Peter Kropotkin - History for the 99%

History for the 99%   

Seeing Neighbours Falling Into Poverty Pisses Me Off.

Peter Kropotkin 

Loving readers: If you read only a little of this, go to the end and read a few paragraphs from Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread.

Peter Alekseevich Kropotkin, the most unlikely of revolutionaries was born this day in 1842. Why so unlikely? Born to a Russian noble family, he bore the title ‘Prince.’ As a child he served as a page in the Court of Alexander II, Tsar of all Russia. He attended the most prestigious of schools until taking a commission with a Cossack Regiment serving in the East.  He had an encyclopaedic mind, publishing important papers in the fields of geography, geology, and biology. But above all, he was a man of finely attuned conscience, who saw Russian society as it was, violent, oppressive, wherein a tiny brutal minority held the vast majority as slaves. It was this clarity of vision and conscience that brought him to confront the horrors of his time, when, like now, avarice, and unbridled ambition lives vampirically on the vast sufferings of others.

While Kropotkin’s scientific endeavours continued throughout his life, his political interests began early in life. For all his immense privilege, he was aware almost instinctively of its source, the suffering of the slaves that the Russians called ‘раб’ or in English, serfs. But being a man of science and philosophy he did more than note this and react in repulsion. He tried to understand it. What were the roots of such a brutal state of affairs?apparently What sustains the fiction that a man may own a man, a woman, a child?

His older brother Alexander, who was later to kill himself while exiled to Siberia, was arrested as a university student by the Tsar’s secret police. His crime was reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self Reliance. Only when the professor who had lent him the book stepped forward was he released without apology. The penchant for subversive reading was apparently a family affair, for soon young Peter was reading Proudhon and Bakunin, along with other luminaries of the socialist movement, a movement that had frightened Europe’s hereditary rulers into savage suppression during the year of revolutions that sprang up city by city in 1848.

In 1862 Peter joined the military, one of the expected routes of advancement for a young man of his status. As a junior officer with a Cossack regiment, he explored portions of Siberia, and explored the state of penal settlement they came across..  In 1871, after writing several well  received scientific papers on the geology and geography of Siberia, he returned west where he rejected an offered scientific post in favour of political organising. In 1872 he joined the Chaikovskii Circle, a secret group of socialists that attempted to organise among the peasantry and illicitly published books and pamphlets by Marx,  John Stuart Mill, and Darwin. He began writing, too often perhaps under his own name, for he was arrested for the first of many times in 1874.  He was imprisoned in the imposing fortress of Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg. As is fitting of a prison built with the unpaid labour of slaves, the fortress erected by Peter styled ‘the Great,” could not hold Peter. By bribery or deceit he escaped and fled across Europe to Switzerland.  His brother Alexander was arrested the same year, and on charges of ‘political untrustworthiness’  was, accompanied with his wife and children, exiled to Siberia, where he would die.

Peter Kropotkin’s politics did naught to make his Swiss hosts comfortable, and at their suggestion in 1881, he moved to France. There he formally joined the First International as the International Working Men's Association came to be known known. The First International was an early federation of socialist leaning political parties, some radical and seeking an immediate overthrow of Capitalism - as for example Marx and Engels, but many more moderate. Peter Kropotkin was of the latter temperament, and not by temperament alone. He had earlier written back in 1869:

The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion - the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose - to destroy it.
Peter Kropotkin was none of these things. Firm in his beliefs and thoughts, but gentle of disposition, he believed that humanity could be swayed towards a principled anarchism through persuasion and example. Others, especially those in power were not inclined to notice the distinction of revolutionist and gradualists.  He was arrested again, this time by the French Secret Police as a member of an illegal organisation. After the fall of the Paris Communion in 1848, membership in the First International was illegal. He was sentenced to five years.

