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Title: Basic Kropotkin
Author: Brian Morris
Date: October, 2008
Language: en
Topics: anarchism, Pëtr Kropotkin, history
Source: Retrieved on September 20, 2013 from http://www.afed.org.uk/ace/kropotkin_history_of_anarchism.html
Notes: Published by The Anarchist Federation. Printed copies available: http://www.afed.org.uk/ace][www.afed.org.uk]] [[http://www.afed.org.uk/ace — Anarchist Communist Editions pamphlet no.17

Brian Morris

Basic Kropotkin

An introduction to the thought and politics of one of the most

influential anarchist communists of 100 years ago — Peter Kropotkin

FOREWORD — by the Anarchist Federation

In the preface to her book on Kropotkin (Kropotkin and the Rise of

Revolutionary Anarchism) Caroline Cahm writes that “…the history of the

European anarchist movement and the anarchist communist ideas which have

tended to dominate its thinking and activity are only just beginning to

receive the attention they deserve”. This was written in 1989 and only

in the last few years has a slow process started that is beginning to

rectify this situation, for example the publication of two new and

important books on Bakunin. As Brian says, Kropotkin was not the

originator of anarchist communism, and he never claimed to be. Anarchist

communism developed amongst the workers of the First International and

appears to have spontaneously expressed itself in several places at the

same time. In Switzerland Dumartheray, the exiled worker from Lyons, who

was familiar with the ideas of Cabet and his version of communism, seems

first to have expressed these ideas. At the same time in Italy, Covelli,

who had become familiar with the ideas of various German communists, was

together with other members of the First International, including

Malatesta, to express the ideas of anarchist communism. But it was above

all Kropotkin who was to popularize anarchist communism and to be

instrumental in its wider circulation in the European workers movement

and beyond in, for example, China and Japan.

Brian is addressing himself in this pamphlet to Kropotkin’s ideas on

anarchism as a social and political movement. It should be pointed out

though, that Kropotkin was very much under the sway of the concept of

scientific progress, prevalent among thinkers in the 19^(th) century.

Malatesta was to address himself to the notion of “scientific anarchism”

as expressed by Kropotkin. He thought that this concept was neither

science nor anarchism. Mechanical concepts of the universe could not be

equated with human aspirations and the idea of anarchism. In addition

Malatesta rejected Kropotkin’s views on harmony in nature, which he saw

as too optimistic. This in its turn would create too much optimism about

the inevitability of anarchist communism. Rather for Malatesta, it was

not the emphasis on harmony in nature but the struggle against

disharmony in human society. Despite this, it was Kropotkin’s linking of

science and anarchism, with all of its faults, which won an audience

throughout society and enabled anarchist communism to play a role in the

working class movements as well as in intellectual life.

Kropotkin’s views on the First World War cannot be ignored. Enemies of

anarchism have tried to draw the lesson that this failure to take an

internationalist position and to instead side with the Allies must have

somehow sprung from his anarchist communism, and hence this body of

ideas must be flawed. When one considers that the overwhelming majority

of anarchist communists took an internationalist position then this

theory is shown to hold no water. Rather it was perhaps Kropotkin’s

blinkered views on France as the leading country of radical thought and

revolution, which must be defended at all costs, with false comparisons

with the Paris Commune of 1871, which may have swayed Kropotkin to adopt

this mistaken position, a position disastrous for both his reputation

and for the international movement.

Let’s leave the last word to Malatesta: “In any case anarchists will

always find in his writings a treasury of fertile ideas”.

INTRODUCTION

An important and talented geographer, an explorer in his early youth,

Peter Kropotkin was one of the most seminal figures in the history of

the anarchist movement. He has indeed been described as a unique

combination of the prophet and the scientist. Although Kropotkin made

many important contributions to science, particularly his theory of

“mutual aid” which emphasized the importance of co-operation and

symbiosis in the evolutionary process, throughout his life he was a

revolutionary socialist, devoting time and energy to the anarchist

cause. By his exemplary life and by generating a “treasury of fertile

ideas”, as his friend Errico Malatesta put it, Kropotkin undoubtably

stirred the imagination of his generation. He was indeed a pioneer

ecological thinker, and his Fields, Factories and Workshops was one of

the great prophetic works of the nineteenth century.

