Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology

I

ntroduction

Bread and Liberty

Kropotkin… was a prominent figure in the realm of learning, recognised as such by the foremost men of the world. But to us he meant much more than that. We saw in him the father of modern anarchism, its revolutionary spokesman and brilliant exponent of its relation to science, philosophy, and progressive thought. As a personality he towered high above most of his contemporaries by virtue of his humanity and faith in the masses. Anarchism to him was not an ideal for the select few. It was a constructive social theory, destined to usher in a new world for all of mankind. For this he had lived and laboured all his life.

—Emma Goldman[1]

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) was the foremost anarchist theoretician of the late 19th and early 20th century. His fellow anarchist and friend Errico Malatesta rightly stated he was without doubt one of those who have contributed most to the elaboration and propagation of anarchist ideas and has well deserved the recognition and the admiration that all anarchists feel for him.[2] Leading anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker stated he owed a great deal to Kropotkin and his books had influenced my whole development, had shaped my whole life. Kropotkin was a scholar and a thinker, a man of extraordinarily wide reading and learning, a historian, geographer, economist and social philosopher. He was no utopist. He had a practical view of life.[3] For George Orwell, Kropotkin’s inventive and pragmatical outlook made him one of the most persuasive of Anarchist writers.[4]

Kropotkin’s ideas left their mark on the libertarian[5] movement across the globe, a movement that is still indebted to his decades of activism within it as one of the most seminal figures in the history of the anarchist movement as well as one of its most important theoreticians.[6] As Nicholas Walter summarised:

Kropotkin’s most characteristic doctrines are… anarchist communism as the end—that the whole of society should be organised on the basis of common ownership and popular control at grass roots—and of revolutionary expropriation as the means—that this must be accomplished by the forcible seizure by the mass of the people of all capital and property. His political doctrines may be summed up by the phrase used for the [title of the] Russian edition of La Conquête du pain…: Bread and Liberty.[7]

While not the first advocate of communist-anarchism, Kropotkin was instrumental in helping it to become the dominant anarchist theory of the late 19th century, a position it holds to this day. His works were spread across the globe, influencing the labour and anarchist movements in Europe, the Americas and Asia (particularly in Japan, Korea and China). As well as being the world’s leading anarchist thinker for five decades, Kropotkin was an active anarchist militant who participated in the many debates within the movement over strategy and tactics. He consistently advocated a vision of socialism from below, built by the working class managing their own struggles:

Workmen’s organisations are the real force capable of accomplishing the social revolution—after the awakening of the proletariat has been accomplished, first by individual action, then by collective action, by strikes and revolts extending more and more; and where workmen’s organisations have not allowed themselves to be dominated by the gentlemen who advocate the conquest of political power, but have continued to walk hand in hand with anarchists—as they have done in Spain—they have obtained, on the one hand, immediate results (an eight-hour day in certain trades in Catalonia), and on the other have made good propaganda for the social revolution—the one to come, not from the efforts of those highly-placed gentlemen, but from below, from workmen’s organisations.[8]

His anarchism was built upon the awareness that the worker claims his share in the riches he produces; he claims his share in the management of production; and he claims not only some additional well-being, but also his full rights in the higher enjoyment of science and art.[9] His goal was to produce a society fit for humans to live in, prosper and fully develop their potential rather than one marked by classes and hierarchies within which most people simply survive. This vision of self-liberation of the oppressed is reflected in the strategies he advocated (direct action and revolutionary unionism), his vision of revolution (mass action to expropriate capital and destroy the State) as well as his sketches of a free society (created and managed from below by the people themselves, directly) and is expressed in numerous articles for the anarchist press.

Unfortunately, although critically important in getting a clear understanding of Kropotkin’s politics, most of these writings are unknown.[10] The most easily available of his texts are those that are very general and theoretical, not those dealing with the concrete political and strategic issues facing the anarchist movement at the time. This means that he far too often gets cast as a visionary or as a theorist rather than as an active anarchist militant actively engaged in the issues of the day, grappling with challenges facing the workers’ movement and anarchist strategies within and outwith it to produce social transformation.

So in order to get a better grasp of Kropotkin’s ideas, we need to look at the articles he wrote for the libertarian press, which he himself stated are more expressive of my anarchist ideas.[11] While he mentions in passing anarchist advocacy of direct action, economic class war and revolutionary unionism in his general introductions to libertarian ideas, it is his articles in anarchist newspapers which are more focused on these practical matters. As he acknowledged in one polemic over syndicalism in 1907, I now ask myself if it would not be useful to make a selection of these articles on the labour movement and publish them in a volume for if he had then it would show that he along with other anarchists had "always believed that the working class movement—organised in each trade for the direct conflict with Capital (today in France it is called Syndicalism and ‘direct action’) constitutes true strength, and is capable of leading up to the Social Revolution and realising it."[12]

This anthology seeks to show the importance Kropotkin placed on the workers’ movement both as a fertile area for anarchist propaganda and as a means of creating libertarian communism. It seeks to challenge the all-too-common notion that he was a dreamer, presenting enticing visions of a better world but with no idea how to reach it. In reality, he was keenly aware of the need to understand capitalism and the State, to participate in the oppositional movements and struggles within it and to learn the lessons of previous revolutions to ensure the success of the next one.

To do so will show why Kropotkin’s influence was so great and the impact he had on the development of anarchism. It aims to combine his better-known theoretical works with the less well-known articles he wrote to influence the anarchist and workers’ movements, showing how he built upon and developed the libertarian ideas previously championed by Proudhon and Bakunin. These ideas, such as anti-statism, anti-capitalism, self-management, possession, socialisation, communal-economic federalism, decentralisation, working class self-emancipation, and so forth, are as important today as they were in his time. It aims to allow a new generation of radicals to gain an understanding of Kropotkin’s libertarian communism in order to develop it for the struggles we face today.

