The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings Quotes

“Man is not a being whose exclusive purpose in life is eating, drinking, and providing a shelter for himself. As soon as his material wants are satisfied, other needs, which, generally speaking may be described as of an artistic character, will thrust themselves forward. These needs are of the greatest variety; they vary with each and every individual; and the more society is civilized, the more will individuality be developed, and the more will desires be varied.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“Servant or wife, man always reckons on woman to do the housework.

But woman, too, at least claims her share in the emancipation of humanity. She no longer wants to be the beast of burden of the house. She considers it sufficient work to give many years of her life to the rearing of her children. She no longer wants to be the cook, the mender, the sweeper of the house! And, owing to American women taking the lead in obtaining their claims, there is a general complaint of the dearth of women who will condescend to domestic work in the United States. My lady prefers art, politics, literature, or the gaming tables; as to the work-girls, they are few, those who consent to submit to apron-slavery, and servants are only found with difficulty in the States. Consequently, the solution, a very simple one, is pointed out by life itself. Machinery undertakes three-quarters of the household cares.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“Political economy has always confined itself to stating facts occurring in society, and justifying them in the interest of the dominant class. Therefore, it pronounces itself in favour of the division of labour in industry. Having found it profitable to capitalists, it has set it up as a principle.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“We know the consequences of the division of labour full well. It is evident that, first of all, we are divided into two classes: on the one hand, producers, who consume very little and are exempt from thinking because they only do physical work, and who work badly because their brains remain inactive; and on the other hand, the consumers, who, producing little or hardly anything, have the privilege of thinking for the others, and who think badly because the whole world of those who toil with their hands is unknown to them.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“The collectivists say, 'To each according to his deeds'; or, in other terms, according to his share of services rendered to society. They think it expedient to put this principle into practice, as soon as the social revolution will have made all instruments of production common property. But we think that if the social revolution had the misfortune of proclaiming such a principle, it would mean its necessary failure; it would mean leaving the social problem, which past centuries have burdened us with, unsolved.

Of course, in a society like ours, in which the more a man works the less he is remunerated, this principle, at first sight, may appear to be a yearning for justice. But in reality it is only the perpetuation of injustice. It was by proclaiming this principle that wagedom began, to end in the glaring inequalities and all the abominations of present society; because, from the moment work done began to be appraised in currency, or in any other form of wage, the day it was agreed upon that man would only receive the wage he should be able to secure to himself, the whole history of a state-aided capitalist society was as good as written; it was contained in germ in this principle.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, 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.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“Let them, therefore, not talk to us of 'the cost of production' which raises the cost of skilled labour, and tell us that a student who has gaily spent his youth in a university has a right to a wage ten times greater than the son of a miner who has grown pale in a mine since the age of 11; or that a weaver has a right to a wage three or four times greater than that of an agricultural labourer. The cost of teaching a weaver his work is not four times greater than the cost of teaching a peasant his.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“We know that if engineers, scientists or doctors are paid ten or a hundred times more than a labourer, and if a weaver earns three times more than an agricultural labourer, and ten times more than a girl in a match factory, it is not by reason of their 'cost of production', but by reason of a monopoly of education, or a monopoly of industry. Engineers, scientists and doctors merely exploit their capital - their diplomas - as middle-class employers exploit a factory, or as nobles used to exploit their titles of nobility.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“They say, 'No private property', and immediately after strive to maintain private property in its daily manifestations. 'You shall be a commune as far as regards production: fields, tools, machinery, all that has been invented up till now - factories, railways, harbours, mines, etc., all are yours. Not the slightest distinction will be made concerning the share of each in this collective property.

'But from tomorrow you will minutely debate the share you are going to take in the creation of new machinery, in the digging of new mines. You will carefully weigh what part of the new produce belongs to you. You will count your minutes of work, and you will take care that a minute of your neighbours should not buy more than yours.

'And as an hour measures nothing, as in some factories a worker can see to six power-looms at a time, while in another he only tends two, you will weigh the muscular force, the brain energy, and the nervous energy you have expended. You will accurately calculate the years of apprenticeship in order to appraise the amount each will contribute to future production. And this - after having declared that you do not take into account his share in past production.'

Well, for us it is evident that a society cannot be based on two absolutely opposed principles, two principles that contradict one another continually. And a nation or a commune which would have such an organization would be compelled to revert to private property in the instruments of production, or to transform itself into a communist society.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“Collectivists begin by proclaiming a revolutionary principle - the abolition of private property - and then they deny it, no sooner than proclaimed, by upholding an organization of production and consumption which originated in private property.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“Built up by the middle classes to hold their own against royalty, sanctioning, and, at the same time strengthening, their sway over the workers, parliamentary rule is pre-eminently a middle-class rule. The upholders of this system have never seriously maintained that a parliament or a municipal council represent a nation or a city.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“Do you not see that by your methods of teaching, framed by a ministry for 8 million scholars, who represent 8 million different capacities, you only impose a system good for mediocrities, conceived by an average of mediocrities? Your school becomes a university of laziness, as your prison is a university of crime.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“People speak of laziness or crime, without giving themselves the trouble to analyse the cause. They are in a hurry to punish these faults without inquiring if the punishment itself does not contain a premium on ‘laziness’ or ‘crime’.

