Forerunners The modern current of
communism was founded by the
Neo-Babouvists of the journal (published in mid-1841), who drew from the "anti-political and anarchist ideas" of
Sylvain Maréchal. The foundations of anarcho-communism were laid by
Théodore Dézamy in his 1843 work
Code de la Communauté, which he formulated as a critique of
Étienne Cabet's
utopian socialism. In his
Code, Dézamy advocated the abolition of
money, of the
division of labour and of the
state. He also championed the introduction of
common ownership of property and the distribution of resources "
from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs". In anticipation of anarchist communism, Dézamy rejected the need for a transitional stage between
capitalism and communism, instead calling for immediate
communisation through the direct cessation of
commerce. of 1848, which
Joseph Déjacque considered to be a
social revolution by the
proletariat Following the
French Revolution of 1848,
Joseph Déjacque formulated a radical form of communism that opposed both the
revolutionary republicanism of
Auguste Blanqui and the
mutualism of
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Déjacque opposed the authoritarian conception of a "
dictatorship of the proletariat" as discussed by
Joseph Weydemeyer and by
Karl Marx from 1852 onwards; he regarded it as inherently
reactionary and
counter-revolutionary. Instead, he upheld the
autonomy and
self-organisation of workers, which he saw expressed during the 1848
June Days uprising in Paris against the
representative politics of governmentalism. Opposed not just to government, but to all forms of
oppression, Déjacque advocated for a
social revolution to abolish the state, as well as religion, what would become known as the
nuclear family, and private property. In their place, Déjacque upheld a form of
anarchy based on the free distribution of resources. Déjacque particularly focused his critique on private commerce, such as that espoused by Proudhon and by the
Ricardian socialists of the 1820s and 1830s. He advocated workers' right to the satisfaction of their needs, rather than to keep the product of their own labour, as he felt the latter would inevitably lead to
capital accumulation. He thus advocated for all property to be held under common ownership and for "unlimited freedom of production and consumption", subordinated only to the authority of the "statistics book". In order to guarantee the universal satisfaction of needs, Déjacque saw the need for the abolition of
forced labour through
workers' self-management, and the abolition of the
division of labour through integrating the
proletariat and the
intelligentsia into a single class. In order to achieve this vision of a communist society, he proposed a transitionary period of in which
direct democracy and
direct exchange would be upheld, positions of state would undergo
democratization, and the
police and
military would be abolished. Déjacque's communist platform, outlined in his
Humanisphere (1859), preceded the program of the 1871
Paris Commune, and anticipated the anarcho-communism later elaborated by
Errico Malatesta,
Peter Kropotkin and
Luigi Galleani.
Formulation in the International Workingmen's Association led the anti-authoritarian faction within the
International Workingmen's Association. The
International Workingmen's Association (IWA) was established in 1864, at a time when a formalised anarchist movement did not yet exist. Of the few individual anarchists who were influential at this time, it was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, with his conception of
federalism and his advocacy of
abstentionism, who inspired many of the French delegates who founded the IWA and laid the groundwork for the growth of anarchism. Among the French delegates were a more radical minority that opposed Proudhon's mutualism, which held the
nuclear family as its base social unit. Led by the trade-unionist
Eugène Varlin, the radicals advocated for a "non-authoritarian communism", which upheld the
commune as the base social unit and advocated for the
universal access to education. The entry of
Mikhail Bakunin into the IWA in 1868 first infused the federalists with a programme of
revolutionary socialism and
anti-statism, which agitated for
workers' self-management and
direct action against capitalism and the state. By this time, the
Marxists of the IWA had begun to denounce their
anti-authoritarian opponents as "anarchists", a label previously adopted by Proudhon and Déjacque and later accepted by the anti-authoritarians themselves. Following the defeat of the
Paris Commune in 1871, the IWA split over questions of
socialist economics and the means of bringing about a
classless society.
Karl Marx, who favoured the conquest of state power by political parties, banned the anarchists from the IWA. The anarchist faction around the
Jura Federation resolved to reconstitute as their own
Anti-Authoritarian International, which they constructed as a more decentralised and federal organisation. Two of the IWA's largest branches, in
Italy and
Spain, repudiated Marxism and adopted the anti-authoritarian platform. 's work set the foundation for the development of communism from collectivism. As a
collectivist, Bakunin had himself opposed communism, which he regarded as an inherently
authoritarian ideology. But with Bakunin's death in 1876, the anarchists began to shift away from his theory of collectivism and towards an anarchist communism. The term "anarchist communism" was first printed in
François Dumartheray's February 1876 pamphlet,
To manual workers, supporters of political action.
