The Conquest of Bread: The Founding Book of Anarchism

by Pyotr Kropotkin

the decay of these communal institutions came mainly from the incapacity of men of combining the village with the city, the peasant with the citizen, so as jointly to oppose the growth of the military states, which destroyed the free cities.

mankind has not yet found the proper form for combining, on communistic principles, agriculture with a suddenly developed industry and a rapidly growing international trade.

These conditions, which began to appear by the end of the eighteenth century, took, however, their full swing in the nineteenth century only, after the Napoleonic wars came to an end. And modern Communism had to take them into account.

they did not trust the masses, and they did not appeal to them for bringing about the changes which they thought necessary.

Trade-unionism,

not only an instrument for improving the conditions of labour, but also to become an organization which might, at a given moment, take into its hands the management of production;

Each of the atoms composing what we call the Wealth of Nations owes its value to the fact that it is a part of the great whole.

But men of genius are themselves the children of industry as well as of science.

He must sell his labour for a scant and uncertain wage.

Enterprise takes no thought for the needs of the community.

In the East, in Africa, everywhere, in Egypt, Tonkin or the Congo, the European is thus bound to promote the growth of serfdom.

wars, perpetual wars, break out for the right of precedence in the market.

A vast array of courts, judges, executioners, policemen, and gaolers is needed to uphold these privileges; and this array gives rise in its turn to a whole system of espionage, of false witness, of spies, of threats and corruption.

Hypocrisy and sophistry become the second nature of the civilized man.

For alongside of the rapid development of our wealth-producing powers we have an overwhelming increase in the ranks of the idlers and middlemen.

Those who withhold capital constantly reduce the output by restraining production.

too often a third, or even two-thirds, of their number are forbidden to work more than three days a week, because, forsooth, the price of coal must be kept up?

It is enough to cite the immense sums spent by Europe in armaments for the sole purpose of acquiring control of the markets, and so forcing her own commercial standards on neighbouring territories and making exploitation easier at home;

in forcing the consumer on the one hand to buy what he does not need, or foisting an inferior article upon him by means of puffery, and in producing on the other hand wares which are absolutely injurious, but profitable to the manufacturer.

it is only after the overthrow of the old constitution that the real work of revolution can be said to begin.

Its upholders fly the country, to plot in safety elsewhere and to devise measures for their return.

Doubtless the thirst for vengeance will be satisfied.

Others bury themselves in official papers, trying, with the best of wills, to make head or tail of them. They indite laws and issue high-flown worded decrees that nobody takes the trouble to carry out — because the revolution has come.

Honest men come into contact with ambitious ones, whose only dream is power and who spurn the crowd whence they sprung.

Coming together with diametrically opposed views, they are forced to form arbitrary alliances in order to create majorities that can but last a day.

unwitting that the real strength of the movement is in the streets.

All this may please those who like the theatre, but it is not revolution.

With the childlike faith, with the good humour of the masses who believe in their leaders, they think that “yonder,” in the House, in the Town Hall, in the Committee of Public Safety, their welfare is being considered.

the Revolution could not triumph unless those who fought on its side were fed, that on fifteen pence a day a man cannot fight on the ramparts and at the same time support a family.

society is bound to share amongst all, without exception, the means of existence at its disposal.

Anarchy leads to Communism, and Communism to Anarchy,

such a society would find itself forced from the very outset to abandon all forms of wages.

A new method of production cannot exist side by side with the old forms of consumption, any more than it can adapt itself to the old forms of political organization.

The development of Individualism during the last three centuries is explained by the efforts of the individual to protect himself from the tyranny of Capital and of the State.

But the rural township still struggles to preserve the last traces of this Communism, and it succeeds — except when the State throws its heavy sword into the balance.

This tendency exists and is felt as soon as the most pressing needs of each are satisfied, and in proportion as the productive power of the race increases. It becomes an active force every time a great idea comes to oust the mean preoccupations of everyday life.

Whenever European societies have developed up to a certain point they have shaken off the yoke of authority and substituted a system founded roughly more or less on the principles of individual liberty.

men at last attempt to free themselves from every form of government and to satisfy their need for organization by a free contract between individuals and groups pursuing the same aim.

the tendency of the human race is to reduce Government interference to zero;

We can already catch glimpses of a world in which the bonds which bind the individual are no longer laws, but social habits — the result of the need felt by each one of us to seek the support, the co-operation, the sympathy of his neighbours.

Every day millions of transactions are made without Government intervention, and the greatest of them — those of commerce and of the Exchange — are carried on in such a way that the Government could not be appealed to if one of the contracting parties had the intention of not fulfilling his agreement.

the everyday business transacted by merchants would be absolutely impossible were it not based on mutual confidence.

If they do not yet spread over the whole of the manifestations of life, it is that they find an insurmountable obstacle in the poverty of the worker, in the casts of present society, in the private appropriation of capital, and in the State. Abolish

Representative Government is impotent to discharge the functions we have sought to assign to it.

We are beginning to see that government by majorities means abandoning all the affairs of the country to the tide-waiters who make up the majorities in the House and in election committees; to those, in a word, who have no opinion of their own.

“Endeavour to come to an agreement on such or such a question and then return not with a law in your pocket, but with a proposition of agreement which we may or may not accept.”

a free society, regaining possession of the common inheritance, must seek, in free groups and free federations of groups, a new organization, in harmony with the new economic phase of history.

Every economic phase has a political phase corresponding to it, and it would be impossible to touch property without finding at the same time a new mode of political life.

No one will then have to sell his working power for a wage that only represents a fraction of what he produces.

When there are no longer any destitute there will no longer be any rich to exploit them.