The Conquest of Bread

Contents

1. Preface 18 min 11

   Written at Brighton in January 1913 for the revised English edition, the preface answers the objection that communism is an old idea that has never worked. Kropotkin points to village communities and medieval cities as partial successes, traces modern socialism from the French Revolution through Fourier, Saint-Simon, Owen and the schools of the 1840s, and recounts how 1848 and 1871 crushed each revival. After the Commune, he says, workers turned to free communes and labour associations rather than the State, and he presents trade unions, co-operatives and municipal services as experiments preparing a communist society.

2. 1 Our Riches 24 min 8

   “Our Riches” argues that humanity is already rich. Generations of labour have cleared the land, built cities and machines, and accumulated knowledge, so that modern productive powers could secure comfort for all. Yet land, mines, machinery and railways have been seized by a few, who force the propertyless to work for them under “free contract” as peasants once worked for feudal lords. The results are crises, wars for markets, education reserved to a minority and a hypocritical morality. Since no one’s share in the common inheritance can be measured, all belongs to all: the aim is the right to well-being.

3. 2 Well-Being for All 25 min 6

   “Well-Being for All” holds that plenty is achievable: production grows faster than population, against Malthus, yet output is held down by idlers, middlemen, deliberate restriction, armaments and luxury. Expropriation is the means. Kropotkin then imagines the first days of a revolution: the old rulers vanish, would-be governments squabble in the town hall, and the people go hungry, as in 1793, 1848 and 1871. The answer is to proclaim the right to live and to take immediate possession of food, clothing and housing, replacing the 1848 “right to work” with the right to well-being.

4. 3 Anarchist Communism 24 min 6

   “Anarchist Communism” argues that a society abolishing private property must abandon wages, since the products of interdependent labour cannot be apportioned by hours worked, and that modern life already shows communist tendencies: free roads, libraries, water and season tickets. The same society must dispense with the State. Kropotkin sees government’s role shrinking as free agreements, learned societies, the Postal Union and railway conventions take over its functions, and parliamentarianism failing. Every economic phase has its political form; a society regaining its common inheritance must organise through free groups and federations.

5. 4 Expropriation 28 min 6

   “Expropriation” answers the jibe that anarchists would share out overcoats. The aim is not to divide existing fortunes but to remove the poverty that makes fortunes possible: the baron’s rents, the manufacturer’s profits, the shoemaker’s savings and the merchant’s gains all depend on people with nothing to live on. Expropriation must therefore be complete, since partial measures on land, factories or houses alone would wreck the economy and invite reaction. Food, clothing and housing must be included, for they are as necessary to production as tools.

6. 5 Food 58 min 11

   “Food” makes bread the first task of the revolution. Past revolutions fed political debate while the people starved, which brought reaction. National workshops and wages cannot cope with mass unemployment, so the insurgent city must take over all provisions, inventory them through volunteers, and distribute freely what is abundant while rationing what is scarce, as village communes do. To draw food from the countryside it must offer peasants manufactured goods rather than paper money, and it must cultivate the land around itself intensively, combining agriculture with industry.

7. 6 Dwellings 23 min 5

   “Dwellings” argues that houses belong to the community, since their value comes from the city generations have built. A revolution should abolish rent at once and let street and district volunteers survey the housing stock and move slum-dwellers into empty or half-empty homes, without waiting for official boards or compensation schemes. Kropotkin answers objections: small owners occupying their own homes would be left alone, inequalities between town and country would be temporary, and popular self-organisation would cause fewer removals than landlords do now.

8. 7 Clothing 6 min 2

   “Clothing” extends the same method to dress: take over the shops and warehouses, offer freely what is plentiful and ration what is scarce, and set the clothing trades to work. Kropotkin denies that everyone would demand furs and velvet, appeals to the enthusiasm of revolutionary moments for the transition, and promises to show how art and taste would survive.

9. 8 Ways and Means 17 min 4

   “Ways and Means” argues that society must take over the means of production because private enterprise, though it has raised productivity, cannot direct production toward general well-being. The real evil is not surplus value as such but the hunger that compels people to sell their labour. Using figures for American wheat farms, cotton mills and English workers’ houses, Kropotkin calculates that five hours of work a day, from about twenty-two to fifty, would secure comfort for all and leave time for science, art and other pursuits.

