Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $9.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Conquest of Bread
    The Conquest of Bread
    The Conquest of Bread
    Ebook331 pages5 hours

    The Conquest of Bread

    By Peter Kropotkin and Charles Weigl

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A brilliant blueprint for a free society by one of anarchism's most famous theorists.

    The Conquest of Bread is Peter Kropotkin’s most extensive study of human needs and his outline of the most rational and equitable means of satisfying them. The most important and widely read exposition of anarchist economic theory, its combination of detailed historical analysis and far-reaching utopian vision is a step-by-step guide to social revolution: the concrete means of achieving it and the new world that humanity is capable of creating. Writing in a way that he describes as "moderate in style, but revolutionary in substance," Kropotkin adeptly translates complex ideas into common language, while rendering the often-amorphous aspirations of social movements into coherent form. Includes an introduction that historically situates and discusses the contemporary relevance of Kropotkin’s ideas.

    The Working Classics Series revives lineages of radical thought from the history of the anarchist movement.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAK Press
    Release dateOct 15, 2024
    ISBN9781849355759
    Author

    Peter Kropotkin

    Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) was a Russian prince who renounced his nobility and devoted his life to anarchism. His classic works include Fields, Factories, and Workshops; Memoirs of a Revolutionist; and Mutual Aid.

    Read more from Peter Kropotkin

    Related to The Conquest of Bread

    Titles in the series (2)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Political Ideologies For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Letters

      Oct 29, 2020

      Letters
      3 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Feb 24, 2022

      I’m a fan of Jonathan Meades, but his piece on Welsh and Wales was a nasty mix of cliché, minority-bashing, cultural snobbery and factual inaccuracy. He knows neither the country nor anything of the past and present life of the Welsh language. He doe

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Age Of Reason, Sliced And Diced

      Sep 26, 2024

      OCKHAM’S EPONYMOUS RAZOR IS STILL as incisive as it was when first wielded by the English friar and scholastic philosopher six centuries ago. William of Ockham (1287–1347, below) was a pioneer of the theory of knowledge and the great proponent of nom

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Tower And The Sewer

      May 31, 2024

      The Tower And The Sewer
      18 min read

    • Article

      2022 Books Of The Year

      Nov 24, 2022

      2022 Books Of The Year
      14 min read

    • Article

      Tristram And The Tyrants

      Sep 30, 2021

      Tristram And The Tyrants
      5 min read

    • Article

      'The New Negro' Explores Alain Locke Not Only As Writer But Also As A Thinker And A Fighter

      Feb 6, 2018

      Stewart's impressive new book confronts for the whole of its great length the “two-ness” described often by W. E. B. Du Bois in his masterpiece, "The Souls of Black Folk."

      3 min read

    • Article

      Writing Lives

      Nov 28, 2024

      Writing Lives
      6 min read

    • Article

      Seeing The Big Picture

      May 26, 2022

      IBN KHALDUN (1332-1406) WAS A PIONEERING Arab scholar and one of the most important historians of the Middle Ages. He is best known for his three-volume masterwork the Muqaddimah, written in 1377, which integrated politics, sociology, economics, demo

      7 min read

    • Article

      ARTS & CULTURE

      Jan 28, 2021

      ARTS & CULTURE
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Political Economy of Joseph Conrad

      Nov 1, 2020

      What can Joseph Conrad tell us about the political and economic arrangements that make for a flourishing society? I argue in this essay that Conrad presents the England of his time as embodying the institutional and cultural arrangements that make fo

      26 min read

    • Article

      Enigma From the East

      Dec 3, 2018

      Enigma From the East
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Reckoning Is Yet to Come

      Apr 11, 2022

      The Reckoning Is Yet to Come
      7 min read

    • Article

      From The Trojan War To Conflict In Ukraine

      Nov 30, 2023

      THE YEAR 2023 HAS BEENrich in works composed in tempore belli. The most impressive is Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine (William Collins, £26) by General David Petraeus and the historian Andrew Roberts. This is an ambitious and

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Common Genius of Lincoln and Einstein: The president and the physicist teach us a lesson about moral genius.