Kropotkin has generally been ignored by academic scholars, who seem to

prefer obscurantist musings of such reactionary philosophers as

Heidegger, but Kropotkin’s ideas continue to find resonance in many

contemporary currents of thought – in the urban ecology of Lewis Mumford

and Paul Goodman; the bioregional vision of Kirkpatrick Sale; the social

ecology of Murray Bookchin; the plea for intermediate technology and

organic farming by the likes of E.F.Schumacher and Wendell Berry; and in

Taki Fotopoulos’s project of inclusive democracy, to name but a few.

Even poststructuralist philosophers like Michel Foucault and Gilles

Deleuze seem to have appropriated many of the ideas of Kropotkin (and

other anarchists) – with very little acknowledgement! In particular,

Kropotkin’s critique of the state, capitalism, representation and the

vanguard party (Marxism).

A friend and close associate of William Morris, George Bernard Shaw,

Edward Carpenter and the redoubtable Emma Goldman – who described

Kropotkin as “my great teacher” – Kropotkin made enduring and

substantial contributions to the development of physical geography and

ecological thought, as well as to anarchist theory.

This pamphlet explores but one aspect of Kropotkin’s intellectual

legacy, and outlines Kropotkin’s ideas on anarchism as a social and

political movement.

THE HISTORY OF ANARCHISM

Kropotkin makes two essential points about anarchism as a political

tradition. The first is that anyone who sides with the oppressed, who

critiques the present status quo, or offers suggestions for a more

viable future – one in which libery, equality and the wellbeing of all

would have real, concrete expression – is more than likely to be

dismissed by those in power (or their ideologues) as utopian,

unpractical or misguided (AY 85). Secondly, Kropotkin emphasises that

anachism is a social movement, and thus was born among the working

people, and had little to do with the universities or intellectuals per

se (KRP 146).

For Kropotkin, forms of anarchism were inherent in social life itself,

and had co-existed with other social tendencies, throughout human

history. He therefore suggested that at all times two tendencies were

co-present, and continually in conflict;

“ On the one hand, the masses were developing in the form of customs a

number of institutions which were necessary to make social life possible

at all – to insure peace amongst men, to settle any disputes that may

arise, and to help one another in everything requiring co-operative

effort ” (KRP 146).

This was not a context devoid of power; it was rather one of a diffuse

social power, an instituting “ground power”, as Castoriadis describes

it, that was reflected in various institutions – the clan in tribal

society, village communities, the guilds in medieval Europe. But at all

times too there were explicit forms of power, represented by a minority

– the “sorcerers, prophets, priests and heads of military organisations,

who endeavoured to establish and to strengthen their authority over the

people” (KRP 71). In a sense, therfore, anarchism and “governmentalism”

have co-existed throughout human history.

Anarchism is seen by Kropotkin as representative of the first social

tendency, that is

“of the creative, constitutive power of the people themselves who aimed

at developing institutions of common law in order to protect themselves

from the ‘power-seeking minority’” (KRP 147).

Like contemporary writers, Kropotkin implies that anarchism could be

looked at in two ways. On the one hand, it can be seens as a kind of

“river”, as Peter Marshall (1992) describes it in his excellent history

of anarchism. It can thus be seen as a “libertarian impulse” or as an

“anarchist sensibility” that has existed throughout human history; an

impulse that has expressed itself in various ways – in the writings of

Lao Tzu and the Taoists, in classical Greek thought (especially that of

Zeno of Citium), in the mutuality of kin-based societies, in the ethos

of various religious sects, in such agrarian movements as the Diggers in

England and the early Zapatistas in Mexico, in the collectives that

sprang up during the Spanish civil war, and – currently – in the ideas

expressed in the ecology and feminist movements. Anarchist tendencies

seem to have expressed themselves in all religious movements, even in

Islam. One Islamic sect, the Najadatm, believed that “power belongs only

to God”. They therefore felt that they did not really need an Imam or

Caliph, but could organise themselves mutually to ensure justice.

On the other hand, anarchism may be as a historical movement and

political theory that had its beginnings at the end of the eighteenth

century. It was expressed in the writings of Willian Godwin, who wrote

the classic anarchist text An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice

(1973), as well as in the actions of the sans-culottes and the enrages

during the French revolution, and by radicals like Thomas Spence and

William Blake in Britain. As as social movement anarchism developed

during the nineteenth century, and in its classical form, represented by

Bakunin, Goldman, Reclus and Malatesta, as well as by Kropotkin, it was

a significant part of the socialist movement in the years before the

First World War, but its socialism was libertarian not Marxist. The

tendency of writers to create a dichotomy between socialism and

anarchism is, I think, both conceptually and historically misleading.

