|
|
|
@ -1,4 +1,32 @@
|
|
|
|
# The Conquest of Bread
|
|
|
|
# The Conquest of Bread
|
|
|
|
> Peter Kropotkin
|
|
|
|
> Peter Kropotkin
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
A utopian, idealistic, and sadly unmanifest view of the inevitable future from the end of the 19th century.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Kropotkin despairs at the proliferation of wage labour and describes its mechanism of destruction of the lives of the working and middle classes. He asserts that worker specialisation and wage labour are morally indefensible, and should both be abolished as a matter of urgency. He goes further to say that private property - carefully distinguishing 'private' from 'personal' property - is nonsensical, and should too be ostracised from our societies.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
On specialisation, it's hard to disagree with the author. He compares a master smith, having honed their craft over a lifetime of odd repairs and a variety of projects, to a factory worker producing nails for a corporate overlord. Under a modern view of psychological health, the variety afforded by the master's lifestyle is a much more deeply fulfilling existence. However, the factory worker can make more nails, of better quality (due to their added nail-specific experience) and do so more cheaply. The latter is therefore preferable, as by growing a population one can find enough specialised workers to produce any commodity, and do so economically competitively with a generalist.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
His argument for the abolition of wage labour takes issue with contemporary Marxist arguments on the valuation of human labour by time ("labour-notes") or by any other measure, claiming it not meaningfully different to the wages of today. A worker paid in wages, he argues, doesn't benefit directly from their labour. Rather, the owner of the relevant capital assets benefits directly from their labour, and is free to pay the worker virtually whatever they want. The worker themself has only the power to withhold their labour, but even this is an imagined power, as the worker will always be under financial pressure themselves, and without capital assets, has no means to generate wealth besides through their labour. Wage labourers of any variety are therefore forced to sell their time for the primary benefit of others, while their freedom and human individuality may be stripped of them with ever-increasing veracity.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
To remediate this, he appeals to an apparently innate human desire to work for the health and well-being of all. To see oneself and one's community flourish is surely motivation aplenty! He imagines communes, as small as a few agrarian families or as large as Paris-turned-independent-city-state, and hypothesises about how they might interact for the common good of all. He presents calculations of the required amount of food to feed a revolting Paris, and the requisite amount of labour demanded from each, and makes similar estimates for other necessesities such as clothing.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
It is difficult to imagine an exchange between different communes for agricultural machinery, railway infrastructure or some other large investment without some analogue of debt. At this point we must deal with the problem of how such exchanges can be made fair, which there was no attempt to explore in the book. Any attempt to introduce an overarching, mediating structure would presumably culminate in the reconstruction of something very similar to our modern political and economic apparatus.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Likewise, a clear advantage of a modern state over a motley collection of anarchist communes is disaster mitigation - in our world today, a failed crop in one part of the world does not spell disaster, as there is usually some body obliged to come to its aid by virtue of being contained in the same international border. The response is rather the increase of prices in response to reduced supply. What would make an independent commune, who don't necessarily have anything to spare, responsible for the well-being of the commune to the North who no longer have anything to eat?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Overall, Conquest of Bread contains a lot of wonderful ideas. Its criticism of the organisation of society around capital growth is sound, and holds as true today as it did when it was written. It is demoralising to read about Victorian issues which are not only still prescient, but if anything only more entrenched over a century later.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
However, his proposed remedies to our societal maladies seem naive an untenable, only functioning in a best-case world in which conflict is reduced to only that between the working and capitalist classes. Reality would seem to present more complex fault lines, where people are not generally inclined to help one other even were their oppressors removed.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
---
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The threat of over-specialisation is reminiscient of the Selenites in H. G. Wells' The First Men on the Moon, which has an extract in the Moonrise anthology, though at time of writing I've yet to read the full novel.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
=> ./moonrise.gmi Moonrise
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Kropotkin's apparent idealism is perhaps only exists through the lens of capitalist realism that a citizen of the 21st century has no choice but to look through.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
=> ./capitalist-realism.gmi Capitalist Realism
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
=> ../index.gmi Home
|
|
|
|
=> ../index.gmi Home
|
|
|
|
|
ktyl