Peter Kropotkin

“ Again it traversed the same phasis: the tribe, the village community, the free city, the all-powerful State, and finally the result was—death!
A new civilization then sprang up in Greece. Always beginning by the tribe, it slowly reached the village commune, then the period of republican cities. In these cities, civilization reached its highest summits. But the East brought to them its poisoned breath, its traditions of despotism. Wars and conquests created Alexander's empire of Macedonia. The State enthroned itself, the blood-sucker grew, killed all civilization, and then came—death! ”

“ The modern radical is a centralizer, a State partisan, a Jacobin to the core. And the Socialist walks in his footsteps. Like the Florentines at the end of the fifteenth century, who could only invoke the dictatorship of the State, to save them from the patricians, the Socialists know only how to invoke the same gods, the same dictatorship and the same State, to save us from the abominations of an economic system, created by that very State! ”

“ On the one hand, there are those who hope to accomplish the Social Revolution by means of the State: by upholding most of its functions, by even extending them and making use of them for the Revolution. And there are those who, like us, see in the State, not only in its actual form and in all forms that it might assume, but in its very essence, an obstacle to the Social Revolution: the most serious hindrance to the budding of a society based on equality and liberty ”

“ We are answered by an almost childish argument: "The State is there,"—we are told—"it exists, it represents a ready made powerful organisation. Why destroy it instead of making use of it? It works for ill, that is true, but that is due to its being in the hands of exploiters. Having fallen into the hands of the people, why should it not be utilised for a better end and for the good of the people?" ”

“ In the commune, the struggle was for the conquest and maintenance of the liberty of the individual, for the principle of federation, for the right to unite and act; whereas the wars of the States aimed to destroy these liberties, to subjugate the individual, to annihilate free agreement, to unite men in one and the same servitude before the king, the judge, the priest, and the State.
There lies all the difference. There are struggles and conflicts that kill. And there are those that launch humanity forwards. ”

“ Yet to reason thus is to entirely ignore the progress made in the domain of history during the last thirty years; it is to ignore that men have lived in societies during thousands of years before having known the State; it is to forget that for European nations the State is of recent origin—that it hardly dates from the sixteenth century; it is to fail to recognise that the most glorious epochs in humanity were those in which the liberties and local life were not yet destroyed by the State, and when masses of men lived in communes and free federations. ”

“ We can conceive the spirit of research and invention that prevailed, the breath of liberty that inspired their works, the sentiment of fraternal solidarity that grew in those guilds in which men of a same craft were united, not only by the mercantile and technical side of a trade but also by bonds of sociability and fraternity. ”

“ If you look still deeper into all the categories of facts which have been hardly touched upon this evening, if you see the State as it was in history, and as it is in its very essence to-day, and if you consider moreover that a social institution cannot serve all aims indifferently, because, like every other organ, it is developed for a certain purpose, and not for all purposes,—if you take all that into consideration, you will understand why we desire the abolition of the State. ”

“ Then the revolution of the commune, long since prepared by that federative spirit and born of the union of sworn fraternity with the village community, burst forth in the twelfth century with a striking spontaneity all over Europe.
This revolution, which the mass of university historians prefer to ignore, saved Europe from the calamity with which it was menaced. It arrested the evolution of theocratic and despotic monarchies in which our civilisation would probably have gone down after a few centuries of pompous expansion, as the civilisations of Mesopotamia, Assyria and Babylon had done. ”

“ Then look at taxation, an institution of purely State origin, that formidable weapon which the State makes use of in Europe as well as in young societies in the United States to keep the masses under its heel, to favour friends, to ruin the greater number to the advantage of those who govern, and to uphold the old divisions and castes. ”

“ It is easy to understand why modern historians, nurtured as they are in the spirit of the Roman law, and accustomed to look to Roman law for the origin of every political institution, are incapable of understanding the spirit of the communalist movement of the twelfth century. This manly affirmation of the rights of the Individual, who managed to constitute Society through the federation of individuals, villages and towns, was an absolute negation of the centralising spirit of ancient Rome, which spirit penetrates all historical conceptions of the present day university teaching. ”

“ And if we set aside the religious formulæ, which are a tribute to that epoch, we find in it the very essence of the current of ideas which we represent to-day: the negation of all law, both State or divine; the conscience of each individual thus being his one and only law; the commune—absolute master of its destinies, retaking its lands from feudal lords, and refusing all personal or monetary service to the State. In fact, Communism and equality put into practice. ”

“ And who are those barbarians? It is the State: the Triple Alliance, constituted at last, of the military chief, the Roman judge, and the priest, the three forming a mutual insurance for domination; the three united in one power that will command in the name of the interests of society and will crush that society.
We naturally ask ourselves, how these new barbarians could get mastery over communes, formerly so powerful? Where did they get their strength for conquest from? ”

“ The State is but one of the forms taken by society in the course of history. ”

“ More than a century of terrible struggles! And what sufferings! How many men have died in prisons, how many have been transported to Australia, shot and hanged, to reconquer the right of combination, which (I am not tired of repenting) every man, free or serf, practiced freely, before the State had laid its heavy hand on societies. ”

