Communization (or communisation in
British English
British English (BrE, en-GB, or BE) is, according to Lexico, Oxford Dictionaries, "English language, English as used in Great Britain, as distinct from that used elsewhere". More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in ...
) mainly refers to a contemporary
communist theory in which there is a mixing-up of
insurrectionist anarchism, the
communist ultra-left, post-
autonomists
The Autonomists (french: Autonomistes; it, Autonomisti) was a Christian-democratic Italian political party active in the Aosta Valley.
It was founded in 1997 by the union of the regional Italian People's Party with For Aosta Valley, and some ...
, anti-political currents, groups like
the Invisible Committee
The Invisible Committee is the of an anonymous author or authors who have written French works of literature based on far-left politics and anarchism. The identity of the Invisible Committee has been associated with the Tarnac Nine, a group o ...
, as well as more explicitly ‘communizing’ currents, such as . "Obviously at the heart of the word is communism and, as the shift to communization suggests, communism as a particular activity and process..." There are significant differences in perception and usage. Some groups start out from an activist voluntarism (''Tiqqun'', ''Invisible Committee''), while others derive communization as an historical and social result emerging out of capital's development over the last decades (''Endnotes'', ). ''Endnotes'' totally distinguishes itself from the mixing of all sorts of meanings of the word ''communization'' and explicitly refers to the different reception in the Anglophone world as opposed to the original French milieu from which it emerged as a critique.
Theory
In
communist political theory, communization is the process of abolishing
ownership of the
means of production
The means of production is a term which describes land, labor and capital that can be used to produce products (such as goods or services); however, the term can also refer to anything that is used to produce products. It can also be used as an ...
, which, in societies dominated by the
capitalist mode of production, are owned by individual capitalists,
states, or other collective bodies. In some versions of communist theory, communization is understood as the transfer of ownership from
private
Private or privates may refer to:
Music
* " In Private", by Dusty Springfield from the 1990 album ''Reputation''
* Private (band), a Denmark-based band
* "Private" (Ryōko Hirosue song), from the 1999 album ''Private'', written and also recorde ...
capitalist hands to the collective hands of producers, whether in the form of
co-operative enterprises or
communes
An intentional community is a voluntary residential community which is designed to have a high degree of social cohesion and teamwork from the start. The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political, relig ...
, or through the mediation of a state or federation of
workers' councils
A workers' council or labor council is a form of political and economic organization in which a workplace or municipality is governed by a council made up of workers or their elected delegates. The workers within each council decide on what thei ...
on a local, national, or global scale. In other programs, such as those of some
left communists (e.g.
Gilles Dauvé
Gilles Dauvé ( pen name Jean Barrot; born 1947) is a French political theorist, school teacher, and translator associated with left communism and the contemporary tendency of communization.
Biography
In collaboration with other left communis ...
,
Jacques Camatte
Jacques Camatte (born 1935) is a French writer and former Marxist theoretician and member of the International Communist Party, a primarily Italian left communist organisation under the influence of Amadeo Bordiga. After Bordiga's death and ...
),
autonomists
The Autonomists (french: Autonomistes; it, Autonomisti) was a Christian-democratic Italian political party active in the Aosta Valley.
It was founded in 1997 by the union of the regional Italian People's Party with For Aosta Valley, and some ...
(e.g.,
Mario Tronti
Mario Tronti (born 24 July 1931 in Rome) is an Italian philosopher and politician, considered one of the founders of the theory of operaismo in the 1960s.
An active member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) during the 1950s, he was, with Ran ...
), and
libertarian communists
Anarcho-communism, also known as anarchist communism, (or, colloquially, ''ancom'' or ''ancomm'') is a political philosophy and anarchist school of thought that advocates communism. It calls for the abolition of private property but retains res ...
(e.g.
Peter Kropotkin), communization means the abolition of
property
Property is a system of rights that gives people legal control of valuable things, and also refers to the valuable things themselves. Depending on the nature of the property, an owner of property may have the right to consume, alter, share, r ...
itself along with any state-like institutions claiming to represent a given subset of humanity. In these accounts humanity as a whole, directly or indirectly, would take over the task of the production of goods for use (and not for exchange). People would then have free access to those goods rather than exchanging labor for money, and distribution would take place according to the maxim "
."
History
Origins and precedents
The term communization was not used by
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...
and
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels ( ,["Engels"](_blank)
'' communist society
In Marxist thought, a communist society or the communist system is the type of society and economic system postulated to emerge from technological advances in the productive forces, representing the ultimate goal of the political ideology of co ...
described by Marx in ''
Critique of the Gotha Program
The ''Critique of the Gotha Programme'' (german: Kritik des Gothaer Programms) is a document based on a letter by Karl Marx written in early May 1875 to the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany (SDAP), with whom Marx and Friedrich Engels wer ...