Anarchism before Kropotkin

Just as anarchism did not spring into existence, Minerva-like, in 1840 with the publication of Proudhon’s What is Property?, so Kropotkin’s ideas grew and developed over time, building upon workers’ struggles and the legacies of previous libertarian thinkers. When he became an anarchist, he was part of a movement which, influenced by Proudhon and Bakunin, had experienced both the joy and crushing defeat of the Paris Commune as well as the struggles within the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) over political action and the so-called workers’ State.

In order to understand Kropotkin’s ideas and his contributions to the commonwealth of ideas which is anarchism, we first need to sketch their political context. While Kropotkin, particularly in his later works like the article on Anarchism for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, presented anarchism as something which has existed as long as hierarchical authority has, anarchism is better understood as being a specific socio-economic theory and movement which was born in the nineteenth century. Before 1840, no libertarian theory was called anarchism nor was there any popular movement termed anarchist by its members (many had been called this by their governmental and wealthy opponents as an insult[13]).

This does not mean that anarchistic theories and movements did not exist—they did, but they only became retrospectively called anarchist once the anarchist movement discovered them. This can be seen from William Godwin, whom Kropotkin suggested had stated in 1793 in a quite definite form the political and economic principle of Anarchism and so was the first theoriser of Socialism without government—that is to say, of Anarchism.[14] However, Godwin never used the term anarchism, and he was only rediscovered (along with Max Stirner) by anarchists in the 1890s. His ideas had no direct influence on anarchism, which developed independently after his death in 1836.

Therefore, regardless of the merit of the ideas of Godwin and Stirner, it would be anachronistic to discuss them when sketching anarchism before Kropotkin joined the movement. We therefore start with Proudhon’s reformist anarchism before discussing Bakunin’s contribution to revolutionary anarchism. The latter is particularly important, given that it was in the IWMA that many of the strategies normally associated with anarchism (union organising and struggle, social revolution, etc.) first developed: "Within these federations [of the IMWA] developed… what may be described as modern anarchism."[15] However, as will be seen, Proudhon’s influence in the IWMA was significant, and many of the ideas of revolutionary anarchism have their roots in his reformist anarchism.

This placing anarchism within a historical context does not mean, however, that it is the product of a few gifted individuals. While thinkers like Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin helped to develop anarchist ideas, anarchism itself originated in everyday struggles and the Anarchist movement was renewed each time it received an impression from some great practical lesson: it derived its origin from the teachings of life itself.[16] Proudhon developed his ideas in the context of the rise of the French workers’ movement and its demands for self-managed workplace associations to replace wage-labour, as well as the 1848 revolution.[17] Bakunin, likewise, contributed to anarchism by taking up ideas already expressed within the IWMA by workers across Europe.

Little wonder, then, that Kropotkin stressed that Anarchism had its origins in the same creative, constructive activity of the masses which has worked out in times past all the social institutions of mankind—and in the revolts… against the representatives of force, external to these social institutions, who had laid their hands on these institutions and used them for their own advantage. In this sense from all times there have been Anarchists and Statists but Anarchy was brought forth by the same critical and revolutionary protest which gave birth to Socialism in general. Anarchism, unlike other forms of socialism, lifted its sacrilegious arm, not only against Capitalism, but also against these pillars of Capitalism: Law, Authority, and the State. All anarchist writers did was to work out a general expression of anarchism’s principles, and the theoretical and scientific basis of its teachings.[18]

The Birth of Anarchism

Proudhon and Mutualism

Anarchism as a named socio-economic theory and movement starts with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), a working-class French writer who was one of the most influential socialist thinkers of his time. His works defined anarchism as a form of libertarian (or anti-State) socialism with a goal of a federation of self-managed workplace and self-governing communities.

Proudhon ensured his fame with his seminal 1840 work What is Property? which, as well providing the enduring radical slogan property is theft, saw him proclaim: I am an anarchist. This book analysed the justifications for property, turning them against the institution, and concluded that those who do not possess to-day are proprietors by the same title as those who do possess; but, instead of inferring therefrom that property should be shared by all, I demand, in the name of general security, its entire abolition.[19]

Property, Proudhon argued, violates equality by the rights of exclusion and increase, and freedom by despotism. It has perfect identity with theft and the worker has sold and surrendered his liberty to the proprietor who exploits the workers by appropriating their collective force. Anarchy was the absence of a master, of a sovereign, while the proprietor was synonymous with the sovereign, for he imposes his will as law, and suffers neither contradiction nor control. Thus property is despotism as each proprietor is sovereign lord within the sphere of his property and so freedom and property were incompatible. Property had to be socialised, with accumulated capital being social property and the land a common thing. He also advocated industrial democracy: every industry needs… leaders, instructors, superintendents… they must be chosen from the workers by the workers themselves.[20]

He developed these ideas in his 1846 System of Economic Contradictions. This analysed the contradictory nature of capitalism. For example, while machinery promised us an increase of wealth and liberty it also produced an increase of poverty and brought us slavery—having degraded the worker by giving him a master, [it] completes his degeneracy by reducing him from the rank of artisan to that of unskilled labourer. Under capitalism, machines make the chains of serfdom heavier and deepen the abyss which separates the class that commands and enjoys from the class that obeys and suffers.[21]

Under capitalism workers have sold their arms and parted with their liberty to the boss and so [u]nder the regime of property, the surplus of labour, essentially collective, passes entirely, like the revenue, to the proprietor. However, [b]y virtue of the principle of collective force, workers are the equals and associates of their leaders and so that association may be real, he who participates in it must do so as an active factor with a deliberative voice in the council based on equality. This implied socialisation of property as workers must straightway enjoy the rights and prerogatives of associates and even managers when they join a workplace. Recognising that the present form of organising labour is inadequate and transitory, he urged a solution based upon equality,—in other words, the organisation of labour, which involves the negation of political economy and the end of property.[22] As he summarised two years later:

under universal association, ownership of the land and of the instruments of labour is social ownership… We want the mines, canals, railways handed over to democratically organised workers’ associations… We want these associations to be models for agriculture, industry and trade, the pioneering core of that vast federation of companies and societies woven into the common cloth of the democratic and social Republic.[23]

