Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (65 page)

Kropotkin was highly critical of the egoistical kind of individualism advocated by Stirner and Nietzsche. In his view, it led to a destructive and selfish form of hedonism. Instead, he sought the individuality which attains ‘the greatest individual development possible through practising the highest communist sociability.’
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He did not however suggest like Kant that doing one’s duty is inevitably unpleasant. He believed like Godwin that the greatest pleasure comes from benevolence, that ‘personal gratification will come from the gratification of others’. In the final analysis, Kropotkin rejected both religious and utilitarian ethics in favour of a third system of morality which sees in moral actions ‘a mere necessity of the individual to enjoy the joys of his brethren, to suffer when some of his brethren are suffering;
a habit and a second nature, slowly elaborated and perfected by life in society’.
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Kropotkin was the first to recognize that man is an ‘extremely complicated animal’.
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He believed our unconscious life to be very much wider than our conscious one, indeed that it comprises three-quarters of our relations with others. We are also rooted in nature. But man is part of society just as society is part of nature: ‘Man did not create society; society existed before Man.’
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And the leading characteristic of all animals living in society is the feeling of solidarity. The most important factor in human development has been mutual aid, and it our innate moral sense which makes us capable of altruism.

Unlike Proudhon, Kropotkin does not therefore think us naturally aggressive: ‘Man has always preferred peace and quiet. Quarrelsome rather than fierce, he prefers his cattle, land, and his hut to soldiering.’
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Progress has resulted from the resolution of conflict, not, as in Marx’s view, through a dialectical synthesis of opposing forces, but through the triumph of cooperation. But is has not always been easy. He recognizes that history has been ‘nothing but the struggle between the rulers and the ruled’ and in the process both groups have been corrupted by authority.
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Only through higher education and the equality of conditions will human beings be able to free themselves from their slavish instincts.

But Kropotkin’s stress on the similarities between the human species and other species does not mean that he rejects the gains of civilization and culture. Indeed, he celebrates the intellectual faculty as being eminently social. Human beings like other animals need their basic needs satisfied but they are also creative and imaginative. In
The Conquest of Bread
(1892) his principal criticism of the present unequal distribution of property is that it does allow the leisure to develop the full human personality:

In the development of civilization, social human beings will not only evolve the full range of their artistic and intellectual abilities but become more truly individual. Man is therefore both social and individual, with physical
and mental needs. For Kropotkin ‘the strength of Anarchy lies precisely in that it understands
all
human faculties and
all
passions, and ignores none.’
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Although he felt Emma Goldman and her companions were wasting too much space in their journals discussing the ‘sex question’, when the thirty year-old feminist reminded the fifty-seven year-old thinker how important it was for the young, he replied with a twinkle in his eye, ‘Perhaps you are right after all.’
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Kropotkin’s anarchism is thus, like Godwin’s, firmly based on a particular view of human nature. Mutual aid is a principal factor in natural and human evolution. There is a moral principle in nature which ensures that human beings have a sense of justice. We are naturally social, co-operative and moral. But while society is a natural phenomenon, the State and its coercive institutions are an artificial and malignant growth.

Kropotkin of course is left with the problem of explaining how social inequalities and oppressive institutions came to be if human beings are naturally co-operative. In his essay
The State: Its Historic Role
(1897), he examined the origin and nature of the State, the entity he considered the greatest obstacle to the birth of a free and equal society. He distinguishes like all anarchists between the State and society and sees the State as only one form of political organization adopted by society in the course of history. He also argues that the idea of the State is quite different from that of government, despite the tendency of some anarchists to confuse the two. The idea of the State

In tracing the origins of the State, Kropotkin still maintains that human societies originally were based on mutual aid. Man lived in clans or tribes before the founding of the patriarchal family, and did not accumulate private property. Tribal morality was kept alive by usage, custom and tradition only, not imposed by authority. During the course of migrations, the early tribes settled down and formed federated village communities of individual families but with the communal ownership of land. In Europe, from the twelfth century on, associations called guilds formed for mutual support.
From the village community and the guilds emerged the commune or free city of the Middle Ages, which struggled for federative principles and the liberty of the individual citizen. This for Kropotkin, in his idealized version of history, amounts to the high point of European history thus far.

