The Anarchist Prince, Part 2

[Below is Part 2 of my profile of Pyotr Kropotkin, one of the most famous anarchist thinkers and writers of the movement.  Since this installment starts where Part 1 left off, I strongly recommend that readers who are just encountering “The Anarchist Prince” go back to the first section (posted on 13 June) before venturing into the conclusion.

[After finishing Kropotkin’s biography, I move on to a brief examination of his political philosophy and then I discuss, also briefly, two of his books.]

On 6 September 1901, four months after Pyotr Kropotkin’s departure from the United States, President William McKinley (1843-1901; 25th President of the United States: 1897-1901) was shot in Buffalo, New York, by a self‑proclaimed anarchist named Leon Czolgosz (1873-1901); McKinley died on 14 September, succeeded by Vice President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919; 26th President of the United States: 1901-09).  

Rumors spread of an anarchist plot hatched by Kropotkin and U.S. anarchist Emma Goldman.  Chicago’s Hull House was alleged to have been the scene of their conspiracy during Kropotkin’s visit earlier that year (see Part 1).  It was pure fabrication, of course, but Kropotkin was disturbed because of the repressions suffered by his Chicago comrades, including Hippolyte Havel.

In his final years, Kropotkin concentrated on writing.  His works during this period included an autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899); Fields, Factories and Workshops (1901), which discusses the decentralization of industries, the possibilities for agriculture, and the uses of small industries; Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902; first English edition published in New York the same year), which proposed that collaboration is the natural order of the world for both humans and beasts; and The Great French Revolution (1893; English translation: 1909), Kropotkin’s alternative view of the French Revolution of 1789.  

                                                                                                           

These and his other writings, such as Words of a Rebel (1885), which was written while he was in Clairvaux Prison (see Part 1) and outlines the basic premises of anarcho-communism and the shortcomings of capitalism and representative democracy, and The Conquest of Bread (1892), which first appeared as a series of articles in Le Révolté in which Kropotkin surveys economic methods for the fulfillment of human needs, turned him into a world-renowned political figure.  

Emma Goldman declared: “We saw in him the father of modern anarchism, its revolutionary spokesman and brilliant exponent of its relation to science, philosophy and progressive thought.”  Goldman dubbed Kropotkin the “godfather of anarchism.”  (I’ll discuss some of these writings along with Kropotkin’s political philosophy briefly following his biography.)

In 1912, the anarchists of Europe, the U.S., and Australia celebrated Kropotkin’s 70th birthday and in 1914, at the beginning of the World War I, the veteran anarchist expressed a firm pro-Triple Entente position in the pages of a Russian political newspaper.  (The Triple Entente was the agreement before the war among France, Great Britain, and Russia against the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Italy.)

Two years later, Kropotkin and Jean Grave (1854-1939), an eminent French anarcho-communist, drafted a document called the “Manifesto of the Sixteen,” which advocated an Allied victory over Germany and the Central Powers (Germany, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire—Italy having declared neutrality in 1915) in World War I.  It was first published on 14 March 1916 and subsequently widely disseminated.  Because of the “Manifesto,” Kropotkin found himself isolated by the mainstream of the anarchist movement, which had staked out an anti-war position.

In Russia, the February Revolution, which occurred between 8 and 16 March 1917 (in the new calendar; in the old style, still in use in Russia, it was in February, hence the name), brought a provisional republican government to power in Petrograd and forced the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II (1868-1918; reigned: 1894-1917) and the end of Romanov rule.  (The tsar and his family were secretly executed by firing squad in Yekaterinburg in the early hours of 17 July 1918.)

The 74-year-old Kropotkin returned to Russia on 30 May 1917 after 40 years of exile.  He was greeted at the train station in Petrograd by Aleksandr Kerensky (1881-1970; Minister-Chairman of the Russian Provisional Government: 21 July-7 November 1917), at the time, the Minster of War of the new Russian Republic, and Nikolai Tchaikovsky, now a deputy of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.

The former émigré was offered the Ministry of Education in Kerensky’s Provisional Government, which he promptly refused.  Kropotkin felt that working with the bourgeois, capitalist administration would be a violation of his anarchist principles.