Remarkably, his first writings on anarchism were smuggled from prison and published. After three years, Kropotkin was released and left France for the more tolerant Britain. Here he was received and became friends withWilliam Morris and George Bernard Shaw.  His political writing intensified, as did his organising, both locally and by letters to France and Russia. It was in Britain that he was to found the journal Freedom, still published today (and read by the author). It was also in England that he published a series of remarkable books, like the brilliant Conquest of Bread that Emile Zola called a true poem.

He visited both Canada and the United States, where his fame as an anarchist philosopher preceded him. In New York he spoke about the dangers of state capitalism (that underlies Marx ands Engels revolutionary program).

In New Jersey he was asked for a statement on his political beliefs. He said,

I am an anarchist and am trying to work out the ideal society, which I believe will be communistic in economics, but will leave full and free scope for the development of the individual. As to its organization, I believe in the formation of federated groups for production and consumption.... The social democrats are endeavouring to attain the same end, but the difference is that they start from the centre - the State and work toward the circumference, while we endeavour to work out the ideal society from the simple elements to the complex.

Back in Britain, books poured from the man: his autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899), Fields, Factories and Workshops (1901), Mutual Aid (1902) and The Great French Revolution (1909). To this add literally hundreds of journal articles, newspaper pieces and the immense work of editing not one, but several journals.

Peter Kropotkin returned to Russia during the revolution of 1918, hoping for anarchism to develop. Despite efforts in this direction, Lenin’s party seized power.  To Lenin he wrote: Russia was a Soviet Republic only in name and at present it is not the soviets which rule in Russia but party committees.

In Russia he completed his final book, Ethics, Origin and Development (1922).

Peter Kropotkin died of pneumonia in the small city of Dmitrov, 45 miles north of Moscow on
8 February, 1921. It had been a hard winter and there’d been food shortages.  In spite of obvious secret police presence, for Lenin was nothing if not nervous of anarchists, his funeral was attended by thousands. As word spread of his death, tens of thousands mourned. Peter Kropotkin loved humanity, and he loved people. Arrested, imprisoned, he had never betrayed a compatriot. He have his whole life to the belief that violence does not rule us, only enslave us. Slavery, said Kropotkin, will never endure.


Here’s a brief excerpt from Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread:

“The shriek of the engine is heard in the wild gorges of the Alps, the Caucasus, and the Himalayas. The rivers have been made navigable; the coasts, carefully surveyed, are easy of access; artificial harbours, laboriously dug out and protected against the fury of the sea, afford shelter to the ships. Deep shafts have been sunk in the rocks; labyrinths of underground galleries have been dug out where coal may be raised or minerals extracted. At the crossings of the highways great cities have sprung up, and within their borders all the treasures of industry, science, and art have been accumulated.

Whole generations, that lived and died in misery, oppressed and ill-treated by their masters, and worn out by toil, have handed on this immense inheritance to our century. For thousands of years millions of men have laboured to clear the forests, to drain the marshes, and to open up highways by land and water. Every rood of soil we cultivate in Europe has been watered by the sweat of several races of men. Every acre has its story of enforced labour, of intolerable toil, of the people's sufferings. Every mile of railway, every yard of tunnel, has received its share of human blood.

The shafts of the mine still bear on their rocky walls the marks made by the pick of the workman who toiled to excavate them. The space between each prop in the underground galleries might be marked as a miner's grave; and who can tell what each of these graves has cost, in tears, in privations, in unspeakable wretchedness to the family who depended on the scanty wage of the worker cut off in his prime by fire-damp, rock-fall, or flood?

The cities, bound together by railroads and waterways, are organisms which have lived through centuries. Dig beneath them and you find, one above another, the foundations of streets, of houses, of theatres, of public buildings. Search into their history and you will see how the civilization of the town, its industry, its special characteristics, have slowly grown and ripened through the co-operation of generations of its inhabitants before it could become what it is to-day. And even to-day, the value of each dwelling, factory, and warehouse, which has been created by the accumulated labour of the millions of workers, now dead and buried, is only maintained by the very presence and labour of legions of the men who now inhabit that special corner of the globe. 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.”


Great thanks to John Simkin whose research and writing supplied much of the above material.