Imagine a neighborhood where residents freely share a vegetable garden, tools, and a repair workshop, without any monetary transactions taking place. No one buys, no one sells. This functioning, scaled up to an entire society, gives an idea of what the concept of communization encompasses. The term has circulated in critical theory circles for several decades, but it remains poorly understood outside of restricted circles.
Communization: a definition rooted in the concrete
The word designates a process, not a fixed state. Communization describes the movement through which market relations, wage labor, and private ownership of the means of production would be abolished in the very course of a social transformation, and not after a phase of state transition.
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In other words, it is not about taking state power to then redistribute wealth. The transformation occurs directly in daily practices: producing, living, feeding, and caring for oneself become activities organized in common, without mediation by money or a central bureaucracy.
This approach distinguishes itself from classical socialism on a specific point. It rejects the idea of an intermediate period where a party or a state would manage the transition to a classless society. For proponents of communization, this intermediate period reproduces the relations of domination that it claims to abolish. Complementary resources on this theoretical current are available at https://communisation.net/, which gathers texts and analyses from this field of thought.
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Theoretical origins of communization and break with orthodox Marxism
The concept emerged in the 1970s, primarily in France and Italy, within groups that reflect on the failures of 20th-century revolutions. The Soviet experience and the Chinese Cultural Revolution serve as counter-examples: in both cases, the seizure of state power did not lead to the disappearance of class relations.
Journals like Théorie Communiste and Endnotes have contributed to formalizing this critique. Their central argument can be summarized in one sentence: the proletariat cannot liberate itself by seizing capital, but by abolishing the capitalist relation itself.
This position breaks with Marxism-Leninism on the question of strategy. No vanguard party, no five-step program. Communization is conceived as a movement that arises from the contradictions of capitalism at the moment when they become unbearable for those who endure them.
What communization is not
Several confusions often arise. Communization is not communism in the partisan sense of the term. It is also not a utopia described in a manifesto. It does not propose a detailed plan for the future society.
- It is not a party ideology: no electoral program, no seizure of power through the ballot box or an organized coup
- It is not a return to barter: market exchange disappears entirely, including in its non-monetary forms
- It is not a progressive reform: the process requires a clear break with existing social relations, not a gradual adjustment
Communization and ecological crisis: a recent convergence
Since the late 2010s, several authors have linked communization to the climate issue. The logic is straightforward: if capitalism relies on infinite growth in a world with finite resources, abolishing the market relation also means moving away from productivism.
Andreas Malm, in his work on the climate emergency, articulates the critique of fossil capital with the necessity of a radical transformation of production modes. Thomas Piketty, from a different perspective, emphasizes the link between structural inequalities and environmental destruction.
This intersection between ecological critique and communization theory remains an open field. But it raises a concrete question: can we reorganize production and consumption on a large scale without going through the market or centralized planning?
Local experiments that foreshadow the debate
Some contemporary initiatives, without claiming to be communization, illustrate fragments of it. Communities pooling agricultural land, cooperative manufacturing workshops, and mutual care networks function partially outside of market relations.
These experiences do not constitute a communization, as they coexist with the market. However, they show that non-market forms of organization can operate at the local level, in areas as concrete as food or health.
Limits and objections to the project of communization
The concept raises serious objections. The most frequent concerns coordination. How to organize the production of complex goods (medications, infrastructure, energy) without a pricing mechanism or central authority? The theorists of communization acknowledge that this question remains largely open.
Another objection concerns violence. If communization implies a clear break with the existing order, the power relations that ensue raise the question of the forms that this transition would take in practice.
- Coordination problem: no operational model has been tested on a large scale to replace the market as a mechanism for resource allocation
- Temporal problem: the theory describes a process but remains vague about its duration and concrete stages
- Political problem: the absence of an organized program makes mobilization difficult beyond restricted activist circles
These limits do not invalidate the reflection. They situate it: communization functions more as a tool for critical analysis of capitalism than as a ready-made action plan. Its value lies in its ability to pose questions that other theoretical frameworks avoid, particularly the question of whether a society can function sustainably without market relations or a centralized state.
The debate on communization gains relevance as economic and ecological crises multiply. Understanding this concept, even without adhering to it, allows one to grasp why part of critical thought considers that reforms of the current system will not suffice to address the transformations that the century imposes.