The Conquest of BreadKropotkin, Petr Alekseevich, kniaz
Philosophy
The Conquest of Bread
Kropotkin, Petr Alekseevich, kniaz
Anarchism; Communism
This is the direction in which progress is already moving. Even to-day,
when England felt the need of a complete dictionary of the English
language, the birth of a Littré, who would devote his life to this work,
was not waited for. Volunteers were appealed to, and a thousand men
offered their services, spontaneously and gratuitously, to ransack the
libraries, to take notes, and to accomplish in a few years a work which
one man could not complete in his lifetime. In all branches of human
intelligence the same spirit is breaking forth, and we should have a
very limited knowledge of humanity could we not guess that the future is
announcing itself in such tentative co-operation, which is gradually
taking the place of individual work.
For this dictionary to be a really collective work, it would have been
necessary that many volunteer authors, printers, and printers' readers
should have worked in common; but something in this direction is done
already in the Socialist Press, which offers us examples of manual and
intellectual work combined. It happens in our newspapers that a
Socialist author composes in lead his own article. True, such attempts
are rare, but they indicate in which direction evolution is going.
They show the road of liberty. In future, when a man will have something
useful to say--a word that goes beyond the thoughts of his century, he
will not have to look for an editor who might advance the necessary
capital. He will look for collaborators among those who know the
printing trade, and who approve the idea of his new work. Together they
will publish the new book or journal.
Literature and journalism will cease to be a means of money-making and
living at the cost of others. But is there any one who knows literature
and journalism from within, and who does not ardently desire that
literature should at last be able to free itself from those who formerly
protected it, and who now exploit it, and from the multitude, which,
with rare exceptions, pays for it in proportion to its mediocrity, or to
the ease with which it adapts itself to the bad taste of the greater
number?
Letters and science will only take their proper place in the work of
human development when, freed from all mercenary bondage, they will be
exclusively cultivated by those who love them, and for those who love
them.
IV
Literature, science, and art must be cultivated by free men. Only on
this condition will they succeed in emancipating themselves from the
yoke of the State, of Capital, and of the bourgeois mediocrity which
stifles them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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