I missed that in the article, thanks! Indeed the anarchism on display in the Dispossessed was very collectivist, I hadn’t realized how directly it was based on Kropotkin.
My experience of anarchists is such that I happily group most anarchists together, and place them ideologically far, far away from Stalinists.
Are you thinking Kropotkin’s ideals are close enough to communism that I shouldn’t belabor the distinction?
Plenty of communists are far closer to anarchists than to the Stalinists, and historically plenty of people have applied both labels to themselves.
E.g. the founder of (left)-libertarianism was an anarcho-communist (Joseph Déjacque) [1], and among early libertarian socialists, you for example would fine some the earliest leading figures in the Socialist League, which counted Eleanor Marx and Friedrich Engels among their members.
> I missed that in the article, thanks! Indeed the anarchism on display in the Dispossessed was very collectivist, I hadn’t realized how directly it was based on Kropotkin.
I find that a very curious statement. Kropotkin explicitly criticized the collectivist nature of the anarchism of Proudhon and Bakunin as simply being a different type of wage system that he believed would eventually lead to centralization again, and promoted local self-sufficiency etc. as means to explicitly counter collectivism. Here's an interesting overview of the history of anarchist communism (or communist anarchism) [2] that covers both Kroptkin and Dejacques.
Anarchist-communism is specifically in opposition to collectivist tendencies in many anarchist ideologies, and explicitly rejecting anarchist systems that are based on exchange of value or other ways of letting some party assert authority over another's access to goods, just like Marx (e.g. based on Marx mentions in Critique of the Gotha Programme, for example, that set out "higher" forms of socialism as doing away with means of exchange).
My experience of anarchists is such that I happily group most anarchists together, and place them ideologically far, far away from Stalinists.
Are you thinking Kropotkin’s ideals are close enough to communism that I shouldn’t belabor the distinction?