This is the summary of some thoughts I’ve been having recently, trying to articulate what “communism” means to me. Being influenced by a good deal of nihilist, anti-civilization, or other explicitly not-communist forms of anarchism has given me cause to grapple with why exactly communism is a motivating concept for me, as an insurrectionary anarchist or whatever (tendency labels are always so imprecise). Originally published 9/26/20

Communism is the mode of existence in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” AKA wherein the already spurious contradiction in interests between individual and collective is materially dissolved. The singularity and uniqueness of individual persons flourishes with and because of their connection to each other. Importantly this implies not a flattening of difference, or even of conflict, but rather their most nourishing expression.

The traditional manner of thinking about communism is to posit it as a society-wide condition after an eschatological revolution. But in addition to being a condition, it is also a process: “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” Just as with communism as an end goal, communism as process describes a unity, or at least a complementary relationship, between individual and collective interest. To the extent that one of these is overemphasized, it is not communism in practice and will fail to produce communism as an end goal. Therefore, the fact that statist, militaristic, authoritarian, and vanguardist approaches to producing communism continually fail is no surprise—you can’t just pivot from some entrenched despotic collectivism towards the cohesively individual-collective mode of existence that is communism.

This, to me, is the meaning of the term ‘communization’: that, to actualize communism one has to make communism in the present. Communism as an end goal relies upon (perhaps is, all along) the process of communism. Therefore, there might be a post-revolution communism, but it is necessarily preceded by an accumulation of smaller communisms, localized communisms, a swarm of communist war machines. This is an immanent conception of communism. While I still maintain the possibility of an all-encompassing revolution, I feel that what is more likely is the increasing balkanization of capitalist states under conditions of worsening climate collapse, with pockets of libertarian autonomy opening up just as surely as pockets of grassroots fascism and outright dead zones.

I believe that this view of communism is well suited to these conditions we find ourselves in: not waiting for a revolution, but reaching around us to grasp what vital communal relations we can, to arm our loves for a communism extant within, against, and beyond this world. Obviously, the goal is still to make an irreversible break with racial capitalist civilization and extinguish its presence on the earth, but we cannot wait for that possibility to approach. We need each other, now.