The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin

there is enough in the world for everyone to have enough; we’ve got to fucking fix things, we have to fucking fix things

As any and all regular readers of this blog will know – if there still are any (I think my failure to “grow out of” severe mental illness (i.e. not to learn any lessons and keep repeating the same mistakes (i.e. not to follow up/through on fundamental life changes, not to develop a solid social life etc etc etc)) is (understandably?) off-putting) – I’m into anarchist things now.

Anarchistic, rather than anarchist, perhaps, but I don’t really know what the difference is between those two things and maybe I just like it because an extra syllable is an extra syllable??

Soooooooo

I’ve been reading all of these contemporary and late 20th century texts about anarchism, always presuming that the earlier stuff, the original stuff, would be too confusing for me. But then I saw on social media that a [British] friend of mine who I don’t see as an intellectual superior (or, to be frank, as an intellectual inferior… I suppose I see them almost as… an intellectual equal, even though they don’t live in London) was happily reading and discussing The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin, so I thought that I should probably give it a go, too.

I immediately purchased the book online from an international conglomerate with at least once famous anarchistic principle (anti tax) and began to read as soon as the Penguin Classics edition arrived at my squalid (the bathroom floor is about to collapse) North London abode.

How does the intellectual meat of Peter Kropotkin – an Anarchist aristocrat, intellectual and activist who spent much time in jail in numerous countries due to his revolutionary politics and whose big funeral was allegedly the last public anarchistic event permitted in Soviet Russia – differ from the summation of his ideas espoused by more recent voices (e.g. David Graeber) a century or so later?

Not by much, to be honest, as not a lot has changed.

Kropotkin seeks to avoid the label of utopianism, of day-dreaming, and he goes out of his way to emphasise and discuss practical and statistical justification for his ideas and projected anarchistic societies (i.e. no starvation, no government, no misery, no cruelty, no exploitation).

Yes, he doesn’t quite explain the origins of the numbers he uses for his calculations, but his discussion of how many hours of labour would be required by each person to ensure they had sufficient housing, clothing, food and heat, all have an internal consistency.

Kropotkin also does deal here with one of the classic anti-anarchist questions, “who cleans the toilets?/empties the bins? etc”, with the blunt answer of “shared labour means shared labour, you fucking idiot”, however he does steer clear of the other one (“what do we do with people who are unrepentantly violent/cruel/selfish?”), which does perhaps permit the accusation he is so keen to dispel, because some people are dickheads, Peter, yet consensus-based execution and ostracisation are too close to acts of state violence to be permissible in a society that seeks to avoid anyone exerting power over any other.

Kropotkin’s book here – initially published in 1892 but this Penguin Classics version based on the 1913 edition (Kropotkin died in 1923) – explores the same issues as we all fucking have to deal with on the daily here in the 21st century.

The profit motive, the wage system, theft, inequality, poverty, inequity, insufficient free time to enjoy ourselves, hopelessness, fear, exploitation, hypocrisy, bullshit, institutionalised cruelty…

Global market systems crushing us all, representative democracy only representing the interests of those who are never hungry or cold, the status quo being maintained with violence and propaganda and enforced lack of education, of vision, of thought…

All that’s changed is that the technology used in these systems has improved/sped up, but no meaningful benefits for the majority of people has happened. If anything, wider access to education has made more of us more aware of the realities we live within and built a sense of powerlessness that creates nothing but extreme misery.

Christ, I’m fucking miserable lol.

Kropotkin’s revolution, his vision of an anarchistic society still appeals because we are still so fucking far away from a better future.

He justifies his assertion that five hours of productive work a day would be enough for us all to eat, to sleep, to remain warm, yet we all work much more than this without any real benefit, with no security, no comfort, no relief, no no no joy.

The human world, it’s a mess.

–///–

I was going to add in some excerpts from the text to illustrate its points, but there isn’t really any point in that as it won’t make me any happier or you any more revolutionary, so why even bother?

Byebye.