Status Updates From The Conquest of Bread (Dove...

Chapter 11: Free agreement.
People think without a state nothing would be possible because how would society organize itself? The chapter gives examples of how people without the intervention of the state cooperate to build railroads, sailors union to rescue boats and the red cross. The society doesn't need the state.

Chapter 10: Agreeable work.
In this chapter women's problems are finally addressed after only talk about men. I liked that even in a book written in 18 century is recognized that women are slaved by society and any revolution needs to put this in consideration. Any revolution needs to think in free women from this burden.

Chapter 9: The need of luxury.
With all basic needs covered then we address the artistic need of luxury. Basically having a hobby which would be possible because people would have time. Music, astronomy, etc.

Chapter 8: Ways and means.
The point of the chapter is to prove that people only need to work like 5 hours a day and only half of the year and it kinda proved it.

Chapter 7: Clothes.
Of course people need to take control of the fabrics and warehouse and like with the houses people need to distribute clothes freely whoever needs it.

The common complain is in this way everybody will use the same and the artistic part of clothing would die. The book states this is not true and it'll prove it. We'll see.

Chapter 6: Dwelling.
On the day the expropiation of the houses takes place, on that day wokers will realize new times have come. Of course this exprorpiation have to be done by popular movements instead by a goverment because at first place the middle class would never do something like that because they doesn't even consider this kind of problems a "problem".

Chapter 5: food.
The revolution is gonna take time. Months or even years and one problem that is obvious but revolutions have failed to address is the food. People will run out of food and without food the revolution die.

Solution: people in the fields keep working the land to feed big cities and big cities keeps providing the products of its industry to the villages like clothes, machinery, etc, like equals.

So for I kind of hate this book. The preface sums up all the problems with socialism and then the book jumps into explaining why we strive for a system that only ever fails. The author lacks appreciation for the function of middlemen or good leadership. Thinks all wealth is created through theft.

Chapter 4: Expropriation.
The point of expropriate is giving back to the workers the fruits of their work. If the few doesn't own the land, the fabrics, etc, then they won't have the capability to exploit the poor.

There's a trick and you need to expropriate all (houses, land, fabrics) because if you don't then the sectors that remain private will only oppress the people even more to compensate it.

Chapter 3: anarchist communism.
First we need to get rid of the private property and after that the idea of the need of a government as a elected group of people who made laws. Maybr societies like a group of workers of rail roads or another group of people for fishing, etc.

Now ¿Who regulates those groups? Of course if you expropriate the means of productions the chances to corrupt these groups are smaller but...

The right to well being is a right that needs to be ensure since the beginning of every revolution. If this doesn't happen then the revolution is doomed since the beginning.

In the contrary the "right to work" is just a lie to slave people and allow a few to profit with the sacrifice and effort of others.

Nice.

Chapter 1: Our riches.
As starting point explains why the means of productions should be for everybody. At the end, every new discover, every construction, every advance has been made with the effort of many generations of workers but only a few own this things.

The text is not as dense as the introduction and is better at explaining it's ideas. Good start.

The introduction about the history of cooperativism and socialism specifically in France is pretty dense. For what I read was expecting something lighter but of course this introduction wasn't written by Kropotkin.

omg kropotkin ícono feminista???

Ight

Nathan Robinson recommended this book in his “library of radicalism” or some such list. I had read some Kropotkin in my youth. He is not hard to read. But all the mentions of “the coming Revolution” and “when the Revolution takes place” make it hard, so far, to take him seriously. I share his outrage at gross inequality—who would disagree? But the ancom Revolution is only a dream. I’ll read on.

Kropotkin’s basic idea: “But ours is neither the Communism of Fourier and the Phalansteriens, nor of the German State-Socialists. It is Anarchist-Communism — Communism without government — the Communism of the Free.”

“The result of this state of things is that all our production tends in a wrong direction. Enterprise takes no thought for the needs of the community. Its only aim is to increase the gains of the speculator. Hence the constant fluctuations of trade, the periodical industrial crises, each of which throws scores of thousands of workers on the streets.”

“The working people cannot purchase with their wages the wealth which they have produced”

I wasn't kidding about considering this as a cleanse after Rich Dad, Poor Dad

tqm Kropotkin, tú siempre supiste que la anarquía es amor y la evolución es apoyo mutuo
Darwin es un pendejo

Kropotkin puts my views into words, and I wish I would have read this sooner!

The writing and exposition is good. The characterization of the society in its time period is fair, yet modest in its assumptions. However, logic seems to ground itself on seemingly good suppositions of man. I typically think this book deserves a great examination of how simple assumptions can have bizarre consequences on its suggestions. Caution is one's best friend and a guide towards reading the entire book.

Interesting read already, I agree with Kropotkin's thoughts and feel like this book summarizes pretty well what the upper class has done to everyone who has contributed in the making of everything we own and the disrespect it shows to be deprived from our earnings

Much more readable than Proudhon/Bakunin. Find myself agreeing with a lot of what is being said, though i disagree about how to get there. There's a lot of imagination about what an ideal communist society would look like. The focus on ideas as motive forces and the idea that the masses would come to resolve all these issues so spontaneously seems very utopian. Lack of analysis of process, change, and history also.

"It is because, having reduced the mass to a point at which they have not the means of subsistence for a month, or even a week in advance, the few can allow the many to work."

I'm not convinced Pyotr was not a time traveler.

Why does every book on anarchist or Marxist political theory seem to require a 40 page introduction?!?

Each of these books should just begin with a concise 2 sentence intro of:

"Yo, you know how some shit sucks? X wrote the following pages in an attempt to address a particularized suckatude."

Parece un libro que promete hacerte comprender, en cierta medida, el sentimiento popular que motivó a que las masas quisieran sumarse a esta ya reconocida revolución rusa.

Communists saw Capitalism as Feudalism evolved, and eventually things would get so bad everyone would revolt against the landlords and the factoryowners whose ownership of everything forced the masses to work for starvation wages. This shared experience made Communism inevitable, so the working people of the world would cooperate and never live this way again.

Reading this optimism now is quite painful.

We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For [...] he can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must accept, or die of hunger.