If you want to know what anarchism really is and why we should care read Kropotkin

[marmar]

from OnTheCommons.org:



Where Is Kropotkin When We Really Need Him?
If you want to know what anarchism really is and why we should care read Kropotkin

By David Morris


On February 8, 1921 twenty thousand people, braving temperatures so low that musical instruments froze, marched in a funeral procession in the town of Dimitrov, a suburb of Moscow. They came to pay their respects to a man, Petr Kropotkin, and his philosophy, anarchism.

Some 90 years later few know of Kropotkin. And the word anarchism has been so stripped of substance that it has come to be equated with chaos and nihilism. This is regrettable, for both the man and the philosophy that he did so much to develop have much to teach us in 2012.

I am astonished Hollywood has yet to discover Kropotkin. For his life is the stuff of great movies. Born to privilege he spent his life fighting poverty and injustice. A lifelong revolutionary, he was also a world-renowned geographer and zoologist. Indeed, the intersection of politics and science characterized much of his life.

His struggles against tyranny resulted in years in Russian and French jails. The first time he was imprisoned in Russia an outcry by many of the world’s best-known scholars led to his release. The second time he engineered a spectacular escape and fled the country. At the end of his life, back in his native Russia, he enthusiastically supported the overthrow of the Tsar but equally strongly condemned Lenin’s increasingly authoritarian and violent methods. ........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://onthecommons.org/where-kropotkin-when-we-really-need-him

[xchrom]

1. Du rec. Nt

[RevStPatrick]

2. Kropotkin's wiki page...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petr_Kropotkin

[joshcryer]

7. Wikiquotes page, almost every one of these is golden:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Peter_Kropotkin

Two of the most perfect lives I have come across in my own experience are the lives of Verlaine and of Prince Kropotkin: both of them men who have passed years in prison: the first, the one Christian poet since Dante; the other, a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which seems coming out of Russia. - Oscar Wilde

[TBF]

3. For a feminist perspective also read Emma Goldman -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Goldman

She was influenced by Kropotkin amongst others.

[qb]

4. Alcoholics Anonymous is an anarchy success story.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/38398959/Benign-Anarchy-Voluntary-association-mutual-aid-and-Alcoholics-Anonymous

excerpt:

Kropotkin's influence is clear from the following quote from Bill W. in 'AA Comes of Age,' pp. 224-225, where he explains the transition from an arrangement in which the co-founders made all of the big decisions, to one in which the AA fellowship as a whole could be responsible for itself:

"... When we first come into A.A. we find here, as we have observed before, a greater personal freedom than any other society knows. We cannot be compelled to do anything. In that sense this society is a benign anarchy. The word 'anarchy' has a bad meaning to most of us, probably because one of its excitable adherents long ago threw bombs around Chicago. But I think that the gentle Russian prince who so strongly advocated the idea felt that if men were granted absolute liberty and were compelled to obey no one in person, they would then voluntarily associate themselves in a common interest. Alcoholics Anonymous is an association of the benign sort the prince envisioned."

[white_wolf]

5. I always thought Proudhorn was the father of Anarchism.

Shows how much I know, I'll have to read some of his works.

[joshcryer]

6. Proudhon just laid the foundation for property and how it alienates...

...and in effect creates a state. If property is theft, therefore, to remove theft, you must remove the state. That's the basic idea.

Kropotkin laid the foundation for anarcho-communism, which Proudhon's mutualism comes short of being. In mutualism, you still have monetarism, under Kropotkin it is non-existant.

No money, not vouchers, not subsidies, no money, period. Full stop. End!

So it's not entirely untrue that Proudhon was the "father" of anarchism (he coined the term, after all).

But Kropotkin is undoubtedly the father of modern anarchism as it is mostly aspired toward by most people.

ie, anarcho-communism.

[LooseWilly]

8. I'm sorry... but Somalia is anarchy, as I define the word. Kropotkin is just a critic of bureaucracy

I read this stuff and I feel like there is a crowd that is praising what amounts, for me, to something akin to a critique of the absurdities of the DMV... and somehow the critic is ensconced as a hero.

At the age of nineteen, when he was an officer of the Cossacks, he went to Transbaikalia where he took a passionate interest in the great reforms undertaken by the government in 1862, and carried out by the Higher Administration of Siberia. As secretary to government committees he was in touch with the best of the civil servants and began to study the various projects of local government administration. But he very soon saw that the reforms proposed by the District Chiefs and protected by the Governors General, were submitted to the orders and influence of the central government. Administrative life revealed to him every day absurdities in system and method. Seeing the impossibility of achieving any kind of reforms, he took part in 1863 in an expedition along the Amur.

