The Conquest of BreadKropotkin, Petr Alekseevich, kniaz
Philosophy
The Conquest of Bread
Kropotkin, Petr Alekseevich, kniaz
Anarchism; Communism
It will come. As we have said, things are already improving. Only let us
fully understand that a revolution, intoxicated with the beautiful
words, Liberty, Equality, Solidarity, would not be a revolution if it
maintained slavery at home. Half humanity subjected to the slavery of
the hearth would still have to rebel against the other half.
FOOTNOTE:
[8] It seems that the Communists of Young Icaria had understood the
importance of a free choice in their daily relations apart from work.
The ideal of religious Communists has always been to have meals in
common; it is by meals in common that early Christians manifested their
adhesion to Christianity. Communion is still a vestige of it. Young
Icarians had given up this religious tradition. They dined in a common
dining room, but at small separate tables, at which they sat according
to the attractions of the moment. The Communists of Anama have each
their house and dine at home, while taking their provisions at will at
the communal stores.
CHAPTER XI
FREE AGREEMENT
I
Accustomed as we are by heredity prejudices and our unsound education
and training to represent ourselves the beneficial hand of Government,
legislation and magistracy everywhere, we have come to believe that man
would tear his fellow-man to pieces like a wild beast the day the police
took his eye off him; that absolute chaos would come about if authority
were overthrown during a revolution. And with our eyes shut we pass by
thousands and thousands of human groupings which form themselves freely,
without any intervention of the law, and attain results infinitely
superior to those achieved under governmental tutelage.
If you open a daily paper you find that its pages are entirely devoted
to Government transactions and to political jobbery. A man from another
world, reading it, would believe that, with the exception of the Stock
Exchange transactions, nothing gets done in Europe save by order of some
master. You find nothing in the paper about institutions that spring up,
grow up, and develop without ministerial prescription! Nothing--or
almost nothing! Even where there is a heading, "Sundry Events" (_Faits
divers_, a favorite column in the French papers), it is because they are
connected with the police. A family drama, an act of rebellion, will
only be mentioned if the police have appeared on the scene.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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