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Title: Kropotkin: Class Warrior Author: Anarcho Date: November 22, 2014 Language: en Topics: Pëtr Kropotkin Source: Retrieved on 24th April 2021 from https://anarchism.pageabode.com/?p=825 Notes: This is a write-up of the notes of a talk made at the 2014 London Anarchist bookfair. I have made a few slight changes/additions. On the day I skipped the section of “small-scale” production (“Kropotkin the Medievalist?) and covered the differences between communist-anarchism and syndicalism in the discussion period. It is based, of course, on the work I did for Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology. A newly translated article by Kropotkin from May 1890 (“The action of the masses and the individual”) is appended.
This is a write-up of the notes of a talk made at the 2014 London
Anarchist bookfair. I have made a few slight changes/additions. On the
day I skipped the section of “small-scale” production (“Kropotkin the
Medievalist?) and covered the differences between communist-anarchism
and syndicalism in the discussion period. It is based, of course, on the
work I did for Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin
Anthology. A newly translated article by Kropotkin from May 1890 (“The
action of the masses and the individual”) is appended.
We think that we all know Kropotkin. It is best shown by a recent book
entitled The Prince of Co-operation and can be found in many other
works. For example, Carolyn Ashbaugh in her book Lucy Parsons: American
Revolutionary proclaimed him the “gentle anarchist theoretician of
non-violence”.
The reality is very different.
He was not a Tolstoy-like visionary dreaming of a new Middle Ages but
rather a Russian prince who rejected his privileges to become a class
warrior for the people, for the working masses: a committed and
realistic revolutionary communist-anarchist.
Which raises an obvious question: How did we get this false picture of
Kropotkin?
Perhaps it was Kropotkin’s own fault. After all, he had a jovial
personality as well as a very bushy beard, he wanted the free
distribution of goods and always preferred red to black flag. Yes, that
is right – he comes across as the Anarchist Santa!
However, to be serious any thinker’s legacy is determined by what texts
are easily available and who champions you after your death. The
“conventional wisdom” about the person is what results.
Take Proudhon, for example. Out of the over 20 volumes of the works he
published during his life until recently very little was available in
English: three complete books, three partial book translations and a few
articles from the period of the 1848 revolution. It would be fair to say
that he is better known via Marx and Engels than his own works – but,
unfortunately, some forget that those two were not disinterested,
accurate commentators!
In English-speaking world, he was championed after his death by Benjamin
Tucker, the American Individualist Anarchist. There is some overlap but
ultimately they held distinctly different ideas, most obviously Tucker
had no critique of wage-labour nor understanding that exploitation
occurred in production and so, unlike Proudhon, had no vision of
workers’ self-management as a necessary part of anarchism.
These two facts mean that the conventional wisdom on Proudhon is mostly
wrong but I hope that my anthology Property is Theft! is challenging
that to some degree.
The same can be said of Kropotkin. The most easily available works by
him are very general and theoretical introductions to anarchism, not
those on the concrete political and strategic issues facing the
movement. He was championed in the post-war period by the overtly
“reformist” elements in British movement who, like Tucker and Proudhon,
ignored most of his ideas.
I have quoted Carolyn Ashbaugh’s terrible book about Lucy Parsons as an
example of how Kropotkin is misunderstood. So what is the picture of
Kropotkin you get from such works? The clichés are well known: that he
viewed nature and society through rose-tinted glasses; that he was
utopian and backward looking; that he was utterly impractical and had no
vision of how revolution would occur; that he saw libertarian communism
being achieved more-or-less overnight as part of a fundamentally easy
transformation.
Sadly for those who peddle such nonsense, none of this is true.
In the film the Princess Bride (an excellent book and film, by the way)
a character repeatedly says “inconceivable” to which one of his
compatriots finally replies:
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it
means.”
This applies to anarchism, with writers on the subject repeatedly
showing they simply do not understand what the word they are using
means. Ashbaugh, for example, argues that Lucy Parsons and the Chicago
anarchists were not anarchists. The “Chicago leaders, as early as 1883,
were syndicalists” she asserted because “they had given up political
work for work in the unions which they believed would provide the social
organisation of the future”.