On 6-7 November 1917 (25-26 October old style), the Bolsheviks launched the October Revolution, forcing out the Kerensky government in Petrograd (the new name for Saint Petersburg until 1924, when it was renamed again as Leningrad).  The republican government ceded authority to the Bolshevik communists led by Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924; Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars: 1917-24). 

In a little less than a year, Russia went from the Russian Empire to the Russian Republic to the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic.  (The Soviet Union, formally the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR, was established in 1922.)

Kropotkin was at first enthusiastic about the changes in his homeland after the Bolsheviks took control, but he soon grew fearful of the methods of the Bolshevik dictatorship, especially the Red Terror, the tactic of punitive measures taken by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War (1917-1923) against perceived class enemies and people accused of counter-revolutionary activities.  Kropotkin persisted in expressing these feelings in writing, though he never again participated actively in politics. 

Kropotkin saw the Bolsheviks consolidating power in the center, precisely what the old anarchist opposed.  He knew a party with this power wouldn’t share it with anyone, most importantly, not the people.  In Kropotkin’s eyes, the revolution must become a nationwide effort, enveloping all classes.

In March 1920, Kropotkin wrote a letter to Lenin admonishing the Bolshevik leader that Russia was a Soviet Republic in name only, that it wasn’t people’s soviets that governed the country but party committees.  (The word soviet is Russian for ‘council.’  The word predates the communist era and is formed from the prefix со-, meaning ‘with’ [the equivalent of the Latin com-] and the old Slavic verb веть, ‘to talk’ or ‘to inform.’)

The Soviet government tried to keep the old revolutionary within the pale as he was considered a hero of the cause.  Kropotkin’s name was still revered by many communists and members of the government and the party didn’t want to see him actively oppose them so that they’d have to take action to neutralize his influence.

Toward this end, the Soviet government reached out to offer Kropotkin an apartment in the Kremlin and rations.  The People’s Commissar of Education even wrote to Sofya Grigoryevna to ask her to influence Pyotr Alekseyevich not to reject help from the government—probably in order to put the Bolshevik imprimatur on him as a sort of ward of the government.  Kropotkin, though, firmly refused government help.

The Kropotkins moved out of Moscow in July 1918 to Dmitrov, a small city some miles north.  With the civil war between the Reds (communists) and the Whites (republicans) still raging, not to mention the Red Terror under the direction of Feliks Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926), head of the Soviet secret police, Kropotkin was issued a “security certificate” signed by Lenin himself in order to protect him from harassment or arrest—or worse.

Nonetheless, during the last years of his life in Dmitrov, despite Lenin’s order not to interfere with him, Kropotkin lived under the vigilant surveillance of agents of Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka—the precursor to all the Soviet secret police agencies of USSR history, including the NKVD, the MVD, and, finally, the KGB..

All the Soviet government’s efforts didn’t stop Kropotkin from criticizing the Bolshevik revolution.  He continued his active social activities and worked on a new book, Ethics: Origin and Development, one of the foundational texts of the anarchist movement.  Continuing the argument of Mutual Aid, Ethics traces the development of moral teachings from ancient Greece, Christianity, and the Middle Ages through 19th-century philosophers.  The book remained unfinished at his death but the first volume was published posthumously in 1922.

In January 1921, Kropotkin fell ill with pneumonia. Lenin sent a group of the country’s best doctors, led by the People’s Commissar of Health, to Dmitrov.  The government offered Kropotkin enhanced nutrition and special rations, but he wouldn’t accept any special privileges and declined the offers.

Pyotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin died quietly in the early hours of 8 February 1921 at the age of 78.  The next day, the newspapers announced his death and printed the funeral arrangements on their front pages. 

The anarchist prince’s body was transported by train from Dmitrov to Moscow where his casket lay in state in the Hall of Columns.  Mourners, including hundreds of delegations from Moscow plants, factories, and institutions, as well as thousands of ordinary people came to bid farewell to the revolutionary hero for two days.  Near the coffin stood anarchists as a guard of honor.

Kropotkin was buried with great pomp on 13 February at Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery, the burial place during the Soviet era second in prestige only to the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.  Emma Goldman, then living in Russia to which she’d been deported in 1919, came to deliver a eulogy.  Even at his funeral, however, Chekists kept a surreptitious eye on the proceedings.

