NOTE: This rather lengthy posting is excerpted from part 2 of an article on Kropotkin's approach to economics (which originally ran in Libertarian Labor Review issues #11 and #12 as part of our ongoing series on anarchist economics), addressing issues such as labor vouchers and free distribution. In cutting text I have retained the original numbering of the end notes.

Peter Kropotkin's Anarchist Communism
by Jon Bekken

In his monumental work, The Conquest of Bread, Kropotkin devoted a lengthy chapter to rebutting such common objections as the notion that nobody would work without compulsion and that overseers were necessary to enforce quality standards. Free association, Kropotkin argued, was the solution to most of these objections. If sluggards and loafers began to proliferate, they should be fed to the extent that available resources permitted, but treated as "ghost[s] of bourgeois society." But very few people would in fact refuse to contribute to society, "there will be no need to manufacture a code of laws on their account." [3]

Economists' arguments in favor of property actually "only prove that man really produces most when he works in freedom..." Kropotkin argued that, far from shirking work when they do not receive a wage, when people work cooperatively for the good of all they achieve feats of productivity never realizable through economic or state coercion.

To the extent possible, all goods and services should be provided free of charge to all. Goods available in abundance should be available without limit; those in short supply should be rationed. Already, Kropotkin noted, many goods were provided based on need. Bridges no longer require tolls for passage; parks and gardens are open to all; many railroads offer monthly or annual passes; schools and roads are free; water is supplied to every house; libraries provide information to all without considering ability to pay, and offer assistance to those who do not know how to manage the catalogue. (That many of these services have been eroded in recent years does not invalidate his premise.) [....]

Kropotkin called for expropriation not only of the means of production (land, mines, factories, etc.), but of all goods.

Kropotkin argued that, based upon the technology of his day, people would need put in no more than five hours a day of labor (for 25 years or so of their lives) in order to satisfy their needs for food, clothing, housing, wine, transportation and related necessities. [...]

Such a society could in return guarantee well-being more substantial than that enjoyed today by the middle classes. And, moreover, each worker belonging to this society would have at his disposal at least five hours a day which he could devote to science, art, and individual needs which do not come under the category of necessities, but will probably do so later on, when man's productivity will have been augmented and those objects will no longer appear luxurious. [10]

This latter point was, for Kropotkin, of the greatest importance. It was not enough merely to meet people's material wants--human beings must also be free to pursue their artistic and aesthetic senses. Kropotkin believed that luxury, far from being wasteful, was an absolute necessity. But if these joys, "now reserved to a few... to give leisure and the possibility of developing everyone's intellectual capacities," were to be obtained for all, then "the social revolution must guarantee daily bread to all." [11]

Tastes, Kropotkin recognized, varied widely. Some people required telescopes and laboratories to complete their lives, others require dance halls or machine shops. But all of this activity was best removed from the confines of capitalist production and carried out on a voluntary, cooperative basis after participants had completed their few hours of necessary labor. Freed from the drudgery of capitalist production, we would all be free to develop our creative instincts. Kropotkin was certain that the result would be finer art, available to all; dramatic scientific advances (science was, after all, until relatively recently an entirely voluntary endeavor).

Kropotkin felt it was also necessary to attack the division of labor that both Marxist and capitalist political economists have extolled as a prerequisite of improved productivity (although Marx did argue that ultimately labor should be reintegrated). Kropotkin was prepared to concede that it might well be the case that a person who did only one thing, over and over again, might indeed become quite proficient at it. But such a worker "would lose all interest in his work [and] would be entirely at the mercy of his employer with his limited handicraft."

It is not enough, after the revolution, to simple reduce the hours of labor. Kropotkin found the notion that workers should be confined to a single repetitious activity a "horrible principle, so noxious to society, so brutalizing to the individual..." The Social Revolution must abolish the separation between manual and brain work, give workers control of their workplaces, abolish wage labor. "Then work will no longer appear a curse of fate; it will become what it should be--the free exercise of all the faculties of man." [15] Under the rubric of the division of labor, those who actually make things are not supposed to think or make decisions, while others "have the privilege of thinking for the others, and ... think badly because the whole world of those who toil with their hands is unknown to them."

The division of labor means labelling and stamping men for life--some to splice rope in factories, some to be foremen in a business, others to shove huge coal baskets in a particular part of a mine; but none of them to have any idea of machinery as a whole, nor of business, nor of mines. And thereby they destroy the love of work and the capacity for invention... [16]

It would be far better, Kropotkin argued, for teachers to share in the duties of washing the floors, sweeping the school-yard, and the myriad of other tasks essential to school operations, than to allow the formation of an intelligentsia, "an aristocracy of skilled labor." [17]

And much of the advantage derived from the division of labor is in any event lost through the necessity it creates to cart goods from place to place, and to create enormous bureaucracies to coordinate production of disparate parts that must ultimately be integrated into a single machine. [...] The advantages of centralized production are similarly illusory. While it is sometimes convenient for capitalists to bring their operations under central control (although even they increasingly find it necessary to encourage local initiative), this is not because of any technical advantages. Industry is centralized to facilitate market domination, not because of often non-existent economies of scale. [19] To this day, the high-tech, advanced industries so often held up to demonstrate the superiority of centralized control are often carried out in small-scale, dispersed operations. Decentralization is, in fact, more efficient.

