A Few Thoughts About the Essence of Anarchism, by Peter Kropotkin (1914)
Article from ‘Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Communism’, January 1914, London, UK
(Letter by P. KROPOTKIN to the French Anarchist Congress held at Paris, in August last.)
So far as we know anything about the history of human society, there has always been found in it two currents of thought and action — two different tendencies. There has been the authoritarian tendency, represented by the wizards (the scientists of olden times), the priests, the military chiefs, and so on — who maintained that society must be organised by a central authority, and that this authority must make laws and be obeyed. And in opposition to this authoritarian current there has always been the popular current, which worked at organising society, not from above downwards, but on a basis of equality, without authority, from the simple to the complex, by the free consent of the individuals in the clan and the tribe, and later on in the village community and the confederation.
From the earliest times these two currents were found struggling against each other. They continue to do so, and the history of mankind is the history of their struggles.
This second current is represented now by the Anarchists, whilst those who ignore — willingly or not — the constructive work that has been accomplished by the popular current in the savage tribe, the village community, the urban commune, the federations of communes, and, till our own days, in the working men’s organisations, open and secret, as well as in the thousands of free societies now formed for all sorts of purposes — those who ignore this work and consider themselves predestined to organise the masses are the representatives of the dominating, governing tendency that found its expression in the Church, the State, and authoritarian Socialism.
Since its first steps the popular current has been working at developing among men those institutions which render possible man’s life in society. The savages, when they were hardly emerging from the ordeal of the Glacial period, must have noticed that there were among them dominating tendencies; and that in order to combat them, or at least to bridle them, the revolt of isolated individuals would not be sufficient. Something else was necessary.
As the representatives of the dominating tendency must have already preached then — as they do now — the necessity of stopping “disorder” by establishing an authority, by transforming custom into law and mutual agreements into obligations, and by developing a religion, so also the representatives of the popular libertarian tendency evidently understood since then that they would not be able to combat this tendency otherwise than by opposing to it some sort of voluntary organisation of society.
Their words were different from those we use now, but this idea must have already been born then. And we, see, indeed, that while they were developing such an organisation they based themselves upon a very large liberty of the individual and upon the equal rights of every individual of the tribe, the stem, and the clan to a share of the land occupied by the tribe, the stem, or the clan. They thus recognised equal rights to the land, which was at that time (together with the plundering on enemies) the chief source of income.
What we describe now as political and economic equality was thus aimed at since those times by the primitive builders of society. More than that. To the dominating spirit of the minorities of warriors and wizards, they were opposing the constructive spirit of the masses. To the spirit of obedience and submission they opposed the spirit of independence of the individual, and at the same time the spirit of voluntary co-operation, so as to constitute society without subduing every one to authority.
Nowadays, in the struggle of the exploited ones against the exploiters, the same constructive activity has fallen to the Anarchists. Their aim is the free individual. But they understand that it is not by robbery, nor by seizing upon and monopolising all sorts of natural wealth (lands, mines, roads, rivers, seaports, etc.), nor by exploiting the labour of other men fallen (forcibly or willingly) into servitude, that they shall succeed in freeing the individual.
They understand that, as they live amidst sociable creatures, such as men are, they never would free themselves if they tried to free themselves alone, individually, without taking the others into account. To have the individual free, they must strive to constitute a society of equals, wherein every one would be possessed of equal rights to the treasuries of knowledge and to the immense wealth accumulated by mankind and its civilisation; wherein nobody should be compelled to sell his labour (and consequently, to a certain degree, his personality) to those who intend to exploit him.
This is why Anarchy necessarily is Communist; why it was born amidst the international Socialist movement; and why an Individualist, if he intends to remain Individualist, cannot be an Anarchist.
He who intends to retain for himself the monopoly of any piece of land or property, or any other portion of the social wealth, will be bound to look for some authority which could guarantee to him possession of this piece of land, or this portion of the modern machinery — so as to enable him to compel others to work for him.
Either the individual will join a society of which all the members own, all together, such a territory, such machinery, such roads, and so on, and utilise them for the life of all — and then he will be a Communist; or he will apply to some sort of authority, placed above society, and obtain from it the right of taking, for his own exclusive and permanent use, such a portion of the territory or the social wealth. And then he will NOT be an Anarchist: he will be an authoritarian.
This last has already been done by the bourgeois — by the present exploiters of the human herd. There is no new social experiment to be made that way, as it has already been made on a large scale for several centuries in succession. The middle classes of the present times have tried, and succeeded in dividing among themselves the territory and the social wealth, so as to make them the property of separate individuals and their heirs. And they have succeeded in this legal appropriation by creating the State, especially the modern State with a representative Parliamentary Government. And they have taken full advantage of this appropriation of the land to exploit those who had had no share in the robbery and the partition. They have constituted modern society on that basis.
They imagined that in this way they would conquer full liberty for themselves, or, at least, freedom for their own individual development. And they discover now that they are, with their children, the serfs of the State — of that same State for the growth of which they have worked so energetically, in the hope that, while guaranteeing them their individual properties and protecting them from the proletarians, it would never attack the freedom of the monopolists.
But they see now — those of them, at least, who are intelligent enough to understand what is going on today — that it becomes impossible to maintain this privileged position any longer. They play their last cards to retain it, but they realise that this is impossible. This is why some of them — the clever ones — make an offer to some of the exploited to associate themselves with the middle classes, by constituting out of them a Fourth Class of monopolists, to exploit together the rest of the nation, as well as all the nations that are backward in industry.
However, Labour begins to see through this trick; and after having allowed themselves to be fooled during the last forty or fifty years by the promise of a “conquest of political power” the mass of the workers begin to see that they have lost their time, that they have been the tools of the politicians, and now they are giving them the cold shoulder.
What the Anarchists had foreseen and foretold forty years ago — i.e., the inevitable failure of Parliamentarism as a means of attaining the emancipation of Labour and preparing the advent of a Socialist society — becomes now evident to every one. And this failure, in proportion as it becomes more and more evident, is bound to produce a new awakening of the working classes.
The more necessary is it, therefore, to find a short and precise expression of our aims, and to indicate in which directions we intend to work, so as TO BUILD UP THE FUTURE AS WELL AS TO DESTROY THE PAST.