What is Anarcho-Communism?
Anarcho-communism is a form of anarchism that wants to abolish both the state and private property. In its place it imagines free communes and federations of workplaces and neighbourhoods. People would decide things together and take what they need from shared stores. Supporters say this removes the two sources of bossing and exploitation at once: the government and the boss. It differs from Marxism because it rejects any state, even a temporary one, and it differs from market anarchism because it rejects wages and private capital.
Core beliefs
- All rulers and states are unjust, because they rest on force.
- Land, factories and tools should belong to everyone, not to owners.
- Goods should be shared by need, not sold or paid for by hours worked.
- Communities should run themselves through direct, face to face decision making.
- Communes should link up by free agreement, from the bottom upward.
- Helping each other is natural to people, and rulers and bosses suppress it.
History
The ideas took shape in the 1870s, after a split between anarchists and Marxists in the First International. Carlo Cafiero and Errico Malatesta in Italy, and Peter Kropotkin in Russia and exile, set out the case. Kropotkin's book The Conquest of Bread, published in 1892, became a standard text. Anarchist unions grew strong in Spain, and in 1936 anarchists in Catalonia and Aragon ran farms and factories collectively during the civil war. In Ukraine, Nestor Makhno led a peasant army and a free territory after 1917 until the Bolsheviks crushed it. Franco's victory in 1939 ended the Spanish experiment. Later writers such as Murray Bookchin tied the ideas to ecology.
Variants
Anarcho-syndicalists build their plans around trade unions and workplace councils. Insurrectionists favour direct action and small groups over mass organisations. Platformists want a tightly organised revolutionary federation. Some followers, such as Bookchin in his later career, moved toward municipal assemblies and ecological planning. A further split concerns tactics. Some thinkers in the late nineteenth century supported assassinations as acts of revolt, while most later anarchists rejected this and stressed organising.
Criticisms
Critics say a society without a state cannot settle disputes or defend itself, and that unwritten rules and informal power would grow back. Economists argue that without prices and wages, communes could not work out what to produce or reward effort. Marxist critics said anarchists had no plan to defeat a well armed ruling class. Liberal and conservative critics point to the violence of some anarchist groups. The Spanish experiment, anarchists reply, was crushed by war and betrayal, not shown to fail on its own terms.
In practice
No large anarcho-communist society has lasted. Its clearest examples were short lived and tied to war, such as Catalonia in 1936 and Ukraine after 1917. Its influence is stronger in small things: co-operatives, mutual aid networks, squats, free schools and occupations. On the 12 axes it scores at the extreme on Ownership, Markets and Structure, toward Public, Planned and Local, and strongly toward Democratic on Authority.