His influential 1851 work, General Idea of the Revolution, saw him at his most radical: No authority, no government, not even popular, that is the Revolution; Capitalist and landlord exploitation stopped everywhere. The State was established for the rich against the poor, its laws simply [s]pider webs for the rich and powerful, steel chains for the weak and poor, fishing nets in the hands of the Government. Co-operatives would ensure wage-labour abolished due to the immorality, tyranny and theft suffered in capitalist firms, which plunder the bodies and souls of the wage-workers and are an outrage upon human dignity and personality. Instead the industry to be carried on, the work to be accomplished, are the common and undivided property of all those who take part therein. Land and housing would revert to the commune with repairs, management, and upkeep of buildings, as well as for new constructions being organised by communes and building workers’ associations.[24] This would produce a federal system:

Unless democracy is a fraud, and the sovereignty of the People a joke, it must be admitted that each citizen in the sphere of his industry, each municipal, district or provincial council within its own territory, is the only natural and legitimate representative of the Sovereign.[25]

Proudhon’s vision of a free economy was based on workers’ self-management of production with the exchange of produce among working men’s associations by means of labour-cheques issued by the National Bank.[26] Socially, he advocated a system of communal federalism as only this ensured not an abstract sovereignty of the people, as in the Constitution of 1793 and subsequent constitutions, or as in Rousseau’s Social Contract, but an effective sovereignty of the working, reigning, governing masses… how could it be otherwise if they are in charge of the whole economic system including labour, capital, credit, property and wealth?[27] An agricultural-industrial federation would shield the citizens of the federated communes from capitalist exploitation as much from the inside as from the outside and stop the political decay of the masses, economic serfdom or wage-labour, in a word, the inequality of conditions and fortunes. This was necessary as political right must have the buttress of economic right.[28]

Federation was based on mandating and recalling delegates for we can follow [our deputies] step by step and make them transmit our arguments and our documents; we shall indicate our will to them, and when we are discontented, we will revoke them. Thus the imperative mandate, permanent revocability, are the most immediate, undeniable, consequences of the electoral principle. It is the inevitable program of all democracy. He also urged the National Assembly, through organisation of its committees, to exercise executive power, just the way it exercises legislative power through its joint deliberations and votes.[29] These ideas, it must be noted, were applied during the Paris Commune and were praised by Karl Marx in The Civil War in France.[30] As anarchist James Guillaume argued at the time, the Paris Revolution is federalist… in the sense given it years ago by the great socialist, Proudhon. It is above all the negation of the nation and the State.[31]

To achieve these goals Proudhon opposed revolution in favour of reform. He saw mutual banking (co-operative credit) as the means by which labour would organise and emancipate itself, arguing it was the organisation of labour’s greatest asset and would lead to the spontaneous, popular formation of groups, workshops or workers’ associations.[32] Proudhon did not abstractly compare an ideal system to the current one, arguing against such speculation by the Utopian Socialists. Rather than seeking to invent another perfect community or social panacea, he urged radicals to analyse, understand, and so transcend capitalism by seeing what tendencies within it point beyond it:

It is important, then, that we should resume the study of economic facts and practices, discover their meaning, and formulate their philosophy. Until this is done, no knowledge of social progress can be acquired, no reform attempted. The error of socialism has consisted hitherto in perpetuating religious reverie by launching forward into a fantastic future instead of seizing the reality which is crushing it.[33]

He stressed that radicals had to be forward-looking rather than seeking to recreate past glories, denouncing this queer preoccupation which, in time of revolution, bedazzles the most steadfast minds, and, when their burning aspirations carry them forward into the future, has them constantly harking back to the past… Could [society] not turn its gaze in the direction in which it is going?[34] This was combined with a strong advocacy of working class self-emancipation:

Workers, labourers, men of the people, whoever you may be, the initiative of reform is yours. It is you who will accomplish that synthesis of social composition which will be the masterpiece of creation, and you alone can accomplish it.[35]

Social reform had to be done outside of the State for the problem of association consists in organising… the producers, and by this organisation subjecting capital and subordinating power. Such is the war that you have to sustain: a war of labour against capital; a war of liberty against authority; a war of the producer against the non-producer; a war of equality against privilege. He rejected the idea that the State could be captured for social change, arguing that it finds itself inevitably enchained to capital and directed against the proletariat and so it is of no use to change the holders of power or introduce some variation into its workings: an agricultural and industrial combination must be found by means of which power, today the ruler of society, shall become its slave. During the1848 revolution he propose[d] that a provisional committee be set up… amongst the workers… in opposition to the bourgeois representatives, so that a new society be founded in the centre of the old society for the government can do nothing for you. But you can do everything for yourselves. This organisation of popular societies was the pivot of democracy, the cornerstone of republican order and would rip the nails and teeth off State power and hand over the government’s public force to the citizens.[36]

These ideas would be expounded and developed by subsequent anarchists, not least Kropotkin, who highly respected Proudhon as undoubtedly one of the greatest writers who have ever dealt with economical questions, a writer who was "one of the most suggestive—maybe the most suggestive—amongst those writers who lead men to think for themselves. He has covered in his works nearly the whole field of human enterprise: economics, politics, art, war; and everywhere he has dealt with the subject in the most suggestive way."[37] Moreover, the point of view of Proudhon was the only one which, in my opinion, was really scientific[38] and the Frenchman was the writer whom I like best of all those who wrote about the social question.[39] At the bottom of Proudhon’s General Idea of the Revolution "lay a deeply practical idea—that of Anarchy."[40]

This does not mean Kropotkin was uncritical of the French anarchist’s ideas, specifically rejecting his reformism and ideas on payment by labour done, concluding that while as a critic he is great, as a constructor [he is] weak.[41] Suffice it to say, this did not stop Kropotkin repeatedly noting Proudhon’s importance as a thinker and his contributions to anarchism.

