Peter Kropotkin

Books

David Priestland:

"Kropotkin’s synthesis can be found in two of the most important – and readable – texts of anarchism: The Conquest of Bread (1892) and Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899). Society, he argued, could be run along the lines of the peasant communities he saw in Siberia, with their “semi-communistic brotherly organisation”, free of domination by either the state or the market. And this, he insisted, was not mere nostalgia or utopianism, for new technology and modern agriculture would make such decentralised development highly productive. But Kropotkin was mindful, too, of the needs of the environment, an awareness born of his geographical and scientific interests, and he is rightly considered one of the pioneering theorists of Green politics.

He also rooted his anarchism in evolutionary science. Mutual Aid (1902) argued that communities founded on radical equality and participatory democracy were feasible because human nature was innately collaborative. Unlike Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer, who argued that all forms of life were driven by a competitive “struggle for existence” between organisms, Kropotkin insisted that another type of struggle was more important – between organisms and the environment. And in this struggle, “mutual aid” was the most effective means of survival." (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/03/anarchism-could-help-save-the-world)