Libertarian Marxism is a broad scope of economic and political philosophies that emphasize the anti-authoritarian and libertarian aspects of Marxism. Early currents of libertarian Marxism such as left communism emerged in opposition to Marxism–Leninism.
Libertarian Marxism is often critical of reformist positions such as those held by social democrats. Libertarian Marxist currents often draw from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' later works, specifically the Grundrisse and The Civil War in France; emphasizing the Marxist belief in the ability of the working class to forge its own destiny without the need for a vanguard party to mediate or aid its liberation. Along with anarchism, libertarian Marxism is one of the main currents of libertarian socialism.
Libertarian Marxism includes currents such as autonomism, council communism, De Leonism, Lettrism, parts of the New Left, Situationism, Socialisme ou Barbarie and workerism. Libertarian Marxism has often had a strong influence on both post-left and social anarchists. Notable theorists of libertarian Marxism have included Maurice Brinton, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, Raya Dunayevskaya, Daniel Guérin, C. L. R. James, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Negri, Anton Pannekoek, Fredy Perlman, Ernesto Screpanti, E. P. Thompson, Raoul Vaneigem and Yanis Varoufakis, who claims that Marx himself was a libertarian Marxist.
Overview
Marxism started to develop a libertarian strand of thought after
specific circumstances. According to Chamsy Ojelli, "[o]ne does find
early expressions of such perspectives in Morris and the Socialist Party of Great Britain
(the SPGB), then again around the events of 1905, with the growing
concern at the bureaucratisation and de-radicalisation of international
socialism".
In December 1884, William Morris established the Socialist League which was encouraged by Friedrich Engels and Eleanor Marx.
As the leading figure in the organization, Morris embarked on a
relentless series of speeches and talks on street corners as well as in
working men's clubs and lecture theatres across England and Scotland.
From 1887, anarchists began to outnumber Marxists in the Socialist League.
The 3rd Annual Conference of the League held in London on 29 May 1887
marked the change, with a majority of the 24 branch delegates voting in
favor of an anarchist-sponsored resolution declaring: "This conference
endorses the policy of abstention from parliamentary action, hitherto
pursued by the League, and sees no sufficient reason for altering it".
Morris played peacemaker, but he ultimately sided with the
anti-parliamentarians, who won control of the Socialist League which
consequently lost the support of Engels and saw the departure of Eleanor
Marx and her partner Edward Aveling to form the separate Bloomsbury Socialist Society.
20th century
However,
"the most important ruptures are to be traced to the insurgency during
and after the First World War. Disillusioned with the capitulation of
the social democrats, excited by the emergence of workers' councils, and
slowly distanced from Leninism, many communists came to reject the
claims of socialist parties and to put their faith instead in the
masses". For these socialists, "[t]he intuition of the masses in action
can have more genius in it than the work of the greatest individual
genius". Luxemburg's workerism and spontaneism are exemplary of
positions later taken up by the far-left of the period—Pannekoek, Roland Holst and Gorter in the Netherlands, Sylvia Pankhurst in Britain, Gramsci in Italy and Lukacs
in Hungary. In these formulations, the dictatorship of the proletariat
was to be the dictatorship of a class, "not of a party or of a clique". However, within this line of thought "[t]he tension between anti-vanguardism and vanguardism
has frequently resolved itself in two diametrically opposed ways: the
first involved a drift towards the party; the second saw a move towards
the idea of complete proletarian spontaneity. [...] The first course is
exemplified most clearly in Gramsci and Lukacs.
[...] The second course is illustrated in the tendency, developing from
the Dutch and German far-lefts, which inclined towards the complete
eradication of the party form".
In the emerging Soviet state, there appeared left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks which were a series of rebellions and uprisings against the Bolsheviks led or supported by left wing groups including Socialist Revolutionaries, Left Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and anarchists. Some were in support of the White Movement while some tried to be an independent force. The uprisings started in 1918 and continued through the Russian Civil War
and after until 1922. In response, the Bolsheviks increasingly
abandoned attempts to get these groups to join the government and
suppressed them with force.
The POUM is viewed as being libertarian Marxist due to its anti-Soviet stance in the Civil War in Spain.
Theory
For "many
Marxian libertarian socialists, the political bankruptcy of socialist
orthodoxy necessitated a theoretical break. This break took a number of
forms. The Bordigists
and the SPGB championed a super-Marxian intransigence in theoretical
matters. Other socialists made a return 'behind Marx' to the anti-positivist programme of German idealism.
Libertarian socialism has frequently linked its anti-authoritarian
political aspirations with this theoretical differentiation from
orthodoxy. [...] Karl Korsch
[...] remained a libertarian socialist for a large part of his life and
because of the persistent urge towards theoretical openness in his
work. Korsch rejected the eternal and static, and he was obsessed by the
essential role of practice in a theory's truth. For Korsch, no theory
could escape history, not even Marxism. In this vein, Korsch even
credited the stimulus for Marx's Capital to the movement of the oppressed classes".
In rejecting both capitalism and the state, some libertarian
socialists align themselves with anarchists in opposition to both
capitalist representative democracy and to authoritarian forms of Marxism.
Although anarchists and Marxists share an ultimate goal of a stateless
society, anarchists criticise most Marxists for advocating a
transitional phase under which the state is used to achieve this aim.
Nonetheless, libertarian Marxist tendencies such as autonomism and council communism
have historically been intertwined with the anarchist movement.
Anarchist movements have come into conflict with both capitalist and
Marxist forces, sometimes at the same time as in the Spanish Civil War,
although as in that war Marxists themselves are often divided in
support or opposition to anarchism. Other political persecutions under
bureaucratic parties have resulted in a strong historical antagonism
between anarchists and libertarian Marxists on the one hand and Leninists, Marxist–Leninists and their derivatives such as Maoists
on the other. However, in recent history libertarian socialists have
repeatedly formed temporary alliances with Marxist–Leninist groups in
order to protest institutions they both reject.
Part of this antagonism can be traced to the International Workingmen's Association, the First International, a congress of radical workers, where Mikhail Bakunin (who was fairly representative of anarchist views) and Karl Marx
(whom anarchists accused of being an "authoritarian") came into
conflict on various issues. Bakunin's viewpoint on the illegitimacy of
the state as an institution and the role of electoral politics
was starkly counterposed to Marx's views in the First International.
Marx and Bakunin's disputes eventually led to Marx taking control of the
First International and expelling Bakunin and his followers from the
organization. This was the beginning of a long-running feud and schism
between libertarian socialists and what they call "authoritarian
communists", or alternatively just "authoritarians". Some Marxists have
formulated views that closely resemble syndicalism and thus express more affinity with anarchist ideas. Several libertarian socialists, notably Noam Chomsky, believe that anarchism shares much in common with certain variants of Marxism such as the council communism of Marxist Anton Pannekoek. In Chomsky's Notes on Anarchism, he suggests the possibility "that some form of council communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial
society. It reflects the belief that democracy is severely limited when
the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite,
whether of owners, managers, and technocrats, a 'vanguard' party, or a State bureaucracy".
Post-World War II
Cornelius Castoriadis, theorist of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie
In the mid-20th century, some libertarian socialist groups emerged from disagreements with Trotskyism which presented itself as Leninist anti-Stalinism. As such, the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie emerged from the Trotskyist Fourth International, where Castoriadis and Claude Lefort constituted a Chaulieu–Montal Tendency in the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste in 1946. In 1948, they experienced their "final disenchantment with Trotskyism",
leading them to break away to form Socialisme ou Barbarie, whose
journal began appearing in March 1949. Castoriadis later said of this
period that "the main audience of the group and of the journal was
formed by groups of the old, radical left: Bordigists, council
communists, some anarchists and some offspring of the German 'left' of
the 1920s". In the United Kingdom, the group Solidarity was founded in 1960 by a small group of expelled members of the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League.
Almost from the start, it was strongly influenced by the French
Socialisme ou Barbarie group, in particular by its intellectual leader Cornelius Castoriadis, whose essays were among the many pamphlets Solidarity produced. The intellectual leader of the group was Chris Pallis (who wrote under the name Maurice Brinton).
