Concluding remarks

Previous:
Introduction
Deconstruction of Economic Thought
Characterisations and Characteristics of Communitarian Anarchism
Communitarian Anarchism Economic Thought
Kropotkin and the marginalisation of anarchist economic thought
Kropotkin’s economic thought: An Overview
Kropotkin’s work did not fall or fade into obscurity after it was published. His writings were widely read and were translated into many different languages in his own time and since:

‘Kropotkin’s work in the field of anarchist teaching was popularized through cheap pamphlets, sold up into the hundreds of thousands in practically every European language, and Chinese and Japanese as well’ (Baldwin 1968, p.31).

It was the communitarian anarchism of Kropotkin which found its way to Chinese intellectuals in the early years of the Chinese Revolution, before Marxist socialism had begun to take a firm hold in their own thought (Pickowicz 1990, pp.450-467). Diego Abad de Santillan acknowledged that Kropotkin’s work was the major influence in anarchist economic thought associated with the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s (Kern 1978, p.137).
Kropotkin’s communitarian anarchism also had a deep effect on the German anarchist Gustav Landauer, who was influential in early theorising regarding Israel’s ‘kibbutz’ concepts. Landauer first translated many of Kropotkin’s writings into German (Hyman 1977, pp.38-9, 61, 98-9). Today, many writings of ‘deep ecologists’ who seek a decentralised and less brutal industrialised society look to the communitarian anarchism of Kropotkin, amongst that of other anarchist thinkers from the past (see esp. Bookchin 1972).
Does the nature of economic thought really matter? Are the histories really of any significance to human society? Today’s capitalist societies are increasingly fragmenting. The opening gap between rich and poor, the growth of informal economies, the failure of the ‘market economy’ to naturally germinate in the fertile soil of the ex-state socialist countries, the continuing humanitarian catastrophes of starving people (see e.g. Mingione 1991), indicate that we have not reached the ‘end of economics’. There is need for any and all economic thought to be accessible in the search for solutions to social and environmental degradation. Through utilising the insights of Polanyi (who has been unfairly called upon here to stand alone in providing an analytical basis for deconstructing the notion of ‘economic thought’) it has been shown that there is more than sufficient intellectual ‘space’ for positive dissenting discourses within histories of economic thought. There is no reason whatsoever, other than ideological bias, why the economic thought embodied in communitarian anarchism should not hold a place within histories of economic thought. Alfred Marshall, in 1897, comparing contemporary economists with the ‘old’, drew a colourful sketch of the increasing power of the ‘science’ of economics, and economists:

They no longer wield the big battle-axe and sound the loud war cry like a Coeur de Lion; they keep in the background like a modern general: but they control larger forces than before. They exert a more far-reaching and more powerful influence on ideas: and ideas fashion the world ever more and more (1925a, p.297).

It is the power/knowledge wielded by ideologically selective histories which makes it imperative to rectify the neglect of discourses such as that of communitarian anarchism.
References