Kropotkin seems to have acknowledged these two ways of looking at

anarchism. In his famous article on anarchism for the Encyclopedia

Britannica (1910), Kropotkin defined anarchism as:

“A principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is

conceived without government – harmony in such a society being obtained,

not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free

agreements between the various groups, territorial and professional,

freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption as also

for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of

a civilised being” (KRP 289).

Society is thus envisaged as an interwoven network of an infinite

variety of groups and associations at various levels of federation

(local, regional, national, international) organised for a variety of

different purposes and functions. Elsewhere, he gives another succinct

definition of an anarchist society.

“The anarchists conceive a society in which all the mutual relations of

its members are regulated, not by laws, nor by authorities, whether

self-imposed or elected, but by mutual agreements between members of

that society and by a sum of social customs and habits – not petrified

by law, routine or superstition, but continually developing and

continually re-adjusted in accordance with the ever-growing requirements

of a free life stimulated by the progress of science, invention, and the

steady growth of higher ideals” (KRP 157).

(Kropotkin admitted that no society had ever existed which fully

expressed these principles).

Social life for Kropotkin was not therefore something immutable; there

could be “no crystallization and immobility, but a continual evolution –

such as we see in nature”. Moreover, the advent of such a society would,

Kropotkin believed, allow for the full develeopment of the individual;

“free play for the individual, for the full deelopment of his individual

gifts – for his individualization” (KRP 157).

Anarchism was seen by Kropotkin as having a double origin: as the

“Constructive, creative activity of the people, by which all

institutions of communal life were developed in the past”, and as a form

of protest against external forces, or a a mode of resistance against

the development of all forms of authority whether coercive or

ideological (KRP 149).

From the remotest antiquity humans therefore have not only created

anarcho-communist forms of association, but have expressed what

Kropotkin describes as the “no-government tendency” which has opposed

the emergence of hierarchic forms of organisation. The clan, the village

community, the guild, the free medieval city, were all institutions,

Kropotkin argues, by means of which the common people resisted the

encroachments of brigands, conquerors, and other power-seeking

minorities (KRP 287).

Kropotkin was always to emphasise the duality of human nature, that

humans were instrinsically both egoistic and social, always striving to

maintain the integrity of their own being while also motivated by social

concerns. Both Lao Tzu and Zeno are thus seen by Kropotkin as expressing

anarchist tendencies, as did the many religious movements which emerged

throughout antiquity and the medieval period, to challenge state and

ecclesiastical authority. Christianity itself, as a movement against the

Roman government, contained many elements, Kropotkin contends, which

were “esentially anarchistic” (KRP 149). Likewise with the Anabaptist

movement. Drawing on the support of the peasantry, it initiated the

Protestant reform movement, until it was suppressed by the reformers

under Martin Luther’s leadership. But within the Anabaptist movement

there was a considerable element of anarchism.

At the time of the Enlightenment, anarchist ideas were also expressed by

the French philosophers, Rousseau and Diderot in particular, and such

ideas, Kropotkin stressed, found their own expression later in the great

French Revolution with the emergence of the independent “sections” in

Paris, and of many “communes” throughout the country.

But for Kropotkin it was William Godwin (1756–1836) in his Enquiry

concerning, Political Justice (1793) who first stated in definite form

the basic principles of anarchism, even though he did not give that name

to his own philosophy. Godwin advocated the abolition of the state,

along with its laws and courts, believing that real justice could only

be attained through free and independent social institutions. As regards

to property, Godwin was openly a communist, stating that every person

had the right “to every substance capable of contributing to the benefit

of a human being”. But Godwin, Kropotkin observed, had not the courage

of his own convictions, and was later to mitigate his communist views in

the second edition of Political Justice (1796). Godwin was essentially

an individualist anarchist – society, he declared “is nothing more than

an aggregation of individuals” – and a utilitarian, and his vision of a

free and equal society is ultimately based on the Greek notion of

individual self-development with its emphasis in reason and autonomy.

The person who first described himself as an anarchist (An-archy: no

government, contrary to authority) was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

(1809–1865). As a critic of the society of his day – both capitalism and

the state – Kropotkin thought that he was both great and inspiring. As

for his constructive suggestions regarding an alternative future

society, these Kropotkin thought unpractical or problematic – even

though he described Proudhon as “undoubtably one of the greastest

writers who have ever dealt with economic questions” (AY 97). Being

hostile to both communism and state socialism, Proudhon developed a

system of mutualism which in essence retained the notion of private

property, and following the ideas of Robert Owen, advocated a system of

labour checks, which represented the hours of labour required to produce

a given commodity. The exchange of services and goods would be thus on

the basis of equilvalence, facilitated by a scheme of mutual exchange

and mutual banking. Kropotkin considered Proudhon’s scheme as something

of a compromise with the interests of capitalism, its individualism

incompatible with the common ownership of land and the instruments of

production, its mutualism simply replicating the wages system with all

its problems and contradictions. But having experienced the reaction to

the French Revolution and having lived through the revolution of 1848,

Proudhon had seen with his own eyes, Kropotkin argued, the crimes

perpetrated by the revolutionary republican government, and the

problematic nature of state socialism. This led Proudhon is such works

as General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851) to

advocate a society without government and to use the term anarchy to

describe it.

BAKUNIN AND ANARCHIST COMMUNISM

It was, however, with the founding of the International Workingmen’s

Association, and in the aftermath of the Paris Commune of 1871, that

anarchism came to be recognised in its modern form. The International

Workingmen’s Association was formally inaugurated in September 1864 in

London – though its structure and constitution were not formally adopted

until the first congress convened in Geneva in September 1866. It began

primarily, as G.D.H. Cole notes, as a “trade union affair”, though trade

unions were still illegal in France. Most of the French participants of

the 1864 proceedings were not industrial workers but artisans, and

essentially followers of Proudhon’s kind of socialism. Kropotkin

describes them as “all mutualists” (KRP 294). Hence the first

International began as a joint affair between British and French Trade

unionists, with the participation of a number of exiles from other parts

of Europe. Chief among these was Karl Marx (1818–1883) who quickly

became one of its most important and active leaders. The first

International, it is worth noting, was therefore not the creation of

Marx, nor was it specifically Marxist at its inception.

What emerged in both the International and in the Paris commune were two

very different conceptions of socialism and the revolution. One,

represented by the Blanquists and the Marxists, followed that of the

Jacobin tradition in the French Revolution and advocated a revolution

through the establishment of a “socialist republic” – the centralised

state. The other conception suggested a free federation of independent

communes, and was advocated by workers mainly from the Latin countries,

who came to be described as anarchists. The General Council of the

International, led by Marx, Engels and some French Blanquist refugees –

whom Kropotkin describes as “all pure Jacobinists” (KRP 165) –

eventually used its position to make a coup d’état in the International,

and this led to the famous “split” in the movement between the

authoritarian socialists and the anarchists. It was in the personality

of Michael Bakunin (1814–1876) that the anarchist tendency within the

International “found a powerful, gifted and inspired exponent”. And as

Kropotkin writes, Bakunin soon became the leading spirit among those

workers from Spain, France, Italy and Switzerland (KRP 294).

Bakunin had become a member of the Geneva section at the International

Workingmen’s Association in July 1868, for many of his associates were

already memebers – and Kropotkin was to join the Association four years

later on his visit to Switzerland. The conflict between Marx and Bakunin

came to a head at the sham conference of the International held in

London in September 1971. This conference affirmed the authority of the

General Council (under Marx), declared the necessity of workers in each

country to form their own political party, and disparaged anarchism as a

political heresy. The Swiss groups of the International, almost all

followers of Bakunin and thus hostile to Marx, immediately organised

their own conference at the Sonvilier in the Jura. It took place in

November 1871, and produced the “Sonvilier Circular” which critiqued the

idea of the “conquest of political power by the working class”. The

split in the International crystallised around the leading figures of

Marx and Bakunin, but it was much more than a struggle of personalities.

For, as Kropotkin biographers write,

“It was also a clash of two wholly different conceptions of social

organisation, two mutually alien philosophies of life” (WA 111).

These were, respectively: the state socialism of the Marxists which put

an emphasis on authority, and acknowledged the need for a revolutionary

government – “the dictatorship of the proletariat” – to secure the

development of communism; and Bakunin’s anarchism, which advocated the

abolition of the state and its replacement by a federal society based on

free communes and voluntary associations.