In the People's Republic of China (PRC) since 1967, the terms ultra-left and left communist refers to political theory and practice self-defined as further left than that of the central Maoist leaders at the height of the GPCR ("Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution"). The terms are also used retroactively to describe some early 20th century Chinese anarchist orientations. As a slur, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has used the term "ultra-left" more broadly to denounce any orientation it considers further left than the party line. According to the latter usage, in 1978 the CPC Central Committee denounced as ultra-left the line of Mao Zedong from 1956 until his death in 1976. Ultra-left refers to those GPCR rebel positions that diverged from the central Maoist line by identifying an antagonistic contradiction between the CPC-PRC party-state itself and the masses of workers and peasants
conceived as a single proletarian class divorced from any meaningful
control over production or distribution. Whereas the central Maoist line
maintained that the masses controlled the means of production through
the party's mediation, the ultra-left argued that the objective
interests of bureaucrats were structurally determined by the centralist
state-form in direct opposition to the objective interests of the
masses, regardless of however "red" a given bureaucrat's thought might
be. Whereas the central Maoist leaders encouraged the masses to
criticize reactionary "ideas" and "habits" among the alleged 5% of bad
cadres, giving them a chance to "turn over a new leaf" after they had
undergone "thought reform",
the ultra-left argued that cultural revolution had to give way to
political revolution "in which one class overthrows another class". The emergence of the New Left in the 1950s and 1960s led to a revival of interest in libertarian socialism. The New Left's critique of the Old Left's authoritarianism was associated with a strong interest in personal liberty, autonomy (see the thinking of Cornelius Castoriadis) and led to a rediscovery of older socialist traditions, such as left communism, council communism and the Industrial Workers of the World. The New Left also led to a revival of anarchism. Journals like Radical America and Black Mask in the United States, Solidarity, Big Flame and Democracy & Nature, succeeded by The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy in the United Kingdom, introduced a range of left libertarian ideas to a new generation.
In 1969, French platformist anarcho-communist Daniel Guérin
published an essay called "Libertarian Marxism?" in which he dealt with
the debate between Marx and Bakunin at the First International and
afterwards suggested that "[l]ibertarian marxism [sic] rejects
determinism and fatalism, giving the greater place to individual will,
intuition, imagination, reflex speeds, and to the deep instincts of the
masses, which are more far-seeing in hours of crisis than the reasonings
of the 'elites'; libertarian marxism [sic] thinks of the effects
of surprise, provocation and boldness, refuses to be cluttered and
paralysed by a heavy 'scientific' apparatus, doesn't equivocate or
bluff, and guards itself from adventurism as much as from fear of the
unknown".
Autonomist Marxism, neo-Marxism and situationist theory are also regarded as being anti-authoritarian
variants of Marxism that are firmly within the libertarian socialist
tradition. Related to this were intellectuals who were influenced by
Italian left communist Amadeo Bordiga, but who disagreed with his Leninist positions, including Jacques Camatte, editor of the French publication Invariance; and Gilles Dauve, who published Troploin with Karl Nesic.
Notable libertarian Marxist tendencies
First English edition of Vladimir Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (published by the Executive Committee of the Communist International for delegates to its 2nd World Congress) in which Lenin attacks left communists and council communists
De Leonism
De Leonism, occasionally known as Marxism–De Leonism, is a form of syndicalist Marxism developed by Daniel De Leon. De Leon was an early leader of the first United States socialist political party, the Socialist Labor Party of America. De Leon combined the rising theories of syndicalism in his time with orthodox Marxism. According to De Leonist theory, militant industrial unions are the vehicle of class struggle. Industrial unions serving the interests of the proletariat will bring about the change needed to establish a socialist system. The only way this differs from some currents in anarcho-syndicalism
is that—according to De Leonist thinking—a revolutionary political
party is also necessary to fight for the proletariat on the political
field.