Kropotkin argued that the coming social revolution's "great[est] service to humanity" would be "to make the wage system in all its forms an impossibility." [20] In Kropotkin's day, most socialists acknowledged the need to abolish the wage system, but argued for its replacement by labor tokens representing either the "value" of people's labor or time put in on the job. Kropotkin, too, argued for such a system in 1873. [21] But he soon concluded that such schemes were both wildly impractical and thoroughly reformist:

Once the abolition of private property is proclaimed, and the possession in common of all the means of production is introduced--how can the wages system be maintained in any form? This is, nevertheless, what collectivists are doing when they recommend the use of the 'labor-cheques' as a mode of renumeration for labor. [22]

Such devices make sense only within the framework of a market economy where goods are produced and distributed not on the basis of need, but on ability to pay. Whether such an economic system maintains wage differentials (the arguments against these were reviewed in the first installment) or proclaims equal wages (or, perhaps, wage differentials favoring those engaged in "disagreeable or unhealthy work"), it nevertheless upholds an organization of production and consumption which originated in private property -- and which is realizable only within its constraints. [23]

Kropotkin refuted such arguments 100 years ago, when they were still fresh:

They say, "No private property," and immediately after strive to maintain private property in its daily manifestations....
It can never be. For the day on which old institutions will fall under the proletarian axe, voices will call our: 'Bread, shelter, ease for all!' And those voices will be listened to; the people will say: 'Let us begin by allaying our thirst for life, for happiness, for liberty, that we have never quenched. And when we shall have tasted of this joy, we will set to work to demolish the last vestiges of middle-class rule: its morality drawn from account-books, its "debit and credit" philosophy... and we shall build in the name of Communism and Anarchy.' [24]

But the fundamental point, for Kropotkin, was that people must seize control of their economic destiny--must be prepared to experiment with new processes and new methods of organization while taking advantage of the existing methods to meet immediate needs. The technical means of satisfying human needs, Kropotkin was convinced, were at hand, "The only thing that may be wanting to the Revolution is the boldness of initiative.... Ceasing to produce for unknown buyers, and looking in its midst for needs and tastes to be satisfied, society will liberally assure the life and ease of each of its members, as well as that moral satisfaction which work gives when freely chosen and freely accomplished..." [25]

The Social Revolution would build on the basis of what was-- seizing the existing industries and goods to meet immediate needs and as the building blocks from which we would construct a free society. And while it is neither possible nor desireable to spell out in every detail how such an economy might operate, Kropotkin argued that it was in fact essential to think about its general outlines in advance, so that we might build with a purpose. Expropriation, direct action, federalism and self-management were, for Kropotkin, the means. But a society not built upon communist principles would inevitably succumb to the central power it established to oversee production and distribution. Only the free distribution of necessities, in all their variety, on the basis not of position or productivity, but of need, was compatible with a free society.

Notes:

3: Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread. New York University Press, 1972 (reprint of 1913 edition), pp. 55, 170 174.
4: Conquest of Bread, pp. 161-63.
9: Kropotkin, "Expropriation" (1895), pp. 171-72. In: M. Miller (ed.), Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution. MIT Press, 1970.
10: Conquest of Bread, pp. 122-23.
11: Conquest of Bread, p. 124.
15: Conquest of Bread, p. 164.
16: Conquest of Bread, pp. 198-99.
17: "Must We Occupy Ourselves with an Examination of the Ideal of a Future System?" p. 56. In Miller.
19: Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow. Freedom Press edition (1985), pp. 153-54.
21: "Must We Occupy Ourselves..." pp. 68-69.
22: Kropotkin, "The Wage System," pp. 94-96. In: V. Richards, Why Work? Freedom Press. Conquest of Bread, p. 176.
23: For an example of one such approach see Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel's Looking Forward: Participatory Economics for the Twenty-First Century, reviewed [in LLR #12]. Similarly, WSA's Richard Laubach argues, in the Discussion Bulletin (#23, May 1987, p. 21; #25, Sept. 1987, pp. 17-22), for giving all workers a set of votes on what to produce... 'consumption credits'" used "to acquire goods and services [and thereby] provide information about the community's cumulative preferences." (He does not mean that we would inform central planners of our consumption plans for the coming year, an unwieldy system, though not a market economy. Instead, consumers would be provided with an equal number of "consumption credits" which they would use to buy things from stores, just as with money.) We are clearly talking about money here, and an economic system which must quickly revert to a full-fledged market economy or to central planning--in either case one that has little if anything to do with meeting human needs and promoting human freedom.
24: Conquest of Bread, pp. 179, 189.
24: Conquest of Bread, p. 229.

A copy of the complete article is contained in LLR no. 11-#12, available for $5 (both) from LLR, Box 762, Cortland NY 13045. LLR no. 15, now in press ($3), includes part II of Abraham Guillen's Libertarian Economics, an analysis of TDU Boring-from-Within, reports on international syndicalism, and several book reviews.

bekkenj@snycorva.cortland.edu