      Oct 30, 2014

      Abraham Lincoln would still be remembered today as a self-taught prairie prodigy and an astute political operator who crushed the Confederate uprising, even without the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the end of slavery. Albert

      6 min read

    • Article

      How New Gods Are Made

      Mar 24, 2022

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT [email protected] On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine Anna Della Subin Granta Books 2022 Hb, £20, 460pp, ISBN 9781783785018 Many of the subjects of this delightfully curious book had no

      11 min read

    • Article

      Freedom of Thought

      Mar 4, 2019

      Oxford University Press, 220 pp., $18.95 REAL PRESIDENTS READ BOOKS. When the Library of Congress was destroyed in the War of 1812, the former president Thomas Jefferson offered his collection to replace it, commenting that “I do not know that it co

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Vivid Chronicle Of Chroniclers

      Feb 24, 2022

      AS A PUBLISHING executive, Richard Cohen edited authors such as Jeffrey Archer, John le Carré, and Fay Weldon. As a fencer he competed at three Olympic Games, wrote a history of swordsmanship, and appeared as an extra in the James Bond movie Die Anot

      5 min read

    • Article

      Exercice Agréable or Tantalizing Taste

      Aug 2, 2018

      In the eighteenth century, the French Société des Gens de Lettres led by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, compiled their famous encyclopedia, announced as a “Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers” and written to offer

      4 min read

    • Article

      Metaphysical Influences

      Jan 25, 2024

      Metaphysical Influences
      11 min read

    • Article

      How To Become A Cult Writer

      Apr 1, 2022

      How To Become A Cult Writer
      8 min read

    • Article

      When Classicists Attack Classics

      Mar 28, 2024

      RESEARCH INTO THE ANCIENT WORLD has a serious problem with imperialism. The best introduction to this subject is Rajiv Malhotra’s 2016 book The Battle for Sanskrit: Is Sanskrit Political or Sacred, Oppressive or Liberating, Dead or Alive? Malhotra, a

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Conquest of Bread

    4/5

    105 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      I completely disagree but this is worth a read. Author was ahead of its time. By about 1000 years. I'm sure he'll be vindicated once machines take over.
    • 4/5
      Well, this was interesting to look over. Especially after my big focus on Chinese authoritarian capitalism over the past few weeks.

      Kropotkin advocates a unique ideology, which might now be classified as 'anarcho-communism'. This combination was jarring, from my biased American viewpoint, especially because communism is immediately associated with central planning and statism. Kropotkin, to his credit, immediately identifies some of the problems with central planned economies.

      After this, he constructs his new ideal society with loving detail, moving from the basic necessities (food, clothing, shelter), to wages and the structure and distribution of goods, and education. He avoids much hard economic detail, and this book is made for mass discussion.

      Now I find myself in agreement with him in more areas that I would have thought. Mechanization, technology, and planning have made many previously awful jobs much more reasonable and efficient. Women need to be brought out and made equal, of course, of course. Cooperation has worked in some fields, particularly with modern technology and the internet. I could go on about crowd-sourcing, the public domain, GNU, Creative Commons Licenses, and so forth. I agree that happy and autonomous workers are best, in terms of production, and happiness. Not to mention that there has been an empirically shown biological imperative for altruism. (see: Stephen Jay Gould's essay for further detail)

      However, I confess I am distrustful that people will willingly buy into such ideas, what after the spread of the idea of rugged individualism. Or whether if people are simply good enough to willingly move over to communes, or participate in group or community thinking. Or if any moneyed interests will conspire to make such a society impossible. And this is coming from an avowed idealist/optimist. Although I'd much prefer this society to a Social Darwinist 'every man for himself' arena. Only too often have I seen evolution, a wonderful biological theory, tarnished by being used as a justification for societal misfortunes and inequalities.

      Will such a utopia work? Perhaps. I'm not really sure. My inner empirical scientist wants to say 'try it out and let's see'. Perhaps that's the only way to be sure.

