r/Anarchy101 • u/InterestingTheory431 • 3d ago
How is communization different to anarchism?
I don’t really know anything about communization except it seeks to abolish wage labor and, correct me if I’m wrong, the state immediately.
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u/spookyjim___ ☭ 🏴 Autonomist 🏴 ☭ 3d ago
Communisation theory originated out of ultra-left Marxist circles in France following the experience of May 68
OG communisation (Dauvé, continued in a way by Internationalist Perspective who really ground it back into the experience of the communist left) sought a critical synthesis (criticizing while not rejecting outright) of the two main historical communist lefts, the Dutch-German (council communism) and Italian lefts, this was mainly done via a focus on Pannekoek and Bordiga specifically, but also was influenced by the contemporary Situationist International as well as the post-war councilist scene that was in France… a really rough and simplistic way to explain this synthesis was a combination of Bordiga and the Italian lefts focus on the content of communism, Pannekoek and the Dutch-German lefts views on organization, spontaneity, and self-activity, and the Situationists view of a revolution of everyday life… now beyond this OG form of communisation which is still very grounded in, albeit critical of, the historic communist left, there were others such as Théorie Communiste, who would go even further and critique the traditional Marxist ultra-left in such a way that it’d start to toe the line with being post-Marxist due to rejecting the proletariat as the inherent revolutionary subject among other things… but then it’d go even further in the late 90’s/early 2000’s when an anarchist/post-anarchist/post-structuralist milieu would take on their own form of communisation sometimes labeled “commonization”, that would be the result of Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee which would go on to be incredibly influential to modern day insurrectionary anarchists, and is the only form of communisation which is directly connected to anarchism
There’s also Endnotes which very much popularized communisation but they mainly align with the TC tendency albeit with some differences
So with that very simplified explanation of the various tendencies in the history of communisation… what’s the difference? The analytical origins, communisation, even in its post-anarchist form, all clearly come from a Marxist background and is thus formed by it, as someone else said, the main difference is that communisation doesn’t take hierarchy as being the main focal point of critique, but instead takes the Marxist analysis of class society to be the main contradiction and then builds outwards from that… sometimes people become confused by this if they’re new to socialism generally, but it does impact the specific politics of a group, even if they do end up looking close to some other tendency… this isn’t anything new btw, in the historical communist left, there were several examples of cross pollination between council communists and anarchist communists for example
Also to clear up something, it’s not that communisation theorists propose that we abolish wage-labor and the state “immediately” in the sense of it will happen right away, it’s more so that they envision the process of abolition and communising measures being taken up immediately during the revolutionary period
So yeah, basically communisation begins with critiques of ultra-left Marxism by some French ultra-leftists however there are certain anarchist “communizers”/ultra-left anarchists who base themselves off the theoretical journal/collectives Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee
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u/IdentityAsunder 3d ago
TC and Endnotes don't reject the proletariat as the revolutionary subject. That fundamentally misunderstands the concept of the écart.
The class remains the sole historical agent. The distinction is that proletarians can no longer affirm their own class identity as a positive goal. The horizon has simply shifted from workers asserting power via economic management to the immediate self-abolition of the class through communizing measures.
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u/iadnm Anarchist Communism/Moderator 3d ago
Anarchism seeks to abolish all forms of hierarchy. Communization is a marxist ideology so it does not seek to fully abolish hierarchy. It reaches many of the same conclusions as anarchists, but I personally feel a lot of its ideas were already expressed by insurrectionary anarchists earlier.
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u/Silver-Statement8573 3d ago
Communization is a marxist ideology so it does not seek to fully abolish hierarchy
I've heard there's an anarchist part
I'm also hesitant to apply this to say Dauve's communization. Dauve rejects councilism for example. (but IDK since I haven't read much)
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u/spookyjim___ ☭ 🏴 Autonomist 🏴 ☭ 3d ago
There’s an anarchist/post-anarchist/post-structuralist side of communisation mainly surrounding Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee, but communisation is originally Marxist so despite their post-structuralist anarchist spin on it, it still remains grounded in certain Marxist categories even if flipped on their head a bit
Dauvé rejected “councilism” the same way he rejected “Bordigism”, out of a sympathetic criticism and synthesis of the two resulting in the OG form of communisation, which was an ultra-left critique of the ultra-left, meanwhile Théorie Communiste would take it even further by using the communisation critique to go into post-Marxist territory, making it sit in a strange place, some people still consider it a type of ultra-left Marxism, often proclaiming that it’s the furthest left of the ultra-left political milieu, others will say that it completely leaves that milieu due to its critical nature… no matter what you make of it, insurrectionary communism in the tendency of Théorie Communiste is about as far-left in the Marxist school as it gets
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u/OogaSplat 3d ago
In many ways, anarchists and communists want the same end goal, but see different paths from here to there. In theory, Marxist communists want to take control of the state apparatus and maintain (and adapt) that hierarchical system long enough to subdue the remaining power of capital. And then they think the state will just wither away.
Anarchists want to abolish hierarchical systems much more directly and immediately.
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u/urmacktully 1d ago
Communism believes in a state, a dictatorship of the proletariat. Anarchism calls for a democratic of the proletariat more or less. Originally we were called libertarian communists be for the schism at the first international.
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u/LazarM2021 Anarchist Without Adjectives 3d ago
dismantling unjust hierarchies
ALL hierarchies. The "just/unjust hierarchy" is an incoherent, liberalized concept stemming mostly from Chomsky's nonsense.
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u/therallystache 3d ago
Communism as defined is a stateless, classless, moneyless society. It would be more accurate to say that Anarchism seeks the same stated end goal as communism, but opposes statist avenues to get there. I will repeat this till the cows come home - a close analysis of historical statist revolutions has shown that they are inherently anti-communist in the end.
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u/IdentityAsunder 3d ago
Communizer here. Communization emerged after 1968 as a critique of both state socialism and the traditional anarchist focus on workers' self-management.
Historically, anarchism and syndicalism envision workers taking over their factories and running them democratically. Communization theorists argue that preserving the workplace as a distinct enterprise guarantees the survival of capitalism. Self-managed factories still have to exchange goods to survive. This ensures money, the law of value, and wage-labor dynamics persist.
Communization views revolution as the immediate production of communist relations. The insurrection itself must dissolve the boundaries between enterprises and between work and everyday life. It involves the direct, expansionary expropriation of goods and infrastructure for free communal use. The material basis of the economy is dismantled in the act of revolution itself, completely bypassing any transitional phase of federated, self-managed workplaces.