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The Legacy of Peter Kropotkin

via Autonomies

Disorder is the blossoming of the most beautiful passions and the greatest of devotions, it is the epic of supreme human love.

Peter Kropotkin, Words of a Rebel

Struggle! To struggle is to live, and the fiercer the struggle the intenser the life.

Peter Kropotkin, Anarchist Morality

Words from the anarchist historian and militant, Frank Mintz …

Current society and the pandemic, as seen from a few reflections of Kropotkin

(El salto diario, 02/11/2021)

The analysis of society that we find in Peter Kropotkin’s essays gives us elements to better understand our world, as well as the effects derived from the pandemic.

Long before the pandemic, it was possible to observe a detail that defines our world: 6 million children between 1 and 5 years of age die each year due to lack of access to food and drugs, and this setting aside the mortality of adolescents and adults. It is a figure that is much lower than that of the period of the 50s and 60s. However, if we take these 6 million between 1948 and 2018, in seventy years the mortality represents 420 million people. This total is three times more than the mortality of the two world wars of the 20th century. The first caused 10 million combatants killed and another 50 million civilians. The second was worse, with 20 million combatants and 47 million civilians killed, including the 20 million from Nazism among Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and political dissidents.

Therefore, democratic neoliberalism, protector of private property in the US or of Marxist-Leninist values in China, is much more effective at exterminating the poor, and this without gas chambers, but thanks only to the free market. Those who have money thrive; the peons, the unemployed, must hang on, wait and wait, or explode. According to estimates by the World Bank in 2018, neoliberalism secures extreme consumerism for 20% of the planet’s inhabitants, and extreme scarcity for 1.9 billion poor people (at least 1 billion people earn 2 euros a day or less). And yet, as the former head of the British economy, Margaret Thatcher, put it in 1980: there is no alternative. The exact translation could be: there is no alternative to neoliberal capitalism.

The morality of neoliberalism, represented by Margaret Thatcher, says that we ourselves must be satisfied that we are among the privileged 20%, because the others will gradually reach our level. After some few millions of deaths, there is no other alternative. And it is useless to observe that the economies of two countries (the US and the Marxist-Leninist Republic of China) could greatly reduce poverty in the world, or that the riches of the Vatican and several Muslim countries could alleviate hunger, or that an equitable and rational distribution of food would almost immediately end a large part of the poverty. The experts and politicians claim to have the solution, and they give us the provisional answer that it is true that it is better to live like a poor person in Spain than to be one in Senegal or China.

Neoliberalism in the US and China is extremely adept at transforming malice into morality. As in every religion, social equality and the overcoming of problems are just around the corner: in our case, at the next conference of world experts in 2030 or 2050.

The pandemic showed that, within neoliberalism, there are no plans or forecasts between countries, but oppositions and selfishness in the field of health, which is at the same time present in the economy, social exchanges, and in life itself. And as for popular protests, they occurred, but they were very much slowed by confinement, as well as confusing and confused by the contradictions of medical experts and the musings of supposed wise men.

Faced with the mental, moral and economic imbalance imposed by neoliberalism, I think we need some kind of compass, a controllable and criticisable reference that I see in the writings of Peter Kropotkin, who died a century ago, in February 1921. Why not take Miguel Bakunin or Karl Marx? The big difference is that both Bakunin and Marx reflected on the general problems of socialism, the international organisation of the proletariat and the political evolution of the world, but much less on day-to-day questions.

The Words of a Rebel, The Conquest of Bread, The Great French Revolution (1789-1793), Mutual Aid, etc., are essays that start with practical aspects and reject the dominant system, grounded in logical arguments and great confidence in the creative and supportive capacity of the anonymous many, the exploited, the voiceless. The first titles are classic revolutionary works of anarchist socialism. As historical works, they highlight the role of farm workers vis-à-vis different bourgeois groups and expose the ideas of the ancestors of 19th century socialism. They are an in-depth study that Lenin appreciated and that led him to want to meet its author in 1919. In Mutual Aid, Kropotkin relied on a theory of his compatriot Karl Federovich Tesler, who questioned Darwin’s claims about natural selection. He also relied on his training as a scientist to qualify or oppose generalisations based on the latter.

