State socialism has
failed, so has the market. We need to rediscover the anarchist
thinker Peter Kropotkin
Ed Miliband’s
late-night pilgrimage to Russell Brand’s loft apartment, days
before the last election, was seen by supporters as a canny bid for
the youth vote, and by critics as a cringe-worthy attempt to harness
the Shoreditch Messiah’s charisma. Yet neither view captures its
real significance as a sign of the profound weakness of mainstream
social democracy and its desperate efforts to co-opt the energies of
the most dynamic element of today’s left: anarchism. In their
eagerness to ridicule Brand’s “ramblings”, commentators have
ignored his strong identification with the left-anarchist tradition.
For among the works he has recommended to his followers is a
collection of writings by another charismatic figure who sometimes
lived in London, the father of anarchist communism: Prince Peter
Kropotkin.
Comparisons between
Kropotkin and Brand may seem strained. Kropotkin’s background as
the scion of one of the grandest and most ancient Russian
aristocratic families is far removed from Brand’s humbler origins.
Kropotkin was a highly educated polymath, while Brand – though
undeniably intelligent – has played the part of popular entertainer
and motor-mouth wit.
Yet, like Brand, the
exiled Kropotkin became a fashionable figure in London, lauded by the
late-Victorian artistic and intellectual avant garde – from William
Morris to Ford Madox Ford. In a weird prefiguring of the
Miliband-Brand wooing, he even received the first Labour Party leader
Keir Hardie at his Bromley home. And just as satirical comparisons
are made between Brand and the son of God, so Oscar Wilde described
Kropotkin as a “beautiful white Christ”.
It is no surprise that
anarchist sages and prophets should be so fashionable, both then and
now. In Europe before the first world war, those varieties of
socialism that placed their faith in state-led social reform –
social democracy and Marxism-Leninism – had not yet begun to
eclipse their anarchist competitor. But now that era of statist
optimism is over, a left reinvigorated by the current crisis of
globalised capitalism is searching for alternatives more suited to
our individualistic era.
Peter Alexeyevich
Kropotkin, born in 1842, came of age in troubled times. Humiliated by
his defeat in the Crimean war in 1856, Alexander II set out to reform
Russia’s archaic aristocratic order while preserving its
fundamentals, and the Kropotkins were stalwarts of the old system. As
a youth, Kropotkin trained for the army in Russia’s most elite
military academy, and his intellectual distinction even ensured that
he was chosen as a page at the tsar’s court. He soon came to
despise the status-obsessed cruelties of the ancien regime,
identifying not with the nobility but with the peasants who had cared
for him as a child.
This alliance of
sympathy for the poor with commitment to the life of the mind,
especially science, came to define Kropotkin’s career – whether
in the service of the tsarist state, or in pursuit of anarchist
revolution. Posted to Siberia by the military, he sought to improve
the lives of convicts, while also leading pioneering geographical
expeditions. And once in exile from Russia (persecuted for his
revolutionary activity), he devoted himself to reconciling his deep
moral outrage at social inequality with his love of science by
developing a coherent anarchist vision – marking him out from his
less intellectually ambitious anarchist predecessors, Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin.
Kropotkin’s synthesis
can be found in two of the most important – and readable – texts
of anarchism: The Conquest of Bread (1892) and Fields, Factories and
Workshops (1899). Society, he argued, could be run along the lines of
the peasant communities he saw in Siberia, with their
“semi-communistic brotherly organisation”, free of domination by
either the state or the market. And this, he insisted, was not mere
nostalgia or utopianism, for new technology and modern agriculture
would make such decentralised development highly productive. But
Kropotkin was mindful, too, of the needs of the environment, an
awareness born of his geographical and scientific interests, and he
is rightly considered one of the pioneering theorists of Green
politics.
He also rooted his
anarchism in evolutionary science. Mutual Aid (1902) argued that
communities founded on radical equality and participatory democracy
were feasible because human nature was innately collaborative. Unlike
Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer, who argued that all forms
of life were driven by a competitive “struggle for existence”
between organisms, Kropotkin insisted that another type of struggle
was more important – between organisms and the environment. And in
this struggle, “mutual aid” was the most effective means of
survival.
Between the 1880s and
the 1920s, Kropotkin’s communist anarchism competed for influence
with a more statist Marxism, and won many converts among
intellectuals, peasants and working class communities, especially in
southern Europe and the United States (including the “Wobblies” –
the Industrial Workers of the World). In Asia, too, anarchism infused
the thought of the early Chinese Communist Party, and underpinned the
Indian civil disobedience campaigns of Gandhi – though he was
closer to Tolstoy’s more religious anarchism.
But the anarchists’
own struggle would be lost, partly because their commitment to
democratic participation undercut their capacity to sustain stable
mass organisations, and because they were undermined by the violence
espoused by some anarchist groups (against Kropotkin’s advice),
which provoked ruthless state repression. In the end, though, their
fate was sealed by a broader intellectual shift, as the prestige of
states rose in the wake of total war – especially in the 1950s and
60s, when both communist east and capitalist west presented rival
visions of state-led “progressive modernisation”.
But now states have yet
again fallen in popular esteem, damaged by the crisis of Keynesian
and communist economics since the 1970s, and by the rise of “60s”
values, which prize individual self-expression and personal
fulfilment over loyalty to nation states and other centralised
institutions.
This individualism is
particularly strong among the educated and the young, just as it was
among the Bohemians of Victorian England. And it is no surprise that
anarchism should have become important again on the left in recent
years – from the “anti-globalisers” of the late 1990s, to the
2011 Occupy movement. Indeed Occupy’s principal theorist, David Graeber, is a Kropotkin enthusiast.
Anarchism’s
challenges remain much the same as they were in Kropotkin’s day.
How can a group so suspicious of established institutions build an
effective movement for the long term? How can it win over a majority
addicted to endless growth and ever higher living standards? And how
can its ideal social order, founded on local participatory democracy,
control the enormous concentrations of power in states and
international markets?
Yet much has changed to
anarchism’s advantage. A more educated society is becoming ever
less deferential and possibly less materialistic. Meanwhile, the
failures of both state socialism in 1989 and global capitalism in
2008, and their glaring inability to deal with environmental
degradation, demand that we question the way we live as never before.
Kropotkin is no messiah, but his writings force us to imagine a
politics that might just help save the world.
(Source)
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