Review of The Conquest of Bread (1892)
Peter Kropotkin (writer).
Read in 2025.
A summary of the ideology of “Anarchist Communism”, that is an anti-authoritarian vision of society where people meet their own needs together, using modern technology and immediacy, without being ordered around by a boss or bureaucracy. For example, on the housing crisis:
We do not deny that there are plenty of egotistic instincts in isolated individuals. We are quite aware of it. But we contend that the very way to revive and nourish these instincts would be to confine such questions as the housing of the people to any board or committee, in fact, to the tender mercies of officialism in any shape or form. Then indeed all the evil passions spring up, and it becomes a case of who is the most influential person on the board. The least inequality causes wranglings and recriminations. If the smallest advantage is given to any one, a tremendous hue and cry is raised—and not without reason.
But if the people themselves, organized by streets, districts, and parishes, undertake to move the inhabitants of the slums into the half-empty dwellings of the middle classes, the trifling inconveniences, the little inequalities will be easily tided over. Rarely has appeal been made to the good instincts of the masses—only as a last resort, to save the sinking ship in times of revolution—but never has such an appeal been made in vain; the heroism, the self-devotion of the toiler has never failed to respond to it. And thus it will be in the coming Revolution.
But, when all is said and done, some inequalities, some inevitable injustices, undoubtedly will remain. There are individuals in our societies whom no great crisis can lift out of the deep mire of egoism in which they are sunk. The question, however, is not whether there will be injustices or no, but rather how to limit the number of them.
Now all history, all the experience of the human race, and all social psychology, unite in showing that the best and fairest way is to trust the decision to those whom it concerns most nearly. It is they alone who can consider and allow for the hundred and one details which must necessarily be overlooked in any merely official redistribution.
A systematic effort, including principles, practical concerns, and common objections. Many of the details have aged well, including the feminism. To be sure, Kropotkin also makes mistakes. As an example of a contemptuous error, he completely ignores Adam Smith’s criticism of extreme divisions of labour, going instead with the strawman of Smith that was current on the far left at the time. As another example, Kropotkin claims that “all great researches, all discoveries revolutionizing science, have been made outside academies and universities”, which is a paranoid invitation to crackpots.
Most of Kropotkin’s errors are more innocent, but still contain within them a note of contempt via the Dunning–Kruger effect. For example, he dismisses half the workforce as “useless middlemen” without seriously considering how, in his own example, “the wool merchants, and all their intermediate agents, [...] the railway companies, mill-owners, weavers, dealers in ready-made clothes, sellers and commission agents” would be replaced. If you take away the railway companies but leave the trains, and you take away all currency to measure supply against demand, then who is left to determine when to make how much of what, and when and how to move it around to the people who need it? In Kropotkin’s own calculations, “transport” does not count toward the labour required to keep everyone clothed. Kropotkin’s solutions are simplistic even for the economy of Gilded Age. In that global economy, trusting logistics “to those whom it concerns most nearly” would not be as easy as organizing by parishes. Even with the Internet to help connect producers to consumers 100 years later, and even with Kropotkin’s dream of everybody pitching in to do the simplest manual labour, there would still be meaningful work for plenty of middlemen. Unfortunately, Kropotkin left the practical examples to later generations.
On a more fundamental level, although Kropotkin begins to anticipate “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” (1972) when he says that “it becomes a case of who is the most influential person on the board”, he does not show a deeper understanding of sociology. He sometimes falls victim to Frazerian contamination, as when he dismisses Marx’s Capital (1867/1887) because Marx, who was on the far left, was influenced by Ricardo, who was not on the far left. Environmental concerns are unknown to him; the waste that he wants to minimize is of “human energy”. Misinformation and disinformation are mentioned, but barely. His perspective on the economy, and especially on all profit, is that of a crude zero-sum game.
The author does not deny that his conviction comes from an emotional reaction to inequality. Usually, he comes up with similarly simple answers—like emergency rationing, or the joy of working together—that he knows are unpalatable to a lot of people, and he’s honest about that too. His honesty makes up for many of his flaws, though not for his naïvité. It is curious, and very interesting to me, to see him weaving conscientiously between the most concrete human needs, which are symbolized by bread in the context of the Paris Commune, and the prospect of a near-total cultural reset by means of social engineering, carried out from within by “earnest revolutionaries” who “prepare the ground and encourage ideas to grow in this direction”.
The gap in between familiar bread and total transformation is titanic, and yet, Kropotkin is more level-headed about his project than a hundred later libertarians and techno-utopians have been about their respective solutions. He doesn’t deny, for example, that the fear of mob violence is going to be an important factor: Both a risk and a dangerous indirect means of controlling those who are losing their privileges in “the Revolution”. He promises luxury and scientific progress, but he does not deny that there will be sacrifices. Impressively, he resists almost completely the temptation to speculate about the many inventions made since 1892 that have made fairness and freedom easier to attain.
References here: Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), Our Daily Bread (2005).