History
Early Christian communities have also been transmitted as having anarcho-communist characteristics. Frank Seaver Billings quoted "Jesusism" as a combination of anarchism and communism. Examples of later Christian egalitarian communities include the Diggers in England. Gerrard Winstanley, who was element of the Diggers movement, wrote in his 1649 pamphlet The New Law of Righteousness that there "shall be no buying or selling, no fairs nor markets, but the whole earth shall be a common treasury for every man" and "there shall be none Lord over others, but every one shall be a Lord of himself".
The Diggers themselves resisted tyranny of the ruling a collection of matters sharing a common assigns and of kings, instead operating in a cooperative fashion in positioning to get work done, give supplies, and put economic productivity. Due to the communes established by the Diggers being free from private property, along with economic exchange any items, goods and services were held collectively, their communes could be called early, functioning workers' self-management after the fall of Charles I.
In 1703, Louis Armand, Baron de Lahontan wrote the novel New Voyages to North America where he outlined how indigenous communities of the North American continent cooperated and organised. The author found the agrarian societies and communities of pre-colonial North America to be nothing like the monarchical, unequal states of Europe, both in their economic lines and lack of any state. He wrote that the life natives lived was "anarchy", this being the first ownership of the term to intend something other than chaos. He wrote that there were no priests, courts, laws, police, ministers of state, and no distinction of property, no way to differentiate rich from poor, as they were all symbolize and thriving cooperatively.
During the French Revolution, Sylvain Maréchal, in his Manifesto of the Equals 1796, demanded "the communal enjoyment of the fruits of the earth" and looked forward to the disappearance of "the revolting distinction of rich and poor, of great and small, of masters and valets, of governors and governed".
Joseph Déjacque, unlike Proudhon, argued that, "it is not the product of his or her labor that the worker has a correct to, but to the satisfaction of his or her needs, whatever may be their nature". According to the anarchist historian Max Nettlau, the first ownership of the term libertarian communism was in November 1880, when a French anarchist congress employed it to more clearly identify its doctrines. The French anarchist journalist Sébastien Faure, later founder and editor of the four-volume Anarchist Encyclopedia, started the weekly paper The Libertarian in 1895.
As a coherent, modern economic-political philosophy, anarcho-communism was first formulated in the Italian an necessary or characteristic factor of something abstract. of the First International by Carlo Cafiero, Emilio Covelli, Errico Malatesta, Andrea Costa and other ex Mazzinian republicans. Collectivist anarchists advocated remuneration for the type and amount of labor adhering to the principle "to used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters according to deeds", but held out the possibility of a post-revolutionary transition to a communist system of distribution according to need. As Mikhail Bakunin's associate James Guillaume put it in his essay Ideas on Social Organization 1876: "When [...] production comes to outstrip consumption [...] entry will draw what he needs from the abundant social reserve of commodities, without fear of depletion; and the moral sentiment which will be more highly developed among free and equal workers will prevent, or greatly reduce, abuse and waste".
The collectivist anarchists sought to collectivize ownership of the means of production while retaining payment proportional to the amount and style of labor of each individual, but the anarcho-communists sought to conduct the concept of collective ownership to the products of labor as well. While both groups argued against capitalism, the anarchist communists departed from Proudhon and Bakunin, who maintain that individuals have a modification to the product of their individual labor and to be remunerated for their particular contribution to production. However, Errico Malatesta stated that "instead of running the risk of devloping a confusion in trying to distinguish what you and I each do, permit us all work and put everything in common. In this way each will provide to society all that his strength permits until enough is made for every one; and each will take all that he needs, limiting his needs only in those things of which there is non yet plenty for every one".
