What is Communisation Theory?

[Zoroaster]

I've been recently reading an article by Gilles Dauvé, in which he explains what Communisation is, but I still don't understand it. So, what is it exactly?

[(A)]

From Wikipedia.

In communist political theory, communization is the process of abolishing ownership of the means of production, which, in societies dominated by the capitalist mode of production, are owned by individual capitalists, states, or other collective bodies. In some versions of communist theory, communization is understood as the transfer of ownership from private capitalist hands to the collective hands of producers, whether in the form of co-operative enterprises or communes, or through the mediation of a state or federation of workers' councils on a local, national, or global scale. In other programs, such as those of some left communists (e.g. Gilles Dauvé), autonomists (e.g., Mario Tronti), and libertarian communists (e.g. Peter Kropotkin), communization means the abolition of property itself along with any state-like institutions claiming to represent a given subset of humanity. In these accounts humanity as a whole, directly or indirectly, would take over the task of the production of goods for use (and not for exchange). People would then have free access to those goods rather than exchanging labor for money, and distribution would take place according to the maxim "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

[Sasha]

http://www.revleft.org/vb/showthread.php?t=177747

[Ele'ill]

that link is broken for me, I was searching earlier today for threads on this topic and saw this thread

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

I stole this from an article here: https://libcom.org/library/communisation

In a nutshell


The idea is fairly simple, but simplicity is often one of the most difficult goals to achieve. It means that a revolution is only communist if it changes all social relationships into communist relationships, and this can only be done if the process starts in the very early days of the revolutionary upheaval. Money, wage-labour, the enterprise as a separate unit and a value-accumulating pole, work-time as cut off from the rest of our life, production for value, private property, State agencies as mediators of social life and conflicts, the separation between learning and doing, the quest for maximum and fastest circulation of everything, all of these have to be done away with, and not just be run by collectives or turned over to public ownership: they have to be replaced by communal, moneyless, profitless, Stateless, forms of life. The process will take time to be completed, but it will start at the beginning of the revolution, which will not create the preconditions of communism: it will create communism.

"Those who developed the theory of communisation rejected this posing of revolution in terms of forms of organisation, and instead aimed to grasp the revolution in terms of its content. Communisation implied a rejection of the view of revolution as an event where workers take power followed by a period of transition: instead it was to be seen as a movement characterised by immediate communist measures (such as the free distribution of goods) both for their own merit, and as a way of destroying the material basis of the counter-revolution. If, after a revolution, the bourgeoisie is expropriated but workers remain workers, producing in separate enterprises, dependent on their relation to that workplace for their subsistence, and exchanging with other enterprises, then whether that exchange is self-organised by the workers or given central direction by a "workers' state" means very little: the capitalist content remains, and sooner or later the distinct role or function of the capitalist will reassert itself. By contrast, the revolution as a communising movement would destroy - by ceasing to constitute and reproduce them - all capitalist categories: exchange, money, commodities, the existence of separate enterprises, the State and - most fundamentally - wage labour and the working class itself." (Endnotes, # 2, 2010)


I think the concept becomes needlessly complex due to a combination of poor French to English translations and also the use of a fair amount of academic speak on the part of the theorists themselves.

[radiocaroline]

Creating communes... Simple as.. No need for long words or silly anecdotes

[Comrade #138672]

Is communization not just another word for socialization? Unless you insist on there being a difference between communism and socialism, but even then.