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Pyotr Kropotkin Quotes

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Famous Pyotr Kropotkin Quotes

“We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We called those barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must accept, or die or hunger. The result of this state of things is that all our production tends in a wrong direction. Enterprise takes no thought for the needs of the community. Its only aim is to increase the gains of the speculator. Hence the constant fluctuations of trade, the periodical industrial crises, each of which throws scores of thousands of workers on the streets.”

Work Capitalism Socialism

Book:The Conquest of Bread

Source: The Conquest of Bread

“We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We called those the barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must accept, or die of hunger.”

Book:The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

Source: The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“To make a distinction between simple and professional work in a new society would result in the revolution sanctioning and recognizing as a principle a brutal fact we submit to nowadays, but that we nevertheless find unjust.”

Book:The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

Source: The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“We understand that all men have but one dream - that of emerging from, or enabling their children to emerge from, this inferior stage; to create for themselves an ‘independent’ position, which means what? - To also live by other men’s work! As long as there will be a class of manual workers and a class of ‘brain’ workers, black hands and white hands, it will be thus. What interest, in fact, can this depressing work have for the worker, when he knows that the fate awaiting him from the cradle to the grave will be to live in mediocrity, poverty and insecurity of the morrow? Therefore, when we see the immense majority of men take up their wretched task every morning, we feel surprised at their perseverance, at their zeal for work, at the habit that enables them, like machines blindly obeying an impetus given, to lead this life of misery without hope for the morrow; without foreseeing ever so vaguely that some day they, or at least their children, will be part of a humanity rich in all the treasures of a bountiful nature, in all the enjoyments of knowledge, scientific and artistic creation, reserved today to a few privileged favourites. It is precisely to put an end to this separation between manual and brain work that we want to abolish wagedom, that we want the social revolution. Then work will no longer appear a curse of fate: it will become what it should be - the free exercise of all the faculties of man.”

Book:The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

Source: The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“Well-being - that is to say, the satisfaction of physical, artistic, and moral needs, has always been the most powerful stimulant to work. And where a hireling hardly succeeds to produce the bare necessities with difficulty, a free worker, who sees ease and luxury increasing for him and for others in proportion to his efforts, spends infinitely far more energy and intelligences and obtains first-class products in a far greater abundance. The one feels riveted to misery, the other hopes for ease and luxury in the future. In this lies the whole secret. Therefore a society aiming at the well-being of all, and at the possibility of all enjoying life in all its manifestations, will give voluntary work, which will be infinitely superior and yield far more than work had produced up till now under the goad of slavery, serfdom, or wagedom.”

Book:The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

Source: The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“By admitting that the only guarantee not to be robbed of the fruits of your labour is to possess the instruments of labour - which is true - the economists only prove that man really produces most when he works in freedom, when he has a certain choice in his occupations, when he has no overseer to impede him, and lastly, when he sees his work bringing in a profit to him and to others who work like him, but bringing in little to idlers. Nothing else can be deducted from their argumentation and this is what we maintain ourselves.”

Book:The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

Source: The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“They fear that without compulsion the masses will not work. But during our own lifetime, have we not heard the same fears expressed twice? Once, by the anti-abolitionists in America before the emancipation of the Negroes, and, for a second time, by the Russian nobility before the liberation of the serfs? ‘Without the whip the Negro will not work,’ said the anti-abolitionist. ‘Free from their master’s supervision the serfs will leave the fields uncultivated’, said the Russian serf-owners. It was the refrain of the French noblemen in 1789, the refrain of the Middle Ages, a refrain as old as the world, and we shall hear it every time there is a question oof sweeping away an injustice. And each time actual facts give it the lie.”

Work Compulsion

Book:The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

Source: The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings