"It is often said that Anarchists live in a world of dreams to come, and
do not see the things which happen today. We do see them only too well,
and in their true colors, and that is what makes us carry the hatchet
into the forest of prejudice that besets us." - Anarchism It's Philosophy and Ideal (1898 ) - Peter Kropotkin
Zoologist, evolutionary
theorist, revolutionary and,Anarchist Philosopher Peter Alexeivich
Kropotkin (Пётр Алексе́евич Кропо́ткин) was born on 9 December 1842 into an aristocratic Russian
family, and received a privileged education,as a member of the Russian
ruling class.
At he age of
15,he entered the Corps of Pages in St Petersburg, an elite Court
institution attached to the imperial household. In 1862 he was promoted
to the army and utilising the privilege that members of the Corps could
choose their regiment, he decided to reject the career expected of him
by his family and instead joined a Siberian Cossack regiment in the
recently annexed Amur district.In Siberia he saw the horrors of the
Tsarist penal system and witnessed the poverty and injustice, caused by
it, and became frustrated by the central bureaucracy and local
corruption in St Petersburg.
Around this time, he also became aware of anarchist ideas there, when
the exiled poet Mikhail Mikhailov gave him a copy of Proudhon's System of Economic Contradictions to read. In 1871, he renounced his aristocratic heritage in 1871,abandoning material success
and would spend his life in the Spirit of Revolt that is the title of one of
his famous essays, he became convinced that the government was
unable as well as unwilling to make meaningful change in the lives of
peasants and workers. Kropotkin turned toward anarchism to find a viable
path to social change. He believed that capitalism and authoritarianism creates
artificial scarcity, which leads to privilege and inequality.
He worked with the Jura workers’ federation in
Switzerland, smuggled forbidden radical literature back to Russia, and
joined a workers’ circle in Russia, his political activities earned him a sentence in a St. Petersburg prison,
which ended in a spectacular and risky escape in June 1876. Prison in
Switzerland and France reinforced his views on repressive authority and
helped forge his belief in the need for non-violent, humane, and less
centralized forms of government. His 1877 plea for decent treatment in
prisons, which he called “universities of crime,” was decades ahead of
its time.
Like many an exile, after extensive travel across Europe, he ended up in
England 1886 in the midst of radical debate across Western Europe. He
moved between London, the south coast of England, and Switzerland,
endlessly torn between debate in the city and clean country air for his
prisonruined health. When not creating revolutionary theory, he wrote
copiously, undertook technical translations, and contributed the definitive treatise on Anarchism for the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.
He continued his writing on science in numerous journals at this time as
well as contributing to the anarchist press. An expanded second
English-language edition of Modern Science and Anarchism appeared in December 1912, published to mark Kropotkin’s 70th birthday by the group around Freedom.
Age had not diminished his hopes or activity, and he still stressed
that the task of anarchists was “to aid the people to display in full
its creative powers for working out new institutions, leading to free
Anarchist-Communism” against the “two enemies” of Capital and the
State.Through his many writings he attempted to put anarchism on a
scientific
basis, and pointed out the economical and social value of the human
being, and the failure of Capitalism to reach this objective.He saw
human co-operation as ultimately being driven not by government, but by
groups of individuals, working together,
in order to make the world a better place. He combined the qualities of a
scientist and moralist with those of a revolutionary organiser and
propogandist. He lived completely by his words and deeds, and was also
known for his kindliness and towering intellect.
Kropotkin was a man of his time, a man of 19th-century science,
philosophy, who was one of the great naturalists of his day, a
sensibility that
developed in him in congruence not only with his cientific interests
but through lived experience,.In his book Mutual Aid contended
on the basis of his own naturalist research in Siberia that cooperation
was as much a part of animal and human behavior as conflict. He was also
in the forefront of challenging the prevailing Darwinian principle that
evolution was strictly about competition and the survival of the
nastiest.
