Communization refers to a theory according to which revolution does not go through a transitional phase (dictatorship of the proletariat, self-management, workers’ state), but through the immediate destruction of capitalist relations in the very movement of struggle. The proletariat does not take power to then transform society: it abolishes classes, including its own, by eliminating wage labor, value, and private property as insurrectional acts unfold.
This definition clearly separates communization from historical communism as it was practiced in the twentieth century. It also breaks with currents that place a political program between the uprising and a classless society.
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Programmatism and theoretical break: what communization rejects
To understand communization, the most useful starting point is the concept it contests: programmatism. This term encompasses all theories where the proletariat derives the foundations of a future social organization from its own condition. Revolution becomes a program to be realized, step by step.
In this logic, the proletariat is a positive pole. It carries an intrinsic revolutionary nature, which manifests in the dictatorship of the proletariat, workers’ councils, transitional periods, or generalized self-management. The resolution of the contradiction between capital and labor relies on the affirmation of one of the two terms.
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The theory of communization considers this schema outdated. The proletariat can no longer assert itself as a class carrying an alternative project because its own existence is inseparable from the capitalist social relation. Several texts published on communisation.net develop this analysis by detailing how capital restructurings since the 1970s have liquidated the material bases of programmatism (stable employment, working-class identity, class institutions).
The abolition of capital is therefore not a distant goal achieved after a rise in the workers’ movement. It plays out in the very gestures of struggle, or it does not play out at all.
Communization and simultaneous abolition of social relations
The core of communization lies in one word: simultaneity. It is not about abolishing private property first, then wage labor, then the state. These relations form a system. Any attempt to treat them separately reproduces what it claims to destroy.
Concretely, communization implies:
- The abolition of wage labor as a mode of distribution of means of subsistence, replaced by a direct pooling of available resources.
- The abolition of market value, meaning that produced goods no longer circulate as commodities and are no longer measured by abstract labor time.
- The dissolution of the state as a separate apparatus from society, including its so-called “workers'” or “popular” forms.
This triptych is not a utopia projected into a distant future. The theory of communization asserts that these ruptures occur in the conflict itself, or they degenerate into reform, counter-revolution, or a new apparatus of domination.
The question of gender and social reproduction
Since the end of the 2010s, part of feminist materialist theory has opened an additional front. The question posed is that of the communization of social reproduction: how to simultaneously abolish class relations and gender relations in daily practices?
This extension of the theoretical framework acknowledges that domestic work, caregiving, and child-rearing are structurally assigned and unpaid activities. Ignoring them leaves a part of the system intact that communization claims to destroy en masse.
Contemporary practices: ZAD and forms of partial communization
Communization does not exist solely as a theoretical corpus. Several investigations conducted on the ZADs (Notre-Dame-des-Landes, Bure) describe practices that resemble a “bottom-up” communization: pooling of land, decision-making by assemblies, rejection of wage labor and private property in occupied spaces.
These experiences are sometimes referred to as “fragments of real communism” within capitalism. They raise a question that theory alone does not resolve: can localized, partial communization, encircled by market relations, hold without transforming into a classic alternative community?
The theoretical answer is generally negative. Communization, by definition, is not limited to a space: it presupposes the destruction of the capitalist relation on a scale that makes a return impossible. A ZAD tolerated by the state remains embedded in a world of commodities.
However, these experimental grounds feed reflection. They show that the immediate pooling of means of life, without monetary mediation or formal hierarchy, produces forms of organization that correspond neither to the market nor to state planning.
Polysemy of the word communization: a terminological trap
The term “communization” also circulates in a very different register. In recent works on denazification or decommunization in Eastern Europe, it refers to processes of reconfiguration of institutions after a regime change. This meaning has nothing to do with the revolutionary Marxist tradition.
This ambiguity complicates research and discussion. A reader who encounters the word in a contemporary history article will not find the same thing as in a text from the journal Sic or from Théorie Communiste. Two uses of the same word coexist without intersecting.
For those interested in communization in the revolutionary sense, verifying the theoretical framework of the source remains the minimal precaution. The context of enunciation makes all the difference between an analysis of radical social transformation and a narrative of post-authoritarian institutional politics.
Communization remains a minority theoretical framework, contested even within the radical left. Its strength lies in the rigor of its critique of programmatism and in its refusal to separate the moment of struggle from the content of transformation. Its most debated limitation concerns the absence of an organizational model: if revolution cannot be programmed, the question of what happens concretely the next day remains open.