The Conquest of Bread

Prince Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin, revolutionary and scientist, was descended from the old Russian nobility, but decided, at the age of thirty, to throw in his lot with the social rebels not only of his own country, but of the entire world. He became the intellectual leader of Anarchist-Communism; took part in the labor movement; wrote many books and pamphlets; established Le Révolté in Geneva and Freedom in London; contributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica; was twice imprisoned because of his radical activities; and twice visited America. After the Bolshevist revolution he returned to Russia, kept himself apart from Soviet activities, and died true to his ideals.

THE BOOK:

The Conquest of Bread is a revolutionary idyl, a beautiful outline sketch of a future society based on liberty, equality and fraternity. It is, in Kropotkin's own words, "a study of the needs of humanity, and of the economic means to satisfy them." Read in conjunction with the same author's "Fields, Factories and Workshops," it meets all the difficulties of the social inquirer who says: "The Anarchist ideal is alluring, but how could you work it out?"

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. OUR RICHES 1

II. WELL-BEING FOR ALL 12

III. ANARCHIST COMMUNISM 23

IV. EXPROPRIATION 34

V. FOOD 47

VI. DWELLINGS 73

VII. CLOTHING 84

VIII. WAYS AND MEANS 87

IX. THE NEED FOR LUXURY 95

X. AGREEABLE WORK 110

XI. FREE AGREEMENT 119

XII. OBJECTIONS 134

XIII. THE COLLECTIVIST WAGES SYSTEM 152

XIV. CONSUMPTION AND PRODUCTION 168

XV. THE DIVISION OF LABOUR 176

XVI. THE DECENTRALIZATION OF INDUSTRY 180

XVII. AGRICULTURE 191

NOTES 213

PREFACE

One of the current objections to Communism, and Socialism altogether, is that the idea is so old, and yet it has never been realized. Schemes of ideal States haunted the thinkers of Ancient Greece; later on, the early Christians joined in communist groups; centuries later, large communist brotherhoods came into existence during the Reform movement. Then, the same ideals were revived during the great English and French Revolutions; and finally, quite lately, in 1848, a revolution, inspired to a great extent with Socialist ideals, took place in France. "And yet, you see," we are told, "how far away is still the realization of your schemes. Don't you think that there is some fundamental error in your understanding of human nature and its needs?"

At first sight this objection seems very serious. However, the moment we consider human history more attentively, it loses its strength. We see, first, that hundreds of millions of men have succeeded in maintaining amongst themselves, in their village communities, for many hundreds of years, one of the main elements of Socialism--the common ownership of the chief instrument of production, the land, and the apportionment of the same according to the labour capacities of the different families; and we learn that if the communal possession of the land has been destroyed in Western Europe, it was not from within, but from without, by the governments which created a land monopoly in favour of the nobility and the middle classes. We learn, moreover, that the medieval cities succeeded in maintaining in their midst, for several centuries in succession, a certain socialized organization of production and trade; that these centuries were periods of a rapid intellectual, industrial, and artistic progress; while the decay of these communal institutions came mainly from the incapacity of men of combining the village with the city, the peasant with the citizen, so as jointly to oppose the growth of the military states, which destroyed the free cities.