Libertarians in the First International

Proudhon had infused anarchism with most of its basic concepts—anti-statism, anti-capitalism, federalism, workers’ self-management—as well as a clear focus on the working classes as the agents of social transformation premised on their self-organisation and self-emancipation, albeit within a reformist strategy. After his death in January 1865, Proudhon’s followers applied his ideas within the nascent labour movement across Europe but particularly in France. So when the French mutualists helped found the IWMA, libertarian ideas were set for a new evolution based on the requirements of this new environment—trade unions. This would give birth to revolutionary anarchism, initially collectivist and then communist.

It is necessary to stress that the IWMA was not created by Marx but by French and British trade unionists.[42] Sadly, the Marx-centric perspective is common within radical circles, and so the IWMA itself is marginalised. Combined with an all-too-frequent ignorance of Proudhon’s ideas, this means that we do not know much about its debates, and what we think we know is often wrong.

This can be seen from the so-called collectivism debates which climaxed at the Basel Congress of 1869 with the success of a collectivist motion which was opposed by some of the French Internationalists. This is usually portrayed as the victory of Marxism over Proudhon’s ideas, but in reality, it was a debate on the specific issue of agricultural collectivisation:

The endorsement of collectivism by the International at the Basel Congress might appear to be a rejection of the French position on co-operatives. Actually, it was not, for collectivism as it was defined by its proponents meant simply the end of private ownership of agricultural land. Lumped together with this was usually the demand for common ownership of mines and railways.[43]

Thus it was not a debate over co-operative production in favour of some other model but rather concerned its extension to agriculture. At the Geneva Congress of 1866 the French Internationalists, usually labelled Proudhonists, persuaded the Congress to agree by unanimous vote that there was a higher goal—the suppression of ‘salaried status’ [i.e., wage-labour]—which… could be done only through co-operatives. At the Lausanne Congress of 1867, they acknowledged the necessity of public ownership of canals, roads, and mines and there was unanimous accord on public ownership of the means of transportation and exchange of goods.[44] This was Proudhon’s position as well and the resolution on collectivisation had a remarkably Proudhonian tone, with it urging the collectivisation of roads, canals, railways, mines, quarries, collieries and forests, and these to be ceded to ‘workers’ companies’ which would guarantee the ‘mutual rights’ of workers and would sell their goods or services at cost. The land would be turned over to ‘agricultural companies’ (i.e., agricultural workers) with the same guarantees as those required of the ‘workers’ companies’.[45] De Paepe clarified the issue: Collective property would belong to society as a whole, but would be conceded to associations of workers. The State would be no more than a federation of various groups of workers.[46]As Proudhon had advocated workers’ companies to run publicly owned industries as well as arguing the land was common property and be transferred to communes, the resolution was not the rejection of Proudhon’s ideas that many assume. In fact, it can be considered a logical fusion of his arguments on land ownership and workers’ associations. Given that the main leader of the collectivist position was César De Paepe, a self-proclaimed mutualist, this debate was fundamentally one amongst followers of Proudhon, not between mutualists and Marxists. Indeed, the 1869 resolution was consistent with Proudhon’s ideas meaning that in the congresses of the First International the libertarian idea of self-management prevailed over the statist concept.[47]

It was also within the International that libertarians applied Proudhon’s ideas on an agricultural and industrial combination in the labour movement. Here we discover the syndicalist idea of unions as the means of both fighting capitalism and replacing it being raised.[48] They were first raised in the International by delegates from the Belgium section at the Brussels conference in 1868. Unions were for the necessities of the present, but also the future social order, the embryos of the great workers’ companies which will one day replace the capitalist companies with their thousands of wage-earners, at least in all industries in which collective force is used and there is no middle way between wage slavery and association. The productive societies arising from the trades unions will embrace whole industries… thus forming a NEW CORPORATION which would be organised equitably, founded on mutuality and justice and open to all.[49]

The then secretary of the Belgium federation, Eugène Hins, wrote an article on these ideas in its newspaper L’Internationale which discussed how the current Conseil fédéral (federal council) made up of delegates from the sociétés de résistance (resistance societies) would co-ordinate the activities of the trades as well as fixing cost and sale prices (and so wages). The sociétés de résistance themselves would organise production. The International’s sections would include all workers and would reflect matters of general concern at a local level based on a Comité administratif (administrative council). Consumer co-operatives would function as communal shops (bazars communaux) and control the distribution of goods at cost-price (i.e., on a non-profit basis). General insurance funds would exist for old age, sickness and life-insurance based on the caisses de secours mutuel et de prévoyance (mutual aid and contingency funds). In this way the economic and political organisations of the working classes were to remain outside the bourgeois framework, so that it could supersede the bourgeois institutions and power in the long run.[50]

At the Basel Congress of the IWMA this was repeated: Trade Unions will continue to exist after the suppression of the wage system… they will be the organisation of labour.[51] This mode of organisation leads to the labour representation of the future as wage slavery is replaced by the free federation of free producers while the organisation of trade unions on the basis of town or country… leads to the commune of the future: Government is replaced by the assembled councils of the trade bodies, and by a committee of their respective delegates.[52]

This vision of a future economic regime based on federations of workers’ associations echoed Proudhon’s vision—right down to the words used! It reflected both current trade union organisation and the Frenchman’s ideas as expressed in, for example, System of Economic Contradictions and On the Political Capacity of the Working Classes, and was a common idea within the libertarian wing of the International:

As early as the 1860s and 1870s, the followers of Proudhon and Bakunin in the First International were proposing the formation of workers’ councils designed both as a weapon of class struggle against capitalists and as the structural basis of the future libertarian society.[53]

So we see the Barcelona Internationalist paper La Federación argue, in November 1869, that the International contains within itself the seeds of social regeneration… it holds the embryo of all future institutions.[54] The next year saw French left-mutualist (and future Communard martyr) Eugène Varlin argue that unions form the natural elements of the social edifice of the future; it is they who can be easily transformed into producers associations; it is they who can make the social ingredients and the organisation of production work.[55]

Bakunin and Revolutionary Anarchism

So by 1869 a clear collectivist current that advocated common ownership of both land and capital as well as embracing trade unions as both the means of struggle and the structure of a free society had developed in the IWMA. The most famous champion of these ideas was Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876).