10. 9 The Need for Luxury 34 min 9

    Man has needs beyond food, and a free society must meet them. Kropotkin reckons that after four or five hours of obligatory work for necessaries, people would have five or six hours for associations of their choosing: authors who print their own books, scientific societies with thousands of members, workshops and laboratories open to all, art made for the community rather than the market. He cites the volunteer readers of the English dictionary, the Zoological Society, and academies’ treatment of Darwin and Joule, and argues that luxury would become an artistic pleasure open to all.

11. 10 Agreeable Work 18 min 4

    Factories and mines can be made as healthy and pleasant as laboratories, and well-run ones already show that this pays. Kropotkin describes a model steelworks and a coal mine he visited. He then turns to domestic work, “the last form of slavery,” rejecting both Fourier’s phalanstery and socialists who expect wives to keep house. Machines such as Mrs Cochrane’s dishwasher, central heating, electric light and shared kitchens and laundries can free women, and a revolution that left slavery at home would be no revolution.

12. 11 Free Agreement 34 min 7

    Society already depends on voluntary agreement far more than newspapers and histories admit. Kropotkin’s examples are the European railway network, coordinated by delegates’ conferences without any central government; Dutch boatmen’s guilds; the Lifeboat Association; the Red Cross in the war of 1870–71; and even the voluntary military societies behind the German army. He grants that capital and the state distort these bodies, but argues they show that complex cooperation needs no government, and would work better without it.

13. 12 Objections 41 min 7

    Kropotkin answers the objection that nobody would work without wages. Slaveholders and serf-owners said the same; communal work in Swiss and Russian villages and artels is more productive than wage-labour, which wastes energy and breeds “go-canny.” Manual work is shunned because it is degrading, not because people are lazy. A commune could ask four or five hours a day and exclude persistent shirkers without law or prisons. Most “idleness” stems from bad teaching, poor health or monotonous specialised work, and should be cured rather than punished.

14. 13 The Collectivist Wages System 37 min 8

    Kropotkin attacks the collectivists’ plan to keep representative government and wages after common ownership. Labour-notes, whether graded by skill as Gronlund and Marx allow or equal as Guesde proposes, reproduce wage-labour. Higher pay for skill rests on a monopoly of education, not cost, and the Paris Commune erred in paying its members more than its fighters. Since every product is the joint work of past and present society, no contribution can be measured. Needs must come before works, or the state will end up dispensing charity.

15. 14 Consumption and Production 16 min 4

    Kropotkin proposes reversing the method of political economy: begin with the needs of the population and ask how they can be met with least waste of effort, making economics a “physiology of society.” From this standpoint “over-production” is a myth, since Russia exports grain its peasants need and Britain coal its poor lack. Workers consume less than they produce because rent, taxes and interest take the rest. Starting from needs leads to communism, starting from profit to capitalism or collectivism.

16. 15 The Division of Labour 8 min 4

    Political economy elevated the division of labour into a principle because it profited capitalists. Kropotkin mocks Adam Smith’s nail-making example and argues that lifelong specialisation stunts workers, splits society into thinkers and drudges, and destroys the inventiveness that created modern industry. The same doctrine assigned whole nations a speciality, but the spread of technical knowledge is undoing that international division of labour.

17. 16 The Decentralization of Industry 24 min 5

    Industry is spreading from Britain to France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Brazil and India, where British capital builds mills employing cheap labour, and specialised trades such as Lyons silk lose their monopolies. Every region gains by combining agriculture with varied industry. A revolutionary city cut off from trade would have to feed itself; Parisians would turn to scientifically organised intensive farming, as revolutionary France once improvised beet sugar and saltpetre.

18. 17 Agriculture 51 min 11

    Kropotkin argues that intensive agriculture could feed Paris and its two departments from their own land with little work. He calculates that bread would need about a third of the territory and meat and milk much of the rest, at 25 five-hour days a year per worker. He cites Paris market-gardeners, Guernsey and Jersey glasshouses and English hothouse grapes, and attacks rent, taxes and middlemen for holding agriculture back. The book ends on the Champ de Mars of 1790: working the soil in common will unite the freed society.