Free association (communism and anarchism)

Free association (also called free association of producers or, as Marx often called it, a community of freely associated individuals) is a relationship among individuals where there is no state, social class or authority, and private property of means of production. Once private property is abolished, individuals are no longer deprived of access to means of production enabling them to freely associate (without social constraint) to produce and reproduce their own conditions of existence and fulfill their individual and creative needs and desires. The term is used by anarchists and Marxists and is often considered a defining feature of a fully developed communist society.

The concept of free association, however, becomes more clear around the concept of the proletariat. The proletarian is someone who has no property nor any means of production and, therefore, to survive, sells the only thing that they have, their abilities (the labour power), to those owning the means of production. The existence of individuals deprived of property, deprived of livelihood, allows owners (or capitalists) to find in the market an object of consumption that thinks and acts (human abilities), which they use in order to accumulate increasing capital in exchange for the wage that maintains the survival of the proletarians. The relationship between proletarians and owners of the means of production is thereby a forced association in which the proletarian is only free to sell his labor power, in order to survive. By selling his productive capacity in exchange for the wage which ensures survival, the proletarian puts his practical activity under the will of the buyer (the owner), becoming alienated from his/her own actions and products, in a relationship of domination and exploitation. Free association would be the form of society created if private property was abolished in order to allow individuals to freely dispose of the means of production, which would bring about an end to class society, i.e. there would be no more owners neither proletarians, nor state, but only freely associated individuals.

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