Notes
1. Here and elsewhere in the book Rexroth uses the term “libertarian” in its original sense as a near-synonym for “anarchist” or “antiauthoritarian.” It should go without saying that this has nothing to do with the more recent right-wing capitalist use of the term.
1. The phrase “individual anarchism” appears here and in a few other
places in the original edition. I have changed it to “individualist
anarchism,” which is the much more usual term for that type of
anarchism.
2. Allusion to the 1953 East German revolt demanding “a government of
steelworkers”; the 1956 workers’ councils revolution in Hungary; the
1968 “Prague Spring” in Czechoslovakia; and the successive Polish
revolts of 1956, 1970, and 1976, culminating in the 1981 “Solidarity”
movement.
2. Allusion to Djilas’s book The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist
System (1956), for which he was imprisoned for nine years.
2. See “The Explosion Point of Ideology in China” (Situationist
International Anthology, PM Press, 2024, pp. 240-251) and Simon Leys’s
book The Chairman’s New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (1971),
online here.
9. See Frederick Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property,
and the State (1884), which drew on the then-recent anthropological
researches of Lewis Henry Morgan.
14. Allusion to Karl Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study
of Total Power (1957). Wittfogel argued that the necessity for
large-scale irrigation networks and flood control tended to generate
all-powerful centralized bureaucracies in ancient “Oriental”
societies such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China; and that this type
of totalitarian power was in many respects reproduced in modern
Stalinist regimes.
16. “Eremitical” (or “hermitical”): relating to the life of solitary
religious hermits.
32. Rexroth is referring here to the modern Pope John XXIII (reigned
1958-1963) who was later declared a saint. The earlier “Pope John XXIII”
mentioned on pp. 60-62 was a retired pirate (!) and was retroactively
declared an “antipope.”
36. Milton’s sonnet is “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” (1655).
39. The original edition says “superseded St. Francis,” but since Waldo
came before Francis, the sense is “preempted.”
44. On this intriguing topic, see Rexroth’s essay “The Spiritual Alchemy
of Thomas Vaughan,” online
here.
48. “Unpredicable” is is not a misspelling of “unpredictable”! It
(roughly) means undescribable or unqualifiable.
56. “When Adam dalf and Eve span”: i.e. when Adam delved (hoed the
ground) and Eve spun (to create thread for sewing).
58. The original edition says “the Great Revolution,” but this is an
obvious slip for the Glorious Revolution (1688-1689), the relatively
bloodless revolution that kicked out King James II and replaced him with
his daughter and son-in-law, Mary and William of Orange, who agreed to
reign in a monarchy in which the Parliament had significantly more
leverage than before.
64. Oddly enough, there were three historic “Defenestrations of
Prague”: 1419, 1483, and 1618. The first one marked the beginning of the
Hussite wars. The third one triggered the Thirty Years War.
112. See Bourne’s essay “War Is the Health of the State,” online
here.
121. Rexroth wrote interesting essays on both
Gnosticism and
the
Kabbalah.
179. Allusion to Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy: A Reply to “The
Philosophy of Poverty” by M. Proudhon (1847).
227. On the old revolutionary movement, here is a passage from a 1962
situationist article:
The assault of the first workers’ movement against the whole organization of the old world came to an end long ago, and nothing can bring it back to life. It failed. Certainly it achieved immense results, but not the ones it had originally intended. . . . The apparent successes of this movement are actually its fundamental failures (reformism or the establishment of a state bureaucracy), while its failures (the Paris Commune or the 1934 Asturian revolt) are its most promising successes so far, for us and for the future. . . . The classical workers’ movement can be considered to have begun a couple decades before the official formation of the International, with the first linkup of communist groups of several countries that Marx and his friends organized from Brussels in 1845. And it was completely finished after the defeat of the Spanish revolution, that is, after the Barcelona May days of 1937.
We need to rediscover the whole truth of this period and to reexamine all the oppositions between revolutionaries and all the neglected possibilities. . . . Marx’s thought is obviously the first which must be rediscovered. . . . But it is also necessary to reassess the anarchist positions in the First International, Blanquism, Luxemburgism, the council movements in Germany and Spain, Kronstadt, the Makhnovists, etc. Without overlooking the practical influence of the utopian socialists. All this, of course, not with the aim of scholarship or academic eclecticism, but solely in order to contribute toward the formation of a new, profoundly different revolutionary movement, a movement of which we have seen so many premonitory signs over the last few years, one of which is our own existence. [Situationist International Anthology, pp. 109–110.]
235. On the May 1968 revolt, see René Viénet’s book Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement: France, May ’68 and the related articles, documents, and graffiti in the Situationist International Anthology (pp. 288–325, 435–457).
Ken Knabb’s notes for the new edition of Kenneth Rexroth’s Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (PM Press, 2026).