it took the form of periodic redistribution of the common lands to “private proprietors” who did not own the land but worked it under the principle of usufruct. This is just one form of collective property. It combined individual/family responsibility with an overall communal organization. Here I recommend Engel’s work The Mark, written in 1882, with which Marx indicated his agreement.
Engels once said in relation to the Paris Commune, if I recall correctly, that we could simply use the term community. I think this is important in one sense, as in Ferdinand Tönnies’s distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). But communal of course carries different connotations that are more holistic, related to collective property and the exchange of use values, which is part of a deep historical discussion and a long series of class struggles. It thus carries a whole different significance.
HLM: Until the end of the Middle Ages, the notion of communal society seems to have always been linked to the question of society’s command structure as well as to that of property: is the commune a political organization, an economic organization, or both at the same time?
JBF: I would say both at the same time. All societies have political command structures of one kind or another, not necessarily what we call the state. All such forms of organization are geared first and foremost to the organization of property relations and production, whether this takes the form of communal property or private property.
HLM: Marx wrote about the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, which, in his view, represented not the construction of a new state power, but the negation of the dual relation of state and civil society. You recall that he writes in The Civil War in France that the Commune was “aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators”: in what way?
JBF: The Paris Commune of 1871 took its name of course from the Paris Commune of 1789, but represented a very different phenomenon, in this case not part of a bourgeois revolution, but representing a revolution against the bourgeoisie. You will recall that at the end of Capital, vol. 1, Marx refers to the “expropriation of the expropriators,” which he sees as the negation of the negation.” Capital expropriated the property of innumerable peoples both in Europe and throughout the world via enclosures and the colonial expropriation of the property of Indigenous peoples (which Marx saw as related to processes of “extermination” and “extirpation”). The Paris Commune was aimed centrally at the reversal of capitalist private property relations and the establishment of more communal or collective relations of production. It was therefore a manifestation of the very “expropriation of the expropriators” that Marx in Capital had pointed to as the necessary historical development.
HLM: “Communes” exist today in capitalist societies: in what way are they the heirs of this communal past, and in what way have they perhaps perverted it?
JBF: This is difficult to say since there are so many different forms. I would recommend studying postrevolutionary societies, or transitional societies, in this respect. My article appeared in the July—August 2025 special issue of Monthly Review guest edited by Chris Gilbert and Cira Pascual Marquina, entitled “Communes in Socialist Construction.” It examines how the struggle for communal society has played out in different ways in China, Venezuela, Brazil, the USSR, Hungary, and in peasant struggles globally—even in relation to the Cooperation Jackson cooperative in the United States. I could not even begin to summarize the rich analyses included there and simply recommend that anyone who is interested, begin by reading the issue.
HLM: You have a very beautiful statement according to which, for Marx, “the past mediated between the present and the future.” How can a form of organization as ancient as the commune represent a desirable future, and do you see systems in the world that resemble it? (China, Venezuela, etc.)
JBF: The quote you provide here is a phrase that originated with me that I have used on occasion. It evolved out of my understanding of Marx’s historical dialectic, or the dialectic of continuity and change. A historical materialist perspective helps us to understand that the “past” is never simply gone, dead and buried, but that it constantly resurrects itself in terms of struggles that represent the incompleteness of historical change, contradictions still not resolved and even sharpened, and a future still to be made. Marx’s understanding of revolutionary change constantly relied on the past as the mediator between the present and future in this way.
I have just completed a book entitled Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx (Monthly Review Press, 2025), which explains how much of Marx’s materialist understanding and his conception of human freedom evolved out of his encounter with Epicurus in his dissertation, and how that affected his understanding of communal/collective society and the development of social individuals. Although we have experienced enormous technological change over the millennia, there is a continuity (as well change) in the long historical struggle over the social relations of production, represented by the age-old conflict between communal society and class-exploitative society.
It is clear there are aspects of present-day communal organization, in China and Venezuela and elsewhere, that draw on and even in some ways deepen many of the historical communal relations with which Marx and Engels were concerned, associated with precapitalist societies. I can’t comment on this further in this limited space except to reiterate that there is a wealth of detail on this in the special issue of Monthly Review mentioned above. There is also a wonderful book published by Monthly Review Press in 2023 by Chris Gilbert entitled Commune or Nothing! Venezuela’s Communal Movement and Its Socialist Project.