This is why a free society, if it saw the number of idlers increasing in its midst, would no doubt think of looking first for thecauseof laziness, in order to suppress it, before having recourse to punishment.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“Somebody has said that dust is matter in the wrong place. The same definition applies to nine-tenths of those called lazy. They are people gone astray in a direction that does not answer to their temperament nor to their capacities.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“Wage-work is serf-work; it cannot, it must not, produce all that it could produce. And it is high time to disbelieve the legend which represents wagedom as the best incentive to productive work. If industry nowadays brings in a hundred times more than it did in the days of our grandfathers, it is due to the sudden awakening of physical and chemical sciences towards the end of the last century; not to the capitalist organization of wagedom, butin spite ofthat organization.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, 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.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, 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.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, 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.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“And we say, ‘Down with the privileges of education, as well as those of birth!’ We are anarchists precisely because these privileges revolt us. They revolt us already in this authoritarian society. Could we endure them in a society that began by proclaiming equality?”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, 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.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“It is not for us to answer the objections raised by authoritarian communism - we ourselves hold them. Civilized nations have suffered too much in the long, hard struggle for the emancipation of the individual, to disown their past work and to tolerate a government that would make itself felt in the smallest details of a citizen’s life, even if that government had no other aim than the good of the community. Should an authoritarian socialist society ever succeed in establishing itself, it could not last; general discontent would soon force it to break up, or to reorganize itself on principles of liberty.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“To emancipate woman is not only to open the gates of the university, the law courts or the parliaments to her, for the ‘emancipated’ woman will always throw domestic toil on to another woman. To emancipate woman is to free her from the brutalizing toil of the kitchen and wash-house; it is to organize your household in such a way as to enable her to rear her children, if she be so minded, while retaining sufficient leisure to take her share of social life.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“The most important economy, the only reasonable one, is to make life pleasant for all, because the man who is satisfied with his life produces infinitely more than the man who curses his surroundings.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“Factory, forge and mine can be as healthy and magnificent as the finest laboratories in modern universities, and the better the organization the more will man’s labour produce.

If it can be so, can we doubt that work will become a pleasure and a relaxation in a society of equals, in which ‘hands’ will not be compelled to sell themselves to toil, and to accept work under any conditions? Repugnant tasks will disappear, because it is evident that these unhealthy conditions are harmful to society as a whole. Slaves can submit to them, but free men will create new conditions, and their work will be pleasant and infinitely more productive. The exceptions of today will be the rule of tomorrow.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“It is evident that a factory could be made as healthy and pleasant as a scientific laboratory. And it is no less evident that it would be advantageous to make it so. In a spacious and well-ventilated factory the work is better; it is easy to introduce many small ameliorations, of which each represents an economy of time or of manual labour. And if most of the workshops we know are foul and unhealthy, it is because the workers are of no account in the organization of factories, and because the most absurd waste of human energy is a distinctive feature of the present industrial organization.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“What fatherland can the international banker and rag-picker have in common?”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“the strength of anarchy lies precisely in that it understandsallhuman faculties andall passions,and ignores none”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“It is in order to obtain for all of us joys that are now reserved to a few; in order to give leisure and the possibility of developing everyone’s intellectual capacities, that the social revolution must guarantee daily bread to all. After bread has been secured, leisure is the supreme aim.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“In taking 'anarchy' for our ideal of political organization we are only giving expression to another marked tendency of human progress. Whenever European societies have developed up to a certain point, they have shaken off the yoke of authority and substituted a system founded more or less on the principles of individual liberty. And history shows us that these periods of partial or general revolution, when the old governments were overthrown, were also periods of sudden progress in both the economic and the intellectual field. So it was after the enfranchisement of the communes, whose monuments, produced by the free labour of the guilds, have never been surpassed; so it was after the great peasant uprising which brought about the Reformation and imperilled the papacy; and so it was again with the society, free for a brief space, which was created on the other side of the Atlantic by the malcontents from the Old World.

And, if we observe the present development of civilized nations, we see, most unmistakably, a movement ever more and more marked tending to limit the sphere of action of the government, and to allow more and more liberty to the individual. This evolution is going on before our eyes, though cumbered by the ruins and rubbish of old institutions and old superstitions. Like all evolutions, it only awaits a revolution to overthrow the old obstacles which block the way, that it may find free scope in a regenerated society.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.

By what right then can anyone whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say - This is mine, not yours?”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings