Communism is Freedom

“the ideological conflict is no longer between those who defend capitalism and those who reject it, but rather between hope and resignation.”

“strengthen the belief in the actual possibility of organizing our shared life in an entirely different and better way.”

“the result of having concrete experiences of being able to act and make changes together with other people.”

“Beautiful utopias don’t matter if they’re not accompanied by a confidence in the ability of collective action to change the course of history”

“More and more people are thinking about what a postcapitalist society could look like, and discussions about ‘degrowth communism’, ‘half-earth socialism’, ‘fully automated luxury communism’, ‘post-scarcity’, ‘salvage communism’ and ‘the world commune’ are proliferating.”

“An individual’s access to their own material conditions of existence is always mediated by social relations, which is another way of saying that it is always a political issue, and for this reason, freedom can never merely consist in the absence of the power of the community over the individual, but must also consist in the possibility on the part of individuals to participate in the political processes that shape their relationships to their conditions of existence.”

“Communism is the effort to establish institutions that can ensure the highest possible degree of individual freedom and democratic control over those aspects of human life that are, necessarily, shared by the members of a society.”

“Communism relies on the acknowledgement that there are aspects of our life that are ontologically collective, and which therefore cannot be left to individuals.”

“The communization of our shared conditions of existence isn’t based on a moral claim about the common or the collective as somehow finer or better or higher than the individual, but on the simple insight that the reproduction of the human species is inherently social, and that the total democratization of the shared aspects of this reproduction is the only reasonable consequence of that fact.”

“The fundamental condition of communism is that the basic conditions of the life of society are brought under democratic control.”

“Let’s call the basic unit of the institutional structure of communism the commune.”

“In practice, this is an ideal impossible to realize, partly because one of the basic conditions of all communes is a stable biosphere, and that can only be guaranteed through some sort of global regulation of the use of our common natural resources.”

Commentator’s Note: I would need to engage with the program here in much more depth to see if I can really get on board. There are many gaps. From the section “The Commune” through the following sections “The Public Sector” and “The Private Sector,” this reads very much as an “ideal impossible to realize,” and less an actionable program. But, the following quotation, “free, classless, and diverse,” I can get behind.

“So, what would life under communism look like? Above all, a communist society would be free, classless, and diverse.”

“Communism would give everyone the freedom to shape their own lives as they wish. Communism would be synonymous with more democratic decision-making, fewer working hours, better housing, better food, and a stable biosphere, as well as with something capitalism can never offer—economic security.”

“This is based on an article which originally ran in Information and was translated from the Danish by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg”