The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin - Public Audiobook from LibriVox
I've recently been listening to a lot of audiobooks from LibriVox at work. It's a great service that uses volunteers to collaborate and record voice narration of classic works that are in the public domain; available to everyone around the world free of charge.
I'm going to start sharing links and personal commentary of some of the most interesting works that I have discovered for the first time, starting today with The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin.
Stream it chapter-by-chapter online here
The Conquest of Bread (French: La Conquête du Pain; Russian: Хлеб и воля) is an 1892 book by the Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin. Originally written in French, it first appeared as a series of articles in the anarchist journal Le Révolté. It was first published in Paris with a preface by Élisée Reclus, who also suggested the title. Between 1892 and 1894 it was serialized, in part, in the London journal Freedom, of which Kropotkin was a co-founder.
In the work, Kropotkin points out what he considers to be the defects of the economic systems of feudalism and capitalism, and why he believes they thrive on and maintain poverty and scarcity. He goes on to propose a more decentralized economic system based on mutual aid and voluntary cooperation, asserting that the tendencies for this kind of organization already exist, both in evolution and in human society.
The Conquest of Bread has become a classic of political anarchist literature. It was heavily influential on both the Spanish Civil War and the Occupy movement, and continues to be influential on the Kurdish Rojava revolution in the Syrian Civil War.
Personally, the thing that attracts me to the concept of anarchism is the decentralisation of power back into the hands of ordinary people through direct democracy or citizen assemblies, making elected representatives and bureaucracies redundant.
I am personally an individualist, not a communist, and am therefore put off by Kropotkin's assertion that private property should be abolished and everyone should inherit the entire world. That being said, he makes a very strong argument in favour of this. Basically, in the first few chapters, Kropotkin outlines how we all inherit the collaborative labour and intellectual work of millions of our ancestors. Therefore, no-one can stake a claim to 'own' land or resources more than any other person.
Kropotkin essentially constructed the principal difference between communism and anarcho-communism; in Marxist theory, the product of the worker should belong to the worker and not the capitalist, in anarchist tradition, the product of the worker belongs to each and every human.
Kropotkin asserts that every human deserves an essential right to well-being, because every human contributes to the collective social product.
No more of such vague formulae as "The right to work", or "To each the whole result of his labour." What we proclaim is the Right to Well-Being; Well-Being for All!
Ongoing conquests of bread around the world
Inside the failed state of Syria, a political revolution is thriving under the principles of Kropotkin.
The autonomous region of Rojava is currently under the experimental control of a network of Democratic Confederalists, who borrow heavily from anarchist tradition.
The leader of this revolution, Abdullah Öcalan, released a provisional constitution in January 2014 which you can read through here. It places a large emphasis on minority rights and gender equality. In fact, the Kurdish feminist movement has won fans all over the globe for their ambition and resolve.
The Youtuber Brave the World summarises the anarchist-feminist fight in Rojava in this video:
Wherever you stand politically, I would recommend that you give Peter Kropotkin a try as his teachings, whilst radical, certainly have significance in the 21st century.
If you feel that you have been failed by both socialism and capitalism, why not give anarchism a try?