Communalism
From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century
(1974 book by Kenneth Rexroth,
reprinted with additional material by Ken Knabb in 2026)
New Introduction
Kenneth Rexroth was born in Indiana in 1905, descended from a variety of
abolitionists, socialists, anarchists, feminists, and freethinkers.
After an unusually enlightened upbringing he was orphaned at the age of
thirteen. He spent most of his teenage years in Chicago, where he worked
as a cub reporter and helped run a bohemian café, mingling with the
musicians, artists, writers, radicals, and eccentrics of the Jazz Age.
Almost totally self-educated, he read omnivorously, wrote poetry, did
abstract painting, and began teaching himself several languages. In his
late teens he joined the IWW and hitched all over the country, spending
summers in the Far West working as a cowboy cook and wrangler and at
various farm and forestry jobs, and once worked his way to Paris and
back.
In 1927 he and his wife Andrée moved to San Francisco, where they divided their time between the city and the California Sierras. (He later wrote a detailed manual: Camping in the Western Mountains.) In the early 1930s he took part in the struggles that led to the San Francisco General Strike of 1934. During World War II he was a conscientious objector and worked to aid Japanese Americans who were being sent to concentration camps (including coming up with scams that enabled some of them to escape incarceration altogether).
After the war he co-founded the San Francisco Anarchist Circle, which gave rise to numerous political and cultural offshoots, including the first Pacifica radio station, KPFA. Often referred to as “the founder of the San Francisco Renaissance” or “the godfather of the Beats,” he hosted readings and discussions at his home, pioneered the reading of poetry to jazz, introduced Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac to Gary Snyder, wrote a twice-weekly newspaper column, reviewed more than five thousand books on all topics over KPFA, and published more than thirty volumes of poems, plays, essays, and translations of poetry from Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese (including four volumes of Chinese and Japanese women poets).
In 1968 he moved to Santa Barbara, California, where he taught popular courses in poetry and song. Apart from some extended sojourns in Japan, he lived there until his death in 1982.
* * *
I’ve started with that brief summary of Rexroth’s life for readers who may not be familiar with the remarkable author of this remarkable book — a book that reflects his wide-ranging experiences in the real world, not in academia.
Following World War II and the defeat or co-option of the old radical movements, Rexroth had been slowly and steadily working toward a radical renewal, beginning with the Anarchist Circle and continuing with various other activities into the fifties. In 1957, at a time when most commentators were complacently declaring that the age of experiment and revolt was over, he wrote:
The youngest generation is in a state of revolt so absolute that its elders cannot even recognize it. . . . Critically invisible, modern revolt, like X-rays and radioactivity, is perceived only by its effects at more materialistic social levels, where it is called delinquency.
In 1960, as the early civil rights movement was getting under way, he noted that this revolt was taking a more positive turn:
The brutal reactionary tendencies in American life are being challenged, not on a political basis, Left versus Right, but because of their patent dishonesty and moral violence. . . . The programs are used up . . . power and program are not the question: what matters is the immediate realization of humane content, here, there, everywhere, in every fact and relationship of society. . . . This means personal moral action. I suppose, if you wish to call it that, it means a spiritual revolution.
During the next few years these new tendencies continued to percolate, but mostly under the radar. (Note that most of the things “the sixties” later became famous for did not come to widespread public notice till around 1965.) Here is one of his newspaper columns at that point:
Living as I do in the Haight-Ashbury, which seems to have become the headquarters for the New Youth, the New Left, the New Student, the New Bohemia, the New Negro, and several other New Categories, I am constantly reminded of “what’s happening,” and though Mr. Smith may not know what it is, I think I have a pretty fair idea.
The other evening I read with great interest a new book, All Things Common: The Hutterian Way of Life by Victor Peters, published by the University of Minnesota Press. The Hutterians are a German-speaking pietist, communal, and pacifist sect whose origins date back to the very beginnings of the Reformation. They are now mostly settled in Canada, but some of their colonies are again in the Dakotas and Montana. They fled the United States during the persecutions of World War I. Today they are meeting a certain amount of persecution from other Canadians, not because of their communism or their pacifism, but because they are so much more successful farmers than most of their neighbors.
The next day I was in a supermarket buying New Year’s dinner. Ahead of me was a young couple, more or less typical of Haight-Ashbury. I suddenly realized that the girl had on a characteristic Hutterian jumper or overall apron. The only difference was the length of the skirt. Then it dawned on me that there was no essential difference at all — the husband was not in a Beat uniform, but “dressed plain” in work clothes, with a beard and long hair. The girl wore no makeup and her hair was unaltered.
They were very young, yet obviously, from the pile of groceries, they had several children. They were extraordinarily polite to others and to one another. Their voices were low and gentle. They were discussing with great interest serious general ideas. It might have been a supermarket in an Alberta market town.
Think of the little girls that show up at your door on Sunday morning with a record player and ask, “Are you ready for Armageddon? Armageddon’s coming.” Are they wrong? Are you ready? Always before it has been necessary to have strong supernatural sanctions to sustain a subculture which chose to cut loose from the dominant society, to opt out of the immorality of Things As They Are.
Today thousands and thousands are doing so on a largely secular and uninstitutionalized basis. In the words of Dostoevsky, they are respectfully handing back their tickets. As they strive for a new community, honest morality, sane goals in life, and their passing fads and follies drop away, the youth who are seceding from our crazy, lethal social order are converging with those predecessors —Mennonites, Brethren, Amish, Hutterites, Quakers — who withdrew from the madness and horror of the Wars of Religion and the collapse of the society of the Middle Ages.
The record of 400 years of persecution suffered by these pious, inoffensive groups passes belief — pogroms, burnings alive, looting, rape, total destruction of most of their communities, wanderings over the face of the earth.
I wonder if that is what the future has in store for their modern successors? It is a needless worry. This time there won’t be a future. Are you ready for Armageddon? [San Francisco Examiner, January 9, 1966]
That was written just as Haight-Ashbury was blossoming and the hip counterculture was beginning to spread all over the world. Rexroth continued to call attention to these new developments, sometimes encouraging their innovations, sometimes deflating their illusions, and several of his key articles on the counterculture and the New Left were collected in The Alternative Society (1970).
He then began working on the present book, which he wrote to “let the hippies know they weren’t the first people to do these sorts of things.” Here’s his cover blurb for the original 1974 edition:
In Communalism Kenneth Rexroth has written a study of communes and intentional communities, religious and secular, from their known beginnings to the twentieth century. Today, when communism in the original sense of the word is more popular than ever before, Rexroth has looked over the long tradition of communal living in search of the general principles, the abiding factors that inspire the foundation of intentional communities, those that give them cohesion and such permanence as they may in any instance possess, and also those elements that lead to failure.
This historical survey discusses many different kinds of communes, among many different peoples, and raises such questions as whether there is a permanent form of alternative society; whether it is successful; whether it is durable for the human satisfaction it provides. And why don’t more people choose it? Why isn’t it the prevailing form throughout history, and is it ever likely to become such?
The book is a fascinating survey of these experiences and experiments, from the “primitive communism” of hunter-gatherer societies and neolithic villages, through the Essenes and early Christians, millenarian uprisings and apocalyptical sects (Anabaptists, Hutterites, Brethren of the Free Spirit), the Diggers in the English Revolution, nineteenth-century intentional communities (Brook Farm, Oneida, Fourierists), to the countercultural communes of the 1960s. It’s clearly and grippingly narrated and as far as I can tell the historical facts are all accurate. It even offers some practical suggestions for those who may wish to try forming their own intentional communities — as well as providing all sorts of object lessons in what not to do!
I don’t think there’s much point in reiterating what Rexroth has already said so well, but it may be helpful to clarify what is and is not included in the book.
In his introduction he notes that he is using the term communalism as more or less equivalent to “communism” in the original literal sense of the term — people holding “all things common” — which was the meaning used by both Marx and the early anarchists before the term was hijacked by the Bolsheviks and turned into a misleading label for state-capitalist dictatorships. He goes on to mention the different radical currents that carried on the earlier and more accurate notion of communism — the various forms of anarchism (particularly the explicitly communist-anarchist tradition of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman); the various forms of non-Bolshevik Marxism (“left Marxism,” “left communism,” “council communism,” “ultraleftism”) articulated by Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, Karl Korsch, and Marx himself (who was in reality much closer to the communist anarchists than to the statist “Communists” who claimed to be his followers); and popular movements such as the Paris Commune (1871), the anarchist revolution during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), and the revolts against officially Communist regimes from the Makhnovist Ukrainian peasant army (1918-1920) and the Kronstadt sailors (1921) to the Hungarian workers’ councils of 1956 and other revolts in East Europe.