Given Kropotkin’s belief that brutality, unbending repression, and
inhumanity were the inevitable products of a centralized state, it is no
coincidence that he was most impressed with commune -based democracy in
Switzerland and with the self-help and cooperative movements in
England.With the advent of the Russian Revolution, Kropotkin approved of
soviets as giving the masses a voice but was appalled to see them
subordinated to the direction of the Party. Like most anarchists, he
held that replacing one autocracy with another, monarchy or republic,
solves nothing, and that progress and justice for the working people can
grow only from local power, cooperation, and equality. Returning to
Russia
after the 1917 Revolution, he was honored by the new government, who
desiring to legitimize Bolshevik authority with the reputation of a
universally respected anarchist, Lenin maintained cordial relations with
Kropotkin;
Bolshevik propagandists
took advantage of this to publicize the lie that Kropotkin was more or
less in favor of the Bolshevik program. In fact, Kropotkin opposed their
authoritarian program, as he made clear in a series of statements and
protests. Far from endorsing Lenin’s seizure of state power, Kropotkin
is quoted as saying “Revolutionaries have had ideals. Lenin has none. He
is a madman, an immolator, wishful of burning, and slaughter, and
sacrificing.”
Kropotkin die
d of pneumonia on February 8,1921 in the city of Dimitrov in Russia. In the 1920s Roger N. Baldwin
summed up Kropotkin this way.
“Kropotkin is referred to by scores of people who knew him in all
walks of life as “the noblest man” they ever knew. Oscar Wilde called
him one of the two really happy men he had ever met…In the anarchist
movement he was held in the deepest affection by thousands–“notre
Pierre” the French workers called him. Never assuming position of
leadership, he nevertheless led by the moral force of his personality
and the breadth of his intellect. He combined in extraordinary measure
high qualities of character with a fine mind and passionate social
feeling. His life made a deep impression on a great range of classes–the
whole scientific world, the Russian revolutionary movement, the radical
movements of all schools, and in the literary world which cared little
or nothing for science or revolution.”
Kropotkin’s funeral, on February 13, 1921, was arguably the last
anarchist demonstration in Russia against Bolshevik tyranny, until the
fall of the Soviet Union with thousands in attendance with the tacit
approval of Lenin himself,making this funeral ceremony into a
demonstration of unmistakable significance.Alexander Berkman and Emma
Goldman and many other prominent anarchists
from abroad participated. They managed to exert enough pressure on the
Bolshevik
authorities to compel them to release seven anarchist prisoners for the
day; the Bolsheviks claimed they that would have released more but the
others supposedly refused to leave prison. Victor Serge recounts how
Aaron Baron, one of the anarchists who was temporarily released,
addressed the mourners from Kropotkin’s graveside before vanishing forever into the jaws of the Soviet carceral system.
When Kropotkin died, a few weeks before the Kronstadt rebellion, the
repression of anarchists in Russia had not been completed yet.but in the
course of the same year, this movement was to be smothered by the
Bolshevik party, its leaders arrested, killed, on the run or deported.
Being the foremost opponents of tyranny, the anarchists were among the
first victims of Soviet prisons and firing squads. Emma Goldman,
Alexander Berkman, and many others tried to warn the world of the
horrors of Lenin and Stalin, but most people only learned about
the gulag archipelago much later from Aleksandr Solzenhitsyn.
Deportation befell Grigori Maximov (1893-1950) who had represented the
Russian Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists at Kropotkins burial.
Maximov arranged for a photo report of the ceremony that started at the
home of the deceased in the village of Dmitrov and ended at the
graveyard of the Novodevičy monastery, with an in-state and procession
in Moscow in between. The photo report was meant to become a memorial
album (Berlin 1922) to 'make humanity acquainted with the work of
Kropotkin'.
Kropotkin's message that mutual aid and social cohesion should
be encouraged over massive social inequity and the exaltation of the
individual over society is as relevant to the central debates of our
time as it was to the debates of his time. His legacy lives on, in the
actions of the many who have been inspired by him and in his many
writings, all of which are freely
available online, a rich source of ideas for libertarians today.
Kropotkin, Emma Goldman summarised, “gave up his title and wealth for
the cause of humanity. He did more: since becoming an anarchist he had
forgone a brilliant scientific career to be better able to devote
himself to the development and interpretation of anarchist philosophy.
He became the most outstanding exponent of anarchist-communism, its
clearest thinker and theoretician. He was recognised by friend and foe
as one of the greatest minds and most unique personalities of the
nineteenth century.”
His legacy still lives on, in his many writings, and the actions of
those who were inspired by him, as does his Spirit of Revolt. Like him
there are many who want to see in this world and end to privilege and
inequality, a world based on cooperation and mutual aid.
So on this day I say happy birthday to comrade Peter Kropotkin and reprint one of his fine essays from the 1880's.
