Friday, July 9, 2010

Communization

I'm intrigued by the hard-left militancy at the Oakland Oscar Grant riots. Recall that the "Occupy California" forces were among the rioters and looters on the ground. They celebrated the looting as "liberating the shoes" from the capitalist immiseraters. I just found one of the movement's mobilization pamphlets from earlier this year, "After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California." These folks are fairly sophisticated in the ideological outlook. The introductory essay discusses the state's crisis of educational funding and advocates direct action toward revolutionary "communization." Looking at Wikipedia, I see this description:
Communization is the process of the abolition of the private 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 these accounts, communization means that the multitude or humanity as a whole, directly or indirectly, takes over the tasks of planning the production of goods for use (not for exchange) and according to socially-determined needs. People would then have free access to those goods rather than exchanging labor for money and then exchanging labor for goods as in less advanced phases of socialism.

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