The paradox is that Kropotkin was a scientist, a former officer in the Tsarist army with a general for a father and a mother-granddaughter of a general, with the paternal family having belonged to the Russian aristocracy since the 15th century. When he already had a solid university career before him, Peter Kropotkin joined clandestine anti-Tsarist groups that were dedicated to training peasants and workers to prepare for social change. As a good scientist he studied which socialist tendency to choose between that of Marx and that of Bakunin, and for that purpose, he asked the authorities to go abroad under the pretext of establishing contacts with university colleagues. While in Switzerland he met with different groups of Swiss and Russians and eventually chose anarchism, because, in his opinion, it did not manipulate the workers by inciting them to vote for apparently progressive bourgeois candidates. This is how Kropotkin became an anarchist, at the age of 28. Then he was detained for two and a half years by the Tsarist police, organised his escape and arrived in Western Europe in 1876. He was detained in France for another two years and then, with his prison experience, wrote a book on the near impossibility of reforming prison and the judicial system without the abolition of capitalism.

This conclusion is quite pressing today, as well as the aspect of mutual aid in nature and between human beings, which is a recognised contribution by Kropotkin to anthropology and sociology, which opposes the supposed intellectual (and almost hereditary) supremacy of winners and losers, variant of a religious vision of groups of chosen believers; all fanciful hypotheses that knowingly confuse social superiority due to family fortune, or mafia-like relationships, with exceptional intelligence, thus justifying the hierarchy of exploiters in society.

These contributions by Kropotkin are reinforced by concrete and practical affirmations, of which we highlight a few below.

In the pamphlet Anarchist Morality, criticising some religious and philosophical views, Kropotkin points out that, “The history of human thought recalls the oscillations of the pendulum”, with periods of slumber and awakening. “But the inveterate enemies of thought — the government, the lawgiver, and the priest — soon recover from their defeat. By degrees they gather together their scattered forces, and remodel their faith and their code of laws to adapt them to the new needs. Then, profiting by the servility of thought and of character, which they themselves have so effectually cultivated; profiting, too, by the momentary disorganization of society, taking advantage of the laziness of some, the greed of others, the best hopes of many, they softly creep back to their work by first of all taking possession of childhood through education.” This is an analysis that still holds true today in Russia or the US and, in part, in other countries such as France and Tunisia.

It is fundamental because it means recognising that, for example, the proletarian experience of struggle and direct action can become dulled, disappear; something that Kropotkin himself did not always take into account.

However, in the face of regrets and revolutionary exaltations, Kropotkin concludes in Anarchist Morality: “Then you will have lived; and a few hours of such life are worth years spent vegetating. Struggle so that all may live this rich, overflowing life. And be sure that in this struggle you will find a joy greater than anything else can give. This is all that the science of morality can tell you. Yours is the choice.”

In Words of a Rebel, with a clear allusion to the Paris Commune (we are now celebrating its 150th anniversary), we read: “Disorder – what they call disorder – is all the ages during which whole generations sustained an incessant struggle and sacrificed themselves to prepare a better existence for humanity by freeing it from the servitude of the past. It is the ages during which the popular genius took its free way and in a few years made gigantic steps forward, without which men would have remained in the condition of the slave of antiquity, cringing and debased by misery.”

In The Conquest of Bread we can read: “If we wish for a Social Revolution, it is no doubt in the first place to give bread to all; to transform this execrable society, in which we can every day see robust workmen dangling their arms for want of an employer who will exploit them; women and children wandering shelterless at night; whole families reduced to dry bread; men, women, and children dying for want of care and even for want of food. It is to put an end to these iniquities that we rebel. But we expect more from the Revolution. We see that the worker compelled to struggle painfully for bare existence, is reduced to ignorance of these higher delights, the highest within man’s reach, of science, and especially of scientific discovery; of art, and especially of artistic creation. It is in order to obtain these joys for all, which are now reserved to a few; in order to give leisure and the possibility of developing intellectual capacities, that the social revolution must guarantee daily bread to all. After bread has been secured, leisure is the supreme aim.” These words reflect the inspiration that dazzled thousands of workers and their families in the revolutionary Spain of 1936-1939.

These words are part of Peter Kropotkin’s heritage. But he himself went through a sad episode: he became intoxicated by the nationalism of French and English culture, supposedly progressive and favourable to the next revolution in the Latin and Slavic countries, which weakened his analytical capacity.

With incredible courage, in very fragile health, after forty years in exile, Kropotkin decided to return to Russia, already liberated from Tsarism in 1917, to end his life there. It was then that Lenin wanted to meet and manipulate Kropotkin. Or was it his attempt to do the opposite? We will see this strange situation on another occasion.