Here is Kropotkin from 1891:
“Were not our Chicago Comrades right in despising politics, and saying
the struggle against robbery must be carried on in the workshop and the
street, by deeds not words?”
And again from a year later:
“No one can underrate the importance of this labour movement for the
coming revolution. It will be those agglomerations of wealth producers
which will have to reorganise production on new social bases. They will
have to organise the life of the nation… They – the labourers, grouped
together – not the politicians.”
Both these quotes are from speeches commemorating the deaths of the
Chicago Martyrs so I guess Peter can join Lucy in not knowing what
anarchism “really” is!
It could be argued that Kropotkin was speaking after the hanging of the
Martyrs and so perhaps he had revised his ideas in light of their
activities. Well, here is Kropotkin from “as early” as 1881:
“We have to organise the workers’ forces – not to make them into a
fourth party in Parliament, but in order to make them a formidable
MACHINE OF STRUGGLE AGAINST CAPITAL. We have to group workers of all
trades under this single purpose: “War on capitalist exploitation!” And
we must prosecute that war relentlessly, day by day, by the strike, by
agitation, by every revolutionary means.”
Was that not what the “Chicago leaders” had concluded in 1883? Little
wonder, then, that Albert Parsons – Lucy’s husband and one of the
Martyrs – included two of Kropotkin’s articles on communist-anarchism in
his book Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis!
Let me now turn to a more recent writer, Pat Stack of the British SWP.
According to him, we anarchists “dismiss ... the importance of the
collective nature of change” as anarchism “downplays the centrality of
the working class”, argues that this class “is not the key to change”
and “despises the collectivity”. For anarchists, “revolutions were not
about ... collective struggle or advance”. He went on to assert that
Kropotkin “far from seeing class conflict as the dynamic for social
change as Marx did, saw co-operation being at the root of the social
process” and it “follows that if class conflict is not the motor of
change, the working class is not the agent and collective struggle not
the means.”
Someone should have told Kropotkin:
“In order to be able to make revolution, the mass of workers must
organise themselves, and resistance and the strike are excellent means
by which workers can organise… What is required is to build resistance
associations for each trade… and fight against the exploiters, to unify
the workers’ organisations… to federate across borders… workers’
solidarity must become … a daily reality”
Ironically for Stack, Kropotkin opposed the Marxism of his day (social
democracy) because it had “moved away from a pure labour movement, in
the sense of a direct struggle against capitalists by means of strikes,
unions, and so forth” into a vote-gathering machine. These awkward facts
did not stop Stack smugly proclaiming that the syndicalists’ “huge
advantage… over other anarchists [like Kropotkin] was their
understanding of the power of the working class, the centrality of the
point of production (the workplace) and the need for collective action”!
Perhaps this is unfair, because Direct Struggle Against Capital was not
available? However, Caroline Cahm’s excellent Kropotkin and the rise of
revolutionary anarchism, 1872–1886 has been available since 1989 and
this is essential reading if you are going to write about Kropotkin. Or
– and here is a radical notion! – read him. You do not need to delve
into rare pamphlets or journals resting in archives to discover
Kropotkin’s position: he summarised it well in his justly famous 1910
Encyclopaedia Britannica article on anarchism:
“the anarchists… do not seek to constitute, and invite the working men
not to constitute, political parties in the parliaments. Accordingly,
since the foundation of the International Working Men’s Association…
they have endeavoured to promote their ideas directly amongst the labour
organisations and to induce those unions to a direct struggle against
capital…”
Okay, it is the SWP so what can you expect?
Yet even normally sensible libertarian socialists can write nonsense
about Kropotkin. Maurice Brinton, for example, stated that Kropotkin’s
“aim is to convince and reason with (rather than to overthrow) those who
oppress the masses” and that he stood for “a co-operation that clearly
transcended the barriers of class.”