    Book preview

    The Conquest of Bread - Peter Kropotkin

    INTRODUCTION

    In his 1885 introduction to Peter Kropotkin’s Words of a Rebel, Élisée Reclus claimed that public opinion is unanimous in respecting this man.¹ The fact that Kropotkin was wasting away in Clairvaux prison at the time suggests that the French authorities, at least, weren’t among his fans. However, a few class enemies aside, the assessment seems fairly accurate. When Jean Grave was imprisoned in Clairvaux a decade later, he found guards who still remembered, and thought highly of, their former guest, so impressed were they by his personality.²

    Respect seems too tame a word to describe how people felt about Kropotkin. It’s hard to read more than a few pages about him without coming across one of countless flattering accounts from comrades, acquaintances, and even political opponents. When he lectured, an invisible charm seemed to issue from this man and enter into the inmost hearts of the audience.³ People have variously described that charm as graciousness, invincible benevolence, unaffected sincerity, and immense goodness.⁴ To Romain Rolland, he has realized in his own life the ideal of moral purity, of serene abnegation, of perfect love of humanity.⁵ E. M. Heath, who met him when she was a child, found Kropotkin gay and brimming over with life and interest in everything.⁶ Yet, as the Paris communard Louise Michel noted, he could not see others suffer and their least misfortune brought tears to his eyes.⁷ Given the reverent tone that runs through such accounts, it’s not surprising that, later in his life, visits to the man became almost sacred pilgrimages. Oscar Wilde called him a beautiful white Christ and numerous writers, including George Bernard Shaw, referred to his saintliness.⁸

    Canonization is a dangerous thing. It turns the personal characteristics of historical figures, shaped over time by experience and will, into innate qualities. Saints come to us already perfectly formed. Their complex lives—full of contradictions, struggles, and mistakes—are sanded down to a smooth and flawless surface. They are inanimate objects, relics to be venerated rather than understood. Saints can certainly be models to emulate, but there’s little they can teach us. For Kropotkin, one of the great anarchist teachers, this is a particularly tragic fate.

    If we don’t consign Kropotkin to the living death of sainthood, what can he teach us? Obviously, there’s his written work itself, much of which is as insightful and relevant as the day he wrote it—the underlying logics of political oppression and economic exploitation, unfortunately, haven’t changed much in the last century. But one of the defining features of Kropotkin’s writing is how well it speaks for itself. He was not only a prolific and widely published anarchist author, he was also one of the most clear and immediately accessible. The Conquest of Bread is exemplary in this regard. In an almost literal sense, the book needs no introduction: which might be why most introductions to previous editions avoid discussing its content and stick to general outlines of Kropotkin’s life. Why write CliffsNotes for a text that anyone can understand?

    What is most fascinating about The Conquest of Bread, though, is precisely what makes it so hard to introduce: that Kropotkin achieved the rare feat of presenting complex social and economic ideas in common, even engaging, language. Just as interesting is the question of how a well-educated member of the Russian ruling class became such an effective revolutionary propagandist in the first place. The canonization to which Kropotkin has been subjected obscures this vital question. In reality, Kropotkin’s path from aristocrat to anarchist, and from there to effective anarchist, was by no means a smooth one. It was a process filled with the confusion and paradoxes that came with confronting his class privilege.⁹ It was also marked by a series of very human decisions, both conscious and unconscious, about his place in the revolutionary tradition, and the role and purpose of his written work. It involved choices not only about how, why, and for whom he should be writing, but also about how to do it well. Most importantly, and contrary to the standard great man approach to history, his development as both a revolutionary and a writer was largely guided and inspired by the people his work sought to inspire and guide. From childhood on, he describes his most profound moments of intellectual and political development as growing out of encounters with workers and peasants. It will be instructive, therefore, to trace the developments that led Kropotkin to write The Conquest of Bread, simultaneously one of the most important works of anarchist analysis and propaganda.

    Over the last century, propaganda has become a dirty word. Until World War I, the term was used frequently by revolutionaries in the neutral sense that they were propagating their ideas as widely as possible. With the rise of the advertising and public relations industries, alongside government agencies devoted entirely to shaping public opinion and manufacturing consent, propaganda took on overtones of manipulation, deceit, and coercion.¹⁰ Today, the very act of communicating with the masses (who must always be imprisoned between quotation marks) seems hubristic and politically suspect. However understandable the motivation, this means, essentially, that the terrain of ideology has been largely ceded to capitalism and the state.

    These issues are particularly problematic for anarchists, who are especially attuned to all social divisions of power and privilege. Propaganda automatically implies a distinction between a person who knows something (often an intellectual, another dirty word) and the people who supposedly lack, and direly need, that knowledge. Unlike most revolutionary movements, anarchists tend to be uncomfortable using vanguardist methods to remedy people’s false consciousness.

