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solaireastora 's review for:
The Conquest of Bread
by Peter Kropotkin
An interesting but deeply flawed book.
I sympathize with Kropotkin’s anger at the injustices caused by the modern industrialized world, and many passages are insightful criticisms of deep-rooted problems that continue to be relevant today. I found his interpretation of ‘lazy’ workers particularly good. However as much his description of the problems is correct, I cannot agree with his solutions. He makes much of grounding his vision of a future society in ‘science’ and throws around many statistics and notes to try to illustrate the feasibility of his idea - but it falls apart for me for a few reasons.
Firstly and most importantly he lays out no mechanism for resolving conflicts within his anarchist communist society. With the abolition of the state, who has a monopoly on the use of force? No one. How are conflicts to be resolved between members of the community? With no police, judges, court system, or legal system capable of arbitrating disputes? Members could take vengeance or ‘justice’ into their own hands.
Secondly, there are no mechanisms for resolving conflicts between Kropotkin's proposed society and other societies around it. He dances around this by claiming that if once the revolution occurs it will spread rapidly around the world, but this would be unprecedented and I view it as highly unlikely. So, without a state and military, how would the anarchist society fare in an armed conflict with its centralized neighbours? Poorly. Anarchist societies cannot prevent themselves from falling prey to aggressive neighbours. Kropotkin’s overall view of human nature seems hopelessly optimistic in not allowing for conflicts to break out. A society must have a way for resolving disputes that doesn’t rely on everyone just being nice.
Thirdly, how are food-importing nations or areas to survive in his autarchic society? While dismantling our system of global trade could arguably have important benefits, living in an isolated, barter-system, autarky seems like it would be impossible for many nations and miserable for many more.
For these main issues and many minor ones - Who will seriously volunteer to clean the sewers and waste of this society? Could megaprojects like NASA be run and organized by part time volunteers? Who decides how and what to teach the children? - I find this book absurd. If his type of society could work it would actually exist somewhere on the planet in something more than a localized form.
I sympathize with Kropotkin’s anger at the injustices caused by the modern industrialized world, and many passages are insightful criticisms of deep-rooted problems that continue to be relevant today. I found his interpretation of ‘lazy’ workers particularly good. However as much his description of the problems is correct, I cannot agree with his solutions. He makes much of grounding his vision of a future society in ‘science’ and throws around many statistics and notes to try to illustrate the feasibility of his idea - but it falls apart for me for a few reasons.
Firstly and most importantly he lays out no mechanism for resolving conflicts within his anarchist communist society. With the abolition of the state, who has a monopoly on the use of force? No one. How are conflicts to be resolved between members of the community? With no police, judges, court system, or legal system capable of arbitrating disputes? Members could take vengeance or ‘justice’ into their own hands.
Secondly, there are no mechanisms for resolving conflicts between Kropotkin's proposed society and other societies around it. He dances around this by claiming that if once the revolution occurs it will spread rapidly around the world, but this would be unprecedented and I view it as highly unlikely. So, without a state and military, how would the anarchist society fare in an armed conflict with its centralized neighbours? Poorly. Anarchist societies cannot prevent themselves from falling prey to aggressive neighbours. Kropotkin’s overall view of human nature seems hopelessly optimistic in not allowing for conflicts to break out. A society must have a way for resolving disputes that doesn’t rely on everyone just being nice.
Thirdly, how are food-importing nations or areas to survive in his autarchic society? While dismantling our system of global trade could arguably have important benefits, living in an isolated, barter-system, autarky seems like it would be impossible for many nations and miserable for many more.
For these main issues and many minor ones - Who will seriously volunteer to clean the sewers and waste of this society? Could megaprojects like NASA be run and organized by part time volunteers? Who decides how and what to teach the children? - I find this book absurd. If his type of society could work it would actually exist somewhere on the planet in something more than a localized form.