The Spirit of Revolt
' There are periods in the life of human society when revolution becomes an imperative necessity, when it proclaims itself as inevitable. New ideas germinate everywhere, seeking to force their way into the light, to find an application in life. These ideas are opposed by the inertia of those whose interest it is to maintain the old order; they suffocate in the stifling atmosphere of prejudice and traditions. The accepted ideas of the constitution of the state, of the laws of social equilibriam, of the political and economic interrelations of citizens, can hold out no longer against the implaceable criticism which is daily undermining them. Political and economic institutions are crumbling. The social structure, having become uninhabitable, is hindering, even preventing, the development of seeds which are being propogated within its damaged walls and being brought forth around them.
The need for a new life becomes apparent. The code of established morality, which governs the greater number of people in their daily life, no longer seems sufficient. What formerly seems just is now felt to be crying injustice. The morality of yesterday is today recognised as revolting immorality. The conflict between new ideas and old traditions flames up in every class of society, in every possible environment, in the very bosom of the family. The son struggles against his father, he finds revolting what his father has all his life found natural; the daughter rebels against the principles which her mother has handed down to her as a result of long experience. Daily, the popular conscience rises up against the scandals which breed amidst the privileged and the leisured, against the crimes committed in the name of the law of the stronger, or in order to maintain these privileges. Those who long for the triumph of justice, those who would put new ideas into practice are soon forced to recognize that the realization of their generous, humanitarian and regenerating ideas cannot take place in a society thus constituted; they perceive the necessity of a revolutionary whirlwind which will sweep away all this rotteness, revive sluggish hearts with its breath, and bring to mankind that spirit of devotion, self-denial, and heroism, without which society sinks through degradation and vileness into complete disintegration.
In periods of frenzied haste towards wealth, of feverish speculation and of crisis, of the sudden downfall of great industries and the ephemeral expansion of other branches of production, of scandulous fortunes amassed in a few years and dissipated as quickly, it becomes evident that the economic institutions which control production and exchange are far from giving to society the prosperity which they are supposed to guarantee; they produce precisely the opposite result. Instead of order they bring forth chaos; instead of prosperity, poverty and insecurity, instead of reconciled interests, war, a perpetual war of the exploiter against the worker, of exploiters and of workers among themselves. Human society is seen to be splitting more and more into two hostile camps, and at tthe same time to be subdividing into thousands of small groups waging merciless war against each other. Weary of these wars, weary of the miseries which they cause, society rushes to seek a new organisation. it clamours loudly for a complete remodelling of the system of property ownership, of production, of exchange all economic relations which spring from it.
The machinery of government, entrusted with the maintenance of the existing order, continues to function, but at every turn of its deteriorated gears it slips and stops. Its working becomes more and more difficult, and the dissatisifaction caused by its defects grows continuously. Every day gives rise to a new demand. "Reform this," "reform that," is heard from all sides. "War, finance, taxes, courts, police, everything must be remodelled, reorganised, established on a new basis." say the reformers. And yet all know that it is impossible to make things over, to remodel anything at all because everything is interrelated; everything would have to be remade at once; and how can society be remodeled when it is divided into two openly hostile camps? To satisfy the discontented would be only to create new malcontents.
Incapable of undertaking reforms, since this would mean paying the way for revolution, and at the same time too impotent to be frankly reactionary, the governing bodies apply themselves to half measures which can satisfy nobody, and only cause dissatisfaction. The mediocrities who, in such transition periods, undertake to steer the ship of State, think of but one thing: to enrich themselves against the coming debacle. Attacked from all sides they defend themselves awkwardly, they evade, they commit blunder upon blunder, and they soon succeed in cutting the last rope of salvation; they drown the prestige of the government in ridicule, caused by their own incapacity.
Such periods demand revolution. It becomes a social necessity; this situation itself is revolutionary.
When we study in the works of our greatest historians the genesis and development of vast revolutionary convulsions, we generally find under the heading, " The Cause of the Revolution," a gripping picture of the situation on the eve of events. The misery of the people, the general insecurity, the vexatious measures of the government, the odious scandals laying bare the immense vices of society, the new ideas struggling to come to the surface and repulsed by the incapacity of the supporters of the former regime- nothing is omitted. Examining this picture, one arrives at the conviction that the revolution was indeed inevitable, and that there was no other way out than by the road of insurrection.
