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Anarchist communism

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{| align=right style="margin-left: 15px; text-align: center; padding:5px;" class=box |- rowspan=2 style="border-bottom:3px solid grey;" valign="top" |{{Anarchism}} |} '''Anarchist communism''' is a form of anarchism that advocates the abolition of the State and capitalism in favor of a horizontal network of voluntary associations through which everyone will be free to satisfy his or her needs. Anarchist communism is also known as '''communist anarchism''', '''anarcho-communism''', or '''libertarian communism'''. However, while all anarchist communists are libertarian communists, not all libertarian communists are anarchists, such as council communism council communists. What distinguishes anarchist communism from other variants of libertarian communism is the former's opposition to all forms of political power, hierarchy and domination.

Development of ideas
Anarchist communism was first formulated in the Italian section of the First International, by Carlo Cafiero, Errico Malatesta, Andrea Costa and other ex-Giuseppe Mazzini Mazzinian Republicans. Out of respect for Mikhail Bakunin, they did not make their differences from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Proudhon's individualist anarchism and mutualism (economic theory) mutualism explicit until after Bakunin's death. While both groups argued against capitalism , the anarcho-communists departed from Proudhon and Bakunin. Proudhon maintained that individuals have a right to the product of their labor and to be paid materially for it including money monetarily, while the communists believe individuals should be given goods according to their needs without respect to how much labor they exert. Joseph Dejacque admonished Proudhon's support for individual ownership of the product of labor in a letter, saying "it is not the product of his or her labor that the worker has a right to, but to the satisfaction of his or her needs, whatever may be their nature." Cafeiro explains in ''Anarchy and Communism'' (1880) that private property in the product of labor will lead to unequal accumulation of capital, and therefore undesirable class distinctions: "If we preserve the individual appropriation of the products of labour, we would be forced to preserve money, leaving more or less accumulation of wealth according to more or less merit rather than need of individuals."[http://www.blackrosebooks.net/anarism1.htm] In 1876, at the Florence Conference of the Italian Federation of the International, held in a forest outside Florence due to police activity, they declared the principles of Anarcho-communism, beginning with: :"The Italian Federation considers the collective property of the products of labour as the necessary complement to the collectivist programme, the aid of all for the satisfaction of the needs of each being the only rule of production and consumption which corresponds to the principle of solidarity. The federal congress at Florence has eloquently demonstrated the opinion of the Italian International on this point..." The above report was made in an article by Malatesta and Cafiero in the (Swiss) Jura Federation's bulletin later that year.

Theory
Anarchist communism stresses egalitarianism and the abolition of social hierarchy and class distinctions that arise from unequal wealth distribution, the abolition of capitalism and money, collectivization of the products of labor, and the introduction of the gift economy to facilitate the sharing of goods. In anarchist communism, property no longer exists and each individual and group is only allowed what they need to survive in reasonable comfort and what they can use to give others what they, in turn, need and can use in the same way. What one can use does not mean having so much that all of what one has becomes unusable, but only having enough that any upgrades are unusable. Any material gain beyond that would be considered theft and a reassertion of property, and will be brought to justice, however justice is done. One of the most commonly recommended solutions is simply returning the property to a non-property condition. This is called "expropriation". If a fight were to erupt between the owner and the expropriator, then the owner would be the aggressor. All the same rules about self defense and defense of property still apply, with the only difference being that the ethical roles of the defender and attacker of property would be the reverse than with a capitalist ethical system. The abolition of work in the sense of wage slavery is central to communism. This program of eliminating work points to self control and voluntary cooperation much like volunteering for charity, in terms of its own definition of "voluntary", as the model of useful nonwork. Communism claims that this will improve working conditions, increase efficiency, and make working enjoyable.

Philosophical arguments
One of the justifications for capitalism is the claim that work is necessary because human nature, not capitalism, already makes the individual vain and selfish. Society can only supposedly survive through work. Capitalism defines work as the harnessing of the allegedly inherent individual will to gain. Anarchist communists say that society can be or can only be sustainable without work. Communism is criticized by self styled "individualists" as an authoritarian and collectivist philosophy, while capitalism is called "atomizing", "alienating", slavering, shallow, corrupting and impoverishing by its own critics. But Anarchist communism is a rejection of work. Work is a process where the owning of a person or what they need is used by the boss to make the worker do what the boss wants. Thus, communism is only considered collectivist and capitalism only considered individualist because of what they do to resources. In terms of people, communism would be individualist and capitalism would be collectivist. Anarchist communism emphasizes the collective experience as distinct and important in the pursuit of freedom. All forms of anarchism recognize the experience of collective identity to some extent, but the Anarchist Communists, starting with Peter Kropotkin and extending out through Alexander Berkman, Nestor Makhno, and many others recognized that there was more to experiences which were less individualistic than meets the eye. Implicitly, the anarchist communists followed a Kantian scheme of classification: like Immanuel Kant Kant they divided life into its individualistic parts, which have a parallel with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and the less obvious parts of life which characterize human relations to each another, which parallels Kant's practical reason Practical Reason. Thus it is argued, no matter how autonomous individuals might be to ourselves when they are alone, once we start interacting with the world and with other people our change in circumstance calls for a different perspective. This follows from human biology. The parts of life that Kant singled out in his work on Practical Reason are generally not well understood. There are questions concerning the experience of work and its actual feeling. Also, questions arise concerning what natural thoughts come into play during work. Because of some sort of biological limitation when people deal with these aspects of life they tend to resort to using obscure or abstraction abstract metaphors and analogies to explain what they are talking about. This is where the difference between anarchist communism and other anarchist schools of thought shows up most clearly: the anarchist communists have taken on these hard-to-explain aspects of life, have desired to understand them, and have integrated strategies for liberation involving these aspects of life into their overall point of view. The catch with these aspects of life is that while mental liberation might be amazing, becoming aware of the collective substructure of life and society leads to deeper liberation than is commonly thought possible. Thus in this respect the anarchist communists see themselves as pursuing a fuller definition of liberation than other anarchists.