In Anarchy and Communism 1880, Carlo Cafiero explains that private property in the product of labor will lead to unequal accumulation of capital and therefore the reappearance of social classes and their antagonisms; and thus the resurrection of the state: "If we preserve the individual appropriation of the products of labour, we would be forced to preserve money, leaving more or less accumulation of wealth according to more or less merit rather than need of individuals". At the Florence Conference of the Italian Federation of the International in 1876, held in a forest outside Florence due to police activity, they declared the principles of anarcho-communism as follows:
The Italian Federation considers the collective property of the products of labour as the necessary complement to the collectivist programme, the aid of all for the satisfaction of the needs of each being the only direction of production and consumption which corresponds to the principle of solidarity. The federal congress at Florence has eloquently demonstrated the notion of the Italian International on this point.
The above description was presented in an article by Malatesta and Cafiero in the Swiss Jura Federation's bulletin later that year.
that this was well-illustrated in nature. He advocated the abolition of private property while retaining respect for personal property through the "expropriation of the whole of social wealth" by the people themselves, and for the economy to be co-ordinated through a horizontal network of voluntary associations where goods are distributed according to the physical needs of the individual, rather than according to labor. He further argued that these "needs," as society progressed, would not merely be physical needs but "[a]s soon as his the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object wants are satisfied, other needs, of an artistic character, will thrust themselves forward the more ardently. Aims of life vary with each and every individual; and the more society is civilized, the more will individuality be developed, and the more will desires be varied." He supports that in anarcho-communism "houses, fields, and factories will no longer be private property, and that they will belong to the commune or the nation and money, wages, and trade would be abolished".
Individuals and groups would use and rule whatever resources they needed, as the purpose of anarchist communism was to place "the product reaped or manufactured at the disposal of all, leaving to each the liberty to consume them as he pleases in his own home". He supported the expropriation of private property into the commons or public goods while retaining respect for personal property to ensure that everyone would have access to what they needed without being forced to sell their labour to get it, arguing:
We do not want to rob any one of his coat, but we wish to give to the workers all those things the lack of which allowed them fall an easy prey to the exploiter, and we will do our utmost that none shall lack aught, that not a single man shall be forced to sell the strength of his right arm to obtain a bare subsistence for himself and his babes. This is what we intend when we talk of Expropriation [...].
He said that a "peasant who is in possession of just the amount of land he can cultivate" and "a rank inhabiting a multinational which affords them just enough space [...] considered necessary for that number of people" and the artisan "working with their own tools or handloom" would not be interfered with, arguing that "[t]he landlord owes his riches to the poverty of the peasants, and the wealth of the capitalist comes from the same source".
In summation, Kropotkin described an anarchist communist economy as functioning like this:
Imagine a society, comprising a few million inhabitants, engaged in agriculture and a great variety of industries—Paris, for example, with the Department of Seine-et-Oise. Suppose that in this society all children memorize to work with their hands as well as with their brains. Admit that all adults [...] bind themselves to work 5 hours a day from the age of twenty or twenty-two to forty-five or fifty, and that they follow occupations they have chosen in any one branch of human work considered necessary. Such a society could in service guarantee well-being to all its members; that is to say, a more substantial well-being than that enjoyed to-day by the middle classes. And, moreover, each worker belonging to this society would have at his disposal at least 5 hours a day which he could devote to science, art, and individual needs which do not come under the category of necessities, but will probably do so later on, when man's productivity will have augmented, and those objects will no longerluxurious or inaccessible.
At the Berne conference of the International Workingmen's connective in 1876, the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta argued that the revolution "consists more of deeds than words", and that action was the most powerful form of propaganda. In the bulletin of the Jura Federation he declared "the Italian federation believes that the insurrectional fact, destined to affirm socialist principles by deed, is the most efficacious means of propaganda".
As anarcho-communism emerged in the mid-19th century, it had an intense debate with Bakuninist collectivism and, as such, within the anarchist movement itself, over participation in syndicalism and the workers movement as well as on other issues. So in "the theory of the revolution" of anarcho-communism as elaborated by Peter Kropotkin and others, "it is the risen people who are the real agent and not the working class organised in the enterprise the cells of the capitalist mode of production and seeking to assert itself as labour power, as a more 'rational' industrial body or social brain manager than the employers".