Although Kropotkin never actually met Bakunin personally, he saw Bakunin

as a key figure in the development of modern anarchism. In countering

the efforts of the General Council of the International and the Marxists

to turn the entire labour movement into an “elective parliamentary and

political movement”, Bakunin and his associates were instrumental in the

founding of anarchism. As Kropotkin writes, it was out of this

“rebellion” that modern anarchism subsequently developed (KRP 150).

Kropotkin thus felt that it was Bakunin, in a series of powerful

pamphlets and letters, who first established the leading principles of

modern anarchism, particularly in Bakunin’s advocacy of the complete

abolition of the state. This implied the repudiation not only of

“revolutionary government” but of the democratic state and all forms of

representative government.

“All legislation made within the state, even when it issues from the

so-called universal suffrage, has to be repudiated because it always has

been made with regard to the interests of the priviledged classes” (KRP

165).

Although Bakunin was at heart a communist, he desbribed himself as a

“collectivist” anarchist to express a state of affairs in which all the

instruments of production are owned in common – collectively – by the

working people, through either labour associations or free communes. The

form of distribution, whether by labour checks or not, was to be left to

the collectives themselves. The anarchists within the first

International did not initially refer to themselves as anarchists but

rather as “federalists” or as “anti-authoritarian” socialists. But in

the aftermath of the Paris commune, groups of workers by degrees adopted

the label of their Marxist opponents, and came to describe themselves as

“anarchist communists”. Among the workers of Spain, France, Italy and

Switzerland there thus emerged what Kropotkin refered to as the “main

current” of anarchism – anarchist communism, which viewed anarchism and

communism as necessarily complementary and mutually supporting. As

Kropotkin wrote:

“The great bulk of anarchist workingmen prefer the anarchist communist

ideas which gradually evolved out of the anarchist collectivism of the

International Workingmen’s Association.” (KRP 297).

Among the better known exponents of this tendency were Elisee Reclus,

Jean Grave, Errico Malatesta, Emma Goldman, Sebastian Faure, Emile

Pouget and Johann Most – and, of course, Kropotkin himself, who spent a

lifetime lucidly outlining, defending and promoting the anarchist

communist tendency.

OTHER ANARCHIST CURRENTS

Besides anarchist communism, Kropotkin recognised and described three

other currents within the anarchist movement as it developed towards the

end of the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States –

individualist, Christian and literary anarchism. The first of these,

individualist anarchism, in turn, could be divided into two branches,

the mutualists and the “pure” individualists.

The mutualists included, besides the many followers of Proudhon, the

disiples of William Thompson in Britain and a contemporary of Proudhon,

Josiah Warren (1798–1874). Having originally been a member of Robert

Owen’s socialist community “New Harmony” which was established in 1825

on the banks of the Wabash river in Indiana, Warren turned against

communism, having felt that the failure of the New Harmony Community was

due to its collectivism and to its suppression of individual initiative.

In the following year, Warren established in Cincinnati a “store” in

which goods were exchanged on the principle of time-value and labour

checks. Such “equity-stores”, Kropotkin noticed, were still in existence

in the 1860s in the United States. In essence, Warren’s radical thought

was an amalgamation of individualism, fear of the state and economic

mutualism.

The ideas of both Proudhon and Warren, Kropotkin writes, had an

important influence in the United States, “creating quite a school”. Of

particular importance in the development of this school of economic

thought – individualist anarchism or mutualism – were Stephen Pearl

Andrews, Ezra Heywood and Lysander Spooner. At the end of the nineteenth

century its most prominent representative was Benjamin Tucker

(1854–1939) who had been a close friend of Warren. At the age of

twenty-one Tucker had translated Proudhon’s famous What is Property

(1840) and in 1881 had founded the radical newspaper Liberty. Kropotkin

describes Tucker’s individualist anarchism as a “combination of (the

conceptions), of Proudhon with those of Herbert Spencer” (KRP 296). For

Tucker, “Anarchism means absolute liberty, nothing more, nothing less”.

This meant liberty in production and exchange, which he described as

“the most important of all liberties”. Like Proudhon, he was vehemently

anti-communist and described Proudhon as “perhaps the most vigourous

hater of communism that ever lived on this planet”. Proudhon, of course,

had equated communism with state socialism and authoritarian religious

communities, and thus came to declare that “communism is oppression and

slavery”, a mode of organisation that denied the liberty and sovereignty

of the individual and equality. Tucker therefore came to argue that

Kropotkin was not an anarchist but a revolutionary communist. Tucker had

the idea that the communist anarchists would force a communal property

system on everyone and were thus not anarchists. Kropotkin, however,

always stressed the autonomy of the individual and never denied the

right of any person to cultivate their own plot of land.

Kropotkin offered many criticisms of the individualist anarchism

(mutualism) of Proudhon. Warren and Tucker – in its stress on egoism and

the right of individuals to oppress others if they have the power to do

so, in its affirmation of private property, petty commodity production

and the wage system (the market economy), and in justifying the use of

violence to enforce agreements and defend private property. Kropotkin

acknowledged and applauded Tucker’s admirable criticisms of capitalist

monopolies and the state and of state socialism, as well as his

“vigorous defence of the rights of the individual”, but in defending the

right to private property, Tucker, Kropotkin wrote, opens up the way

“for reconstituting under the heading of ‘defence’ all the functions of

the state” (KRP 173–74). Thus Kropotkin concludes that the position of

the mutualists is “the same as that of Spencer, and of all the so called

‘Manchester School’ of economists, who also began by a severe criticism

of the state and end in its full recognition in order to maintain the

property monopolies, of which the state is the necessary stronghold”

(KRP 162).

The debate between the defenders of private property (and the so-called

market socialists) and anarchist communists still reverberates in many

contemporary anarchist journals.

Writing around the turn of the century, Kropotkin suggested that the

individualist anarchism of the American Proudhonists found little

support or sympathy amongst working people, i.e. those who possessed no

property.

“Those who profess it – they are chiefly ‘intellectuals’ – soon realise

that the individualisation they so highly praise is not attainable by

individual efforts, and either abandon the ranks of anarchists, and are

driven into the liberal individualism of the classical economists, or

they retire into a sort of Epicurean a-moralism, or super-man theory,

similar to that of Stirner and Nietzsche” (KRP 297).

These last two writers represent a second form of individualist

anarchism, which Kropotkin describes as “pure individualism”. The

fullest expression of this individualist anarchism was to be found,

Kropotkin wrote, in the remarkable works of Max Stirner (1806–1856),

whose book The Ego and its Own (1845) was brought into prominence by

John Henry Mackay at the end of the century. Stirner was a left-Hegelian

metaphysician but proposed a strident philosophy of egoism that

repudiated all “abstractions” – freedom, god, truth, humanity – in its

affirmation of the unique ego, the corporeal self. Along with Nietzsche,

Stirner has been seen as a precursor of existentialism. Although (unlike

Marx and Engels) Kropotkin acknowledged the importance of Stirner, and

also the beautiful poetic writings of Nietzsche, he was never

sympathetic to his strident egoism. Affirming Stirner’s revolt against

the state and all forms of authoritarian communism, Kropotkin wrote:

“Reasoning on Hegelian metaphysical lines, Stirner preaches the

rehabilitation of the ‘I’ and the supremacy of the individual; and he

comes in this way to advocate complete ‘amoralism’ (no morality) and an

‘association of egoists’” (KRP 161).

But Kropotkin goes on: “how metaphysical and remote from real life is

this ‘self-assertion of the individual’; how it runs against the

feelings of equality of most of us; and how it brings the would-be

‘individualists’ dangerously near to those who imagine themsleves to

represent a superiour breed” (KRP 172).

He points out too the impossibility of the individual to attain any

authentic or meaningful development of the human personality in

conditions of oppression and economic exploitation. Inspite of its

usefulness as a critique, and its importance in its advocacy of of the

full development of the person (ego), for Kropotkin, individualist,

“life-style” anarchism was a limited expression of anarchism and one

that mostly appealed to artistic and literary figures (KRP 293).

A second current of anarchism outlined by Kropotkin was in fact that

which found its expression in literary and artistic circles. Kropotkin

emphasised that not only had the best of contemporary literature deeply

influenced anarchism itself, but hundreds of modern authors were

expressing, in varying degrees, anarchist ideas at the end of the

nineteenth century. He mentions Ibsen, Whitman, Thoreau, Marc Guyau,

Spencer, Herzen, Nietszche, and Edward Carpenter (KRP 299).

