"With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols of things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. [...] It will be a marvellous thing — the true personality of man — when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us, by being what it is. The personality of man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child."
— Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891
This is not an antiquated fantasy of a good life. This is not an esoteric science needing decrypting.
This is, at its simplest, the same scale as if 3-12+ friends were to put together a social gathering — with the intention of pooling, refining and deploying the resources and infrastructure to help in a shared interest on freely deliberated, intentionally adaptable and soundly agreed terms.
The interest, in this hypothetical case: to live autonomously amongst a voluntary harmony of free ideas and free decisions over ourselves that contributes to shared interests, desires and needs. In short, a way of doing "society" where The Society, The "Need" For "A Good" Society is Not The Center of coming together. A way of asserting the individual participants, the free gatherings, councils, etc., As The Centers of any incentive to come together. The contents of wise and prudent works will determine what social shape, what taxonomic definition, if any, is prescribed to the people who lend a hand in the world directly shaped, in the world that lives are nourished in.
I would prefer this intentional situation to encourage plurality where genuinely possible and clearly beneficial. And I would find this satisfactory to myself as an individualist green anarchist who would happily work with anarchist communists, anti-authoritarian council communists, autonomist Marxists and unlabeled left-libertarians simply pursuing participatory activities as the resolute correction to longstanding injuries.
Any effort calling itself "Communist" that actively refuses to underscore the essential character of anarchists' vital participation, including the participation of self-describing individualist anarchists like myself with non-individualist associates, is not a communist effort at all. Communism in this sense remains the same dusty, golden carrot dangling from the old, dead branch of Leninism, of its infantilization, its contempt for working people who would resolutely direct themselves against the bourgeoisie, expecting them to herald a Good Shepherd to Show Them The Way.
The communism that I want is a communism that encompasses only what the sustaining elements of that communism decide it will. And as someone who would gladly participate as a consenting sustainer, a friendly neighbor opposed to all authority, a voluntary steward to what matters to me, to what concerns me, I would like to personally reside in a humble cottage with a garden in the woodlands, aside or away from other self-owning individuals, rather than continue to live in apartments and suburbs as I have for almost three decades now. And I would certainly resist, I would certainly be the worst nuisance to any forceful demand to toil under someone else's, on some external collective's terms, calling it "the struggle for Communism."
And for the kind of communism I want to be realistic, it must always be ad hoc, spontaneous and able to be burned down and rebuilt as wanted. That is all there is to it. I refuse to call myself a communist not because I am against communism that includes and actively involves anarchists and other anti-authoritarians. I refuse to call myself a communist because I understand that the good nature and the sharp intellect of the individual communist comes far before the communism which that individual aspires to. There is not an existing communism, there is not an existing socialism on the verge of communism to fall in with. There is only a great swathe of proletarians, of anti-work individuals to meet, get to know and get to collaborate with.
What comes from that is to be decided by the involvement of the people considering their existing circumstances, considering the nuanced efforts to build real material potential, considering the means to actualize the effective steps out of liberalism and out of authoritarian leftism at once.
I wrote a short piece in October 2024, Black and Red Rags. I still stand on its contents, regardless of what misunderstandings doubtlessly come from trying to take in my meaning. If spectacles of belonging were not so pernicious, there would be no concern of Marxist-Leninists, PSL and DSA members battering and berating anarchists. They could remain in the circles they are while still understanding the basic premise I have made, agreeing and disagreeing with clear factors accounted for, dialog aptly tracing these threads. Getting somewhere. Yet we still exist under the monstrously warped dying swipes of colonial, patriarchal capital accelerated through repressive, chaos-inducing technologies. And every video essay, podcast, comment section and group chat distracts from putting hands on things, moving them into place and applying them as agreed to, as felt immediately in individuals or in groups of friends.
I will always maintain that the best communism wears the black rather than the red. Red is the color of a hope for a workers' state, with little vocal contemplation of that alleged withering away of the state. Black is the color of the intent for a complete and immediate withering away of command, of submission, of compulsory toil, of any and all power given to anti-individual, anti-autonomy, anti-agency and anti-freethought sentiment. Black for the anarchist means both the old blood of rebel ancestors as well as the blacking out of everything that continues to black out every individual light. The black-colored communism, in this instance, is the shared substance of capable neighbors, friends and loved ones asserting and enriching conscious self-worth, putting what they can and want into gathering and nourishing among good spirits.
We do not need to sacrifice and give new blood to the red, to expect the red to eternally go on as a forsaken beautiful idea. Nor should the black go on as a simply "more legitimate" forsaken beautiful idea. The black is one particular designation of an unrelenting character of living spirit. The black, at the very least, is the articulate, resonant and active resentment that informs the next fighting intellect. The red is the persistent, symbolically defiant hope, the perfectly stunted agitation congealed into another heritage on the reductive, anti-individual human mantle.
If certain people who are less plugged into theory will need to articulate their hopes for survival as individuals and as loved ones through the lens of a safety net, of at least an immediate hardscrabble communism, I squarely refuse to blame them.
I instead want to introduce a seed of self-affirmation in what one feels right, not what one is told to feel from the ancient pages of 1917. This is hopefully where amicable encounters with red flag-wavers will produce intelligent dialog, against the sports team mentality of the old world that we want to see in smoldering ashes behind us. We'll see.
Every human being is a contribution to the constellations, to the libraries of mundane brilliance and brilliant mundanity alike. Insofar that there is any traffic of interpersonal affairs, let us compose the free regulations against all fatal mundanity, in agreement with the soundest brilliance that each are capable of elevating and improving. Our communism is not a following of commandments or an idolizing of dead tyrants. Our communism is the fruit of good spirits among friendly and intentional individual human beings living here and now.