Bakunin was, like Kropotkin, a Russian aristocrat who renounced his title to join the struggle against autocracy and became an anarchist. Embracing Hegelian philosophy as a student, Bakunin became a left-republican and spent time in Paris discussing ideas with his friend Proudhon. A man of action, he enthusiastically participated in the 1848 revolutions but was arrested and sent back to Tsarist Russia to be imprisoned in solitary confinement in the Peter-and-Paul prison. After pressure from his family, the Tsar finally reduced his sentence to exile in Siberia, from which he escaped to Europe. There he developed his ideas towards revolutionary anarchism and created the Alliance of Social Democracy to spread them. Failing to convince the League for Peace and Freedom to embrace libertarian socialism, he joined the IWMA in July 1868.

As Kropotkin summarised, Bakunin:

found the proper surroundings and ground for his revolutionary agitation in the International Working Men’s Association. Here he saw masses of workers of all nations joining hands across frontiers, and striving to become strong enough in their Unions to throw off the yoke of Capitalism. And at once he understood what was the chief stronghold the workers had to storm, in order to be successful in their struggle against Capital—the State… "Destroy the State! became the war-cry … Down with Capitalism and down with the State!"[56]

He took up and expanded upon the ideas already being expressed in the libertarian wing of the IWMA, arguing that socialism had to be based on a federation of workers’ councils:

the federative Alliance of all working men’s associations… will constitute the Commune… by the creation of a Revolutionary Communal Council composed of one or two delegates… vested with plenary but accountable and removable mandates… all provinces, communes and associations… [would send] their representatives to an agreed meeting place… vested with similar mandates to constitute the federation of insurgent associations, communes and provinces… to organise a revolutionary force capable of defeating reaction… it is the very fact of the expansion and organisation of the revolution for the purpose of self-defence among the insurgent areas that will bring about the triumph of the revolution… Since revolution everywhere must be created by the people, and supreme control must always belong to the people organised in a free federation of agricultural and industrial associations… organised from the bottom upwards by means of revolutionary delegation.[57]

Anarchists could only achieve their goal by the development and organisation… of the social (and, by consequence, anti-political) power of the working masses as much in the towns as in the countryside.[58] This meant that workers had to organise themselves at the point of production:

Toilers, count no longer on anyone but yourselves. Do not demoralise and paralyse your growing strength by being duped into alliances with bourgeois Radicalism… Abstain from all participation in bourgeois Radicalism and organise outside of it the forces of the proletariat. The bases of this organisation are… the workshops and the federation of workshops, the creation of fighting funds, instruments of struggle against the bourgeoisie, and their federation, not only national, but international.[59]

A living, powerful, socialist movement can be made a reality only by the awakened revolutionary consciousness, the collective will, and the organisation of the working masses themselves.[60] The International, therefore, had to expand and organise itself… so that when the Revolution… breaks out, there will be… a serious international organisation of workers’ associations… capable of replacing this departing world of States.[61] Therefore the "organisation of the trade sections, their federation in the International, and their representation by Chambers of Labour… bear in themselves the living germs of the social order, which is to replace the bourgeois world. They are creating not only the ideas but also the facts of the future itself."[62]

The war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is unavoidable as there was an irreconcilable antagonism which results inevitably from their respective stations in life and would only end with the abolition of the bourgeoisie as a distinct class. In order for the worker to become strong he must unite with other workers in "the union of all local and national workers’ associations into a world-wide association, the great International Working-Men’s Association. It was only through practice and collective experience and the progressive expansion and development of the economic struggle that the worker would recognise his true enemies: the privileged classes, including the clergy, the bourgeoisie, and the nobility; and the State, which exists only to safeguard all the privileges of those classes. There was but a single path, that of emancipation through practical action, which has only one meaning. It means workers’ solidarity in their struggle against the bosses. It means trades-unions, organisation, and the federation of resistance funds."[63]

Strikes were the beginnings of the social war of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie… Strikes are a valuable instrument from two points of view. Firstly, they electrify the masses… awaken in them the feeling of the deep antagonism which exists between their interests and those of the bourgeoisie… secondly they help immensely to provoke and establish between the workers of all trades, localities and countries the consciousness and very fact of solidarity: a twofold action, both negative and positive, which tends to constitute directly the new world of the proletariat, opposing it almost in an absolute way to the bourgeois world.[64] In addition, as strikes spread from one place to another, they come close to turning into a general strike. And with the ideas of emancipation that now hold sway over the proletariat, a general strike can result only in a great cataclysm which forces society to shed its old skin.[65]

Thus the socialist movement must be based on workplace organisation and struggles as strikes create, organise, and form a workers’ army, an army which is bound to break down the power of the bourgeoisie and the State, and lay the ground for a new world. However, this did not imply ignoring political issues or struggles. Anarchism, Bakunin stressed, does not reject politics generally. It will certainly be forced to involve itself insofar as it will be forced to struggle against the bourgeois class. It only rejects bourgeois politics as it establishes the predatory domination of the bourgeoisie.[66] This needed to be fought and to create a people’s force capable of crushing the military and civil force of the State, it is necessary to organise the proletariat[67] as revolution requires an insurrection of all the people and the voluntary organisation of the workers from below upward.[68]

As well as union organisation, Bakunin also saw the need for anarchists to organise as anarchists to influence the class struggle. The Alliance of Social Democracy was the necessary complement to the International. But the International and the Alliance, while having the same ultimate aims, perform different functions. The International endeavours to unify the working masses… regardless of nationality or religious and political beliefs, into one compact body: the Alliance, on the other hand, tries to give these masses a really revolutionary direction. This did not mean that the Alliance was imposing a foreign theory onto the members of the unions, because the programs of one and the other… differ only in the degree of their revolutionary development… The program of the Alliance represents the fullest unfolding of the International.[69] The Alliance would work within popular organisations and unleashes [the peoples’] will and gives wider opportunity for their self-determination and their social-economic organisation, which should be created by them alone from the bottom upwards. It must "not in any circumstances… ever be their master… What is to be the chief aim and pursuit of this organisation? To help the people towards self-determination on the lines of the most complete equality and fullest human freedom in every direction, without the least interference from any sort of domination… that is without any sort of government control."[70]