In Dmitrov, a street was named in Kropotkin’s honor and the house where the geographer and writer had lived was turned into a museum.  All over Russia, especially in places where he’d lived or worked, monuments were raised to Kropotkin and places were renamed in his honor.  In 2004, a monument was erected to Kropotkin in Dmitrov; it stands, appropriately enough, on Kropotkinskaya Street.

Anarchism, which comes from the combination of the Greek prefix an- (αν; ‘without’) and the word arkhos (αρχοϛ; ‘leader’ or ‘ruler’), is defined by Kropotkin as:

a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government—harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.

He wrote further:

A society to which pre-established forms, crystallized by law, are repugnant; which looks for harmony in an ever-changing and fugitive equilibrium between a multitude of varied forces and influences of every kind, following their own course, – these forces themselves promoting the energies which are favorable to their march towards progress, towards the liberty of developing in broad daylight and counterbalancing one another.

The central theme of Kropotkin’s numerous political writings is the abolition of all forms of government in favor of a society operating solely on the principle of mutual aid and cooperation, rather than through governmental institutions.  Anarchism’s historical association with chaos and violence is outside Kropotkin’s definition of the philosophy. 

This conception, though, comes mostly from opponents of anarchism because the movement poses a threat to established authority.  You see that Kropotkin stressed harmony in his anarchistic society, which would ideally be more and better organized than a capitalistic and democratic one. 

The same is true of violence.  Despite his backing of the Allies in World War I and his initial support of the February Revolution, Kropotkin’s beliefs were steadfastly non-violent—he didn’t support the Bolsheviks, who used violence to suppress opposition—and he held that cooperation, not competitiveness, was the way to advance the human condition. 

Mutual Aid attacked the Social Darwinists for their conception of nature and human society as essentially competitive.  He insisted that cooperation and collaboration were the norms in both the natural and social worlds. 

This is a pretty fair basic definition of anarchism, at least as seen by Pyotr Kropotkin.  The philosophy is far more complex than this, however, but this isn’t the place for a full examination of the movement.  (Fortunately, there are plenty of books, articles, and websites to which the curious reader can turn for additional discussion.) 

In addition, as I pointed out earlier, anarchism isn’t monolithic; there are factions and branches.  While opposition to the state is central to anarchist thought, much of the rest of the movement varies from group to group.  For this reason, the Encyclopædia Britannica calls anarchism a “cluster of doctrines and attitudes.” 

Just as anarchism prime is too big a topic to cover here, the varieties of the philosophy are too numerous for me even to list, much less describe.  So I’m going to try to distinguish, however simplistically, among the few factions I named earlier—which are only the ones espoused by comrades of Kropotkin I included in his biography above.

The history of modern anarchism goes back to the 18th century around the period of the French Revolution (1789)—which is why one of Kropotkin’s earliest political books, The Great French Revolution, was on that historical event.  The first person to call himself an anarchist was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1840 in Qu’est ce que la propriété? [What Is Property?]), a major influence on Kropotkin’s thinking.  He labeled himself a “mutualist.” 

Mutualism is an anarchist doctrine and economic system that promotes a socialist society based on free markets and the rights of the occupation and use of property (usufructs).  Mutualism is founded on the Marxist economic theory which states that when workers sell the products of their labor, they should be paid in money, goods, or services equal to the amount of labor required to produce the products (labor theory of value, or LTV).

Mikhail Bakunin, among the most influential figures of anarchism and one of the most famous ideologues in Europe, was a collectivist anarchist.  The principal rival of Karl Marx (1818-83), who, with his collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820-95), was essentially the inventor of modern communism, Bakunin engineered the split with the First International in 1872 that led to the formation of the Jura Federation, which Kropotkin joined.  Bakunin became a sort of mentor to the younger anarchist and helped him form many of his theories.

Collectivist anarchism is a revolutionary socialist concept founded on abolishing both the state and private ownership of the means of production.  Collectivist anarchists envision in its place the collective ownership of the means of production, controlled and self-managed by the producers and workers themselves (that is, a collective). 

Once collectivization has been accomplished, money would be abolished and payment for goods and services would be made with labor notes.  Workers’  pay would be determined based on job difficulty and the amount of time they contributed to production.