    By current standards, Kropotkin was triply damned. He was a noble, an intellectual, and a propagandist. Even though he lived most of his life in poverty, he never denied his class origins, or (unlike many today) pretended to be a member of the working class. Nonetheless, he became one of the most successful, popular writers anarchism has ever known. While he only occasionally addresses this contradiction explicitly, it is a tension and a question that runs throughout his life and work. He provides no answers himself, but his experience is instructive.

    From Aristocrat to Anarchist

    Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin was born in 1842, a prince whose feudal ancestors had ruled the Russian principality of Smolensk. Although the Russian nobility had declined by the time Kropotkin was born—their political power largely symbolic in the centralized Tsarist regime—his father still owned nearly twelve hundred souls in three different provinces, including fifty domestic servants in their Moscow home and another seventy-­five at their country estate in Nikol’skoe.¹¹ This background, in which family dinners were attended by a dozen waiters and a small private orchestra, doesn’t seem the sort to produce an anarchist revolutionary. At the very least, however, it provided Kropotkin with a clear and direct understanding of class divisions at an early age. By his own account, even as a young boy, his allegiance was clearly with servants rather than their owners. And his alienation from his own class only became more pronounced over time.

    Martin A. Miller, more than most of Kropotkin’s biographers, gives a psychological explanation for the boy’s downwardly mobile identification.¹² Relations between parents and children in Russian noble families were generally distant and highly formal. The actual care of young aristocrats was left to servants who often provided for emotional as well as physical needs. This was especially true of the younger Kropotkin brothers, Peter and Alexander, whose mother died when they were children. I do not know what would have become of us, Peter later wrote, if we had not found in our house, amidst the serfs and servants, that atmosphere of love which children must have around them.¹³ Serf culture was also more ­interesting and vibrant than the staid and ritualized world Kropotkin was being groomed to enter. His favorite childhood memories were of illicit servant parties when his father and stepmother were away. Dancing began; not that measured and tiresome dancing, under the direction of a French dancing-­maste . . . which made part of our education, but free dancing which was not a lesson, and in which a score of couples turned round any way; and this was only preparatory to the still more animated and rather wild Cossack dance.¹⁴

    There was, as with almost everything in Kropotkin’s life, an intellectual element to his alienation as well. He was an avid reader, especially taken with Republican literature. That, and his tutor’s description of the French Revolution, in which Republican nobles renounced their titles, led him to drop the Prince from his signature when he was twelve years old. The first section of his Memoirs of a Revolutionist is filled with a litany of offenses by Russian nobles, his father included, against the souls they owned: beatings, forced marriages, forced conscription (for which landowners could make a tidy profit), and more. Human feelings were not recognized, not even suspected, in serfs.¹⁵

    Even at that early age, Kropotkin claims he was determined to be different. However, what this meant, what sort of actions or life-choices it implied, and, most importantly, what his relationship to the masses could or should be, wasn’t so clear. His emotional and intellectual identification faced a bitter class divide, not to mention a whole range of ingrained social and cultural beliefs that made thinking the dilemma through a difficult task. Like many of his generation—or any generation of alienated upper-class youth for that matter—what to do with his budding social critique (and his embarrassing class privilege) wasn’t immediately obvious. By his late teens, he had little more than a strong ethical compulsion to be somehow useful. As he would write to his brother in 1860:

    Everyone must be a useful member to society . . . he must by the measure of his strength try to satisfy the needs of society. . . . What is demanded of him, in my opinion, is no more than an honest fulfillment of his responsibilities, i.e. to conform with the needs of the majority.¹⁶

    Not until he discovered anarchism would these convictions begin to make sense to him. In the meantime, although he fed himself a steady diet of officially suspect or banned literature, his well-intentioned attempts to be useful were of a decidedly liberal nature, focused more on governmental reform than radical social change.