With these ideas Bakunin inevitably came into conflict with Marx. While the latter wished the International to become a political party and participate in elections (political action), Bakunin rejected this in favour of economic direct action by unions, predicting that when common workers are sent to Legislative Assemblies the result is that the worker-deputies, transplanted into a bourgeois environment, into an atmosphere of purely bourgeois ideas, will in fact cease to be workers and, becoming Statesmen, they will become bourgeois… For men do not make their situations; on the contrary, men are made by them.[71] This analysis was confirmed by the rise of reformism within the ranks of Marxist Social Democracy.

This, however, reflected a deeper issue, namely on whether social transformation should proceed from above (by a few leaders) or from below (by the masses). A socialist State, whether created by elections or revolution, would not lead to liberation. The State, stressed Bakunin, is the government from above downwards… by one or another minority. It has always been the patrimony of some privileged class and when all other classes have exhausted themselves it becomes the patrimony of the bureaucratic class. The Marxist State will not content itself with administering and governing the masses politically it will also administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production and distribution of wealth. This will result in a new class, a new hierarchy, which would exploit the masses as the State was the sole proprietor and the only banker, capitalist, organiser, and director of all national labour, and the distributor of all its products.[72] This also was confirmed by the Bolshevik regime under Lenin.[73]

This happens because every State, even the pseudo-People’s State concocted by Mr. Marx, is in essence only a machine ruling the masses from above, through a privileged minority of conceited intellectuals who imagine that they know what the people need and want better than do the people themselves.[74] Hence, Bakunin stressed, anarchists do not accept, even in the process of revolutionary transition, either constituent assemblies, provisional governments or so-called revolutionary dictatorships; because we are convinced that revolution is only sincere, honest and real in the hands of the masses, and that when it is concentrated in those of a few ruling individuals it inevitably and immediately becomes reaction.[75]

Thus, as Kropotkin suggested, the International was essentially a working-men’s organisation, the workers understanding it as a labour movement and not as a political party.[76] This was at the heart of the Bakunin-Marx conflict, a conflict which did not reflect personalities but rather different visions of the labour movement—the Marxists "endeavoured by means of all sorts of intrigues to transform the International Association, created for the purposes of a direct struggle against capitalism, into an arm of parliamentary politics.[77] This struggle came to its head in 1872 and the Hague Congress, where gerrymandering by Marx and Engels ensured the expulsion of Bakunin and committed the International to political action.[78] The majority of the IWMA met at St. Imier in 1872 and urged the proletarians of every land to establish solidarity of revolutionary action outside of all bourgeois politicking. This Organisation of Labour Resistance created a community of interests, trains [the proletariat] in collective living and prepares it for the supreme struggle. The strike was a precious weapon in the struggle and a product of the antagonism between labour and capital. These ordinary economic struggles prepare the proletariat for the great and final revolutionary conquest which will destroy all class difference. The future socialist society would be created by the proletariat itself, its trades bodies and the autonomous communes."[79]

Kropotkin embraced Bakunin’s position; for him, the IWMA was the classic example of what a genuine labour movement should be, namely a vast organisation of trade unions, which it was intended to spread all over the world, and which would have carried on, with international support, the direct struggle of Labour against Capital.[80] Within its libertarian wing grew up then the young power which… took up the struggle for freedom in Europe and developed gradually into Communist Anarchism, with its ideal of economical and political equality, and its bold negation of the exploiting of man by Capital and State alike.[81]

Anarchists, Kropotkin summarised, do not seek to constitute, and invite the working men not to constitute, political parties in the parliaments. Accordingly, since the foundation of the International Working Men’s Association in 1864–1866, they have endeavoured to promote their ideas directly amongst the labour organisations and to induce those unions to a direct struggle against capital, without placing their faith in parliamentary legislation.[82]

Kropotkin’s ideas

Anarchism, then, has always been a form of libertarian socialism and opposed both State and capitalism. It sees the working class as the means of social transformation, for only those who were oppressed and exploited by capitalism and the State had an interest in freeing themselves from both. This was the theoretical context when Kropotkin joined the anarchist movement in 1872. By the time Kropotkin escaped from a Tsarist prison and went into exile in 1876, Bakunin was dead but the movement he was part of continued. Kropotkin contributed immensely to the further development of this rich commonwealth of ideas.

This can be seen in all aspects of Kropotkin’s thought. Thus he defined anarchism as the no-government system of socialism.[83] In this he, like Bakunin, followed Proudhon who stressed that the capitalist principle and the governmental principle are one and the same principle and so the abolition of the exploitation of man by man and the abolition of government of man by man are one and the same formula. It is to protect this exploitation of man by man that the State exists and so anarchists are simultaneously striving for the abolition of capital and of the State for "if you do away with the former, you still have to do away with the latter, and vice versa."[84]

Kropotkin (like Bakunin) also accepted most of Proudhon’s fundamental principles, such as workers’ self-management of production, federalism, socialisation, anti-statism and anti-capitalism. He, like Bakunin, recognised the necessity of social revolution, rejecting Proudhon’s reformism, as well as his patriarchy in favour of a consistent libertarian egalitarianism. He took Bakunin’s union-based revolutionary anarchism and, like others in the IWMA, developed it towards an explicit acceptance of (libertarian) communism, the goal of distribution according to need rather than labour done.