Henry Seymour, the Englishman who brought Kropotkin to Britain in 1886, was an individualist anarchist, the branch of anarchism that emphasizes the individual and her or his will over external factors such as groups, society, traditions, and ideological systems.

To make the matter of differentiating among the various anarchism sects all the more blurry, individualist anarchism and a form called social anarchism (not to be confused with anarchist socialism, which I’ll get to) are mutually influential—though they are also often contrasted. 

Mutualists are sometimes considered a subset of individualist anarchism, sometimes of social anarchism.  Anarcho-communists, the form to which Kropotkin subscribed, have sometimes described themselves as radical individualist anarchists. 

And I have deliberately not added to this rat’s nest of political thought all the alternative labels each anarchistic faction has.

You can already see how confusing the taxonomy of anarchism can get—and there are a minimum of a dozen or so groups and subgroups (and I’m sure there are also sub-subgroups as well).  If it all begins to sound like the Little-Endians and the Big-Endians from Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels (in the story about Lilliput), you’re not wrong.

Charlotte Wilson, Seymour’s erstwhile colleague at The Anarchist newspaper until she and Kropotkin split with him to start their own paper, Freedom, was an anarchist socialist (as I said, not to be confused with a social anarchist).  Wilson was also a member of the Fabian Society, a socialist organization to which George Bernard Shaw belonged as well, and he reportedly labeled her the lone Fabian anarchist (see Part 1). 

The Fabians’ mission was to promote the precepts of democratic socialism in democratic nations and was one of the founding organizations of the British Labour Party; it was hardly a radical body.  Wilson’s branch of anarchism, also known as libertarian socialism among other designations, is a set of socialist political philosophies such as anti-authoritarianism, anti-statism, and libertarianism that eschews the notion of socialism as a movement that espouses centralized state control of the economy.

Like all anarchists, anarchist socialists reject the state itself and they promote decentralized structures of political organizations.   Like the collectivist anarchists, anarchist socialists support the self-management of the workplace by the workers themselves and an overall decentralization through direct democracy of all governing or regulating bodies. 

Emma Goldman, arguably the most famous anarchist in the U.S. in her day (she was popularly known as “Red Emma”) was aligned with many causes and -isms, including feminism, atheism, anti-militarism, anti-capitalism, and advocated for many issues like prison reform, free love (before the hippies), and homosexual rights (long before there was a gay liberation movement). 

Goldman doesn’t seem to have become strongly associated with any specific branch of anarchism, however—though she appears to have leaned toward anarcho-communism.  Like Pyotr Kropotkin, another anarcho-communist, she withdrew support of the Bolsheviks over their statist power structure and their use of violence and terror.

Nikolai Tchaikovsky, known in Russia in his day as the “grandfather of the Russian revolution,” was not an anarchist; he was a revolutionary socialist.  The Tchaikovsky Circle, named for him and which Pyotr Kropotkin joined in 1873, was an element in the Narodnik movement, Russian populism (narod is Russian for ‘people’ or ‘folk’) whose adherents advocated an agrarian socialist reformation. 

Revolutionary socialists believe that social revolution is required to effect changes in the structure of society, to transition it from capitalism to socialism.  In their epistemology, revolution doesn’t necessarily mean a violent insurrection, but a seizure of political power by the working class so that the state is abolished or directly controlled by the working class rather than the capitalist class.  It’s not hard to see why anarchists like Kropotkin would gravitate to factions like the Tchaikovsky Circle.

Finally, I come to anarcho-communism, the branch to which Pyotr Kropotkin himself subscribed.  I deliberately left it till last in order to spotlight it.  With a slew of alternative names, anarcho-communism stands for abolishing the state, capitalism, wage labor, and private property.  Anarcho-communists carve out an exemption for personal and collectively-owned property. 

They believe in the common ownership by the society as a whole (not a collective of workers) of the means of production and direct democracy, along with a network of workers’ councils to organize society.  Production and consumption of goods would be based on the guiding principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (as Karl Marx put it in his 1875 “Critique of the Gotha Program”). 

Kropotkin felt that the collectivist anarchists’ labor notes, which would be exchanged for goods in the communal market, would soon become a new currency and give rise to a state again—a kind of revanchist capitalism. 

