Marx's Communism as Associations of Free Individuals
Marx's communism is usually regarded as the eradication of private property and the creation of a planned economy, or statization. However, for most of his life Marx described the communist society as the "association of free individuals" (AFI) Yet existing discourses on communism have seldom paid attention to the aspect of Marx's communism as AFI. Indeed, the Japanese edition of the Marx Engels Werke translates Marx's term, "Association" into more than twenty different words. Reading Marx's texts on the future society and drawing on recent Japanese works on Marx's AFI, I will focus on three aspects of Marx's communism freedom, individuality and association. I will emphasize the concrete and non utopian nature of Marx's AFI by showing that the sprouts of AFI emerge in capitalism. Finally, I will argue that reducing Marx's AFI to some sort of labor time calculation planning model contradicts his original idea of AFI as an "open model" one that advances towards the abolition of labor in "developed communism"