During a storm forty barges were sunk with the loss of 2,000 tons of flour. This catastrophe gave him an opportunity of getting to know the bureaucratic system still better. The authorities refused to believe in the disaster, while the civil servants concerned with Siberian affairs in Petrograd revealed a complete ignorance of all that concerned their particular specialty. A high functionary said to him: "But my dear fellow, how would it be possible for 40 barges to be destroyed on the Neva without someone jumping in to save them!" When Kropotkin replied that the Amur is four times as big as the Neva, the astonished functionary asked: " But is it really as big as all that?" - and passed on, annoyed, to talk of some frivolity.

(http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/coldoffthepresses/bernerikropotkin.html)

Now, don't get me wrong... his criticisms of the DMV clerks of his day weren't wrong... and the bits of sanity he saw also weren't wrong.

... The higher administration of Siberia was influenced by excellent intentions, and I can only repeat that, everything considered, it was far better, far more enlightened, and far more interested in the welfare of the people than the administration of any other province in Russia. But it was an administration--a branch of the tree which had its roots at St. Petersburg--and that was enough to paralyze all its excellent intentions, enough to make it interfere with and kill all the beginnings of local life and progress. Whatever was started for the good of the country by local men was looked at with distrust, and was immediately paralyzed by hosts of difficulties which came, not so much from the bad intentions of the administrators, but simply from the fact that these officials belonged to a pyramidal, centralized administration. The very fact of their belonging to a government which radiated from a distant capital caused them to look upon everything from the point of view of functionaries of the government, who think first of all about what their superiors will say, and how this or that will appear in the administrative machinery. The interests of the country are a secondary matter.

Parallel with his knowledge of the inefficiency of the central administration bodies. his observations on the free association of those engaged in common interests which he made throughout his long journeys in Siberia and Manchuria also contributed to the formation of his anarchist personality. He saw clearly the role played by the anonymous masses in great historic events and in the development of civilization. This realization, as we shall see later, influenced the whole of his sociological criticism, and was fundamental to his method of historical research.

(bold added)

Again... I think that his criticisms aren't wrong... but his solutions are, really, no less absurd than the absurdities that he criticizes.

I like absurdity though, hence my avatar.

I also like anarchy.. but not this silly watered down stuff that Kropotkin is arguing for... this de-centralization of power, which would deny those "free associations" which Kropotkin so admired the resources to do anything but sit around tippling whatever locally fermentable stuffs might be available.

Firstly, realistically, there is no way to make those centralized powers stop exerting authority except war. Killing. Anarchy. I therefore, refer anarchists to Somalia. War, killing, anarchy. Vacuum of power.

(The streets of East and West Oakland sometimes feel that way... if you want a little taste, go hang out around there... I can attest from experience that no "agents of the state" (cops) will answer a call for help that doesn't involve a murder— or better yet multiple homicides.)

Secondly, the centralization involved in a government also centralizes control of resources, and allows for the "economies of scale" of national production to be brought to bear.. whether by means of a centralized government economic oversight or simply by means of government regulations of contract law and "de-brigand-izing" of the roadways used by laissez-faire corporations to transport their goodies.

The idea that "de-brigand-izing" and contract-law enforcement will happen without the efforts of a central government... is proven false in— Somalia. (You saw that elegant proof coming, didn't you? )

I'm sorry but... just because you don't like DMV clerks, it doesn't mean that you need to do away with testing drivers before allowing them out on the road. The real problem, undiagnosed by Kropotkin apparently, is "the point of view of functionaries of the government, who think first of all about what their superiors will say, and how this or that will appear in the administrative machinery. The interests of the country are a secondary matter" (the bolded portion).

This isn't a problem of centralized authority. ("The higher administration of Siberia was influenced by excellent intentions&quot This is a problem of empowering the workers... you know, the ones who actually struggle to bring to fruition the lofty "business plans" (or "state plans"?) of the higher-ups in the administration.

When the bureaucracy is no longer structured so that the workers "think first of all about what their superiors will say", then there will no longer be (as many) awful DMV clerks.

Hmm... "empowering the workers" (rather than doing away with the structures in which said workers find employment)... I know I've heard something along those lines before... not Proudhon.... not Kropotkin... not Ron Paul... it was... hmm... Marx?