Anarcho-communism

Red and black diagonal flag commonly used by anarcho-communists and other libertarian socialist currents

Anarcho-communism is a current within anarchism and the broader trend of libertarian socialism that advocates for the abolition of the state, private property, and money, proposing a stateless, classless society organized through voluntary associations and communal ownership of the means of production. Anarcho-communists typically argue for the immediate replacement of state power with decentralized communes and federations. While anarcho-communism shares with Marxism the aim of a stateless and classless society (a communist society), Marxists criticize anarcho-communism as a form of utopian and unscientific politics, because it rejects the transitional phase of the dictatorship of the proletariat and underestimates the organized resistance of the bourgeoisie. From the standpoint of historical materialism, the abolition of class society is not achieved by declarations against authority, but through the organized political action of the proletariat in the course of class struggle.

Origin

Anarcho-communism developed out of 19th-century anarchist and socialist currents in Europe, especially from the 1860s onward. It arose in polemics against both reformist social-democracy and other anarchist trends (such as mutualism), and is associated with figures such as Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta. In practice, anarcho-communism spread where the working-class movement was weakly organized or fragmented, often drawing support from petty-bourgeois and declassed strata, radicalized intellectuals, and sections of the proletariat lacking durable party organization.

Marxists hold that these social roots help explain anarcho-communism's emphasis on moral and voluntarist appeals over a scientific analysis of the development of capitalism and the requirements of proletarian revolution.

Theory

Anarcho-communism generally holds that:

• The state is inherently oppressive and must be abolished immediately after revolution.
• Property and production should be held in common, and distribution should be organized "according to need".
• Social coordination should occur through voluntary associations, local communes, and federations, rather than a centralized authority.
• Political parties, parliamentary struggle, and transitional state power are rejected, often in favor of direct action and spontaneous mass uprising.

The question of the state

The key divergence between anarcho-communism and Marxism lies in the state question. Marxism recognizes the state as an instrument of class rule. Under capitalism, it is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in one form or another. The proletariat, in overthrowing the bourgeoisie, seizes state power in its stead and establishes a dictatorship of the proletariat, using state power to suppress counter-revolution and reorganize the economy—only then can the state begin to wither away as classes sublate into their own negation and thus cease to exist.

Anarcho-communism, in contrast, tends to treat the state as a transhistorical evil to be abolished "overnight", without grasping that the state is rooted in class antagonisms and cannot disappear until those antagonisms are eliminated. This leads anarcho-communism to substitute voluntarism for strategy, and to collapse the end goal (statelessness) into an immediate tactic.

Social base

Historically, anarcho-communism has often found support among:

• strata of the petty bourgeoisie threatened by capitalist centralization,
• declassed elements and radical intellectuals,
• sections of the proletariat not consolidated into disciplined mass organizations.

Marxists argue that these social roots contribute to anarcho-communism's tendency toward subjectivism and hostility to centralized proletarian organization, weakening the working class in its struggle against capital.

Criticism

Marxist criticism of anarcho-communism centers on:

• Rejection of proletarian political power: by opposing the dictatorship of the proletariat, anarcho-communism abandons the working class's means to suppress bourgeois resistance and defend revolutionary gains.
• Underestimation of counter-revolution: the bourgeoisie does not vanish after an insurrection; it reorganizes through sabotage, civil war, foreign intervention, and ideological struggle.
• Hostility to organization: anarcho-communism frequently rejects the necessity of a disciplined proletarian party, leaving the movement vulnerable to spontaneity, fragmentation, and capture by bourgeois politics.
• Confusion of goals and methods: the communist objective of statelessness is treated as an immediate administrative decree rather than the outcome of a revolutionary process.

As Mao Tse-tung emphasized, class struggle does not end by proclamation; even after the overthrow of armed enemies, enemies "without guns" remain, and the struggle continues on political and ideological fronts.

See also

• Anarchism
• Libertarian socialism
• Utopian socialism
• Dictatorship of the proletariat
• Withering away of the state
• Class struggle