“ Thus, to take an example among many others, the Kabyles have retained their village community with the powers I have just mentioned. But man feels the necessity of action outside the narrow limits of his hamlet. Some like to wander about in quest of adventures, in the capacity of merchants. Some take to a craft, "an art" of some kind. And these merchants and artisans, unite in "fraternities," even when they belong to different villages, tribes and confederations. There must be union for mutual help in distant adventures or to mutually transmit the mysteries of the craft—and they unite. ”

“ In those cities, under the shelter of their liberties acquired under the impulse of free agreement and free initiative, a whole new civilization grew up and attained such expansion, that the like has not been seen up till now.
All modern industry comes to us from those cities. In three centuries, industries and arts developed there to such perfection that our century has been able to surpass them only in rapidity of production, but rarely in quality, and very rarely in beauty of the produce. In the higher arts which we try to revive in vain to-day, have we surpassed the beauty of Raphael? ”

“ To give free scope to Socialism, it is necessary to reconstruct society, which is based to-day on the narrow individualism of the shopkeeper, from top to bottom. It is not only, as they have been pleased sometimes to say in a vague metaphysical way, a question of returning to the worker "the integral product of his work," but a question of remodelling in their entirety all relations among men, from those existing to-day between every individual and his church warden or his station master, to those existing between trades, hamlets, cities and regions. ”

“ In the course of the sixteenth century, modern barbarians come and destroy the whole civilization of the cities of the Middle Ages. These barbarians do not completely annihilate it; they cannot do so, but they check it, at least, in its progress for two or three centuries. They drive it in a new direction.
They fetter the individual, they take all his liberties away, they order him to forget the unions which formerly were based on free initiative and free agreement, and their aim is to level the whole of society in the same submission to the master. ”

“ And if, putting aside antique empires, we study the origin and development of that young barbarian civilisation till the time when it gave birth to our modern States, we shall be able to grasp the essence of the State. We shall do it better than we should have done, if we had launched ourselves in the study of the Roman Empire, or the empire of Alexander, or else of despotic Eastern monarchies. ”

“ All the great discoveries which have made modern science,—the compass, the clock, the watch, printing, the maritime discoveries, gunpowder, the law of gravitation, the law of atmospheric pressure, of which the steam-engine is but a development, the rudiments of chemistry, the scientific method already pointed out by Roger Bacon, and practised in Italian universities,—where does that all come from, if not from the free cities which developed under the shelter of communal liberties? ”

“ When they ought to have destroyed the old organisation, destroyed the State, and constructed a new organisation, by beginning at the basis itself of society—the free village commune, the free workers' union, and so on—they thought to utilise "the organisation that already existed." ”

“ Peasants have only kept scraps of their common lands. This is the way in which the mutual assurance of lord, priest, soldier and judge—the State—has behaved towards peasants in order to despoil them of their last guarantee against misery and economic servitude. ”

“ Man did not create society; society is anterior to man.
We also know today—anthropology has clearly demonstrated it—that the starting point of humanity was not the family, but the clan, the tribe. The paternal family such as we have it, or such as is depicted in Hebrew tradition, appeared only very much later. Men lived tens of thousands of years in the stage of clan or tribe, and during that first stage—let us call it primitive or savage tribe, if you will—man already developed a whole series of institutions, habits, and customs, far anterior to the paternal family institutions. ”

“ He thus renounced imposing his judge on the commune, while giving himself importance before other feudal lords. But it was in nowise the rule: hundreds of communes lived without any other sanction than their good pleasure, their ramparts and their lances.
In a hundred years this movement spread, with striking unity, to the whole of Europe,—by imitation, observe well,—including Scotland, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and Russia. ”

“ Well, then, to satisfy all these needs of an emotional and intellectual kind the Kabyles, the Mongols, the Malays do not turn to a government: they have none. Men of customary law and individual initiative, they have not been perverted by the corrupted idea of a government and a church which would be supposed to do everything. They unite directly. They constitute sworn fraternities, political and religious societies, unions of crafts—guilds as they were called in the Middle Ages, sofs as Kabyles call them to-day. ”

“ The towns are besieged, taken by assault, pillaged; their inhabitants are decimated or transported. The State is victorious all along the line. And the consequences are these.
In the fifteenth century, Europe was covered by rich cities, whose artisans, masons, weavers and carvers, produced marvels of art, whose universities laid the foundations of science, whose caravans travelled over continents, and whose vessels ploughed rivers and seas. ”

“ The peasants of a village have a thousand interests in common: interests of economy, neighbourhood and constant intercourse. They are perforce compelled to unite for a thousand divers things. But the State cannot allow them to unite! It gives them school and priest, police and judge; that must suffice them, and should other interests arise, they must apply in the regular way to Church and State. ”

“ At different intervals evolution has been broken in a certain region, to begin again elsewhere. Egypt, Asia, the banks of the Mediterranean, Central Europe have in turn been the scene of historical development. But in every case, the first phase of the evolution has been the primitive tribe, passing on into a village commune, then into that of the free city, and finally dying out when it reached the phase of the State.
In Egypt, civilization began by the primitive tribe. It reached the village community phasis, and later on the period of free cities ”