In addition, Kropotkin applied his scientific training to anarchism. This meant gathering evidence and drawing conclusions from it, analysing capitalist society and discovering the tendencies within it that pointed to a future free society. Just as change had to come from below, from the actions of the people themselves, so revolutionary politics had to be based on an analysis of the facts and built upwards. While there is a tendency to portray him as someone pining for a past that never existed (such as idealising the Medieval Commune[85]), the reality is different. Ironically, this is best seen by the very book often used to characterise him as backward-looking: Fields, Factories and Workshops. As becomes clear reading this work, his conclusions are based on a detailed analysis of industrial trends within all the major advanced capitalist economies of the time. Similarly with his arguments for communism and anarchism, which he supported with examples drawn from modern society. Thus he pointed to the federalism used within the European railways as evidence in favour of free agreement as well as examples of distribution according to need such as free roads, libraries, and so on.[86] He focused his analysis on contemporary society:

We shall not construct a new society by looking backwards. We shall only do so by studying, as Proudhon has already advised, the tendencies of society today and so forecasting the society of tomorrow.

The only basis upon which it is possible to construct the society of the future is the new conceptions which germinate in men’s minds. And these alone can give the revolutionary, aided by his revolutionary fire, the boldness of thought necessary for the success of the Re­volution.[87]

This applied to movements that arise within class society but in opposition to it. The origin of the anarchist inception of society lies in the criticism… of the hierarchical organisations and the authoritarian conceptions of society and the analysis of the tendencies that are seen in the progressive movements of mankind. Kropotkin discussed the various social institutions humanity had created to survive in the hostile environment of class society, institutions which resist the encroachments upon their life and fortunes by those who endeavoured to establish their personal authority over them. These took the form of the primitive clan, the village community, the medieval guild and the unions from which modern anarchism sprang: the labour combinations… were an outcome of the same popular resistance to the growing power of the few—the capitalists in this case.[88] This expressed itself during revolutions as well, when these popular organisations become strong enough to overthrow the current system and become the framework of a new one.

On Capitalism and the State

For anarchism capitalism is an exploitative, oppressive, class-riddled economic system defended by a centralised, hierarchical State. Kropotkin echoed this analysis of Proudhon and Bakunin: it is evident that in present-day society, divided as it is between masters and serfs, true liberty cannot exist; it will not exist so long as there are exploiters and slaves, government and governed.[89]

Modern society was based upon the liberty to exploit human labour without any safeguard for the victims of such exploitation and the political power organised as to assure freedom of exploitation to the middle-class.[90] Its political and economic aspects are facts and conceptions which we cannot separate from each other. In the course of history these institutions have developed, supporting and reinforcing each other and so they are connected with each other—not as mere accidental co-incidences but by the links of cause and effect.[91] The two were interwoven, as "the political regime… is always an expression of the economic regime which exists at the heart of society. This meant that regardless of how the State changes, it continues to be shaped by the economic system, of which it is always the expression and, at the same time, the consecration and the sustaining force."[92]

Echoing Proudhon’s analysis of property as both theft (exploitation) and despotism (oppression), Kropotkin argued that under capitalism a worker was forced to sell his work and his liberty to others who accumulate wealth by the labour of their serfs.[93] Private property, as a result, meant that individual freedom [has] remained, both in theory and in practice, more illusory than real and that the want of development of the personality (leading to herd-psychology) and the lack of individual creative power and initiative are certainly one of the chief defects of our time. Economical individualism has not kept its promise: it did not result in any striking development of individuality.[94] This was for an obvious reason: "For the worker who must sell his labour, it is impossible to remain free, and it is precisely because it is impossible that we are anarchists and communists."[95] Capitalism was rooted in exploitation and inequality:

The very essence of the present economic system is that the worker can never enjoy the well-being he has produced… Inevitably, industry is directed… not towards what is needed to satisfy the needs of all, but towards that which, at a given moment, brings in the greatest profit for a few. Of necessity, the abundance of some will be based on the poverty of others, and the straitened circumstances of the greater number will have to be maintained at all costs, that there may be hands to sell themselves for a part only of that which they are capable of producing; without which private accumulation of capital is impossible.[96]

Private property in the means of production ensures that the worker finds no acre to till, no machine to set in motion, unless he agrees to sell his labour for a sum inferior to its real value and so some part of the value of his produce will be unjustly taken by the employer. Moreover, as production’s only aim is to increase the profits of the capitalist we have continuous fluctuations of industry, the crisis coming periodically.[97] Crisis was caused by over-production, that is production that is above the purchasing power of the worker which remains fatally characteristic of the present capitalist production, because workers cannot buy with their salaries what they have produced and at the same time copiously nourish the swarm of idlers who live upon their work.[98]

Kropotkin also critiqued capitalist economics, arguing that it "has always confined itself to stating facts occurring in society, and justifying them in the interest of the dominant class… Having found [something] profitable to capitalists, it has set it up as a principle."[99] He dismissed the sophisms taught by economists, uttered more to confirm exploiters in their rights than to convert the exploited[100] and recognised the role of economists as defenders of the class system:

Political Economy—that pseudo-science of the bourgeoisie—does not cease to give praise in every way to the benefits of individual property… [yet] the economists do not conclude, The land to him who cultivates it. On the contrary, they hasten to deduce from the situation, The land to the lord who will get it cultivated by wage earners![101]

The State exists to defend this regime. It is a society for mutual insurance between the landlord, the military commander, the judge, the priest, and later on the capitalist, in order to support each other’s authority over the people, and for exploiting the poverty of the masses and getting rich themselves. Such was the origin of the State; such was its history; and such is its present essence and the rich perfectly well know that if the machinery of the State ceased to protect them, their power over the labouring classes would be gone immediately.[102] The mission of all governments is to protect and maintain by force the privileges of the possessing classes.[103]

A key part of this role has been State intervention to create and support capitalism. The rise of capitalism has always seen the State tighten the screw for the worker and impose industrial serfdom. While preaching laissez-faire for itself, the bourgeoisie was at pains not to sweep away… the power of the State over industry, over the factory serf.[104] This has continued to this day and, rhetoric notwithstanding, the State has always intervened to support capitalism:

