page_title: Social anarchism
section_title: Anarcho-communism
hierarchical_section_title: Social anarchism / Historical currents / Anarcho-communism
caption_attribution_description: Peter Kropotkin circa 1900
context_page_description: Social anarchism is the branch of anarchism that sees individual freedom as interrelated with mutual aid. Social anarchist thought emphasizes community and social equality as complementary to autonomy and personal freedom. It attempts to accomplish this balance through freedom of speech, which is maintained in a decentralized federalism, with freedom of interaction in thought and subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is best defined as "that one should not withdraw from individuals and commit to the community what they can accomplish by their own enterprise and industry" and that "[f]or every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them", or the slogan "Do not take tools out of people's hands".
  Social anarchism has been the dominant form of anarchism.
context_section_description: Anarcho-communism is a theory of anarchism that advocates the abolition of the state, markets, money, capitalism and private property. Politically, anarcho-communists advocate replacing the nation-state and representative government with a voluntary confederation of free communes (self-governing municipalities), with the commune replacing the nation as the core unit of social-political administration. Economically, anarcho-communists believe in converting private property into the commons or public goods while retaining respect for personal property. In practice, this means common ownership of the means of production, direct democracy with production organised through a horizontal network of voluntary associations and consumption based on the guiding principle: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". Some forms of anarcho-communism such as insurrectionary anarchism are strongly influenced by egoism and radical individualism, believing anarcho-communism is the best social system for the realization of individual freedom. Most anarcho-communists view anarcho-communism as a way of reconciling the opposition between the individual and society.
  The ideas associated with anarcho-communism developed out of radical socialist currents after the French Revolution, but it was first formulated as such in the Italian section of the First International. The theoretical work of Peter Kropotkin, who believed that in anarchy workers would spontaneously self-organize to produce goods for all of society, took importance later as it expanded and developed pro-organizationalist and insurrectionary anti-organizationalist sections. In terms of its vision for a post-capitalist economy, it differs from anarcho-syndicalism in seeing the centre of political-economic organisation as the commune, rather than the workplace, with economic issues being administered primarily on a communal (territorial), rather than unionist (industrial), basis. Although most anarcho-syndicalists agree with the communist method of distribution—"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"—they disagree with the commune-based method of organising production and structuring society, making them communists in one sense, but not the other. To date, the best known examples of an anarcho-communist society (i.e. established around the ideas as they exist today and achieving worldwide attention and knowledge in the historical canon) are the Free Territory during the Russian Revolution, the Korean People's Association in Manchuria and the anarchist territories during the Spanish Revolution 
  During the Russian Revolution, anarchists such as Nestor Makhno worked through the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine to create and defend anarcho-communism in the Free Territory of Ukraine from 1919 before being conquered by the Bolsheviks in 1921 during the Russian and Ukrainian civil wars. In 1929, anarcho-communism was achieved in Korea by the Korean Anarchist Federation in Manchuria (KAFM) and the Korean Anarcho-Communist Federation (KACF), with help from anarchist general and independence activist Kim Chwa-chin, lasting until 1931, when Imperial Japan assassinated Kim and invaded from the south while the Chinese Nationalists invaded from the north, resulting in the creation of Manchukuo, a puppet state of the Empire of Japan. Through the efforts and influence of the Spanish anarchists during the Spanish Revolution within the Spanish Civil War starting in 1936, anarcho-communism existed in most of Aragon, parts of Andalusia and the Levante and Andalusia as well as in the stronghold of anarchist Catalonia before being crushed by the combined forces of the regime that won the war, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini as well as Spanish Communist Party repression backed by the Soviet Union and economic and armaments blockades from the capitalist countries and the Spanish Republic itself.
caption: Peter Kropotkin
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