Communization

Communization theory (or communisation theory in British English) refers to a tendency on the ultra-left that understands communism as a process that, in a social revolution, immediately begins to replace all capitalist social relations with communist ones. Thus it rejects the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which it sees as reproducing capitalism. There exist two broad trends within communization theory: a ‘Marxist’ one (exemplified by Gilles Dauvé, Théorie Communiste, and later, Endnotes) and an ‘anarchist’ one (represented by Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee). The term ‘communization’ in this context was coined by Dauvé, following the uprising of May 68, in an attempt to explain its failure. Dauvé’s theory synthesised the council communist emphasis on proletarian self-emancipation and rejection of the party-form with Italian communist Amadeo Bordiga’s critique of capitalism in the Soviet Union, which stressed the importance of the content of communism. He was additionally influenced by the Situationists’ rejection of work (at least in words) and focus on the revolutionary transformation of everyday life. In his 1843 Code de la Communauté, the Neo-Babouvist Théodore Dézamy called for an immediate move from capitalism to communism. Instead of a transitional stage between the two, he envisioned the gradual abolition of the state and the "communisation of social relations" through the direct cessation of commerce. In The Conquest of Bread, anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin called for the immediate expropriation of all property, for the purposes of ensuring well-being for all, following an insurrectionary period. He also proposed the immediate communisation of social relations, which would integrate both agricultural and industrial workers into the process by each fulfilling the needs of the other. But anarcho-communists came to disagree on what form communisation would take. Some came to see that it was insurrectionists themselves, rather than the organised working class, that would be the real agent of a social revolution.