The Conquest of Bread was a breath of fresh air! I cannot believe I read a book about politics / economics that was actually optimistic and left me feeling good about fundamental human nature.
People are generally pretty good at self-organizing to solve problems, and have done so effectively in small communities for thousands of years.
We have the technology* and productive power to ensure everyone enjoys a decent standard of living.
Much of the scarcity we face today* is artificially created and entirely avoidable if we produce to meet needs instead of maximize profits.
Things like laziness, corruption, and greed can largely be addressed by ensuring that all of a person’s needs are guaranteed to be met. Many people we currently* call “lazy” are either stuck in a hyper-specialized job that they can’t leave because they need to sell their labor to survive, or unmotivated because much of the wealth they produce is absorbed by someone else. And people tend to take more than they need more often than not because they are stuck competing with their fellow man for resources instead of cooperating for the common good.
He also does some back-of-the-napkin math to show that it takes less than a year’s worth of labor to produce everything a household needs for a year, and that the remaining labor time of that year should be open for people to cultivate different skills and pursue their passions. He argues that the distinction between what we today call blue-collar and white-collar work is unhealthy, and that everyone should do a bit of both.
His central thesis IMO seems to be that in the event of a socialist revolution, people shouldn’t be afraid to immediately start doing socialism. Take inventory of the food & start giving it to the hungry, figure out how many empty houses the community has & start housing the homeless, stop growing cash crops / producing niche luxury goods and start growing food / manufacturing necessities until everyone’s needs are met. He sternly warns against half-measures: maintaining the state’s use of violence or keeping track of some kind of currency or propping up political leaders are all things he claims will spell the end of a revolution before it gets off the ground.
I really loved the book. I feel like it provided a great example of what communism could (and IMO should) look like without all the baggage of so-called communist states like China and the USSR.
*= The book was written in the late 1800s. I think a lot of it holds up really well and some points seemed like they really called events that would happen in the next hundred years. That being said, it’s probably not as airtight today as it may have been in 1894.
The issue I think I have with a lot of this stuff is that’s it’s been written well over 100 years ago. The language is hard to understand, and these authors rarely get straight to the point. It’s hard enough to get my head around modern political texts, never mind the old ones. This isn’t just a criticism of Krapotkin, Marx is even worse in this regard. I still don’t really understand half of what the communist manifesto is talking about if it’s even relevant anymore. Old texts don’t always deal with issues like climate change or overpopulation. It’s easy enough to say we can feed people now, even with the overpopulation, but once climate change kicks in hard it’s another issue.
I would also worry about counter-revolution and why anarcho-communist revolutions haven’t stuck to the extent other revolutions have. There are lots of nations that have tried marxism, few seem to have had anarchism for a similar length of time.
The Conquest of Bread was a breath of fresh air! I cannot believe I read a book about politics / economics that was actually optimistic and left me feeling good about fundamental human nature.
That’s what you got from it? To me it was hard to understand what they were getting at. Not even sure I finished it.
Yeah! Kropotkin argues a couple points:
People are generally pretty good at self-organizing to solve problems, and have done so effectively in small communities for thousands of years.
We have the technology* and productive power to ensure everyone enjoys a decent standard of living.
Much of the scarcity we face today* is artificially created and entirely avoidable if we produce to meet needs instead of maximize profits.
Things like laziness, corruption, and greed can largely be addressed by ensuring that all of a person’s needs are guaranteed to be met. Many people we currently* call “lazy” are either stuck in a hyper-specialized job that they can’t leave because they need to sell their labor to survive, or unmotivated because much of the wealth they produce is absorbed by someone else. And people tend to take more than they need more often than not because they are stuck competing with their fellow man for resources instead of cooperating for the common good.
He also does some back-of-the-napkin math to show that it takes less than a year’s worth of labor to produce everything a household needs for a year, and that the remaining labor time of that year should be open for people to cultivate different skills and pursue their passions. He argues that the distinction between what we today call blue-collar and white-collar work is unhealthy, and that everyone should do a bit of both.
His central thesis IMO seems to be that in the event of a socialist revolution, people shouldn’t be afraid to immediately start doing socialism. Take inventory of the food & start giving it to the hungry, figure out how many empty houses the community has & start housing the homeless, stop growing cash crops / producing niche luxury goods and start growing food / manufacturing necessities until everyone’s needs are met. He sternly warns against half-measures: maintaining the state’s use of violence or keeping track of some kind of currency or propping up political leaders are all things he claims will spell the end of a revolution before it gets off the ground.
I really loved the book. I feel like it provided a great example of what communism could (and IMO should) look like without all the baggage of so-called communist states like China and the USSR.
*= The book was written in the late 1800s. I think a lot of it holds up really well and some points seemed like they really called events that would happen in the next hundred years. That being said, it’s probably not as airtight today as it may have been in 1894.
The issue I think I have with a lot of this stuff is that’s it’s been written well over 100 years ago. The language is hard to understand, and these authors rarely get straight to the point. It’s hard enough to get my head around modern political texts, never mind the old ones. This isn’t just a criticism of Krapotkin, Marx is even worse in this regard. I still don’t really understand half of what the communist manifesto is talking about if it’s even relevant anymore. Old texts don’t always deal with issues like climate change or overpopulation. It’s easy enough to say we can feed people now, even with the overpopulation, but once climate change kicks in hard it’s another issue.
I would also worry about counter-revolution and why anarcho-communist revolutions haven’t stuck to the extent other revolutions have. There are lots of nations that have tried marxism, few seem to have had anarchism for a similar length of time.