''. In ''
State and Revolution'',
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1 ...
referred to the lower phase, organized around the principle "
To each according to his contribution
"To each according to his contribution" is a principle of distribution considered to be one of the defining features of socialism. It refers to an arrangement whereby individual compensation is representative of one's contribution to the social pr ...
", as "socialism", with the higher phase as "complete communism", or "full communism", as
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...
would later put it. Thus both Lenin and Stalin gave grounds for thinking of communization not as a transition from capitalism to communism, but as a transition from socialism to communism, a transition that would take place after the working class had seized power, and which may last a long time (in the 1930s Stalin conceived of "full communism" as still a long way off). Thus the interval between the two transitions came to be seen as a necessary "period of transition" between the workers' revolution and communism.
It appears that within so-called "communist" regimes the demand for "communization" was associated with an impatience with the "period of transition" and a desire to break with the remaining capitalist forms (e.g., money, wage labor) still in place in those regimes. Those pushing for a move toward "communizing" in this sense were typically denounced as "
ultra-left
The term ultra-leftism, when used among Marxist groups, is a pejorative for certain types of positions on the far-left that are extreme or uncompromising. Another definition historically refers to a particular current of Marxist communism, where ...
", with their suggestions dismissed as impractical and
utopian
A utopia ( ) typically describes an imaginary community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its members. It was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book ''Utopia'', describing a fictional island society ...
, but they were able to point to the historical examples of the
Paris Commune
The Paris Commune (french: Commune de Paris, ) was a revolutionary government that seized power in Paris, the capital of France, from 18 March to 28 May 1871.
During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, the French National Guard had defended ...
and the
Spanish Revolution of 1936
The Spanish Revolution was a workers' social revolution that began at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and for two to three years resulted in the widespread implementation of anarchist and, more broadly, libertarian socialist org ...
, where more radical measures of popular collectivization had been taken than in the
Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
and
Chinese
Chinese can refer to:
* Something related to China
* Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity
**''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation
** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...
revolutions, as well as to the
German Revolution of 1918–19 and the
Italian councils movement of 1919-1920 in which the historic "
left communist
Left communism, or the communist left, is a position held by the left wing of communism, which criticises the political ideas and practices espoused by Marxist–Leninists and social democrats. Left communists assert positions which they rega ...
" tendencies had been formed.
Late 20th century
The association of the term communization with a self-identified "
ultra-left
The term ultra-leftism, when used among Marxist groups, is a pejorative for certain types of positions on the far-left that are extreme or uncompromising. Another definition historically refers to a particular current of Marxist communism, where ...
" was cemented in France in the 1970s, where it came to describe not a transition to a higher phase of communism but a vision of communist revolution itself. Thus the 1975 Pamphlet ''A World Without Money'' states: “insurrection and communisation are intimately linked. There would not be first a period of insurrection and then later, thanks to this insurrection, the transformation of social reality. The insurrectional process derives its force from communisation itself.” This vision was opposed to the
statism
In political science, statism is the doctrine that the political authority of the state is legitimate to some degree. This may include economic and social policy, especially in regard to taxation and the means of production.
While in use s ...
and
vanguardism
Vanguardism in the context of Leninist revolutionary struggle, relates to a strategy whereby the most class-conscious and politically "advanced" sections of the proletariat or working class, described as the revolutionary vanguard, form orga ...
of the
Leninist
Leninism is a political ideology developed by Russian Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin that proposes the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by a revolutionary vanguard party as the political prelude to the establishm ...
conception of revolution, but it also identified the perceived failure of the
Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
and
Chinese
Chinese can refer to:
* Something related to China
* Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity
**''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation
** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...
revolutions (carried out on the Leninist politico-military model) with the insufficiency of measures taken to abolish capitalist social relations (e.g. lack of direct collectivization, persistence of monetary relations). It also reversed the supposed "pragmatism" of the Leninist focus on the state, arguing that the final goal of the "
withering away of the state
Withering away of the state is a Marxist concept coined by Friedrich Engels referring to the idea that, with the realization of socialism, the state will eventually become obsolete and cease to exist as society will be able to govern itself without ...
" could hardly be advanced by the seizure of state power and the establishment of a "revolutionary" bureaucracy, but that the most practical means to achieve this goal would rather be the abolition of the capitalist relations (money, capital, wages) on which state power depends. Thus La Banquise writes:
Within this 1970s French tendency "communization" thus came to represent the absence of a period of transition and a conception of revolution as the application of communist measures throughout the economy and society. The term is still used in this sense in France today and has spread into English usage as a result of the translation of texts by
Gilles Dauvé
Gilles Dauvé ( pen name Jean Barrot; born 1947) is a French political theorist, school teacher, and translator associated with left communism and the contemporary tendency of communization.
Biography
In collaboration with other left communis ...
and , two key figures in this tendency.
In collaboration with other left communists such as
François Martin and
Karl Nesic, Dauvé has attempted to fuse, critique, and develop different left communist currents, most notably the Italian movement associated with
Amadeo Bordiga
Amadeo Bordiga (13 June 1889 – 25 July 1970) was an Italian Marxist theorist, revolutionary socialist, founder of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI), member of the Communist International (Comintern) and later a leading figure of the Interna ...
