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Title: Anarchocommunism Author: Jesse Cohn Date: 2009 Language: en Topics: anarcho-communism, history Source: Retrieved on 22nd November 2021 from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781405198073.wbierp0079 Notes: Published in The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest.
Anarchocommunism, sometimes also called “anarchist communism” or
“libertarian communism,” is the tendency within anarchism advocating the
abolition both of the state and the system of wages and prices. Under
“the communism of the free,” as Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) called it,
the communist distributive ethic – “from each according to ability, to
each according to need” – would constitute the extension of individual
freedom into the economic realm, permitting each to take and to give at
will, in keeping with the dictates of his or her conscience (1892/1995:
36).
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) and Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) were
both opponents of “communism” in this sense, wary of the potential for
“free riders” to take advantage of the system, effectively living off
the labor of others, hence becoming exploiters in their turn. Against
this, theorists such as Kropotkin and Alexander Berkman (1870–1936)
suggested that informal social pressures, new cultural norms, and a
sense of solidarity would be sufficient to ensure a balance between
production and consumption, with the social sanction of expulsion from
the community reserved for the inevitable handful of intransigents.
Buoyed by such arguments, anarchocommunism became, by the end of the
nineteenth century, the most widely embraced ideological framework in
the international anarchist movement, from Argentina to China, largely
supplanting the “collectivist” position – favoring the continuation of a
wage/price system with “collective ownership of the instruments of work”
– that had predominated during the era of Bakunin’s leadership.
Ultimately, anarchocommunism would exercise influence over radical
thinkers ranging from Nicaraguan revolutionary Augusto CĂ©sar Sandino
(1895–1934) to American social ecologist Murray Bookchin (1921–2006).
The Dutch Provos’ “White Bicycle Plan” (1965), the San Francisco
Diggers’ “Free City” project (1967–8), Food Not Bombs (1980–), and the
Free Software Movement (1985–) can be considered examples of an
anarchocommunist system of free distribution in action.
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Aldred, G. A. (1907) The Possibility and Philosophy of Anarchist
Communism. London: Bakunin Press.
Berkman, A. (1929) [1972] What Is Communist Anarchism? New York: Dover.
Cafiero, C. (1880) [2005] Anarchy and Communism. In R. Graham (Ed.),
Anarchism: A Documentary History, Vol. 1: From Anarchy to Anarchism
(300CE – 1939). Montreal: Black Rose.
Kropotkin, P. (1887) [2002] Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and
Principles. In Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings.
Mineola: Dover.
Kropotkin, P. (1892) [1995] The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Malatesta, E. (1993) Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas. London:
Freedom Press.
Pengam, A. (1987) Anarcho-Communism. In M. Rubel & J. Crump (Eds.),
Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Puente, I. (1932) [2001] Libertarian Communism. Tucson: See Sharp Press.