The Conquest of Bread

The Conquest of Bread is Peter Kropotkin's most detailed description of the ideal society, embodying anarchist communism, and of the social revolution that was to achieve it. Marshall Shatz's introduction to this edition traces Kropotkin's evolution as an anarchist, from his origins in the Russian aristocracy to his disillusionment with the Russian Revolution. The volume also includes a number of his shorter writings, including a hitherto untranslated chapter from his classic Memoirs of a Revolutionist.

Quotes and thoughts while reading:
   "Millions of human beings have laboured to create this civilization on which we pride ourselves today. Other millions, scattered through the globe, labour to maintain it. Without them nothing would be left in 50 years but ruins.
   There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property, born of the past and present. Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the invention of each of these machines which embody the genius of man.
   Thousands of writers, of poets, of scholars, have laboured to increase knowledge, to dissipate error, and to create that atmosphere of scientific thought, without which the marvels of our century would never have appeared. And these thousands of philosophers, of poets, of scholars, of inventors, have themselves been supported by the labour of past centuries. They have been upheld and nourished through life, both physically and mentally, by legions of workers and craftsmen of all sorts. They have drawn their motive force from the environment." (p 15)

"The 'right to well-being' means the possibility of living like human beings, and of bringing up children to be members of a society better than ours, whilst the 'right to work' only means the right to be always a wage-slave, a drudge, ruled over and exploited by the middle class of the future. The right to well-being is the social revolution, the right to work means nothing but the treadmill of commercialism. It is high time for the worker to assert his right to the common inheritance, and to enter possession of it. " (p 30) Hmm, doesn't this sound familiar, like something one might read in a book titled "This Changes Everything"? But this was written at the turn of the 20th century, why didn't it come true?

"As long as there is no fear of the supply running short, no water company thinks of checking the consumption of water in each house. Take what you please! But during the great droughts, if there is any fear of the supply failing, the water companies know that all they have to do is make known the fact, by means of a short advertisement in the papers, and the citizens will reduce their consumption of water and not let it run to waste." (p 62) Wishful thinking, from a different time I am afraid.

"Since our middle-class civilization is based on the exploitation of inferior races and countries with less advanced industrial systems, the revolution will confer a boon at the very outset, by menacing that 'civilization', and allowing the so-called inferior races to free themselves." (p 72)

  "[A] house was not built by its owner. It was erected, decorated and furnished by innumerable workers - in the timber yard, the brick-field and the workshop, toiling for dear life at a minimum wage.
   The money spent by the owner was not the product of his own toil. It was amassed, like all other riches, by paying the workers two-thirds or only a half of what was their due.
   Moreover - and it is here that the enormity of the whole proceeding becomes most glaring - the house owes its actual value to the profit which the owner can make out of it. Now, this profit results from the fact that his house is built in a town - that is, in an agglomeration of thousands of other houses, possessing paved streets, bridges, quays and fine public buildings, well lighted, and affording to its inhabitants a thousand comforts and conveniences unknown in villages; a town in regular communication with other towns, and itself a center of industry, commerce, science and art; a town which the work of twenty or thirty generations has made habitable, healthy and beautiful." (p 75)

"Imagine a society, comprising a few million inhabitants, engaged in agriculture and a great variety of industries—Paris, for example, with the Department of Seine-et-Oise. Suppose that in this society all children learn to work with their hands as well as with their brains. Admit that all adults, save women, engaged in the education of their children, bind themselves to work 5 hours a day from the age of twenty or twenty-two to forty-five or fifty, and that they follow occupations they have chosen in any one branch of human work considered necessary. Such a society could in return guarantee well-being to all its members; that is to say, a more substantial well-being than that enjoyed to-day by the middle classes. And, moreover, each worker belonging to this society would have at his disposal at least 5 hours a day which he could devote to science, art, and individual needs which do not come under the category of necessities, but will probably do so later on, when man's productivity will have augmented, and those objects will no longer appear luxurious or inaccessible." (p 92) Hmm, sounds a lot like B F Skinner proposes in Walden Two. And here I was thinking he had some new idea. Nope, just a reiteration of Kropotkin. Still, it does make a lot of sense, and if you want to know more, read the whole chapter titled "Ways and means".

