KROPOTKIN, PIETR (1842–1921)

Prince Pietr Alekseevich Kropotkin (1842–1921) was born into the Russian aristocracy but spent most of his life in exile in France and England. He was a widely acclaimed scientist and earned his living as a writer but is remembered today as one of the foremost anarchist theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In 1857, Kropotkin joined the Corps of Pages in Moscow. In 1861, he became a Personal Page to Tsar Alexander II, who, at that time, Kropotkin idolized, but his personal experience of the Tsar brought disillusionment. After his time as a Page, Kropotkin turned down positions in prestigious regiments and asked to be posted to an obscure regiment in Siberia where he tried to assist in the reform movement. Again disillusioned, this time with local corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude and interference in Moscow, he turned to science, particularly physical geography. Kropotkin led a number of scientific expeditions in Siberia, the results of which gained him acclaim as a scientist and, much later, contributed to the scientific basis of his anarchism.

Offered the position of secretary to the Russian Geographical Society in 1871, he turned it down and chose a career of social reform rather than science. In 1872, he travelled in Switzerland and Belgium, and was much influenced by his experiences with the anarchists of the Jura Federation. Returning to Russia, he became active in reform circles and was arrested and imprisoned. After a spectacular escape two years later, he left Russia and settled in Switzerland, where he founded the anarchist newspaper Le Révolté, which became, in France, La Révolte and then Les Temps nouveaux. Expelled from Switzerland in 1881, he was arrested in France and jailed for three years. On his release in 1886, he moved to England, where he helped found the newspaper Freedom, which is still published.

He published a pamphlet, Appeal to the Young, in 1880 and his first book, Paroles d’un révolté (recently translated as Words of a Rebel), written while in prison in France in 1885. These works were followed, in French or English, by Law and Authority (1886), In Russian and French Prisons (1887), The Conquest of Bread (1892 in French, 1906 in English), Fields, Factories and Workshops (1898 in French, 1899 in English), Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899), Mutual Aid (1902), Russian Literature: Ideals and Realities (1905), The Great French Revolution (1909), Modern Science and Anarchism (1909), Ethics (published posthumously in 1925) and many pamphlets and articles. Kropotkin lived simply and earned his living from his writings, declining to try to recover the family fortune in Russia.

Until 1914, Kropotkin was treated as the leading anarchist spokesperson, but, in that year, he supported the Allied position in the First World War and was rejected by many anarchists. In June 1917, Kropotkin returned to Russia and was given a hero’s welcome. Even after the Bolsheviks seized power, Kropotkin was, for a time, treated as a grand old man of the Russian Revolution and had access to LENIN. But Kropotkin remained an anarchist, and he was close to Nestor Makhno (1889–1934) and the anarchist rebels in the Ukraine, and supported amnesty for the leaders of the White Army. In ill health, Kropotkin was marginalized by the Bolsheviks and had to live off the food he and his family could grow, combined with support from the anarchists. As EMMA GOLDMAN (1869–1940) discovered when she visited Kropotkin, they could only afford to heat one

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room of their house. But Kropotkin continued to send Lenin letters of advice, which were ignored, until shortly before his death.

While on his explorations of Siberia, Kropotkin noticed what he believed to be co- operative behaviour within species and concluded that the ‘struggle for survival’ hypothesized by CHARLES DARWIN (1809–82) was flawed. Eventually, this insight led to Kropotkin’s book Mutual Aid, which provided a scientific basis for his anarchism. Kropotkin’s anarchism is usually labelled collectivist or communist anarchism and focuses on the community, in contrast to the anarchism of individualists like MAX STIRNER (1806–50).

In a famous article in the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910), Kropotkin defined anarchism as a theory of society without government in which free agreements among individuals and groups produce harmony. As an anarchist, Kropotkin saw the state and law as one of the central barriers to social change.

In his major theoretical works, The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops, Kropotkin argued that modern technology applied to both agriculture and industry could easily produce sufficient goods to eliminate hunger and poverty. The problem with the current system was with distribution, not the inability to produce enough. But the current system of production and distribution benefits those holding power, and it will take a revolution to change the system. While Kropotkin did not reject revolutionary violence, he did not emphasize it either, and his own position regarding violence remains ambiguous.

For Kropotkin, the solution was the socialization of production and distribution under community control with a federation of communities acting together regarding issues that were beyond the scope of the local community. Based on his experiences with the Jura Federation, Kropotkin argued that self-regulating communities were the best means of ensuring both quality and quantity of production, and fairness in distribution.

Kropotkin’s approach to anarchism remained influential throughout the twentieth century. In 1974, Colin Ward (1924–), a leading twentieth-century anarchist theorist, published a revision of Fields, Factories and Workshops with Tomorrow added to the title in which he updated Kropotkin’s statistics and argued that Kropotkin’s dream of community control industry and agriculture could still be realized.

KROPOTKIN, PIETR (1842–1921)