Élisée Reclus was quick to express his support for anarchist communism, at a meeting of the Anti-Authoritarian International in
Lausanne the following month.
James Guillaume's August 1876 pamphlet,
Ideas on Social Organisation, outlined a proposal by which the
collective ownership of the
means of production could be used in order to transition towards a
communist society. Guillaume considered a necessary prerequisite for communism would be a general condition of
abundance, which could set the foundation for the abandonment of
exchange value and the free distribution of resources. This program for anarcho-communism was adopted by the
Italian anarchists, who had already begun to question collectivism. led the break from
collectivist anarchism with the first programme for anarchist communism. Although Guillaume had himself
remained neutral throughout the debate, in September 1877, the Italian anarcho-communists clashed with the
Spanish collectivists in
Verviers at what would be the Anti-Authoritarian International's final congress. Alongside the economic question, the two factions were also divided by the question of organisation. While the collectivists upheld
trade unions as a means for achieving anarchy, the communists considered them to be inherently
reformist and
counter-revolutionary organisations, prone to
bureaucracy and
corruption. Instead, the communists preferred small, loosely-organised
affinity groups, which they believed closer conformed to anti-authoritarian principles. In October 1880, a Congress of the defunct International's
Jura Federation adopted
Carlo Cafiero's programme of
Anarchy and Communism, which outlined a clear break with Guillaume's collectivist programme. Cafiero rejected the use of an exchange value and the collective ownership of industry, which he believed would lead to
capital accumulation and consequently to
social stratification. Instead, Cafiero called for the abolition of all
wage labour (which he saw as a relic of
capitalism) and for the distribution of resources "
from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs".
Organizationalism vis-à-vis insurrectionarism and expansion As anarcho-communism emerged in the mid-19th century, it had an intense debate with
Bakuninist collectivism and, within the anarchist movement, over participation in the workers' movement, as well as on other issues. So in Kropotkin's anarcho-communist theory of evolution, the risen people themselves are meant to be the rational industrial manager rather than a working class organized as enterprise. Between 1880 and 1890, with the "perspective of an
immanent revolution", which was "opposed to the official workers' movement, which was then in the process of formation (general
Social Democratisation) [anarchist communists] were opposed not only to political (statist) struggles but also to strikes which put forward wage or other claims, or which were organised by trade unions." However, "[w]hile they were not opposed to strikes as such, they were opposed to trade unions and the struggle for the
eight-hour day. This anti-reformist tendency was accompanied by an anti-organisational tendency, and its partisans declared themselves in favor of agitation amongst the unemployed for the expropriation of foodstuffs and other articles, for the expropriatory strike and, in some cases, for '
individual recuperation' or acts of terrorism." Even after
Peter Kropotkin and others overcame their initial reservations and decided to enter
labor unions, anti-syndicalist anarchist-communists remained, such as
Sébastien Faure's
Le Libertaire group and Russian partisans of
economic terrorism and s. Most anarchist publications in the United States appeared in Yiddish, German, or Russian. However, the American anarcho-communist journal
The Firebrand was published in English, permitting the dissemination of anarchist communist thought to English-speaking populations in the United States. According to the anarchist historian
Max Nettlau, the first use of the term "libertarian communism" came with the 1880
Le Havre anarchist congress used the phrase to identify its doctrines more clearly. The French anarchist journalist
Sébastien Faure, later founder and editor of the four-volume
Anarchist Encyclopedia, started the weekly paper (
The Libertarian) in 1895.
Methods of organizing: platformism vis-à-vis synthesism , 1921 In
Ukraine, the anarcho-communist guerrilla leader
Nestor Makhno led an independent anarchist army from 1918 to 1921 during the
Russian Civil War of 1917–1923. A commander of the
Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, Makhno led a
guerrilla campaign opposing both the Bolshevik "Reds" and monarchist "Whites". The
Makhnovist movement made various tactical military pacts while fighting various reactionary forces and organizing an
anarchist society committed to resisting state authority, whether
capitalist or
Bolshevik. The
Dielo Truda platform in Spain also met with strong criticism. Miguel Jimenez, a founding member of the
Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI, founded in 1927), summarized this as follows: too much influence in it of
Marxism, it erroneously divided and reduced anarchists between individualist anarchists and anarcho-communist sections, and it wanted to unify the anarchist movement along the lines of the anarcho-communists. Jimenez saw anarchism as more complex than that, that anarchist tendencies are not mutually exclusive as the
platformists saw it and that both individualist and communist views could accommodate
anarcho-syndicalism. Sébastian Faure had strong contacts in Spain, so his proposal had more impact on Spanish anarchists than the Dielo Truda platform, even though individualist anarchist influence in Spain was less intense than it was in France. The main goal there was reconciling anarcho-communism with
anarcho-syndicalism.
