Kenneth Rexroth, Communalism From Its Origins to the Twentieth CenturyThis is what all the schools and tendencies of the libertarian and communal tradition have in common, a primary emphasis on man as a member of an organic community, a biota, in creative, non-exploitative relationship with his fellows and his environment. The communist-anarchists Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin were both geographers and, if anyone was, they were also the founders of the science of ecology.
Kenneth Rexroth, Communalism From Its Origins to the Twentieth CenturyPeople who believe in libertarian communism can be grouped roughly under three general theories, each with its old masters, theoreticians, leaders, organizations, and literature. First there are the anarchists in a rather limited variety: communist-anarchists, mutualists, anarcho-syndicalists, individual anarchists, and a few minor groups and combinations. Second, the members of intentional communities, usually but by no means always religious in inspiration. The words “communalism” and “communalist” seem to have died out and it would be good to appropriate them to this group, although the by now too confusing word “communist” actually fits them best of all.
Kropotkin Pjotr, THE CONQUEST OF BREAD, CHAPTER III, ANARCHIST COMMUNISM (1906) To-day, when groups scattered far and wide wish to organize themselves for some object or other, they no longer elect an international parliament of Jacks-of-all-trades. No, where it is not possible to meet directly or come to an agreement by correspondence, delegates versed in the question at issue are sent to treat, with the instructions: "Endeavour to come to an agreement on such or such a question and then return not with a law in your pocket, but with a proposition of agreement which we may or may not accept."
Murray Bookchin, Ecology and Revolutionary Thought (1964) There is more to anarchism than decentralized communities. If I have examined these possibilities in some detail, it has been to demonstrate than an anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.
