Kropotkin

Brian Morris

Description

The nineteenth century witnessed the growth of anarchist literature, which advocated a society based on voluntary cooperation without government authority. Although his classical writings on mutual aid and the philosophy of anarchism are still published today, Peter Kropotkin remains a neglected figure. A talented geographer and a revolutionary socialist, Kropotkin was one of the most important theoreticians of the anarchist movement.

In Kropotkin: The Politics of Community, Brian Morris reaffirms with an attitude of critical sympathy the contemporary relevance of Kropotkin as a political and moral philosopher and as a pioneering social ecologist. Well-researched and wide-ranging, this volume not only presents an important contribution to the history of anarchism, both as a political tradition and as a social movement, but also offers insightful reflections on contemporary debates in political theory and ecological thought. After a short biographical note, the book analyzes in four parts Kropotkin’s writings on anarchist communism, agrarian socialism, and integral education; modern science and evolutionary theory; the French Revolution and the modern state; and possessive individualism, terror, and war.

Standing as a comprehensive and engaging introduction to anarchism, social ecology, and the philosophy of evolutionary holism, Kropotkin is written in a straightforward manner that will appeal to those interested in social anarchism and in alternatives to neoliberal doctrines.

Sujets

• Left-libertarianism
• Social ecology
• Mutual aid
• Peter Kropotkin
• Évolution

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629635255
• Langue: English

Extrait

Kropotkin: The Politics of Community
Brian Morris
Brian Morris 2004
This edition 2018 PM Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-505-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017964731
Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com
TO MY LIFELONG FRIENDS
PETER AND JOYCE SHARP
Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.
Andre Gide (Ehrlich 1996)
The crackpots, faddists, and terrorists have always given anarchism a bad name and they are still with us today.
Sam Dolgoff (Avrich 1995, 231)
CONTENTS

Preface
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Peter Kropotkin: A Biographical Note
P ART O NE: T HE T HEORY OF A NARCHIST C OMMUNISM
1. The Coming Revolution and Anarchist Communism
2. The Paris Commune and Free Communism
3. Objections to Anarchism and the Critique of Prisons
4. Agrarian Socialism
5. Integral Education
P ART T WO: E COLOGY AND S OCIAL E THICS
6. Modern Science and Anarchism
7. Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution
8. Ethical Naturalism
P ART T HREE: H ISTORICAL S TUDIES
9. Tribal Life and Anarchism
10. The Modern State: Its Historic Role
11. The Poststructuralist Critique of Anarchism
12. The French Revolution
P ART F OUR: A NARCHISM
13. The History of Anarchism
14. Anarchist Terrorism and War
15. Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE

I have been interested in the life and work of Peter Kropotkin ever since I read his Appeal to the Young more than half a century ago. But the writing of the present text, intended as a critical introduction to Kropotkin s social ecology and revolutionary anarchism, was specifically prompted by two concerns.
The first was personal, for in a review of my book Ecology and Anarchism (Images, 1996), which was a collection of various articles and reviews, Graham Purchase had chided me for not exploring the ideas of Kropotkin, although Kropotkin always hovered in the background of my writings. I thought I owed the anarchist-geographer some serious thought.
Second, toward the end of the last century, there were many books pouring off the academic press purporting to be about philosophers of ecology. These books not only completely ignored Kropotkin but even alluded to such iconic figures as Martin Heidegger, J rgen Habermas, and Anthony Giddens, who were seminal scholars but were not, by any stretch of the imagination, ecological thinkers. But even when academic scholars seriously engaged with Kropotkin, they invariably depicted him as a crude positivist or as a Cartesian mechanistic philosopher. On the contrary, Kropotkin, drawing on the insights of Humboldt, Darwin, and his friend lis e Reclus-as I explore in this book-was fundamentally an evolutionary naturalist. Apart from a few notable exceptions, academic scholars derided Kropotkin s anarchism, deeming it unrealistic and contrary to either common sense or human nature-one liberal political theorist even suggesting that Kropotkin lived in a veritable fairyland.
In addition, what also troubled me as the twentieth century drew to a close was that even anarchists began to dismiss his writings as historical baggage that needed to be jettisoned or at least given a major overhaul. Embracing, often with unwarranted enthusiasm, such contemporary fads as neoprimitivism, Nietzschean aesthetics, misanthropic bourgeois individualism (as Kropotkin had earlier described it), and esoteric postmodernist theory-as expressed, for example, in the pages of Freedom or the Green Anarchist -many of these critics of Kropotkin arrogantly rejected his intellectual legacy as obsolete.
In an earlier decade I had written a short introduction to the life and work of Mikhail Bakunin (Black Rose Books, 1993), defending his political integrity against his liberal and Marxist detractors, and I was similarly motivated to write the present book to defend and uphold both the importance and the contemporary relevance of Kropotkin s legacy. As with my other writings, I have tried to keep the text free of academic pretension and jargon and to write in a style that is lucid and readable, and thus of interest to scholars, students, and radical activists alike, as well as to the general reader.
During the last decade, however, in the wake of antiglobalization demonstrations and the rise of the Occupy movement in many major cities and the Democracy Project (in its various guises), there has been a resurgence of interest in the life and work of Kropotkin. He is no longer thought of as an intellectual crackpot, and we have thus seen a plethora of essays and books exploring various aspects of his legacy. Kropotkin s seminal role with regard to the anarchist roots of geography has been reaffirmed, particularly his status as a pioneer earth scientist and as one of the first scholars to explore the critical importance of climate change in the earth s history. It is significant that Kropotkin s portrait hangs in the library of the Royal Geographical Society in London.
Equally important, contemporary studies continue to reinforce the value of Kropotkin s political writings-specifically those on the social, historical, scientific, and philosophical basis of the anarchist movement. For in an important sense, Kropotkin s anarchism was ecological, socialist, and libertarian, as the present book seeks to demonstrate. Kropotkin has even been interpreted as a major critic of classical anarchism -a rather banal and meaningless concept invented and propagated by liberal academics.
But what has been of particular significance since the present book first appeared (in 2004) has been the publication of Iain McKay s anthology of Kropotkin s political writings, Direct Action Against Capital (AK Press, 2014). For what the anthology amply demonstrates is that Kropotkin was not a starry-eyed saint, completely lost in utopian dreams, but rather a practical thinker, actively involved in the economic and political struggles of the late nineteenth century. As a revolutionary anarchist Kropotkin was deeply opposed to capitalism and the state, as well as all forms of social oppression, while envisaging in concrete terms an alternative form of society based on mutual aid, voluntary associations, and communal self-management. But as a social ecologist, Kropotkin also envisaged reconciliation and a relation of mutual cooperation, between humans and the natural world, specifically other life forms. It is Kropotkin s vision of an ecological society based on free communism, and his wider political and philosophical legacy, that this book aims to present.
Brian Morris
May 2017
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

T he following abbreviations appear in citations throughout this book. They refer to works listed in the first section of the bibliography, Kropotkin s Works in English.
AY:
Act for Yourselves
CB:
The Conquest of Bread
E:
Ethics: Origin and Development
EE:
Evolution and Environment
FFW:
Fields, Factories and Workshops
FW:
Fugitive Writings
GFR:
The Great French Revolution 1789-1793
KRP:
Kropotkin s Revolutionary Pamphlet
MA:
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
MR:
Memoirs of a Revolutionist
RFP:
In Russian and French Prisons
RL:
Russian Literature: Ideals and Realities
SW:
Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution
WR:
Words of a Rebel
MK refers to M. A. Miller s biography Kropotkin, and WA refers to The Anarchist Prince, a book by G. Woodcock and I. Avakumovic. Both are listed in the third section of the bibliography, Books and Articles on Kropotkin.
INTRODUCTION

T his book consists of a series of essays that offer reflections on the political philosophy and social ecology of the revolutionary anarchist Peter Kropotkin. It has no specific thesis other than to affirm the contemporary relevance of this much-neglected scholar and political activist. But the essays do aim, overall, to provide a critical introduction to Kropotkin s social anarchism and ecological thought.
A talented geographer, an explorer in his early youth, Kropotkin was one of the most seminal figures in the history of the anarchist movement and has long been considered one of its most important theoreticians. He has been described as a unique combination of the prophet and the scientist. Although Kropotkin made many important contributions to science, throughout much of his life he was a revolutionary socialist, devoting his time and energies to the anarchist cause. His friend Errico Malatesta affirmed that Kropotkin had without doubt contributed more than anyone to the development of anarchist theory. By his exemplary life, and by generating a treasury of fertile ideas, Kropotkin undoubtedly stirred the imagination of his generation. Not without his faults, Kropotkin was gifted with a remarkable intelligence and a generous spirit, and thus, Malatesta concluded, he was one of the shining lights of the anarchist movement (Richards 1965, 268). Describing Kropotkin as my great teacher, the redoubtable Emma Goldman likewise considered Kropotkin as the most outstanding exponent of anarchist communism, and wrote that he was recog