This is false: even Mutual Aid discusses unions and strikes. Yet it is
important to note that this classic is not an anarchist book (as such)
but rather a work of popular science by an anarchist. To understand
Kropotkin’s ideas on class struggle and anarchism you need, perhaps
unsurprisingly enough, to look at his explicitly anarchist works: “What
solidarity can exist between the capitalist and the worker he exploits?…
Between the governing and the governed?” Those works – and not Mutual
Aid – which discuss anarchist perspectives on need to wage the class
struggle and the importance of a militant labour movement in both
improving things now and for social revolution. To quote from a series
of articles in Freedom which were subsequently published as a pamphlet:
“We prefer the ameliorations which have been imposed by the workers upon
their masters in a direct struggle… concessions… have always been
achieved by the action of the trade-unions – by strikes, by labour
revolts, or by menaces of labour war.”
As Kropotkin continually stressed, Mutual Aid was “one-sided”, it was “a
book on the law of Mutual Aid, viewed at as one of the chief factors of
evolution – not of all factors of evolution and their respective
values.” If its critics had bothered to consult its sub-title (“A Factor
of Evolution”) then the most obviously wrong claims would have been
averted.
Another popular myth is that Kropotkin (to quote Stack) “looked
backwards for change. He believed the ideal society would be based on
small autonomous communities, devoted to small scale production.” This
must be true because Marx had proclaimed this of Proudhon based on a
book by the Frenchman – System of Economic Contradictions – that
explicitly stated the opposite!
What of Kropotkin? After extensively studying the advanced Western
economies of his time, he argued for appropriate scale technology:
“if we analyse the modern industries, we soon discover that for some of
them the co-operation of hundred, even thousands, of workers gathered at
the same spot is really necessary. The great iron works and mining
enterprises decidedly belong to that category; oceanic steamers cannot
be built in village factories.”
For Kropotkin, then, the scale of industry would be driven by objective
technological facts rather than an ideologically-driven commitment to
“small scale” production.
Moreover, he was well aware that the structure of industry today
influenced by class: “the benefits which the owners of land or capital…
can derive… from the under-paid work of the wage-labourer, or from the
inferior position of one class of the community toward another class”.
As a free society would not be using the same criteria as a capitalist
one this meant that while it will inherit an industrial structure that
has to be just the starting point for “Socialism implies… a
transformation of industry so that it may be adapted to the needs of the
customer, not those of the profit-maker.”
Sadly, Kropotkin’s common sense is lost on Leninists and their “big is
beautiful” dogma – and it must be stressed that Bolshevik utilisation of
inherited capitalist structures in 1917 and 1918 just created state
capitalism in Russia, not socialism.
Brinton’s and Stack’s comments are based on Paul Avrich’s book The
Russian Anarchists. Much of this book is correct and important, with
ground-breaking accounts of the factory committee movement in 1917 and
the role of anarchists in the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917.
However, its many positive reviews hide the awkward fact that it gets
many things wrong (at best, incomplete), most obviously the ideas of
Bakunin and Kropotkin.
Indeed, all the clichés we associate with Kropotkin are there: his
“benign optimism”, how “nostalgic yearning for a simpler but fuller life
led him to idealise the autonomous social units of bygone years”, that
he “looked backward”, thought there would be a “spontaneous” and
“speedy” revolution, that “co-operation rather than conflict lay at the
root of human progress” and that he gave only “qualified support” to
syndicalism.
Yet if you read closely enough Avrich presents enough actual facts to
refute the impression given. For example, he proclaims that syndicalism
was inspired by Marx’s “doctrine of class struggle” yet on the same page
writes how “the followers of Proudhon and Bakunin in the First
International were proposing the formation of workers’ councils designed
both as a weapon of class struggle against capitalists and as the
structural basis of the future libertarian society”. Avrich suggests
that “nor [for Kropotkin] could the trade unions become the nuclei of
the anarchist commonwealth” after quoting him on unions being “natural
organs for the direct struggle with capitalism and for the composition
of the future order”. Avrich also quotes Kropotkin on the general strike
being “a powerful weapon of struggle” but fails to mention that Engels
caricatured and mocked the idea when it was raised by Bakunin and his
followers in the First International (words used, incidentally, by
orthodox social democrats in the Second International against both
syndicalism and their more radical fellows).
