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Anarcho-communism has been regarded by other anarchist currents as a poor and despised relation, an ideological trophy to be exhibited according to the needs of hagiography or polemic before moving on to ‘serious things’ (the collectivisations in Spain, anarcho-syndicalism, federalism or self-management), and as an ‘infantile utopia’ more concerned with dogmatic abstractions than with ‘economic realities’. Yet anarcho-communism has been the only current within the anarchist movement which has explicitly aimed not only at ending exchange value but, among its most coherent partisans, at making this the immediate content of the revolutionary process. We are speaking here, of course, only of the current which explicitly described itself as ‘anarcho-communist’, whereas in fact the tendency in the nineteenth century to draw up a stateless communist (but is this not a pleonasm?) ‘utopia’ extended beyond anarchism properly so-called.
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See J. Rancière and A. Faure,La Parole ouvrière, 1830–1851 (Paris: Union générale, 1976) pp. 268–78.
Quoted in Max Nettlau,Histoire de l’anarchie, Les dossiers de l’histoire (Paris: Editions de l’Université et de l’Enseignement moderne, 1983) p. 76.
Joseph Déjacque,La Question révolutionnaire (1854), in Joseph Déjacque,A bas les chefs! (Paris: Champ Libre, 1970) p. 67. Elsewhere Déjacque speaks of ‘the illogicality of being communist and authoritarian’ (Déjacque, 1970, p. 245).
Quoted in V. Pelosse, ‘J. Déjacque et la création du néologisme “libertaire” (1857)’,Etudes de Marxologie, VI (December 1972) p. 2366.
Joseph Déjacque,L’Humanisphère, utopie anarchique (1858), in Déjacque, 1970, p. 184.
Joseph Déjacque,De l’être humain mâle et femelle. Lettre à P. J. Proudhon (1857), quoted in Pelosse, 1972, p. 2358.
Déjacque,La Question révolutionnaire, in Déjacque, 1970, p. 67.
Déjacque,L’Humanisphère, in Déjacque, 1970, p. 189.
Déjacque,La Question révolutionnaire, in Déjacque, 1970, p. 48.
Déjacque,La Question révolutionnaire, in Déjacque, 1970, p. 52.
James Guillaume,Idées sur l’organisation sociale (Paris:Volonté Anarchiste, no. 8 — Edition du groupe Fresnes-Antony de la Fédération anarchiste, 1979) p. 15.
C. Cafiero, ‘Anarchie et Communisme’. Republished under the titleCommunisme et Anarchisme (Paris: Groupe Eugène Varlin de la Fédération anarchiste, 1982) p. 7 (emphases in the original).
Peter Kropotkin,Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal, in Roger N. Baldwin,Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets (New York: Dover, 1970) p. 129.
Le Révolté (June 1881), quoted in J. Maîtron,Histoire du mouvement anarchiste en France, vol. I (Paris: Maspero, 1978) p. 112.
Martin A. Miller,Kropotkin (Chicago: University Press, 1976) p. 145.
Pierre Kropotkine,Fatalité de la révolution (Toulouse: Editions CNT, 1975) p. 15.
See Peter Kropotkin,Fields, Factories and Workshops (New York: Greenwood, 1968), and
Peter Kropotkin,The Conquest of Bread (New York: University Press, 1972) pp. 137ff.
Pierre Alekseievitch Kropotkine,Paroles d’un révolté (Paris: Flammarion, 1978) pp. 93, 97.
Elisée Reclus,L’Homme et la terre, vol. II (Paris: Maspero, 1982) pp. 140–1.
Pierre Kropotkine,L’Anarchie, sa philosophie, son idéal (Paris: Publico, 1981) p. 22.
Pierre Kropotkine, ‘La Commune de Paris’, inLe Révolté (March 1880), reproduced in Kropotkine, 1978, pp. 103ff.
Les Temps Nouveaux (25 May 1907), quoted in G. Woodcock and I. Avskumovič,The Anarchist Prince (London: Boardman, 1950) p. 294.
From its foundation in 1895 up till 1899,Le Libertaire adopted a hostile attitude to trade unions. After 1899 it moved towards syndicalism. In hisMon Communisme Faure attributed an important role to trade unions, both in the insurrectionary phase and in the organisation of non-commercial social relations. The division of labour was also to be maintained within the framework of a non-monetary economy. (Sebastien Faure,Mon Communisme (Paris: Editions de ‘La Fraternelle’, 1921).)
For example, the brothers Abram and Iouda Solomonovich Grossman held that mass expropriation ought to replace strikes and saw in the unions a tendency towards the formation of a new ‘ruling aristocracy’. For anti-syndicalists like the Grossmans, anarcho-communist society was envisaged as something quite different from ‘a society of massive industrial complexes managed by trade unions’. Indeed, they argued that the revolution should aim to destroy the unions, along with all other capitalist and statist institutions. (See Paul Avrich,The Russian Anarchists (Princeton: University Press, 1967) pp. 84–9.)
Emile Pataud and Emile Pouget,Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth. How We Shall Bring About the Revolution (Oxford: New International, 1913).
Luigi Galleani,The End of Anarchism? (Sanday: Cienfuegos, 1982);
Alexander Berkman,What Is Communist Anarchism? (New York: Vanguard, 1929). As for Malatesta, he never went beyond James Guillaume’sIdées sur l’organisation sociale, since he made the conditions for the existence of communism (abundance and a spirit of solidarity) a justification for collectivism. Hence collectivism ceased to appear as a form of the wages system and could be integrated into the ideology of anarchism as ‘free experimentation’.
See, for example, Errico Malatesta,Articles politiques (Paris: Union générale d’éditions 10/18, 1979) pp. 210, 381;Ecrits choisis, vol. II (Annecy: Groupe 1er Mai, 1981) pp. 58–9, 63.
Gaston Britel,La Foire aux ânes ou de l’Abolition du salariat (no place: Editions de la Moisson Nouvelle, 1951). This is a collection of texts, the earliest of which dates from the late 1930s.
Raoul Brémond,La Communauté (Paris: Editions de l’Oubli, 1975).
See its anti-commercial programme, Manifesto of 23 September 1911, in R. F. Magon,Land and Liberty: Anarchist Influences in the Mexican Revolution (Sanday: Cienfuegos, 1977) pp. 99–100.
See the draft Declaration of the Insurrectionary Army of the Ukraine (Makhnovist), adopted by the revolutionary military Soviet at its meeting of 20 October 1919, in Alexandre Skirda,Nestor Makhno, le Cosaque de l’Anarchie (Paris: Skirda, 1982) p. 442.
Pierre Kropotkine,Le Salariat (1911), reissued by Le ‘Combat Syndicaliste’ (Paris: 1973) p. 11.
- Alain Pengam
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University of York, UK
John Crump (Lecturer in Politics) (Lecturer in Politics)
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© 1987 Maximilien Rubel and John Crump
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Pengam, A. (1987). Anarcho-Communism. In: Rubel, M., Crump, J. (eds) Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18775-1_4
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