Spanish Revolution of 1936 The most extensive application of anarcho-communist ideas happened in the anarchist territories during the
Spanish Revolution of 1936. In Spain, the national anarcho-syndicalist trade union
Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) initially refused to join a popular-front electoral alliance, and abstention by CNT supporters led to a right-wing election victory. In 1936, the CNT changed its policy, and anarchist votes helped bring the popular front back to power. Months later, the former ruling class responded with an attempted
coup, which led to the outbreak of the
Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939. In response to the army rebellion, an
anarchist-inspired movement of peasants and industrial workers, supported by armed militias, took control of
Barcelona and of large areas of rural Spain, where they
collectivized the land. However, even before the fascist victory in 1939, the anarchists were losing ground in a bitter struggle with the
Stalinists, who controlled the distribution of military aid from the
Soviet Union to the Republican cause. The events known as the "Spanish Revolution" was a workers'
social revolution that began during the outbreak of the
Spanish Civil War in 1936 and resulted in the widespread implementation of
anarchist and, more broadly,
libertarian socialist organizational principles throughout various portions of the country for two to three years, primarily in
Catalonia,
Aragon,
Andalusia, and parts of
the Levante. Much of
Spain's economy was put under worker control; in
anarchist strongholds like Catalonia, the figure was as high as 75%, but lower in areas with heavy
Communist Party of Spain influence, as the
Soviet-allied party actively resisted attempts at
collectivization-enactment. Factories were run through worker committees, and
agrarian areas became collectivized and ran as libertarian
communes. Anarchist
Gaston Leval estimated that about eight million people participated directly or at least indirectly in the Spanish Revolution, which historian
Sam Dolgoff claimed was the closest any revolution had come to realizing a free,
stateless mass society. Stalinist-led troops suppressed the collectives and persecuted both
dissident Marxists and anarchists.
Post-war years poster from the libertarian socialist factions of
Madrid, reading "The surveillance of the city must be ensured by the Antifascist Popular Guard" as a warning against
Nationalist terrorism Anarcho-communism entered into internal debates over the organization issue in the post-World War II era. Founded in October 1935, the Anarcho-Communist Federation of Argentina (FACA, Federación Anarco-Comunista Argentina) in 1955 renamed itself the
Argentine Libertarian Federation. The
Fédération Anarchiste (FA), founded in Paris on 2 December 1945, elected the platformist anarcho-communist George Fontenis as its first secretary the following year. It was composed of a majority of activists from the former FA (which supported
Volin's
Synthesis) and some members of the former Union Anarchiste (which supported the CNT-FAI support to the Republican government during the Spanish Civil War), as well as some young
Resistants. In 1950 a clandestine group formed within the FA called Organisation Pensée Bataille (OPB), led by George Fontenis. The new decision-making process was founded on
unanimity: each person has a right of veto on the orientations of the federation. The FCL published the same year . Several groups quit the FCL in December 1955, disagreeing with the decision to present "revolutionary candidates" to the legislative elections. On 15–20 August 1954, the Ve intercontinental plenum of the CNT took place. A group called appeared, which was formed of militants who did not like the new ideological orientation that the OPB was giving the FCL seeing it was authoritarian and almost Marxist. The FCL lasted until 1956, just after participating in state legislative elections with ten candidates. This move alienated some members of the FCL and thus produced the end of the organization. A group of militants who disagreed with the FA turning into FCL reorganized a new Federation Anarchiste established in December 1953. This included those who formed ''L'Entente anarchiste,'' who joined the new FA and then dissolved L'Entente. The new base principles of the FA were written by the individualist anarchist
Charles-Auguste Bontemps and the non-platformist anarcho-communist
Maurice Joyeux which established an organization with a plurality of tendencies and autonomy of groups organized around
synthesist principles. According to historian Cédric Guérin, the new Federation Anarchiste identity included the unconditional rejection of
Marxism, motivated in significant part by the previous conflict with George Fontenis and his OPB. In the 1970s, the French
Fédération Anarchiste evolved into a joining of the principles of
anarchist synthesis and
platformism. == Philosophical debates ==