The third current of anarchism described by Kropotkin was that of

Christian anarchism, represented by Leo Tolstoy, although Tolstoy never

described himself as an anarchist. Drawing on the teachings of the

Christian gospels and following the dictates of reason, Tolstoy,

Kropotkin wrote, used all the powers of his imagination and rich talents

to make powerful criticisms of the church, state power, and all the

present property laws. Robbers, Tolstoy held, were far less dangerous

than a well-organised government. Holding firm to the teachings of

Christ, Tolstoy combined Christianity, anarchism and pacifism; this led

to important criticisms of patriotism and militarism as well as to

Tolstoy being heralded as an apostle of non-violent resistance, a

political strategy late adopted by Gandhi, who always acknowledged his

debt to Tolstoy. Kropotkin concluded that Tolstoy’s religious arguments

are so well combined with arguments derived from a dispassionate

scrutiny of present evils “that the anarchist portions of his works

appeal to the religious and non-religious reader alike” (KRP 299).

Although Kropotkin sympathetically deals with all forms of anarchism –

his work is singularly free of the abusive epithets and rancour that

mars much contemporary anarchist writing – Kropotkin makes clear his own

allegiance to anarchist communism. This form of anarchism was advocated

for the first time at the Jura congress in October 1880, and although

Kropotkin was to play an important part in the development of anarchist

communism and was later to become its chief exponent and advocate, he

was not its originator. The linkage between anarchism and communism

seems to have evolved spontaneously and independantly among the many

“collectivist” followers of Bakunin in Italy, Spain and Switzerland.

People important in the early development of anarchist communism,

besides Kropotkin, include Elisee Reclus, Carlo Cafiero, Jean Grave and

Errico Malatesta.

In his advocacy of anarchist communism Kropotkin came, like other

anarchist members of the First International, to draw a clear

distinction between his own conception of socialism and that of the

Marxists. Kropotkin critiqued the “revolutionary government” and the

“workers’ state” of the Marxists and throughout his life he made

strident criticisms of state socialism. He was always hostile to the

idea that for the sake of the future, personal liberty could be

sacrificed on the “altar of the state” (KRP 130), and felt that the

plans of the state socialists were not only impractical – as it was

impossible to forsee everything – but that state socialism would

inevitably lead to a party dictatorship (KRP 76). On this issue he and

Bakunin were in close agreement, and with regard to the Russian

Revolution, somewhat prescient, Emma Goldman, in fact, refused to

describe the Bolshevik regime as “communist” considering it a form of

“state capitalism”. In Russia, she wrote, there has never been any

attempt to apply communist principles in any shape or form. Kropotkin

always emphasised that state socialism, by giving the state control and

management over the main sources of economic life, besides the powers

that the state already possesses, would inevitably create a “new tyranny

even more terrible than the old one”. He therefore concluded that thte

state organisation “having been the force to which the minorities

resorted for establishing and organising their power over the masses,

cannot be a force which will serve to destory these priveledges” (KRP

170–71). State socialism would lead to state capitalism and to new

instruments of tyranny, and “would only increase the powers of

bureaucracy and capitalism” (KRP 286).

When Kropotkin returned to Russia in 1917 his worst fears were

confirmed. In a letter to the Danish art critic Georg Brandes, Kropotkin

drew an anthology between the situation as it then existed in Russia

(1918) and the Jacobin revolution in France from September 1792 to July

1794. The Bolsheviks, he wrote, are “striving to introduce the

socialisation of the land, industry and commerce. Unfortunately, the

method by which they seek to establish a communism like Babeuf’s in a

strongly centralised state makes a success absolutely impossible

paralyses the constructive work of the people” (SW 320).

In a message to the works of Western Europe (April 1919) Kropotkin

reiterated the same views, in acknowledging that the effort to introduce

communism in Russia under a strongly centralised party dictatorship had

been an abject failure:

“This effort was made in the same way as the extremely centralised and

Jacobin endeavour of Babeuf. I owe it to you to say frankly that,

according to my view, this effort to build a communist republic on the

basis of a strongly centralised state communism under the iron law of

party dictatorship is bound to end in failure. We learn in Russia how

communism cannot be introduced” (KRP 254).

But though critical of the Bolsheviks, Kropotkin protested with all his

strength against any type of armed intervention in Russia by the Allies,

fearing this would only lead to reaction, and “would bring us back to a

chauvinistic monarchy” (SW 321).

Kropotkin, like other anarchists, supported the revolution, but not the

Bolshevik party, repudiating all forms of state socialism. To the end of

his life Kropotkin was a revolutionary socialist – an anarchist

communist.