De Leonism lies outside the Leninist
tradition of communism. It predates Leninism as De Leonism's principles
developed in the early 1890s with De Leon's assuming leadership of the
Socialist Labor Party. Leninism and its vanguard party idea took shape after the 1902 publication of Lenin's What Is To Be Done?. The highly decentralized and democratic nature of the proposed De Leonist government is in contrast to the democratic centralism of Marxism–Leninism and what they see as the dictatorial
nature of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China and other
"communist" states. The success of the De Leonist plan depends on
achieving majority support among the people both in the workplaces and
at the polls, in contrast to the Leninist notion that a small vanguard
party should lead the working class to carry out the revolution.
Council communism
Anton Pannekoek, one of the main theorists of council communism
Council communism was a radical left movement originating in Germany and the Netherlands in the 1920s. Its primary organization was the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD). Council communism continues today as a theoretical and activist position within Marxism and also within libertarian socialism. The central argument of council communism, in contrast to those of social democracy and Leninist communism, is that workers' councils arising in the factories and municipalities are the natural and legitimate form of working class organisation and government power. This view is opposed to the reformist and Bolshevik stress on vanguard parties, parliaments, or the state.
The core principle of council communism is that the state and the economy should be managed by workers' councils,
composed of delegates elected at workplaces and recallable at any
moment. As such, council communists oppose state-run "bureaucratic
socialism". They also oppose the idea of a "revolutionary party", since
council communists believe that a revolution led by a party will
necessarily produce a party dictatorship. Council communists support a workers' democracy, which they want to produce through a federation of workers' councils.
The Russian word for council is soviet
and during the early years of the revolution workers' councils were
politically significant in Russia. It was to take advantage of the aura of workplace power that the word became used by Lenin for various political organs. Indeed, the name Supreme Soviet, which the parliament was called and that of the Soviet Union itself, make use of this terminology, but they do not imply any decentralization.
Furthermore, council communists held a critique of the Soviet Union as a capitalist state, believing that the Bolshevik revolution in Russia became a bourgeois revolution when a party bureaucracy replaced the old feudal aristocracy. Although most felt the Russian Revolution
was working class in character, they believed that because capitalist
relations still existed (i.e. the workers had no say in running the
economy) the Soviet Union ended up as a state capitalist
country, with the state replacing the individual capitalist. Thus
council communists support workers' revolutions, but oppose one-party
dictatorships.
Council communists also believed in diminishing the role of the party to one of agitation and propaganda, rejected all participation in elections or parliament and argued that workers should leave the reactionary trade unions to form one big, revolutionary union.
Left communism
Left communism describes the range of communist viewpoints held by the communist left, which criticizes the political ideas of the Bolsheviks at certain periods, from a position that is asserted to be more authentically Marxist and proletarian than the views of Leninism held by the Communist International after its first and during its second congress.
Although she lived before left communism became a distinct tendency, Rosa Luxemburg has heavily influenced most left communists, both politically and theoretically. Proponents of left communism have included Amadeo Bordiga, Herman Gorter, Anton Pannekoek, Otto Rühle, Karl Korsch, Sylvia Pankhurst and Paul Mattick.
Prominent left communist groups existing today include the International Communist Current and the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party. Different factions from the old Bordigist International Communist Party are also considered left communist organizations.
Within Freudo-Marxism
Two Marxist and Freudian psychoanalytic
theorists have received the libertarian label or have been associated
with it due to their emphasis on anti-authoritarianism and freedom
issues.
Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Sigmund Freud and one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry. He was the author of several influential books and essays, most notably Character Analysis (1933), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and The Sexual Revolution (1936). His work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936) and his idea of muscular armour—the expression of the personality in the way the body moves—shaped innovations such as body psychotherapy, Fritz Perls's Gestalt therapy, Alexander Lowen's bioenergetic analysis and Arthur Janov's primal therapy. His writing influenced generations of intellectuals—during the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at the police.
On 23 August, six tons of his books, journals and papers were burned in
the 25th Street public incinerator in New York, the Gansevoort
incinerator. The burned material included copies of several of his
books, including The Sexual Revolution, Character Analysis and The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
Though these had been published in German before Reich ever discussed
orgone, he had added mention of it to the English editions, so they were
caught by the injunction.
