Imagine a neighborhood where residents freely share locally produced food, without receipts or salaries. No one manages a budget, no one sells their labor. This scenario, far from being a naive utopia, is at the heart of a specific theoretical current: communization. This term refers to a process of social transformation that would simultaneously abolish wage labor, market value, and social classes, not after a revolution, but during it.
Communization and the abolition of market value: what the term really means
The word “communization” does not refer to a classical political program. It is not about nationalizing factories or redistributing wealth through a planning state. Communization describes a movement that eliminates market relations in the very act of struggle.
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Let’s take a concrete example. During a strike, workers occupy a factory. In a traditional socialist framework, they would restart production under their own management. Communization poses a different question: why continue to produce commodities? Rather than managing the existing economy, the process aims to transform the very nature of what is produced and shared.
This distinction between collective management of the economy (socialization) and the abolition of economic categories themselves (communization) remains the starting point for understanding this current. The resources gathered at communisation.net allow for a deeper exploration of the various theoretical ramifications of this debate.
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Have you ever noticed that “alternative society” projects often retain wage labor, money, and exchange? Communization precisely rejects this framework. It does not propose a better-distributed capitalism, but its complete overcoming.
Theoretical origins of communization: from Marx to the 1970s
The concept does not emerge from nowhere. It is rooted in a reading of Marx focused on the critique of value and abstract labor, rather than on seizing state power.
It was in the 1970s, in France, that the term took on its current meaning. Groups like Théorie Communiste (TC) and authors like Gilles Dauvé developed the idea that the revolution can no longer go through a phase of socialist transition. Their analysis starts from an observation: the experiences of the 20th century (USSR, China, Cuba) showed that workers’ management of the capitalist economy reproduced the relations of domination it claimed to abolish.
The English-language journal Endnotes has contributed to spreading these analyses in the Anglo-Saxon world since the 2000s. The debate has been structured around several axes:
- The critique of self-management as a mere change of manager without transforming social relations
- The analysis of the mutual implication between capital and the proletariat, where each class cannot exist without the other
- The rejection of any “transition period” between capitalism and communism, with communization conceived as an immediate process
These positions remain minority and contested, even within the radical left. Their interest lies in the rigor with which they question the dead ends of previous revolutionary models.
Communization and mutations of contemporary capitalism
Why talk about communization today? Because recent transformations of capitalism make some of its analyses more comprehensible than they were forty years ago.
The generalization of remote work and hybrid models since the pandemic has profoundly changed the concrete organization of wage labor. Digital surveillance, task fragmentation by artificial intelligence, and the multiplication of precarious statuses reshape what it means to “sell one’s labor.” Wage labor is transforming without disappearing, and forms of subordination are renewing.
At the same time, European regulation is evolving. The CSRD directive imposes unprecedented extra-financial transparency on large companies regarding their social and environmental impacts. This type of regulation attempts to frame the effects of financial capitalism without questioning its foundations. For theorists of communization, these adjustments confirm that the system integrates its own critiques without altering its basic structure.
The rise of the platform economy also illustrates this tension. “Independent” delivery workers who depend on an algorithm to get jobs are neither free entrepreneurs nor traditional employees. This gray area, which the law attempts to regulate, corresponds to what theory calls a recomposition of exploitation relations.
Limits and critiques of the theory of communization
This theoretical current does not escape solid objections. The most frequent concerns the absence of a concrete program. If communization rejects any pre-established plan and any transitional organization, how does one move from a commodity society to a classless community?
The theorists respond that the process is defined in the struggle itself, not beforehand. This position has the merit of coherence but leaves a strategic void that many find paralyzing.
Another difficulty: the vocabulary of communization often remains inaccessible outside of restricted militant circles. Expressions like “mutual implication of classes,” “seizing the means of production,” or “abolition of the value-form” assume familiarity with Marxian critique that most readers do not have. This jargon creates a barrier that limits the scope of the debate.
One can also question how this theory addresses concrete social struggles. Demanding movements (wage increases, housing rights, social protection) are sometimes analyzed as structural dead ends rather than as real advancements for those involved. This tension between theoretical radicality and practical urgency remains a major point of friction.
- The absence of an organizational strategy makes it difficult to articulate communization with existing social movements
- The critique of any form of transition may discourage engagement in partial but concrete struggles
- The risk of a self-referential discourse, which only dialogues with itself, is not negligible
Communization offers a demanding framework for understanding the contradictions of contemporary capitalism. Its strength lies in its refusal of half-measures and its ability to pose questions that other political traditions avoid. Its weakness resides in the difficulty of translating this theoretical radicality into accessible practices. Between the critique of a system that continuously renews itself and the construction of an alternative that refuses to define itself in advance, the tension remains intact.