The village communities and the urban communes flourished up until the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance when the corrosive principle of authority in the form of the State began to establish itself. Kropotkin presents the rise of the centralized European State after the sixteenth century as an aberration from the mainstream of Western social organization. Believing that the natural human tendency is towards mutual aid and community, Kropotkin is left with the problem of explaining how the State came to predominate.

Dominant minorities in the traditional village communities, Kropotkin suggests, managed to combine the military power of professional warriors hired for defence with the judicial power of those who had a specialized knowledge of customary law. A single man assumed these two functions, and won the support of the priest. It was not long before serfdom, capitalism and finally the State came into existence. Men then ‘fell in love with authority’ and called for a ‘municipal Caesar’ to solve disputes. And the State by its very nature cannot recognize a freely formed union operating within itself; it only recognizes subjects: ‘The State and its sister the Church arrogate to themselves alone the right to serve as the link between men.’
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In the history of human societies, the State is thus an institution developed ‘to prevent the direct association among men, to shackle the development of local and individual initiative, to crush existing liberties, to prevent their new blossoming — all this in order to subject the masses to the will of the minorities’.
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Kropotkin recognized as much as Marx the influence of economic conditions on political institutions: ‘The
political
regime to which human societies are submitted is always the expression of the economic regime which exists within that society.’
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He also maintained that throughout history a new form of political organization has ‘corresponded to each new form of economic organisation’.
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But the relationship between the two is not one in which an economic base determines the political superstructure as in Marx, but rather one of symbiosis. They influence each other to different degrees depending on the circumstances.

Nevertheless, in his account of the origin of the State Kropotkin implies political power was initially more important than economic power. It would seem that he had to posit in human nature a will to power which leads to the domination and exploitation of one’s fellows. But the will to altruism is stronger. Although Malatesta accused Kropotkin of being a victim of ‘mechanistic fatalism’, this would imply that human volition can change the
present course of events.
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At the end of his essay on the State, he suggests that we are faced with the clear choice of death or renewal:

Kropotkin was thus confident that the dispossessed majority would resist, destroy the new coercive institutions of the State and re-establish mutual aid. If political authority was removed with all other unnatural restrictions, human beings would act socially, that is in accordance with their natures.

While Kropotkin distinguished between the State and government, he felt that they were equally oppressive and should be abolished. In his analysis of representative government, he argues that the workers’ call for universal suffrage can accomplish nothing since political systems will always be manipulated by those who control the economy. Representative government corresponds to ‘Capital-rule’. Only direct action can persuade legislators to make concessions.

The inherent tendency of representative government is always to centralize and unify its functions. It cannot attend to the innumerable affairs of the community. As for elections, they do not magically unearth men who can genuinely represent the nation, and who can manage, other than in a party spirit, the affairs they are compelled to legislate on. The legislator is expected to be a veritable Proteus and is compelled to make laws about things he knows nothing for thirty or forty million inhabitants. Parliamentary rule is ‘pre-eminently a middle class rule’ and majority rule is always a ‘mediocrity rule’.
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Kropotkin is no less dismissive of the kind of revolutionary government advocated by State socialists in the transitional stage to a free society. Since a revolution is a growing and spontaneous movement, any centralized political authority will check and crystallize its progress and in turn will become a counter-revolutionary force by resisting any development beyond itself. The immense and profound complexity of reorganizing society and elaborating new social forms moreover can only be achieved by the collective suppleness of mind of the whole people, not by an elected or dictatorial minority in government. As for the
Volkstaat
or ‘Popular State’ advocated by
some socialists, it is ‘as great a danger for liberty as any form of autocracy’.
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Revolutionary groups should not therefore assume power, but restrict their activity to awaken the consciousness of the people and to remind them of fundamental goals. On the morrow of the revolution, it will be necessary however to satisfy grievances and needs immediately so that the people can recognize that the situation has been transformed to their advantage and is not merely a change of persons and formulae. This can only be achieved by the satisfaction of the basic needs of the people through the full expropriation of social goods and the means of production and the introduction of communism.

Like all anarchists, Kropotkin does not give a blueprint of what a free society would be like but he does suggest certain directions it might take. Such a society would be composed of a network of voluntary associations of equal individuals who are consumers and producers. They would represent ‘an interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees, local, regional, national and international — temporary or more or less permanent — for all possible purposes’.
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The ‘commune’, linked by local interests and sympathies, will become the basic social unit and the centre of life in town and country. For Kropotkin the commune is not just a territorial agglomeration, but