As with the accumulators, the FDA was supposed only to observe the
destruction. It has been cited as one of the worst examples of censorship in the United States.
Reich became a consistent propagandist for sexual freedom going as far
as opening free sex-counselling clinics in Vienna for working-class
patients as well as coining the phrase "sexual revolution" in one of his books from the 1940s.
Herbert Marcuse, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory, was an influential libertarian socialist philosopher of the New Left
On the other hand, Herbert Marcuse was a German philosopher, sociologist and political theorist associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. His work Eros and Civilization (1955) discusses the social meaning of biology—history seen not as a class struggle, but a fight against repression of our instincts. It argues that "advanced industrial society" (modern capitalism)
is preventing us from reaching a non-repressive society "based on a
fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different
relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential
relations". It contends that Freud's argument that repression is needed by civilization to persist is mistaken as Eros is liberating and constructive. Marcuse argues that "the irreconcilable conflict is not between work (reality principle) and Eros (pleasure principle), but between alienated labour (performance principle) and Eros". Sex is allowed for "the betters" (capitalists) and for workers only when not disturbing performance. Marcuse believes that a socialist
society could be a society without needing the performance of the poor
and without as strong a suppression of our sexual drives—it could
replace alienated labor with "non-alienated libidinal work" resulting in
"a non-repressive civilization based on 'non-repressive sublimation'".
During the 1960s, Marcuse achieved world renown as "the guru of the New
Left", publishing many articles and giving lectures and advice to
student radicals all over the world. He travelled widely and his work
was often discussed in the mass media, becoming one of the few American
intellectuals to gain such attention. Never surrendering his
revolutionary vision and commitments, Marcuse continued to his death to
defend the Marxian theory and libertarian socialism.
Socialisme ou Barbarie
The journal Socialisme ou Barbarie
Socialisme ou Barbarie ("Socialism or Barbarism") was a French-based radical libertarian socialist group of the post-World War II period, whose name comes from a phrase Rosa Luxemburg used in her 1916 essay The Junius Pamphlet. It existed from 1948 until 1965. The animating personality was Cornelius Castoriadis, also known as Pierre Chaulieu or Paul Cardan. The group originated in the Trotskyist Fourth International, where Castoriadis and Claude Lefort constituted a Chaulieu–Montal Tendency in the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste in 1946. In 1948, they experienced their "final disenchantment with Trotskyism",
leading them to break away to form Socialisme ou Barbarie, whose
journal began appearing in March 1949. Castoriadis later said of this
period that "the main audience of the group and of the journal was
formed by groups of the old, radical left: Bordigists, council
communists, some anarchists and some offspring of the German 'left' of
the 1920s".
The group was composed of both intellectuals and workers and agreed
with the idea that the main enemies of society were the bureaucracies
which governed modern capitalism. They documented and analysed the
struggle against that bureaucracy in the group's journal. As an example,
the thirteenth issue (January–March 1954) was devoted to the East German revolt of June 1953
and the strikes which erupted amongst several sectors of French workers
that summer. Following from the belief that what the working class was
addressing in their daily struggles was the real content of socialism,
the intellectuals encouraged the workers in the group to report on every
aspect of their working lives.
Situationist International
The Situationist International
(SI) was a restricted group of international revolutionaries founded in
1957 and which had its peak in its influence on the unprecedented general wildcat strikes of May 1968 in France.
With their ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th century European artistic avant-gardes, they advocated experiences of life being alternative to those admitted by the capitalist order,
for the fulfillment of human primitive desires and the pursuing of a
superior passional quality. For this purpose they suggested and
experimented with the construction of situations, namely the setting up
of environments favorable for the fulfillment of such desires. Using
methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of experimental
fields of study for the construction of such situations, like unitary urbanism and psychogeography.
They fought against the main obstacle on the fulfillment of such superior passional living, identified by them in advanced capitalism. Their theoretical work peaked on the highly influential book The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord.
Debord argued in 1967 that spectacular features like mass media and
advertising have a central role in an advanced capitalist society, which
is to show a fake reality in order to mask the real capitalist
degradation of human life. To overthrow such a system, the Situationist
International supported the May 1968 revolts and asked the workers to occupy the factories and to run them with direct democracy through workers' councils composed by instantly revocable delegates.