Criticisms
Some of the early individualist anarchists believed that elements of Anarchist Communism were inconsistent with anarchist principles. Benjamin Tucker calls communist-anarchism "pseudo-anarchism." [http://www.blackcrayon.com/page.jsp/library/tucker/tucker37.htm] However, many individualists of that time, such as Tucker and E. Armand, felt they had much in common with anarchist communism, or worked to propagate its ideas along with their own. In modern times almost all individualist anarchists believe that anarchist communism is a legitimate form of anarchism, though most still reject collective economics. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whose philosophy had great influence on early anarcho-communists, nonetheless refused to use the term "communism" to describe his own views. At the time he wrote most of his works, the word "communism" was typically used to refer to the views of the utopian socialism utopian socialists, whom Proudhon accused of attempting to supply equality by sovereign decrees rather than believing in equality by nature and education. He also criticized them for allegedly "calling justice everything that seems to them to be love of one's neighbor, and incessantly confounding matters of reason with those of sentiment." Unlike anarcho-communists, Proudhon strongly supported private ownership of the products of labor and and felt that collective ownership should arise only where it was natural, such as in mutual banks and worker's associations. In opposition to the communist maxim, Proudhon said "To each according to his works, first; and if, on occasion, I am impelled to aid you, I will do it with a good grace; but I will not be constrained" (''The Philosophy of Misery''). More recently, advocates of post-left anarchy have made accusations, such as in in works such as Bob Black's Anarchy After Leftism, that leftists are "moralistic" and have an attachment to generic moral standards which is incompatible with anarchism, and establish political forms, such as the platformism and direct democracy, which they argue amount to forms of state.

People
* Mikhail Bakunin * Alexander Berkman * Murray Bookchin * Joseph DÃ©jacque * Emma Goldman * Daniel GuÃ©rin * Peter Kropotkin * Nestor Makhno * Errico Malatesta

Books
*Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici, ''[http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=1336 Anarchist Communists: A Question Of Class]'', others *Alexander Berkman, ''[http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/berkman/comanarchism/whatis_toc.html What is Anarchism?]'', ''Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist'', others *Mikhail Bakunin, ''[http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bakunin/godandstate/godandstate_ch1.html God and the State]'', ''The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State'', others *Emma Goldman, ''[http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/goldman/GoldmanCW.html Anarchism and Other Essays]'', ''Living My Life'', others *Peter Kropotkin, ''Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution Mutual Aid'', ''The Conquest of Bread'', others *Nestor Makhno Ida Mett Piotr Arshinov Valevsky Linsky, ''[http://www.nestormakhno.info/english/platform/org_plat.htm The Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists]'' (available in: Castellano, Ä?eÅ¡tina, English, ÎˆÎ»Î»Î·Î½Î¹ÎºÎ¬, FranÃ§ais, Italiano, Ivrit, Magyar, Nederlands, Polska, PortuguÃªs, PyccÐºÐ¸Ð¹, Svenska, TÃ¼rkÃ§e) *Robert Graham (anarchist historian), ''Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume 1: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE-1939)''[http://www.blackrosebooks.net/anarism1.htm] contains extensive selections from the anarchist communists, including Joseph Dejacque, Carlo Cafiero, Peter Kropotkin, Luigi Galleani, Errico Malatesta, Charlotte Wilson, Ricardo Flores Magon, Shifu, Hatta Shuzo, Alexander Berkman, Voline, and Isaac Puente.

External links

- ''Anarchist-Communism'' by Alain Pengam
- Anarkismo.net - Anarchist Communist news, discussion and theory from across the globe
- Anarchist Federation - anarchist communist organisation in Britain
- Conceivia.com - Technology development and support of the world movement
- libcom.org - the home of anarchism and libertarian communism in the UK
- Work - Community - Politics - War: An easy introduction to anti-political insurrectionist communism
- Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici - (FdCA)
- North Eastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists - (NEFAC)
- Workers Solidarity Movement - Anarchist Communist organisation in Ireland

Criticisms

- ''A Critique of Anarchist Communism'' by Ken Knudson A criticism from an individualist anarchist perspective
- ''My Anarchism'' S. E. Parker explains his conversion from communist to individualist anarchism Category:Anarchism Category:Communism Category:Political movements Category:Political theories de:Anarchistischer Kommunismus es:Comunismo libertario eo:Anarki-komunismo fr:Anarcho-communisme he:×?× ×¨×›×•-×§×•×ž×•× ×™×–×? hu:Anarcho-kommunizmus nl:Anarcho-communisme pl:Anarchokomunizm pt:Comunismo libertÃ¡rio fi:Anarkokommunismi tr:AnarÅŸist komÃ¼nizm zh:æ— æ”¿åºœå…±äº§ä¸»ä¹‰

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