Take for example, the situation before 1789 as the historians picture it. You cn almost hear the peasant complaining of the salt tax, of the tithe, of the feudal payments, and vowing in his heart an implacable hatred towards the feudal baron, the monk, the monopolist, the bailiff. You can almost see the citizen bewailing the loss of his municipal liberties, and showering maledictions upon the king. The people censure the queen; they are revolted by the reports of ministerial action, and they cry out continually that the taxes are intolerable and revenue payments exorbrient, that crops are bad and winters hard, that provisions are too dear and the monopolists too grasping, that the village lawyer devours the peasant's crops and the village constable tries to play the role of a petty king, that even the mail service is badly organised and the employers too lazy. In short, nothing works well, everybody complains. " It can last no longer, it will come to a bad end'" they cry everywhere.
But, between this pacific arguing and insurrection or revolt, there is a wide abyss - that abyss which for the greatest part of humanity, lies between reasoning and action, thought and will - the urge to act. How has this abyss been bridged? How is is it that men who only yesterday were complaining quietly of their lot as they smoked their pipes, and the next moment were humbly saluting the local guard and the gendarme whom they had just been abusing - how is it that these same men a few days later were capable of seizing their scythes and their iron-shod pikes and attacking in his castle the lord who only yesterday was so formidable? By what miracle were these men, whose wives justly called them cowards, transformed in a day into heroes marching through bullets and cannon balls to the conquest of their rights? How was it that words, so often spoken and lost in the air like empty chiming of bells, were changed into actions.
The answer is easy.
Action, the continuous action, ceaselessly renewed, or minorities brings about this transformation. Courage, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice, are as courageous as cowardice, submission and panic.
What forms will this action take? All forms - indeed, the most varied forms, dictated by circumstances, temperament, and the means at disposal. Sometimes tragic, sometimes humorous,
but always daring; sometimes collective, sometimes purely individual, this policy of action will neglect none of the means at hand, no event of public life, in order to keep the spirit alive, to propogate and find expression for dissatisfaction, to excite hatred against exploiters, to ridicule the government and expose its weakness, and above all and always, by actual example, to awaken courage and fan the spirit of revolt.
When a revolutionary situation arises in a country, before the spirit of revolt is sufficiently awakened in the masses to express itself in violent demonstrations in the streets or by rebellions and uprisings, it is through action that minorities succeed in awakening that feeling of Independence and that spirit of audacity without which no revolution can come to a head.
Men of courage, not satisfied with words, but ever searching for the means to transform them into action - men of integrity for whom the act is one with the idea, for whom prison, exile, and death are preferable to a life contrary to their principles - intrepid souls who know that it is necessary to dare in order to succeed - these are the lonely sentinels who enter the battle long before the masses are sufficiently roused to raise openly the banner of insurrection and to march, arm in hand, to the conquest of their rights.
In the midst of discontent, talk, theoretical discussions, an individual or collective act of revolt supervenes, symbolizing the dominant aspirations. It is possible that at the beginning the masses will remain indifferent. It is possible that while admiring the courage of the individual or the group which takes the initiative, the masses will at first follow those who are prudent and cautious, who will immediately describe this act as "insanity" and say that " those madmen, those fanatics will endanger everything."
They have calculated so well, those prudent cautious men, that their party, slowly pursuing its work would, in a hundred years, two hundred years, three hundred years perhaps, succeed in conquering the whole world, - and now the unexpected intrudes! The unexpected, of course, is whatever has not been expected of them, those prudent and cautiousness! Whoever has a slight knowledge of history and a fairly clear head knows perfectly well from the beginning that theoretical propoganda for revolution will necessarily express itself in action long before the theoreticians have decided that the moment to act has come. Nevertheless, the cautious theoreticians are angry at these madmen, they excommunicate them, they anathematize them. But the madmen win sympathy, the mass of the people secretly applaud their courage, and they find imitators. In proportion as the pioneers go to fill the jails and the penal colonies, others continue their work; acts of illegal protest, of revolt, of vengeance, multiply.
Indifference from this point on is impossible. Those who at the beginning never so much as asked what the "madmen" wanted, are compelled to think about them, to discuss their ideas, to take sides for or against. By actions which compel general attention, the new idea seeps into people's minds and wins converts. One such act may, in a few days, make more propoganda than thousands of pamphlets.
Above all, it awakens the spirit of revolt: it breeds daring. The old order, supported by the police, that magistrates, the gendarmes and the soldiers, appeared unshakeable, like the old fortress of the Bastille, which also appeared impregnable to the eyes of the unarmed people gathered beneath its high walls equipped with loaded cannon. But soon it became apparent that the established order has not the force one had supposed. One courageous act has sufficed to upset in a few days the entire governmental machinery, to make the colossus tremble, another revolt has stirred a whole province into turmoil, and the army, till now always so imposing, has retreated from a handful of peasants armed with sticks and stones. The people observe that the monster is not so terrible as they thought they begin daily to perceive that a few energetic efforts will be sufficient to throw it down Hope is born in their hearts, and let us remember that if exasperation often drives men to revolt, it is always hope, the hope of victory, which makes revolutions.