    In 1861, after three years in the Corps of Pages, Russia’s elite military academy, Kropotkin was appointed personal aide to Tsar Alexander II. He was thrust into the life of the Emperor’s court and assumed his responsibilities with high hopes. To him, the Tsar was a hero, an honest and devoted man who was engaged in a hard struggle with a powerful reactionary party in order to carry through a series of reforms in which the abolition of serfdom was only the first step.¹⁷ It didn’t take long for disappointment to set in. The wasteful extravagance of the court, coupled with the corruption of its officials was soon apparent. And the Tsar himself—with his vanity and rages, his vast web of cops and spies, and his tendency to ruthlessly repress even the slightest hint of rebellion—was far from the noble ruler Kropotkin had imagined. As he would later write, even if at the outset I had cherished some illusions as to useful activity in the spheres nearest the palace, I should have retained none.¹⁸

    His solution was to leave the spheres of the palace, at least in a geographical sense. Although the Tsar’s aide was expected to move on to a distinguished career in the capital, he refused to remain in St. Petersburg. When it came time to choose where he’d perform his military service, Kropotkin asked to be assigned to the Amur Cossack regiment in eastern Siberia, as far from the center of power as possible. As he saw it, Siberia was an immense field for the application of the great reforms which have been made or are coming.¹⁹ Remote in every sense, Siberia seemed like a place where something positive and useful might take root before corrupt functionaries had a chance to ruin it.

    He was, once again, disappointed. As soon as he arrived, he eagerly set to work on various projects: prison reform, agrarian reform, and an ambitious plan to foster municipal self-government in the area. He traveled the region, compiling detailed reports and writing proposals for a range of social changes, both small and large. And very little came of any of it. Even when the central government, through which all such proposals had to pass, accepted one and allocated the resources to realize it, gross inefficiency and local corruption prevented even the mildest improvements. Frustration and despair set in and, as he wrote at the time, the phrase peaceful reform became loathsome to him.²⁰

    One avenue to social usefulness was closed and another didn’t immediately present itself. Kropotkin, in a sense, took some time off, immersing himself in reading and his fascination with geography and geology, leading expeditions to remote areas of the region and writing reports for the Russian Geographical Society. While this represented something of an escape from his political dilemma, his extensive journeys, in which he traveled over fifty thousand miles in carts, on board steamers, in boats, but chiefly on horseback, brought him into contact with the people he hoped to help—as had his earlier travels as a would-be reformer. He says these encounters with miners, peasants, and assorted workers—many of whom were essential to the success of his expeditions—taught him something all his books hadn’t been able to: an appreciation for more communal forms of social organization.

    Having been brought up in a serf-owner’s family, I entered active life, like all young men of my time, with a great deal of confidence in the necessity of commanding, ordering, scolding, punishing, and the like. But when, at an early stage, I had to manage serious enterprises . . . I began to appreciate the difference between acting on the principle of command and discipline, and acting on the principle of common understanding. . . . Men of initiative are required everywhere; but once the impulse has been given, the enterprise must be conducted, especially in Russia, not in military fashion, but in a sort of communal way.²¹

    While Kropotkin acknowledged that Siberia had destroyed his faith in State discipline, and that he was well on his way to becoming an anarchist, he wasn’t there yet. Nor had he resolved the related question of what sort of nongovernmental relationship he could have with people who, at least in a metaphorical sense, he owned.

    In 1867, he returned to St. Petersburg, where he entered the university and continued his research for the Russian Geographical Society. As always, he found this sort of intellectual labor fulfilling—so much so that he began seriously toying with the idea of devoting his life to it. He dreamed of someday having the time and freedom to write, to leisurely explore and expand the scientific theories he was developing. However, when the opportunity came to do just that, he turned it down. In 1871, while studying glacial deposits in Finland, he received a telegram offering him a position as the Geographical Society’s secretary. This would have allowed him to immerse himself in his studies for the rest of his life. It also would have returned him firmly to the social class he was desperately trying to escape. As he describes it, he watched a Finnish peasant laboriously clearing a field for planting, and compared this scene to the comfortable life being dangled before him:

    But what right had I to these higher joys, when all round me was misery and struggle for a mouldy bit of bread; when whatever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotions must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not enough bread for their children?²²