Worse, Avrich also often presents a selective account of texts to
support his clichés. He argued that “the partisans of syndicalism went
beyond Kropotkin by reconciling the principle of mutual assistance with
the Marxian doctrine of class struggle. For the syndicalists, mutual aid
did not embrace humanity as a whole, but existed only within the ranks
of a single class, the proletariat, enhancing its solidarity in the
battle with the manufacturers”. Yet reading his anarchist works you
quickly see that Kropotkin embraced the “doctrine of class struggle”.
This can seen from the pamphlet Avrich quotes Kropotkin on unions and
the general strike which also argued that a working class movement was
needed which “wages a direct, unmediated battle of labour against
capital – not through parliament but directly by means that are
generally available to all workers and only the workers”. Anarchists had
“to awaken in the workers and peasants an understanding of their own
power, of their determining voice in the revolution and of what they can
accomplish in their own interests.” Clearly “the partisans of
syndicalism” and Kropotkin shared the same perspective. It was also
Bakunin’s position and, indeed, Avrich writes of Bakunin’s
“all-encompassing class war”.
So there is nothing specifically “Marxian” about advocating class
struggle. It is annoying when an otherwise useful book makes mistakes
like that…
Unsurprisingly, given this, Avrich presents a chronology that reflected
and reinforced the conventional wisdom on anarchism and syndicalism,
suggesting that the failure of propaganda by deed in the “early
[eighteen-]nineties… created widespread disillusionment… causing large
numbers of French anarchists to enter workers’ unions”.
Yet Kropotkin was advocating “syndicalism” (anarchist involvement in the
labour movement and unmediated class struggle on the economic arena) in
Russia in the early 1870s before being arrested and imprisoned in 1874,
in France after escaping from his Tsarist prison and before being
arrested and imprisoned in 1882 and, finally, in France and Britain from
1889 onwards.
These facts contradict the standard narrative on anarchism and
syndicalism. The successful return to syndicalism dates from the 1889
London Dock Strike with Kropotkin talking of the General Strike starting
the revolution in 1889 and 1890, as did Malatesta and other leading
communist-anarchists. This was simply returning to ideas raised by the
likes of Bakunin in the 1860s and 1870s in the First International.
What, then, are the differences between communist-anarchism and
syndicalism?
For communist-anarchists, while important in the class struggle and
anarchist activity trade unions were not automatically revolutionary. As
Kropotkin summarised in a letter:
“The syndicate is absolutely necessary. It is the only form of worker’s
association which allows the direct struggle against capital to be
carried on without a plunge into parliamentarianism. But, evidently, it
does not achieve this goal automatically… There is need of the other
element which Malatesta speaks of and which Bakunin always professed”
There was, then, a need for anarchists to organise as anarchists and so
Kropotkin thought that “the formation of an anarchist party… far from
being prejudicial to the common revolutionary cause, is desirable and
useful to the greatest degree”.
Similarly, the General Strike was an excellent means of starting a
revolution and “a good method of struggle, [but] it does not free the
people that use it from the necessity of an armed struggle against the
dominating order”. Syndicalists, moreover, “considerably attenuated the
resistance that the Social Revolution will probably meet with on its
way”.
Finally, unions were just one aspect of a free society. Kropotkin agreed
that workers must become “the managers of production” in “federations of
Trade Unions for the organisation of men in accordance with their
different functions” but also there was the need for “independent
Communes for the territorial organisation” as well as “thousands upon
thousands of free combines and societies growing up everywhere for the
satisfaction of all possible and imaginable needs.”
As you can see, based on this critique of the “conventional wisdom” you
see the real Kropotkin. This is, I must stress, not the “unknown”
Kropotkin as this information was there, if you could be bothered to do
the research. It was also there in his “high-level” works, if you
bothered to pay attention. As noted, even Mutual Aid is not silent on
the class struggle, unions, strikes and so on.
So there is a reason Direct Struggle Against Capital is so entitled –
class war was a core aspect of Kropotkin’s ideas from the start. This is
hardly surprising, as he joined the so-called “Bakuninist” wing of the
First International with its union based organisation and struggle, its
vision of social revolution rooted in the general strike, insurrection
and workers’ councils as well as its advocacy of workers’
self-management of their own organisations, struggles and – in the
future – workplaces and communities.