[W]hile all Governments have given the capitalists and monopolists full liberty to enrich themselves with the underpaid labour of working men… they have never, nowhere given the working men the liberty of opposing that exploitation. Never has any Government applied the ‘leave things alone’ principle to the exploited masses. It reserved it for the exploiters only…

What, then, is the use of talking, with Marx, about the ‘primary accumulation’—as if this ‘push’ given to the capitalists were a thing of the past?…

In short, nowhere has the system of ‘non-intervention of the State’ ever existed. Everywhere the State has been, and still is, the main pillar and the creator, direct and indirect, of Capitalism and its powers over the masses. Nowhere, since States have grown up, have the masses had the freedom of resisting the oppression by capitalists… The State has always interfered in the economic life in favour of the capitalist exploiter. It has always granted him protection in robbery, given aid and support for further enrichment. And it could not be otherwise. To do so was one of the functions—the chief mission—of the State.[105]

This analysis applied to modern so-called democratic States as representative democracy was an organ of capitalist domination.[106] This outcome is no accident. The State has evolved certain characteristics that ensure it. The State "not only includes the existence of a power situated above society, but also of a territorial concentration as well as the concentration in the hands of a few of many functions in the life of societies. It implies some new relationships between members of society… in order to subject some classes to the domination of others and this becomes obvious when one studies the origins of the State."[107] This centralisation is required to ensure minority rule and so the structure of the State reflected its role as defender of the exploitation of the many by the few:

To attack the central power, to strip it of its prerogatives, to decentralise, to dissolve authority, would have been to abandon to the people the control of its affairs, to run the risk of a truly popular revolution. That is why the bourgeoisie sought to reinforce the central government even more.[108]

Using the example of the French Revolution, Kropotkin showed how the middle classes now that they had seen and felt the strength of the people did all they could to dominate the people, to disarm them and to drive them back into subjection and made haste to legislate in such a way that the political power which was slipping out of the hand of the Court should not fall into the hands of the people.[109] Centralisation took power away from the mass of the people and gave it to the few and so while the people have tried at different times to become an influence in the State, to control it, to be served by it they have never succeeded. Instead, it has always ended in the abandonment of this mechanism of hierarchy and laws to others than the people: to the sovereign after the revolu­tions of the sixteenth century; to the bourgeois after those of the seventeenth in England and eighteenth in France.[110]

The State was not some evil imposed on society from outside, but one which grows out of it and which, while sharing key features, evolves alongside it. Every economic phase has a political phase corresponding to it, he argued. A society founded on serfdom, is in keeping with absolute monarchy; a society based on the wage system, and the exploitation of the masses by the capitalists finds its political expression in parliamentarianism. As such, the State form changes and evolves, but its basic function (defender of minority rule) and structure (delegated power into the hands of a few) remains. Moreover, the State has not always existed and to confuse all forms of social organisation with it would be a mistake made only by those who cannot visualise Society without a concentration of the State. To do so is to overlook the fact that Man lived in Societies for thousands of years before the State had been heard of and that large numbers of people have lived in communes and free federations. The State is only one of the forms assumed by society in the course of history. Why then make no distinction between what is permanent and what is accidental?[111] It was a particular form of social organisation and so the word ‘State’… should be reserved for those societies with the hierarchical system and centralisation.[112] That is, those where the people was not governing itself.[113]

Based on this evolutionary analysis of the State and its links with capitalism, anarchists drew the conclusion that the State organisation, having been the force to which the minorities resorted for establishing and organising their power over the masses, cannot be the force which will serve to destroy these privileges.[114] It exists to protect exploitation, speculation and private property; it is itself the by-product of the rapine of the people. The proletarian must rely on his own hands; he can expect nothing of the State. It is nothing more than an organisation devised to hinder emancipation at all costs.[115] Unsurprisingly, Kropotkin was critical of those socialists who viewed the (capitalist) State as both a means to save themselves from the horrors of the economic regime created by that very same State and to achieve the social revolution through the State by preserving and even extending most of its powers.[116]

On State Socialism

Given an analysis of capitalism as an exploitative class system, Kropotkin (like most anarchists) viewed himself as a socialist and insisted that anarchists constitute the left wing of the socialist movement.[117] Yet, at the same time, he warned of the dangers of State socialism both in terms of tactics and final goals. So if anarchism was the left wing of the socialist movement, then Marxism was its right wing:

It is self-evident that when we speak of a revival of ‘Socialism,’ we don’t mean a revival of ‘Social Democracy.’ The writers of the last school have done all they could to make people believe that Social Democracy is Socialism, and Socialism is nothing but Social Democracy. But everyone can easily ascertain for himself that Social Democracy is only one fraction of the great Socialist movement: the fraction which believes that all necessary changes in the Socialist direction can be accomplished by Parliamentary reforms within the present State… and that when all main branches of production shall be owned by the State, and governed by a Democratic Parliament, and every working man will be a wage worker for the State—this will be Socialism. There remains, however, a very considerable number of Socialists who maintain that Socialism cannot be limited to such a meek reform; that it implies much deeper changes, economical and political; and that the above reform cannot be realised within the present State by its representative institutions. Many begin thus to see that it is not by acquiring power in Parliament—under the unavoidable penalty of ceasing to be a Socialist party and gradually becoming a ‘Moderate Radical’ party—that the changes required by Socialism can ever be realised. Social Democracy is the right wing of the great Socialist movement not this movement itself. It is, then, a revival of Socialism altogether that we see coming—one of its causes being precisely the failure of Social Democracy to bring about the great changes which mankind needs and claims at the present moment of its history.[118]

In terms of tactics, Kropotkin opposed the Marxism of his time (Social Democracy) as it had moved away from a pure labour movement, in the sense of a direct struggle against capitalists by means of strikes, unions, and so forth. Strikes repelled them because they diverted the workers’ forces from parliamentary agitation. Marxists recognised the State and pyramidal methods of organisation, which stifled the revolutionary spirit of the rank-and-file workers while anarchists "recognised neither the