The world Kropotkin imagines on p 99 and 100, I believe was alive during the first decade or so of the internet. Now, things have become monetized again, but there was this heyday of anarchism that really felt right about the net.

   "'The works of each!' But human society would not exist for more than two consecutive generations if everyone did not give infinitely more than that for which he is paid in coin, in 'cheques', or in civic rewards. The race would soon become extinct if mothers did not sacrifice their lives to take care of their children, if men did not give continually, without demanding and equivalent reward, if men did not give most precisely when they expect no reward.
   If middle-class society is decaying, if we have got into a blind alley from which we cannot emerge without attacking past institutions with torch and hatchet, it is precisely because we have given too much to counting. It is because we have let ourselves be influenced into giving only to receive. It is because we have aimed at turning society into a commercial company based in debit and credit." (p 155) How about them apples. Isn't that what's wrong with the world today? Everything comes down to how will this help me? Not how can I help?

Again, from p 196 "They will experiment..." we see more linkages between Walden Two and The Conquest of Bread. The whole agriculture section in general is pretty interesting. The methods that Kropotkin wants to see put into use: greenhouses, building up soil, mechanization... have all been put into use. And while we certainly currently have the capacity to feed the world, there is still the issue of distribution.

"I read this books while I was still in Petersburg, where it appeared in 1972 in German Loatin's Translation. Even then I very much disliked the pretentiousness of the book as well as its unscientific character - the theory of value, for example, is not demonstrated scientifically but has to be taken on faith - and its indulgence in scientific jargon. Marx's excursions into the realm of numerical expressions and algebraic formulae were comical: they demonstrate his utter inability to think concretely, in quantitative terms, and Nicholas Tsinger(an astronomer) and I had a good laugh over his 'formulae', which he sets out so pretentiously without even suspecting how amusing they are to a mathematician accustomed to the idea of units of measurement. Highly comical as well is his penchant for expressing himself in formulae where formulae express nothing. In 1876, when I met German Lopatin in London, we spoke a bit about Marx's book, which as its translator he knew thoroughly, and I remarked that Marx's theory as both old (it derives from Adam Smith) and untrue. In contemporary society goods are not exchanged in proportion to the amount of socially necessary labour (as Adam Smith had already remarked); but to the extent that this is desirable in the future society - another question which Marx never even touches one - he was still more or less a communist. To my astonishment, Lopatin replied that the theory of value was not important. Marx's main task was to establish the historical origins of capital. But Lopatin was obviously expressing the opinion of their circle." (p 221)

"...it was Kropotkin's aim to prove that communism at least partial - has more chances of being established than collectivism, especially in communes taking the lead, and that free, or anarchist-communism is the only form of communism that has any chance of being accepted in civilized societies; communism and anarchy are therefore two terms of evolution which complete each other, the one rendering the other possible and acceptable. He has tried, moreover, to indicate how, during a revolutionary period, a large city - if its inhabitants have accepted the idea could organize itself on the lines of free communism; the city guaranteeing to every inhabitant dwelling, food and clothing to an extent corresponding to the comfort now available to the middle classes only, in exchange for a half-day's, or five-hours' work; and how all those things which would be considered as luxuries might be obtained by everyone if he joins for the other half of the day all sorts of free associations pursuing all possible aims - educational, literary, scientific, artistic, sports and so on. In order to prove the first of these assertions he has analyzed the possibilities of agriculture and industrial work, both being combined with brain work. And in order to elucidate the main factors of human evolution, he has analyzed the part played in history by the popular constructive agencies of mutual aid and the historical role of the state." (p 245)

"Alongside science, there is a second element that lies at the foundation of Kropotkin's anarchism, and that is the humanistic. What Kropotkin experienced among the Russian peasants, the Swiss watchmakers, and his own comrades in the revolutionary movement was a moral community whose members instinctively recognized each other's fundamental human worth and dignity.... What is most striking, and most moving, in his autobiography is its account of the growth of his moral consciousness. There was nothing scientific or, indeed, 'natural' about the transformation of this Russian aristocrat, serf owner and page de chambre to the tsar into the sworn enemy of an unjust social order. It was the result of a prolonged and hard-won intellectual and moral struggle...." (p XIX)