Over the past decade, the idea of the commune has again become increasingly important to political theorists and philosophers thinking about communism. Within their debates, the anarchist-communist line of thought and practice of the commune is not much reflected. This is a mistake.
Within this chapter I reconstruct the collectively shared economy of numerous anarchist Intentional Communities as an interstitial terrain and discuss the communards’ practices in regard to three layers: firstly, in regard to the legal order, secondly, in regard to the money- and property-based economy and thirdly, in regard to the communard subjects themselves. Thereby I argue that those communes are extraordinarily strong expressions of interstitiality. By conceptualizing those communes along a practice-theoretical approach and along the anarchist concept of interstitiality new possibilities are opened for generalizing their practices beyond a small-scale. “What is the Commune, that sphinx…?” (Karl Marx).