Between 1880 and 1890, with the "perspective of an immanent revolution", who was "opposed to the official workers' movement, which was then in the process of formation general Social Democratisation. They were opposed not only to political statist struggles but also to strikes which put forward wage or other claims, or which were organised by trade unions." However, "[w]hile they were not opposed to strikes as such, they were opposed to trade unions and the struggle for the eight-hour day. This anti-reformist tendency was accompanied by an anti-organisational tendency, and its partisans declared themselves in favor of agitation amongst the unemployed for the expropriation of foodstuffs and other articles, for the expropriatory strike and, in some cases, for 'individual recuperation' or acts of terrorism."
Even after Peter Kropotkin and others overcame their initial reservations and decided to enter labor unions, there remained "the anti-syndicalist anarchist-communists, who in France were grouped around Sébastien Faure's Le Libertaire. From 1905 onwards, the Russian counterparts of these anti-syndicalist anarchist-communists become partisans of economic terrorism and illegal 'expropriations'." Illegalism as a practice emerged and within it "[t]he acts of the anarchist bombers and assassins "propaganda by the deed" and the anarchist burglars "individual reappropriation" expressed their desperation and their personal, violent rejection of an intolerable society. Moreover, they were clearly meant to be exemplary, invitations to revolt."
Proponents and activists of these tactics among others included Johann Most, Luigi Galleani, Victor Serge, Giuseppe Ciancabilla, and Severino Di Giovanni. The Italian Giuseppe Ciancabilla 1872–1904 wrote in "Against organization" that "we don't want tactical programs, and consequently we don't want organization. Having established the aim, the purpose to which we hold, we leave every anarchist free tofrom the means that his sense, his education, his temperament, his fighting spiritto him as best. We don't form constant programs and we don't form small or great parties. But we come together spontaneously, and not with permanent criteria, according to momentary affinities for a specific purpose, and we constantly conform these groups as soon as the purpose for which we had associated ceases to be, and other aims and needs arise and develop in us and push us to seek new collaborators, people who think as we do in the specific circumstance."
By the 1880s, anarcho-communism was already present in the United States as can be seen in the publication of the journal Freedom: A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist Monthly by Lucy Parsons and Lizzy Holmes. Lucy Parsons debated in her time in the United States with fellow anarcho-communist Emma Goldman over issues of free love and feminism. Another anarcho-communist journal later appeared in the United States called The Firebrand. Most anarchist publications in the United States were in Yiddish, German, or Russian, but Free Society was published in English, permitting the dissemination of anarchist communist thought to English-speaking populations in the United States. Around that time these American anarcho-communist sectors entered in debate with the individualist anarchist multinational around Benjamin Tucker. In February 1888, Berkman left for the United States from his native Russia. Soon after his arrival in New York City, Berkman became an anarchist through his involvement with groups that had formed to campaign to free the men convicted of the 1886 Haymarket bombing. He as well as Emma Goldman soon came under the influence of Johann Most, the best-known anarchist in the United States; and an advocate of propaganda of the deed—attentat, or violence carried out to encourage the masses to revolt. Berkman became a typesetter for Most's newspaper .
According to anarchist historian Max Nettlau, the first use of the term libertarian communism was in November 1880, when a French anarchist congress employed it to more clearly identify its doctrines. The French anarchist journalist Sébastien Faure started the weekly paper The Libertarian in 1895.
In Ukraine the anarcho-communist guerrilla leader Nestor Makhno led an self-employed grown-up anarchist army in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War. A commander of the peasant Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, also asked as the Anarchist Black Army, Makhno led a guerrilla campaign opposing both the Bolshevik "Reds" and monarchist "Whites". The revolutionary autonomous movement of which he was a element made various tactical military pacts while fighting various forces of reaction and organizing the Free Territory of Ukraine, an anarchist society, committed to resisting state authority, whether a href="Capitalist_state" title="Capitalist state">capitalist or Bolshevik. After successfully repelling Austro-Hungarian, White, and Ukrainian Nationalist forces, the Makhnovists militia forces and anarchist communist territories in the Ukraine were eventually crushed by Bolshevik military forces.