    He rejected this offer to the rarified world of higher emotions. At the same time, he began to solidify some of his ideas and develop what might be called a theory of the politics of knowledge, one that might unite his intellectual and political desires. Observing that same peasant, he considered the idea of writing a physical geography of the region so that he might educate the peasants about the best way to cultivate their soil: Here an American stump-extractor would be invaluable; there certain methods of manuring would be indicated by science.²³ But his enthusiastic fantasy hit an immediate, and decidedly, political wall. What is the use of talking to this peasant about American machines, when he has barely enough bread to live upon from one day to the next . . . when all that he can raise must be sold to pay rent and taxes?²⁴

    Knowledge, Kropotkin understood, is power—but knowledge is useless without the social and economic power to acquire and apply it. The peasant didn’t need a geographer to write books for him:

    He needs me to live with him, to help him become the owner or the free occupier of that land. Then he will read books with profit, but not now. . . . The masses want to know: they are willing to learn . . . they are ready to widen their knowledge: only give it to them, only give them the means of getting leisure. This is the direction in which, and the people for whom, I must work.²⁵

    Kropotkin’s class background is still apparent in the missionary zeal with which he imagines that peasants need him to live with and enlighten them. His position also contains a deeper contradiction. As he frames the issue, power precedes knowledge, in the sense that the latter is useless without the former. On the other hand, the help that Kropotkin would give the masses involved the passing on of knowledge—about their current social conditions and the means to improve them. This tension—between action and education—would run through Kropotkin’s work for the rest of his life.²⁶ While he would not resolve it (and it’s unlikely that anyone could), he would deepen his understanding of it, and his overarching political beliefs, on his next trip abroad, where he would once again be educated by a direct relationship with actual working men and women.

    He returned to St. Petersburg still unsure about how to proceed. While he followed political developments in Russia, he didn’t become involved with any organizations, revolutionary or otherwise. He was, however, excited enough by what he read about the International Workingmen’s Association in Europe to travel to Switzerland in order to learn more.

    The International was founded in London in 1864 and held its first congress in Geneva two years later. It was a socialist organization (in the fluid sense that the term had in the mid-nineteenth century) and began as an unlikely alliance of that movement’s varied tendencies. From Proudhonian Mutualists and Italian followers of Mazzini to British Owenites and Christian socialists, the diversity and independence of the International’s various sections turned out to be one of its greatest strengths. There were also, however, serious internal battles going on, although it’s unlikely that Kropotkin was aware of these at first: his knowledge at the time was limited to heavily censored Russian newspapers, which mentioned it pretty frequently in their columns, but . . . were not allowed to speak of its principles or what it was doing.²⁷

    So, he arrived in Zurich with only a foggy idea of the organization’s aims and tendencies—which didn’t prevent him from joining one of its local sections soon after he got there. Accounts of Kropotkin’s stay in the city show an almost desperate desire to learn as much as he could in as short a time as possible. Unable to adequately answer his incessant questions, his hosts gave him stacks of books, pamphlets, and newspapers, which he spent entire days and nights reading. When he emerged from the tiny room in which he had locked himself, filled with a flood of new thoughts, his questions, although better framed and informed, continued. As one of his hosts describes it:

    In view of his very heated, persistent, and pressing desire to thoroughly study and know the tasks, goals, and activity of the International in all its dimensions and from all sides, we advised him to travel to the main centers of the worker-­internationalists: to the Jura and to Geneva. In the Jura were concentrated the followers of Bakunin, the so-called Jura Federation, the antistatists; and in Geneva, the followers of Marx, the statists.²⁸

    He went first to the Marxists, a choice that suggests he hadn’t entirely abandoned his faith in state-oriented approaches. He was welcomed by their leaders, introduced to men of mark, and invited to attend various committee meetings.²⁹ He did so, but soon realized that he preferred spending time with the workers themselves, rather than with their official representatives, in order to follow the movement from the inside, and know the workers’ view of it.³⁰ Here, enjoying a glass of wine and more informal conversation, he met men and women who, unlike the peasants he idealized back home, were not only organized, but, to a large degree, self-organized to achieve revolutionary goals. It would be harder to maintain a missionary’s outlook among such people. Nonetheless, Kropotkin’s position (at least as he describes it in his memoirs years later) was still equivocal. On the one hand, he claims, he understood that the theories that would become scientific socialism or anarchism were originally formulated by workers, through years of debate and discussion in the meetings of the International. The few educated men who joined the movement have only put into a theoretical shape the criticisms and aspirations which were expressed . . . by the workers themselves.³¹ At the same time, he thought, the workers needed intellectuals. I saw how eager the workers were to gain instruction . . . how much the toiling masses needed to be helped by men possessed of education and leisure in their endeavours to spread and to develop the organization.³² Among the Marxists, he also learned to question the role of these educated helpers. He saw how few and rare were those who came to assist without the intention of making political capital out of this very helplessness of the people. . . . Where are those who will come to serve the masses—not utilize them for their own ambitions?³³ After witnessing an underhanded attempt by Marxist leaders to block the Geneva workers’ plans to strike for better wages, Kropotkin was furious: I could not reconcile this wire-pulling by the leaders with the burning speeches I had heard them pronounce from the platform.³⁴ He left Geneva to meet the Bakuninist workers in the Jura mountains.