(and its heretical journal ''
Invariance''), German-Dutch
council communism
Council communism is a current of communist thought that emerged in the 1920s. Inspired by the November Revolution, council communism was opposed to state socialism and advocated workers' councils and council democracy. Strong in Germany ...
, and the French perspectives associated with and the
Situationist International. He has focused on theoretical discussions of economic issues concerning the controversial failure of
Second International
The Second International (1889–1916) was an organisation of socialist and labour parties, formed on 14 July 1889 at two simultaneous Paris meetings in which delegations from twenty countries participated. The Second International continued th ...
Marxism
Marxism is a left-wing to far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialectical ...
(including both
Social Democracy
Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy. As a policy regime, it is described by academics as advocating economic and social interventions to promote s ...
and
Leninist
Leninism is a political ideology developed by Russian Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin that proposes the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by a revolutionary vanguard party as the political prelude to the establishm ...
"Communism"), the global revolutionary upsurge of the 1960s and its subsequent dissolution, and on developments in global
capitalist accumulation and
class struggle.
Early 21st century
In the late 1990s a close but not identical sense of "communization" was developed by the French post-situationist group
Tiqqun
''Tiqqun'' was a French-Italian ultra-left anarchist philosophical journal or zine, produced in two issues from 1999 to 2001. Topics treated in the journal's articles include anti-capitalism, anti-statism, Situationism, feminism, and the hist ...
. In keeping with their ultra-left predecessors, Tiqqun's predilection for the term seems to be its emphasis on communism as an immediate process rather than a far-off goal, but for Tiqqun it is no longer synonymous with "the revolution" considered as an historical event, but rather becomes identifiable with all sorts of activities – from squatting and setting up communes to simply "sharing" – that would typically be understood as "pre-revolutionary". From an ultra-left perspective such a politics of "dropping-out" or, as Tiqqun put it, "desertion" — setting up spaces and practices that are held to be partially autonomous from capitalism — is typically dismissed as either naive or reactionary. Due to the popularity of the Tiqqun-related works ''Call'' and ''
The Coming Insurrection
''The Coming Insurrection'' is a French radical leftist, anarchist tract written by The Invisible Committee, the ''nom de plume'' of an anonymous author (or possibly authors). It hypothesizes the "imminent collapse of capitalist culture". ''T ...
'' in US
anarchist circles it tended to be this latter sense of "communization" that was employed in US anarchist and "
insurrectionist
Insurrectionary anarchism is a revolutionary theory and tendency within the anarchist movement that emphasizes insurrection as a revolutionary practice. It is critical of formal organizations such as labor unions and federations that are based ...
" communiques, notably within the
Californian student movement of 2009-2010. "More recently its ideas have been elaborated and extended in discussions with like-minded groups including the English language ''Endnotes'' and the Swedish journal ''Riff Raff''. Together these collectives have recently collaborated to produce ''Sic – an international journal of communisation'' (issue number one was published in 2011)."
See also
*
Left Communism
Left communism, or the communist left, is a position held by the left wing of communism, which criticises the political ideas and practices espoused by Marxist–Leninists and social democrats. Left communists assert positions which they reg ...
*
Ultra-leftism
The term ultra-leftism, when used among Marxist groups, is a pejorative for certain types of positions on the far-left that are extreme or uncompromising. Another definition historically refers to a particular current of Marxist communism, whe ...
*
Gilles Dauvé
Gilles Dauvé ( pen name Jean Barrot; born 1947) is a French political theorist, school teacher, and translator associated with left communism and the contemporary tendency of communization.
Biography
In collaboration with other left communis ...
*
Communism
Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a ...
*
Communist bandit
*
Communist society
In Marxist thought, a communist society or the communist system is the type of society and economic system postulated to emerge from technological advances in the productive forces, representing the ultimate goal of the political ideology of co ...
*
Marxism
Marxism is a left-wing to far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialectical ...
*
Amadeo Bordiga
Amadeo Bordiga (13 June 1889 – 25 July 1970) was an Italian Marxist theorist, revolutionary socialist, founder of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI), member of the Communist International (Comintern) and later a leading figure of the Interna ...
*
Situationist International
*
Guy Debord
References
Further reading
"Bring Out Your Dead"by Endnotes.
''Call''by Anonymous.
* "Communism and Transition" by Antonio Negri in ''Marx Beyond Marx'' (1978).
"After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California"To Our Friendsby The Invisible Committee
Communisationby Troploin
Everything Must Go! The Abolition of Valueby Bruno Astarian and Gilles Dauve
A World Without Money: Communismby "The Friends of 4 Million Young Workers"
"The Bleak Left: On Endnotes"by Tim Barker in n+1
{{Anarchism
Communism
Political theories
Anarchist theory
Marxism
Left communism
Libertarian socialism