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

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”