    As Kropotkin would later describe it, the International had begun to deviate from its original doctrines and values. Its constitution declared that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. For Kropotkin, this meant that the workers were federalist in principle, that the members of each section of the International, as it was originally set up, should be completely autonomous, free to develop their own tactics, strategies, and goals in whatever way they chose.³⁵ The International itself, as an overarching organization, should not have the power to propose or command: it was simply the place where delegates from local and regional sections came together to discuss their struggles, adopt resolutions based on what they had in common, and develop networks of mutual aid. A major problem arose, Kropotkin wrote, when middle-class revolutionaries entered the organization imbued as they were with the notions of the centralized, pyramidal secret organizations of earlier times.³⁶ In addition to the International’s federal and national councils (composed of delegates from the local and regional sections), a General Council was formed, originally to play a purely intermediary role, facilitating communication among sections and performing largely secretarial duties. However, under the guidance of Marx and Engels, the General Council mutated into another creature altogether. It was not satisfied with playing the part of a correspondence bureau; it strove to govern the movement, to approve or to censure the action of the local federations and sections and even of individual members.³⁷ In 1871, the General Council, according to James Guillaume, convened a secret conference in London, attended almost entirely by partisans of Marx. At that conference, they adopted resolutions destroying the autonomy of the sections and federations of the International and giving the General Council powers that violated the fundamental statutes of the International.³⁸ In addition, contrary to the resolutions passed at all previous congresses, this secret conference decided to direct the organization’s energies toward electoral politics, converting it from an economic revolutionary movement—from a direct struggle of the workingmen’s organizations against capitalism—into an elective parliamentary and political movement.³⁹

    The workers of the Jura Federation were the center of opposition to the Marxists’ authoritarian machinations and, when Kropotkin arrived, they were at the height of their organization, gearing up for the coming International congress—where, although they didn’t know it at the time, they and all the other federalist, Bakuninist sections would be expelled. What he found in the Jura mountains was the exact opposite of what was happening in Geneva. As Miller notes: There was no theoretical distinction between an intellectual leader and an illiterate worker, no hierarchical distinctions, no centers of power to manipulate the workers, and an absolute rejection of all participation in local politics.⁴⁰ The middle-class revolutionaries who joined the federation, did so by abandoning their class privilege and becoming workers themselves. One of the most energetic, James Guillaume—who, given Kropotkin’s personal concerns, must have been something of a role model—had given up his job as a philosophy professor to become a proofreader and manage a small print shop, for a paltry salary that he augmented by translating novels at night. These intellectuals’ contributions to the federation were, according to Kropotkin, more about moral influence among equals than intellectual authority.⁴¹ This was true even of Bakunin, one of anarchism’s towering figures, who had lived for a period in the Jura mountains and had helped the federation, Kropotkin says, clear up their ideas and to formulate their aspirations.⁴² But he had done so as a friend and comrade: His writings were not a text that one had to obey—as is so often unfortunately the case in political parties.⁴³ His ideas were discussed and debated among equals and their general drift and tenor might have been suggested by Bakunin, or Bakunin might have borrowed them from his Jura friends.⁴⁴ This democratization of knowledge—in which workers and intellectuals (to the extent that they could be distinguished) jointly developed political strategy—clearly worked in both directions. Kropotkin was equally impressed by the "clearness of insight, the soundness of judgment, the capacity for disentangling complex social questions, which I

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1