There is no fundamental difference between the politics of Kropotkin and
Bakunin: the problem is simply that Bakunin’s ideas are not well known
(but that is for another time!).
So what were Kropotkin’s real politics?
He was a realistic, practical revolutionary anarchist engaged in the
issues of the day and committed to anarchist involvement in mass
movements, particularly – but not exclusively – the labour movement. He
argued from the early 1870s to his death for “direct struggle against
capital”, for labour organisations to fight and replace capitalism – we
needed to “build up a force capable of imposing better working
conditions on the bosses, but also… to create among the working classes
the union structures that might some day replace the bosses and take
into their own hands the production and management of every industry.”
He was against electioneering as it was reformist and undermined the
socialist movement as political parties are “continually driven by the
force of circumstances to become tools of the ruling classes in keeping
things as they are.” Given the fate of the Marxism of his day, he raised
the obvious question:
“Are we going to abandon the terrain of the economic struggle, of the
worker against the capitalist, in order to become compliant tools in the
hands of the politicians?”
Kropotkin saw the growing mass movement as the link between now and
socialism, urging libertarians to get involved in mass movements to
influence and radicalise them. For example, he was a keen advocate of
the campaign to mark May Day by demonstrations and strikes. This
participation in popular movements was needed and urged anarchists “not
[to] wait for the revolution to fall upon us unsolicited, like manna
from heaven”, always remember that “without the masses, no revolution”
and that “the man of action’s place is where the masses are”. Popular
movements and struggles, like strikes, would produce a social revolution
because “[t]hanks to government intervention, the factory rebel becomes
a rebel against the State.”
Contrary to the myths, Kropotkin saw the revolution as a long and
difficult process that took time:
“we know that an uprising can overthrow and change a government in one
day, while a revolution needs three or four years of revolutionary
convulsion to arrive at tangible results… if we should expect the
revolution, from its earliest insurrections, to have a communist
character, we would have to relinquish the possibility of a revolution”
He was explicitly against the notion of one-day revolutions and argued
that libertarians “do not believe… the Revolution will be accomplished
at a stroke, in the twinkling of an eye, as some socialists dream.” He
was well aware a revolutionary people would be facing economic crisis
and disruption as well as counter-revolution, recognising – for he was
no pacifist – that the working class is that class “which, alone, will
take arms and make the revolution” and a “people that will itself be the
armed strength of the country and which will have afforded armed
citizens the requisite cohesion and concerted action, will no longer be
susceptible to being ordered around.”
Simply put, anarchism was best not because revolution was easy but
because it was difficult. It needed mass participation to overcome its
many problems and because the change needed was “so immense and so
profound” that it is “impossible for one or any individual to elaborate
the different social forms which must spring up in the society of the
future. This elaboration of new social forms can only be made by the
collective work of the masses”. He pointed to the Paris Commune as
evidence that “[a]ny authority external to [the people] will only be an
obstacle” and freely federated communities and workplaces as the
alternative.
Needless to say, his predictions about the problems that the social
revolution would face were confirmed by the Russian Revolution – as were
his warnings over statist “solutions” to them.
So you can see why this talk is entitled Kropotkin: Class Warrior and
why Direct Struggle Against Capital has that title. His message is still
valid:
“The enemy on whom we declare war is capital, and it is against capital
that we will direct all our efforts, taking care not to become
distracted from our goal by the phony campaigns and arguments of the
political parties. The great struggle that we are preparing for is
essentially economic, and so it is on the economic terrain that we
should focus our activities.”
On issue after issue he was proven right. Libertarians today must
recognise the wealth of ideas he left us in his articles and books and
rescue his legacy from the false pictures painted of it by, at best,
well-meaning but uncomprehending liberals or, at worst, malicious
Marxists seeking to rescue the Bolshevik Myth by distorting the ideas of
anarchist thinkers.
Yet there is no point reading Kropotkin without also thinking about our
struggles and problems and how we apply and develop what is best and
valid in his ideas today.
Let us discuss how to do that – it would be what Kropotkin would have
wished.