Read Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism Online
Authors: Peter Marshall
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On his return to St Petersburg, Kropotkin became involved in radical politics which had been stimulated by the nihilists and the
narodniks.
The nihilists had influenced the whole life of the educated classes of Russia. They had attacked the conventions of civilization and tried to transform the customs of everyday life. They refused to bend to any authority and analysed all existing institutions in the sole light of their reason. Kropotkin had been impressed by them and felt that nihilism ‘with its affirmation of the rights
of the individual and its negation of all hypocrisy’ was the first step toward a higher type of man and woman.
12
The
narodniks
in the early sixties had developed out of the nihilist movement and went to live with and educate the people
(narod).
Adopting a mixture of revolutionary populism and philosophical materialism, they called for a new society based on a voluntary association of producers on the lines of the traditional Russian
mir
or village commune.
Kropotkin soon began to move in the Chaikovsky Circle, the most revolutionary populist organization of the day. He stayed with them for two years. He later recalled that he was ‘in a family of men and women so closely united in their common object, so broadly and delicately humane in their mutual relations’, that there was not a single moment of even temporary friction marring the life of the circle.
13
Although they certainly formed a close-knit affinity group, Kropotkin may have exaggerated their unity. His friend Sergei Kravchinksy, for instance, felt at the time that Kropotkin was ‘too exclusive and rigid in his theoretical convictions’, admitting no departure from his ‘ultra-anarchical program’.
14
The majority of the circle were for non-militant agitation, but Kropotkin advocated peasant uprisings and the seizure of land and property. He contributed in November 1873 a lengthy manifesto entitled
Must We Occupy Ourselves with an Examination of the Ideal of a Future System?
It was his first major political statement and shows that many of his fundamental ideas were already formed. Like Proudhon and Bakunin, he calls for the ownership of the land and factories by the producers themselves in village communities. All should work and education should be universal, combining mental and manual skills. All these arguments, Kropotkin claims, lead to ‘the idea of the harmfulness of any central authority and consequently, to anarchy’.
15
He therefore urges that a society be organized without government. This can only be achieved by a complete social revolution conducted by workers and peasants themselves. In the mean time populist agitators should spread their ideas, form a common organization, and go to the people. The only difference with his later communist position is that Kropotkin still retains like Proudhon a scheme of labour cheques in place of money.
Kropotkin’s subversive activities were suddenly brought to a halt by his arrest in March 1874. He was condemned, whilst a trial was being prepared, to solitary confinement in the dreaded Peter and Paul fortress, without sunlight in his cell and only half an hour’s exercise a day. He was allowed books however and continued his scientific enquiries. Despite his natural cheerfulness and careful exercising, he eventually caught scurvy and grew increasingly depressed. The experience left him a permanent hatred of prisons and confirmed his belief that punishment is never a suitable means of reforming conduct.
After three years of imprisonment, Kropotkin made a daring and dramatic escape from a prison hospital with the help of his friends in 1876. He left for Scotland and then England, determined to throw in his lot with the workers and to help develop the ideals and principles underlying the coming revolution, ‘not as an order coming from their leaders, but as a result of their own reason; and so to awaken their initiative’.
16
In the following year, he returned to Switzerland to join the anarchist watchmakers of the Jurassian Federation with whom he felt so much at home.
Kropotkin spent all his energy during the next five years in the anarchist cause, helping to set up the journal
Le Révolté
in 1879 in which many of his most incisive articles first appeared, and encouraging both collective and individual acts of revolt which might trigger off a revolution. At this stage, he also saw the value of strikes, which might conceivably be transformed into an insurrection. Proscribed by the government for its anti-military propaganda,
Le Révolté
reappeared under the name
La Révolte.
Kropotkin and his comrades helped keep alive the anarchist idea during the difficult years following the defeat of the Paris Commune and the collapse of the First International to the early 1880s when the French movement started to grow again.
17
The defeat of the Paris Commune, which ended in the slaughter of twenty-five thousand communards, and saw fourteen thousand more incarcerated, five thousand deported and thousands more driven into exile, meant that a decade would pass before the devastated anarchist movement could pick up momentum again.
The great French geographer and anarchist Elisée Reclus edited many of Kropotkin’s articles of this period, including the collection
Paroles d’un révolté
which was published in Paris in 1885 (and translated into Italian by the socialist Mussolini in 1905). In the same year, the Marxist H. M. Hyndman translated into English his
Appeal to the Young
, a work which he considered ‘a masterpiece, alike in conception and execution. Nothing ever written so completely combined the scientific with the popular, the revolutionary with the ethical.’
18
Inspired by Kropotkin’s
narodnik
impulse, it was a plea to young men and women of the professional classes and of the working class to join the revolutionary movement and to experience a more meaningful life of comradeship. It had the widest influence of all his pamphlets.
The Conquest of Bread
was also first published in Paris in 1892. In it, Kropotkin argued the case for a communist form of anarchism, and offered his most constructive account of a future anarchist society. It was strongly influenced by the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871 which had declared the absolute autonomy of the commune throughout France. Kropotkin considered it to be the first time that the people had tried to implement the anarchist ideal of a decentralized and federal society.
Kropotkin was expelled from Switzerland for his activities. After returning to Lyon in 1882, he was arrested by the French authorities. He was condemned this time to five years in prison. Conditions however were much better at Clairvaux than in Russia, and he could see his new wife Sophie regularly. Owing to the international outcry of liberal thinkers, including Victor Hugo and Swinburne, he was eventually released in 1886.