The government resists; it is savage in its repressions. But though formerly persecution killed the energy pf the oppressed, now, in periods of excitement, it produces the opposite result. It provokes new acts of revolt, individual and collective, it drives the rebels to heroism; and in rapid succession these acts spread, become general, develop. The revolutionary party is strengthened by elements which up to this time were hostile or indifferent to it. The general disintegration penetrates into the government, the ruling classes, the privileged, some of them advocate resistance to the limit; others are in favor of concessions; others, again, go so far as to declare themselves ready to renounce their privileges for the moment, in order to appease the spirit of revolt, hoping to dominate again later on. The unity of government and the privileged class is broken.
The ruling classes may also try to find safety in safety reaction. But it is now too late; the battle becomes more bitter, more terrible, and the revolution which is looming will only be more bloody. On the other hand, the smallest concession of the governing classes, since it comes to late' since it has been snatched in struggle, only awakes the revolutionary spirit still more. The common people, who formerly would have been satisfied with the smallest concession, observe now that the enemy is wavering; they foresee victory, they feel their courage growing and the same men who were formerly crushed by misery and were content to sigh in secret, now lift their heads and march proudly to the conquest of a better future.
Finally the revoluition breaks out, the more terrible as the preceding struggles were bitter.
The direction which the revolution will take take depends, no doubt, upon the sum total of the various circumstances that determine the coming of the catclysm. But it can be predicted in advance, according to the vigor of revolutionary action displaced in the prepatory period by the different progressive parties.
One party may have developed more clearly the theories which it defines and the program which it desires to realize; it may have made propoganda actively, by speech and in print. But it may not have sufficiently expressed its aspirations in the open, on the street, by actions which embody the thought it represents; it has done little, or it has done nothing against those who are its principal enemies; it has not attacked institutions which it wants to demolish; its strength has been in theory, not in action; it has contributed little to awaken the spirit of revolt, or it has neglected to direct that spirit against conditions which it particularly desires to attack at the time of revolution. As a result, this party is less known; its aspirations have not been daily and continuously affirmed by actions, the glamor of which could reach even the remotest hut, they have not sufficiently penetrated into the consciousness of the people; they have not identified themselves with the crowd and the street; they have never found simple expression in a popular slogan.
The most active writers of such a party are known by their readers as thinkers of great merit, but they have neither the reputation nor the capacities of men of action; and on the day when the mobs pour through the streets they will prefer to follow the advice of those who have less precise theoretical ideas and not such great aspirations, but whom they know better because they have seen them act.
The party which has made most revolutionary propoganda and which has shown more spirit and daring will be listened to on the day when it is necessary to act, to march in order to realize the revolution. But that party which has not had the daring to affirm itself by revolutionary acts in the prepatory periods nor has a driving force strong enough to inspire men and groups to the sentiment of abnegation, to the irresistable desire to put their ideas into practice, - (if this desire had existed it would have expressed itself in action long before the mass of the people had joined the revolt) - and which did not know how to make its flag popular and its aspirations tangible and comprhensive, that party will have only a small chance of realizing even the least part of its program. It will be pushed aside by the parties of action.
These things we learn from the history of the periods which precede great revolutions. The revolutionary bourgeoisie understood this perfectly, it neglected no means of agitation to awaken the spirit of revolt when it tried to demolish the monarchical order. The French peasant of the eighteenth century understood it instictively when it was a question of aboloshing feudal rights; and the International acted in accordance with the same principles when it tried to awaken the spirit of revolt among the workers of the cities and to direct it against the natural enemy of the wage earner - the monopolizer of the means of production and of raw materials.
From Le Revolte 1880
Geneva
Further Reading
Pyotr Kropotkin- Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899)/ Mutual Aid (1902)
George Woodcock & Ivaan Avakumovic - The Anarchist Prince (Black Rose Press,1996)
pp
Peter Kropotkin : From Prince to Rebel" (1996) by George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, Black Rose Books, 1996
Cahm, Caroline. 1989. Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism 1871-1886. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See also Emma Goldman's Death And Funeral Of Peter Kropotkin
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