Rexroth approvingly mentions all these currents and movements, but he says virtually nothing else about them. His book is primarily focused on earlier communalistic forms, from rehistoric societies to nineteenth-century intentional communities. As his blurb puts it, it’s a study of a long tradition of “communal living.” The emphasis is on situations where people have actually lived communally, rather than on movements that have only struggled toward the hoped-for goal of a future communal society.
That was a reasonable decision. The scope of those earlier movements is vast enough as it is without adding the complexities of the later more political movements. Moreover, there are already countless histories and studies of those later movements, whereas the earlier movements Rexroth deals with are less well known.
But a few inconsistencies should be noted. Some of the medieval movements Rexroth discusses were only briefly and almost accidentally communistic due to the urgent circumstances of revolts or civil wars. And the Diggers, for example, scarcely had a chance to implement the explicitly communistic perspectives articulated by their spokesman Gerrard Winstanley. On the other hand, in 1936-1939 the workers of Barcelona and the peasants of Catalonia and Andalusia actually formed and lived in various types of anarcho-communist collectives and communities that thrived for months and in some cases even years, despite simultaneously being in the thick of the civil war against Franco’s fascist army. Their experiences could have made another very interesting chapter in Rexroth’s book. I suspect that he decided to skip it because it would have required delving into too many political complexities (notably in order to explain the overall context of the Spanish Communist Party’s backstabbing maneuvers against the anarchist revolution).
Note also that the same blurb refers to the book as “a study of communes and intentional communities.” Intentional communities have not always been totally communistic. In many cases they might be more accurately characterized as “communitarian” or “cooperative.” That’s just an observation, not a criticism. If you are trying to survive within the dominant society you obviously have to make some compromises.
Rexroth is of course quite aware of these nuances. He has simply chosen to examine a series of related topics that he finds significant. One of the reviewers of the original edition noted this eclecticism with a mixture of complaint and astonishment:
The well-known poet/translator/critic has chosen a rather misleading title for a book whose main purpose seems to be to transmit a truly impressive potpourri of information about a vast number of eclectic groups, societies, and religious thinkers in whom the author happens to be interested. The focus may indeed be communalism — a loose definition which here includes everything from paleolithic hunting communities to Assassins and Franciscans and Knights Templars and transcendental free-lovers on Brook Farm. But there is at least as much history as sociology, not to mention political science, anthropology, and religion. Indeed, there is probably no more cogent recounting of the endless numbers of sects, schisms, heresies, reformers, and mystics whose normally incomprehensible struggles with papal authorities over the arcana of the Eucharist make up the history of the Middle Ages. [Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 1974]
Personally, that’s one of the things I like about Rexroth — the fact that he so often reveals unexpected and illuminating connections between different areas of life.
Another is that he’s so down to earth and street-savvy. He’s been around enough to see through what he calls the Social Lie — to know that “the official version of anything is most likely false and that all authority is based on fraud” and that “the art of being civilized is the art of learning to read between the lies.”
In the appendix I’ve noted a few places where I think his views are questionable, but they are few indeed compared with all the things he got so right.
For example:
It is either utopia or catastrophe. . . . The symptoms of the collapse of the civilization are all about us, and they are far more pronounced than they were in the last years of the Roman Empire. Yet not all of these symptoms are necessarily pathological. The contemporary world is being pulled apart by two contrary tendencies — one toward social death, one toward the birth of a new society. Many of the phenomena of the present crisis are ambivalent and can either mean death or birth depending on how the crisis is resolved.
That alternative may have seemed exaggerated when this book came out fifty years ago. It now seems obvious and undeniable.
* * *
This book follows the original 1974 edition except that I’ve corrected typos and made a few slight editorial tweaks, such as regularizing the spelling of some of the historical names and occasionally adding or deleting a comma to make a sentence read more clearly. Asterisks within brackets [*] indicate my notes at the end of the book. I’ve also added an appendix and a bibliography and revised the index.
Special thanks to Bradford Morrow, Rexroth’s literary executor, for okaying this new edition and for permitting me to reproduce so many of Rexroth’s other writings on my website; to John Solt for providing the cover image and for his personal reminiscences of Rexroth; to Jeanne Smith for her superb design work and invaluable technical assistance; and to the folks at PM Press for their proficient and enthusiastic collaboration.
KEN KNABB
September 2026
Kenneth Rexroth’s Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century was originally published in 1974 by Seabury Press, but has long been out of print. A new edition of the book has just been published by PM Press, edited by Ken Knabb, with notes, a new introduction (above), a bibliography, and an appendix on Rexroth’s radical politics. Print and ebook copies can be ordered here.
[Communalism contents and index]