Maybe I'm missing something, but I have found myself somewhat befuddled by the discourse that complains about marxism's "appropriation" of. Apparently, some people are annoyed that the term communism has been used as synonymous with marxism because they believe it is a concept that isthan marxism, and that marxists have unfairly "colonized" it for their own and nefarious purposes. Thus we have anarcho-communists complaining about the supposed appropriation of the name "communism" and the demand for some sort of recognition that this name is older and broader than marxism and should not be espoused as especial to marxist ideology.I am pretty sure that this complaint about the appropriation of the word "communism" is new. A decade and a half ago, when I was a proud anarchist, I was generally under the impression thatreferred to a marxist ideology––specifically a marxist-leninist ideology––and was, in my anarchist imagination, a "failed" anti-capitalism. I was not offended that marxists had appropriated the word "communism" because I never thought of it as belonging properly to anarchism. Obviously I understood that some anarchists used the term "anarcho-communism" but I felt this was simply because they based their anarchism upon certain marxist analyses of history and the economy. Furthermore, I also understood that even some marxists were uncomfortable with the word "communism" because, despite Marx and Engels', it was a word that had become overcoded by those communist movements that had failed. In any case, at least in the anarchist scene with which I was familiar, there was no complaint that the word "communist" was synonymous with "marxist"––we used it to mean the same thing, after all, and proudly saw ourselves as the anti-capitalist trajectory that wascommunist.Considering that this complaint about the supposed marxist appropriation of communism seems to have been made in the past two years, I would like to blame Alain Badiou and hisfor making it into a [non-]issue. After all, he seems to claim that there is an idea of communism that can be located in the dim past, almost like a Platonic idea, and I suppose this is tantalizing for those anti-capitalists who like Badiou but also love their anarchism. The problem, however, is that Badiou has projected a modern concept unto the past where even the same name did not always exist. The supposedof the times where there was no capitalism did not generally use the name "communism"; when they did––they did––it meant something entirely different than even what anarcho-communists would want it to mean. Here we find a transhistorical explanation of a concept that, true to Badiou's neo-Platonism, is somewhat anti-materialist. (At the same time, however, I would be remiss if I did not mention that I enjoyed Badiou's riposte to Negri: when Negri mocked him for being a communist who wasn't a marxist, he responded [and rightly so] that it was better than being a marxist who wasn't a communist!) The confusion surrounding theandof communism has been entirely muddled by Badiou's intervention; I am quite certain that it has to do with the recent muddled complaints about the word's appropriation.Whatever the case, Jean-Luc Nancy did manage to trace the origin of the word "communism" to the 11th Century, thus demonstrating that itswas older than thedefined by Marx and Engels. In, Nancy claims that it was defined in the 14th Century as meaning "people having in common a property belonging to the category of––that is, not being submitted to the law of heritage." But in the 11th century it simply had to do with vague notions of "communal movements" and "communal law". Here we find a name that shares something of the modern meaning but that is still the detritus of a past epoch: to have property in common, to reject "the law of heritage", to be nothing more than a communal movement with a communal law is a vague concept. A community of monks, as Nancy points out, is also a moment of this named "communism"––none of this really has anything to do, regardless of a vague connection, with anti-capitalism.Words can easily be traced into the deep past and accrue various meanings; there is an important distinction to be made betweenandand in my discipline, philosophy, entire libraries are filled with books dedicated to making such distinctions. Simply because a name is shared does not mean the concept is shared; conflating the two categories leads to sloppy definitions. Take, for example, the word: the name is shared by Gramsci and the Ancient Greeks, but the definitive concept, respectively, is not identical. Whereas the termfor the Greeks, based on the root, should grammatically mean the system presided over by a given ruler [a], for Gramsci it meant the way in which a ruling class operationalized its ruling ideas––there is something similar in the conceptualization of the names and yet this similarity is primarily in theand not theThe same problem exists for the word "communism" with its rootthat would eventually appear in numerous Latin-derived languages. And at the end of the 19th Century, when radical movements were attempting to define themselves according to commonly understood words, it is understandable that some words would appear as identical as previous words that were similarly derived, but for different reasons, from the same etymological root. But the fact of the matter is that, in the anti-capitalist milieu, the first ideological movement that chose the word, in order to draw a distinction between itself and a general, was the movement headed by Marx and Engels. They did not use this word because of its prior definitions, also derived from the root of, in previous centuries where capitalism had not yet fully emerged; they simply chose this word because no other anti-capitalist movement in the 18th Century was using it.Crudely put, Marx and Engels wanted tothe notion of thethey cared little about the previous attempts to do so because those attempts had nothing to do with their concrete circumstances––and thus produced a concept that, unlike the past and untheorized variants, would have a modern and world historical resonance. (It is worth noting, here, that the aforelinked Nancy article is a typical exercise in language idealism for failing to recognize this fact: it conflatesandand, in doing so, pretends as if every concept possesses an etymological destiny and, in this destiny, must remain identical simply because of the use of the same word. The semantic games he plays in this article withand the etymological roots of the word should be evidence of a nebulous eclecticism that is unwilling to think through anything beyond the appearance of a given concept.) To claim that the definition provided by Marx and Engels is some sort of appropriation of a general concept is disingenuous because this is the origin of the modern concept.Communism as a modern concept, then, first appears in the formation of the Communist League whose manifesto was written by Marx and Engels. Communism as a concept is irrevocably marxist and was understood as thus by every anti-capitalist who rejected the analysis of this manifesto. Indeed, debates within the First International were understood as debates between theand the, the former being treated as synonymous with marxists due to the Communist League. At that time the word, which was the first modern and fully conceptualized articulation of the word, was understood as a name belonging to marxism. Tracing its origin back to its etymological roots and pre-capitalist usages tells us nothing about its emergence as a concept, only that it was previously used as a semi-concept––a name with a vague definition.Concepts that are worth understanding as concepts should not possess some esoteric meaning that can never be grasped. Concepts must possess a moment of coherence, where definitions are concrete, otherwise they are meaningless: concepts that slip through every usage of a common name, that are nothing but etymological games, are not concepts but meaningless words. If something can meanthen it also meansas a concept. Definitions matter. Most importantly, they matter because they are historical.What does the name "communism" mean historically? It does not mean whatever we would like it to mean, it does not mean the 14th or 11th century vague definitions, and it does not mean anarchism or some other nebulous anti-capitalism. It means the operationalization of marxist ideology and it has been historically understood as such––not because marxists haveit but because the word was defined as a modern concept by Marx and Engels and that, following this definition, it was operationalized in marxist revolutions. The capitalist camp during the cold war understood that communism meant; it understood its enemy. Similarly, anti-capitalists understoodas meaning something specific and not according to some crude etymological destiny where the original definition "of or pertaining to a head" was taken as the basis of theTo claim that the term "communism" has been annexed by marxists, then, is little more than an act of bad faith on the part of people who want to now use the word simply because it has been repopularized by chic philosophers. If the word was annexed then all modern concepts have been similarly annexed and appropriated––must we seek some etymological purity in every word and concept? No: if we speak ofnow then we are speaking of a modern concept that was initially defined by Marx and Engels and the movement they represented. Until very recently all anti-capitalists, even anarcho-communists, understood this definition as a fact. So to those who claim that marxists have "appropriated" the wordwe should reply: stop trying to appropriate our name and pretend that we did not originate it as a concept––find another term to colonize.