After publishing in the last issue of the magazine an analysis of
the May 1968 revolts and the strategies that will need to be adopted in
future revolutions, the SI was dissolved in 1972.
Solidarity
Solidarity was a small libertarian socialist organisation from 1960 to 1992 in the United Kingdom. It published a magazine of the same name. Solidarity was close to council communism in its prescriptions and was known for its emphasis on workers' self-organisation and for its radical anti-Leninism. Solidarity was founded in 1960 by a small group of expelled members of the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League. It was initially known as Socialism Reaffirmed. The group published a journal, Agitator, which after six issues was renamed Solidarity, from which the organisation took its new name. Almost from the start it was strongly influenced by the French Socialisme ou Barbarie group, in particular by its intellectual leader Cornelius Castoriadis,
whose essays were among the many pamphlets Solidarity produced.
Solidarity existed as a nationwide organisation with groups in London and many other cities until 1981, when it imploded after a series of political disputes. The magazine Solidarity continued to be published by the London group until 1992—other former Solidarity members were behind Wildcat in Manchester and Here and Now magazine in Glasgow. The intellectual leader of the group was Chris Pallis, whose pamphlets (written under the name Maurice Brinton) included Paris May 1968, The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control 1917-21 and The Irrational in Politics. Other key Solidarity writers were Andy Anderson (author of Hungary 1956), Ken Weller (who wrote several pamphlets on industrial struggles and oversaw the group's Motor Bulletins on the car industry), Joe Jacobs (Out of the Ghetto), John Quail (The Slow-Burning Fuse), Phil Mailer (Portugal:The Impossible Revolution) John King (The Political Economy of Marx, A History of Marxian Economics), George Williamson (writing as James Finlayson, Urban Devastation - The Planning of Incarceration), David Lamb (Mutinies) and Liz Willis (Women in the Spanish Revolution).
Autonomism
Antonio Negri, main theorist of Italian autonomism
Autonomism
refers to a set of left-wing political and social movements and
theories close to the socialist movement. As an identifiable theoretical
system, it first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerist (operaismo) communism. Later, post-Marxist and anarchist tendencies became significant after influence from the Situationists, the failure of Italian far-left movements in the 1970s and the emergence of a number of important theorists including Antonio Negri, who had contributed to the 1969 founding of Potere Operaio, Mario Tronti and Paolo Virno.
Through translations made available by Danilo Montaldi and
others, the Italian autonomists drew upon previous activist research in
the United States by the Johnson–Forest Tendency and in France by the group Socialisme ou Barbarie.
It influenced the German and Dutch Autonomen, the worldwide social centre movement
and today is influential in Italy, France and to a lesser extent the
English-speaking countries. Those who describe themselves as autonomists
now vary from Marxists to post-structuralists
and anarchists. The autonomist Marxist and autonomen movements provided
inspiration to some on the revolutionary left in English speaking
countries, particularly among anarchists, many of whom have adopted
autonomist tactics. Some English-speaking anarchists even describe
themselves as autonomists. The Italian operaismo ("workerism") movement also influenced Marxist academics such as Harry Cleaver, John Holloway, Steve Wright and Nick Dyer-Witheford.
Communization
Communization mainly refers to a contemporary communist theory in which we find is a "mixing-up of insurrectionist anarchism, the communist ultra-left, post autonomists, anti-political currents, groups like the Invisible Committee, as well as more explicitly 'communizing' currents, such as Théorie Communiste and Endnotes.
Obviously at the heart of the word is communism and, as the shift to
communization suggests, communism as a particular activity and process".
The association of the term communization with a self-identified "ultra-left"
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 that "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".
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 and Théorie Comuniste,
two key figures in this tendency. However, in the late 1990s a close
but not identical sense of "communization" was developed by the French
post-situationist group Tiqqun.
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 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 in the United States anarchist circles it tended to be this latter sense of "communization" that was employed in U.S. anarchist and "insurrectionist" communiques, notably within the Californian student movement of 2009–2010.