Under anarcho-communism, wages would be abolished and workers would simply draw on a storehouse of goods in accordance with the Marxist principle.

As for the common—as opposed to collective—ownership and the abolishment of private property: it may go back to a statement of Proudhon’s, Kropotkin’s first anarchist influence.  In What Is Property?, the French mutualist insisted, in a slogan that has become almost iconic: “Property is theft!” (“La propriété, c’est le vol!”).

Though Kropotkin didn’t invent anarcho-communism, he became its principle theoretician and explicator and it’s largely associated with him (and vice versa). 

Now, let’s take a quick look at a couple of Kropotkin’s books, namely what are arguably his two most important, in the sense that they are his best known and his most often read—by people outside the anarchism world.  I’m talking about Memoirs of a Revolutionist from 1899 and 1902’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.

Parts of what became Memoirs of a Revolutionist were first published in The Atlantic Monthly between September 1898 and  September 1899 under the title “The Autobiography of a Revolutionist.”  In 1899, the book version was released by Houghton Mifflin with an introduction by Georg Brandes (1842-1927), a Danish critic and scholar who’d help launch the Danish Social Liberal Party (Danish: Radikale Venstre, literally “Radical Left”) in 1906.  

In this autobiography, focusing largely on the first 45 years of his life, Kropotkin recounts his youth in the imperial court and his military service in Siberia.  He describes his imprisonment in Saint Petersburg, his escape, and his exile in Western Europe.  

He provides depictions of life in 19th-century Russia, covering examples of the gulf between the aristocracy and the serfs and scenes of plots hatched in the dead of night outside the tsar’s palace.  As an eminent geographer and cartographer, Kropotkin writes fascinatingly about his explorations of Siberia and the Russian Far East.  

The writer draws a picture of tsarist Russia under the rule of Tsar Alexander II and discusses the movements agitating for social and political change and the evolution of the socialist and anarchist activities and ideology in Switzerland, France, and England in which he participated in the aftermath of the suppression of the 1871 Paris Commune.

The essays of Mutual Aid were initially published in the British periodical The Nineteenth Century between 1890 and 1896.  They explore the role of mutually-beneficial cooperation and reciprocity (that is, “mutual aid”) in both the animal kingdom and human societies of the past and the author’s own time.  The first book edition was published in New York by McClure, Phillips & Co in 1902.

Considered a fundamental text of anarcho-communism, the book is a refutation of the theories of society of social Darwinism  that emphasize competition and survival of the fittest, and the romantic depictions by thinkers such as Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), who thought that cooperation was motivated by universal love.  Kropotkin argues instead that mutual aid has pragmatic advantages for the survival of human and animal communities. 

Kropotkin presents a scientific argument for communism as an alternative to the historical materialism of the Marxists, which argues that history is the result of material conditions rather than ideals.  The author based his conclusions on his observations of natural phenomena and history.

The anarchist writer considers mutual aid important for prosperity and survival in the animal kingdom, in indigenous and early European societies, in Medieval cities, and in the late-19th-century village, labor movement, and poor communities.  

Kropotkin castigates the state for destroying historically important mutual aid institutions such as medieval craft guilds, unions, so-called friendly societies, and fraternal organizations, particularly by means of the imposition of private property.

Kropotkin drew from his first-hand observations in Siberia, the Russian Far East, and Mongolia, where he studied indigenous animal populations, noting that the most effective communities were essentially cooperative, rather than competitive.  As a consequence, biologists also consider Mutual Aid an important source in the scientific study of cooperation.

[A word or two about my spellings of Russian words and names.  It’s my practice to transliterate the Cyrillic spellings as closely as I can using the Latin alphabet.  Hence I write Aleksandr because it’s closer to the Cyrillic spelling than Alexander.  I make an exception for words or names that have become commonly rendered in a familiar way, such as the names of the Russian tsars like Nicholas or Alexander.

[Readers will find that many Russian words and (especially) names have multiple spellings in English, such as Pyotr Kropotkin, whose first name is also rendered as Piotr and even Peter.  (I won’t even go onto the additional variations that occur when transliterating Russian into other languages such as German or French!)  I try to be consistent, but the variations make looking the figures up difficult and confusing.]