The Conquest of Bread
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~78,500 words · 373 passages
Cite this work
- APAPeter Kropotkin. (n.d.). The Conquest of Bread. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/peter-kropotkin/the-conquest-of-bread
- MLAPeter Kropotkin. "The Conquest of Bread." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/peter-kropotkin/the-conquest-of-bread.
- ChicagoPeter Kropotkin. The Conquest of Bread. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/peter-kropotkin/the-conquest-of-bread.
What it is about
The Conquest of Bread (1892): how people eat the day after the revolution.
Context and history
Kropotkin does not argue principles: he calculates. How much bread is needed, how many houses, how many hours of work. The thesis is that well-being for all is already possible with existing technique, and that the problem is distribution. It is the most practical anarchist book ever written.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
One of the current objections to Communism, and Socialism altogether, is that the idea is so old, and yet it has never been realized. Schemes of ideal States haunted the thinkers of Ancient Greece; later on, the early Christians joined in communist groups; centuries later, large communist brotherhoods came into existence during the Reform movement. Then, the same ideals were revived during the great English and French Revolutions; and finally, quite lately, in 1848, a revolution, inspired to a great extent with Socialist ideals, took place in France. "And yet, you see," we are told, "how far away is still the realization of your schemes. Don't you think that there is some fundamental error in your understanding of human nature and its needs?" At first sight this objection seems very serious. However, the moment we consider human history more attentively, it loses its strength. We see, first, that hundreds of millions of men have succeeded in maintaining amongst themselves, in their village communities, for many hundreds of years, one of the main elements of Socialism--the common ownership of the chief instrument of production, the land, and the apportionment of the same according to the labour capacities of the different families; and we learn that if the communal possession of the land has been destroyed in Western Europe, it was not from within, but from without, by the governments which created a land monopoly in favour of the nobility and the middle classes. We learn, moreover, that the medieval cities succeeded in maintaining in their midst, for several centuries in succession, a certain socialized organization of production and trade; that these centuries were periods of a rapid intellectual, industrial, and artistic progress; while the decay of these communal institutions came mainly from the incapacity of men of combining the village with the city, the peasant with the citizen, so as jointly to oppose the growth of the military states, which destro
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