Chapter 3 of the book is titled “Anarcho-Communism,” so I was expecting to finally get Kropotkin’s great argument for how to establish communes without a state apparatus forming.
What I got was a series of weird historical cherry-picking and declarations pretending to be arguments.
Detailed notes available here.
Kropotkin’s second chapter is a doozy. He makes a variety of really bad extrapolations, a bunch of incredibly ignorant anti-economic points, and then goes on to demand total expropriation of all goods, both capital and consumption, “private” and personal.
He bases this mostly on floppy definitions of “need” and “live,” as well as the usual incorrigible envy that motivates most actual socialists and communists.
Even worse, the next chapter is supposedly his argument for “anarchic” communism, but considering how he simply papered over the confiscation of all goods with some utopian nonsense, I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for a good argument, because it doesn’t look like one is coming.
Full show notes here.
Welcome to the first episode of my examination of Peter Kropotkin’s book “The Conquest of Bread.”
Episode notes can be found here.
This video can be found on Odysee, YouTube, and BitChute.
Kropotkin is a prominent example of the so-called anarchist strain of communists, which believed that social revolution would lead to the abolishment of private property in the means of production, further leading to a stateless method of organization through communes and labor associations.
The preface and first chapter, however, do not begin by explaining how to enforce the abolishment of private property without a coercive state. Kropotkin instead decides to open his book with a combination of bad economics, misread history, blindness to incentives, rhetorical flourish, and misunderstanding stemming from over-aggregation of the capital structure.
It isn’t a good start, but we’ll see where he goes from here!
Cited articles:
Ludwig von Mises, “The Rise of Capitalism”
https://mises.org/mises-daily/rise-capitalism
Lipton Matthews, “The Problem with Guilds: They’re Monopolistic and Wasteful”
https://mises.org/mises-wire/problem-guilds-theyre-monopolistic-and-wasteful
Robert P. Murphy, “Why Austrians Stress Ordinal Utility”
https://mises.org/mises-wire/why-austrians-stress-ordinal-utility
Murray N. Rothbard, “Ten Great Economic Myths”
https://mises.org/mises-wire/ten-great-economic-myths
Ludwig von Mises, “Planned Chaos”
https://mises.org/library/book/planned-chaos
Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”
https://mises.org/mises-daily/use-knowledge-society
Intro music edited from a piece by Paul Yudin, courtesy Unsplash:
https://pixabay.com/users/paulyudin-27739282/