Peter Kropotkin and communist anarchism

As one of leading advocates for anarchist communism in the 1870s, Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) spent much of his activist career explaining what its implementation involved. Treating communism as a principle of equality directed against subjection, he argued that it had an economic and a political aspect and that the inter-relationship of these two dimensions would reveal the distinctiveness of anarchist revolutionary politics. He also connected communism to anarchism by grounding it in a deep-rooted socialist ethic. The composite, ‘anarchist communism’ emerged as Kropotkin’s answer to capitalist exploitation on the one hand and to the threat of state socialism on the other.