In the following months, he wrote
In Russian and French Prisons
(1887), giving an objective account of his experiences and demonstrating the uselessness of imprisonment as a means of reforming conduct. Prisons are simply universities of crime. Since they cannot be meaningfully improved, the only solution would be to abolish them altogether and to treat wrongdoers humanely. Kropotkin later wrote in his
Memoirs of a Revolutionist
(1899):
Incarceration in a prison of necessity entirely destroys the energy of a man and annihilates his will. In prison life there is no room for exercising one’s will; to possess one’s own will in prison means surely to get into trouble. The will of the prisoner
must
be killed, and it is killed. Still less room is there for exercising one’s natural sympathies, everything being done to prevent free contact with those, outside and within, with whom the prisoner may have feelings of sympathy.
19
Rather than reform the character of a prisoner, prison life merely encourages a deeper dislike of regular work, contempt for current rules of morality, and, worse of all, a morbid development of prisoner’s sensuality.
In his article
Lam and Authority
, Kropotkin further criticizes the legal and penal system. Originally people regulated themselves by unwritten customs. But law was introduced when primitive superstitions were exploited by a few in order to ensure their rule, and was later enforced by the decrees of conquerors: ‘Law made its appearance under the sanction of the priest, and the warrior’s club was placed at its service.’ In recent times, laws have primarily been aimed at protecting private property and the machinery of government, with political authority making and applying them. Kropotkin however contends that they are not only unnecessary, but positively harmful:
consider what corruption, what depravity of mind is kept up among men by the idea of obedience, the very essence of law; of chastisement; of authority having the right to punish, to judge irrespective our conscience and the esteem of our friends; of the necessity for executioners, jailers, and informers — in a word, by all the attributes of law and authority.
20
Crimes, Kropotkin argues, are supported mainly by idleness, law and authority. In a society without government and property, there would be little incentive to crime, and the crimes of passion which might still exist are not likely to increase because of lack of punishment. Those who remained mentally disturbed or consistently anti-social would be given fraternal treatment and moral support within the community. In place of law, he therefore proposes to return to the traditional network of custom and free agreement which has united and regulated human relationships for centuries.
After his release from prison, Kropotkin this time decided to settle in England and came to London in 1886. He was still active in politics, and in 1886 helped set up the Freedom Press Group which has been publishing libertarian literature ever since. It was not a particularly happy time in exile in England: ‘How did I survive this after France and Switzerland!’ he wrote in 1904. He described British anarchism as
‘anarchic de salon
– epicurean, a little Nietzschean, very
snobbish’.
21
Nevertheless for several years, he wrote dozens of articles and gave many lectures each year in an effort to expand British anarchism. He was considered the most famous living anarchist in the world, and was on good terms with prominent figures on the Left in Britain, notably Edward Carpenter, William Morris, H. M. Hyndman, Keir Hardie, and Bernard Shaw. He earned his living by journalism, especially for the scientific press, and enjoyed a growing reputation as a scientist.
Amongst many intellectuals, he was known primarily as a scientist who happened to have extreme views on anarchy and communism. His refusal for instance to stand and toast the King’s health at a banquet given for him by the Royal Geographical Society was dismissed as an eccentric oddity. He was allegedly offered the chair as Professor of Geography at Cambridge University in 1896, but refused since he thought it would compromise his political activity. Instead, he chose to live a quiet life with his caring wife, his beloved daughter, neat garden, and curious library in the suburbs of London and then in Brighton. Although he occasionally had unusual visitors, none of his neighbours would have believed the claim in a report by the French secret police that he was helping to run the internationalist anarchist movement from London.
From 1890, Kropotkin grew less involved in the active anarchist movement, arguing that a free society would best be achieved by the gradual ripening of public opinion. The spate of terrorist outrages in the 1890s earned anarchism a destructive reputation, and Kropotkin was keen to show that it was grounded not in mindless and desperate actions, but in a clear scientific and philosophical base. Moreover from 1893, British anarchism began to decline into a sect as State socialism began to dominate the labour movement. Kropotkin responded by showing how anarchist principles could
be applied in everyday life and felt that it was important to encourage any tendency which checked government power and promoted solidarity and co-operation.
It was not a question of Kropotkin taking a pacifist stance like Tolstoy. Although he admired his compatriot greatly, he wrote that ‘I am not in sympathy with Tolstoy’s asceticism, nor with his doctrine of non-resistance to evil, nor with his New Testament literalism.’
22
Kropotkin thought aggressiveness a virtue; he was not merely a philosophical anarchist. Indeed, under the influence of Bakunin, Kropotkin had actively advocated revolution in the 1870s in the pages of
Le Révolté
and
La Révolté.
He saw the spirit of revolt spreading, and since the existing framework of society was incapable of fundamental reform, he felt that revolution would be most likely. Indeed, his optimism was so strong at this time that he often talked as if the anarchist revolution was imminent and inevitable. In 1880 he wrote: ‘One courageous act has sufficed to upset in a few days the entire governmental machinery, to make the colossus tremble. The government resists; it is savage in its repressions. But… in rapid succession these acts spread, become general, develop.’
23
At the 1883 Lyon trial of anarchists, Kropotkin forecast that social revolution would burst out within a decade and felt that an insurrectional period might then last for five years. While the Italian Federation of the International advocated ‘propaganda by the deed’, Kropotkin stood more in the Russian
narodnik
tradition, seeking to work amongst and educate the people. He thought that small revolutionary groups should submerge themselves in workers’ organizations, and act as catalysts to bring about the social revolution which would take on the nature of a mass uprising. He also recommended working through militant trade unions and was sympathetic to revolutionary syndicalism.