Peter Kropotkin Translated by George Woodcock, 1992
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WORDS of a REBEL Peter Kropotkin translated by George Woodcock, 1992 Translation of: Paroles d'un revolte, 1885. http://www.ditext.com/kropotkin/rebel/rebel.html 1 Contents Introduction by George Woodcock Introduction to the First French Edition by Elisie Reclus I. The Situation Today II. The Breakdown of the State III. The Inevitability of Revolution IV. The Coming Revolution V. Political Rights VI. To the Young VII. War VIII. Revolutionary Minorities IX. Order X. The Commune XI. The Paris Commune XII. The Agrarian Question XIII. Representative Government XIV. Law and Authority XV. Revolutionary Government XVI. All of Us Socialists! XVII. The Spirit of Revolt XVIII. Theory and Practice XIX. Expropriation Notes 2 Peter Kropotkin, Words of a Rebel , 1885. Introduction by George Woodcock Paroles d'un Revolte was Kropotkin's first book, published in Paris in 1885, and this is its first complete English version. A very different work from the more familiar books of the mature Kropotkin, like Mutual Aid; Fields, Factories and Workshops; and Memoirs of a Revolutionist, it is the product of an anarchist agitator rather than a libertarian savant. And it derives its interest as much from what it reveals about an important transitional phase in the development of anarchist doctrines as it does for what it shows us of Kropotkin himself during a transitional period for him as well, an activist interlude between his escape from Russian prisons and his long refuge in the productive exile of London suburbia. The forcing house of early anarchism was the First International, the International Workingmen's Association that was founded in London in 1864 by a heterogenous group of rebels and reformers, including the mutualist followers of the early anarchist Proudhon, some English trade unionists, a handful of German socialists led by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and a scattering of the neo-Jacobin followers of August Blanqui and the Italian nationalist followers of Giuseppe Mazzini. The designation "anarchist" was not much used by any faction at this period (though Proudhon had proclaimed himself an "anarchist" in 1840) but an essential division existed between those, like Marx and his followers, who wished to proceed by governmental means towards the social revolution (with the State perhaps withering away, as Engels put it -- in the far future), and those, soon to be led by Michael Bakunin, who believed that the State and the revolution were incompatible entities and that the revolution should lead immediately to the libertarian society based on the federation of communes and workers' associations. The Congresses of the International became battlegrounds between the Marxists and the Bakuninists, and very soon the dispute took on national lines, with the revolutionaries of Latin Europe -- Spain and Italy, the Midi of France and the French-speaking parts of Switzerland -- supporting Bakunin, and the northern Europeans in general supporting Marx, with the English trade unionists holding the middle ground. The Marxists gained control of the General Council, but at the Hague Congress in 1872 the Bakuninist influence became so strong that the Marxists moved the headquarters of the General Council to New York, where it quickly languished and died. Meanwhile the Bakuninists gained control of what remained of the International in Europe, and the Jura Federation of Switzerland, where the watchmakers were disciples of Bakunin almost to a man, became its main nerve centre. There, at Sonvillier, antigovernmental groups had held their first gathering in November 1871, even before the breakup of the Hague Congress, and it was at St. Imier that the libertarian section of the International held its first Congress in 1873. Kropotkin had encountered the Bakuninists in the Jura in 1872 on his first trip to western Europe and he had been converted by their dedication as much as by their arguments. When he returned to Switzerland in early 1877 after his escape from Russian prisons, he quickly resumed contact with his comrades in the Jura, only to find that the libertarian International was quickly following its Marxist opposite on the way to extinction. Its last Congress would actually be held at Verviers in Belgium in 1877 and then it would die quietly away. Even in 3 the Jura the spark that "le grand Michel" had implanted flickered out after Bakunin died in 1876. In 1877 the last issue of the Bulletin of the Jura Federation, which had been the semi-official organ of pure anarchism, was published. Kropotkin contributed a few articles to late numbers, and then retreated to Geneva, where anarchist activity was reviving because of the presence of a number of exiles from Russia and refugees from the Paris commune, and here he and the young French doctor Paul Brousse collaborated in editing a small paper, L'Avant Garde, intended mainly for smuggling into southern France. By publishing articles praising terrorist attacks on European rulers, L'Avant Garde offended Switzerland's increasing susceptibility to the pressures from its more powerful neighbours, and it was suppressed in December 1878, Brousse being briefly imprisoned because as editor he assumed responsibility for articles with whose extremity of approach he disagreed. Kropotkin felt that it was urgent to create a journal that would take over the role of L'Avant Garde, but when he sought for collaborators, he found the other leading anarchists then in Geneva, including Reclus and Malatesta, had other things to do. Eventually it was with two Geneva working men that he went to work, Franqois Dumartheray and George Herzig; Kropotkin portrayed them vividly in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist, and it is worth quoting his words, since they convey a great deal about the setting in which the essays contained in Paroles d'un Revolte were written, first of all for publication in the new magazine, Le Revolte, Dumartheray was born in one of the poorest peasant families in Savoy. His schooling had not gone beyond the first rudiments of a primary school. Yet he was one of the most intelligent men I ever met. His appreciations of current events and men were so remarkable for their uncommon good sense that they were often prophetic. He was also one of the finest critics of the current socialist literature, and was never taken in by the mere display of fine words or would-be science. Herzig was a young clerk, born in Geneva; a man of suppressed emotions, shy, who would blush like a girl when he expressed an original thought, and who, after I was arrested, when he became responsible for the continuance of the journal, by sheer force of will learned to write very well... To the judgement of these two friends I could trust implicitly. If Herzig frowned, muttering, 'Yes -- well -- it may go,' I knew that it would not do. And when Dumartheray, who always complained of the bad state of his spectacles when he had to read a not quite legibly written manuscript, and therefore generally read proofs only, interrupted his reading by exclaiming, 'Non, ca ne va pas!' I felt at once that it was not the proper thing and tried to guess what thought or expression provoked his disapproval. I knew there was no use asking him, 'Why will it not do?' He would have answered: 'Ah,that is not my affair; that's yours. It won't do; that is all I can say.' But I felt he was right, and I simply sat down to rewrite the passage, or, taking the composing stick, set up in type a new passage instead. Kropotkin setting up his own words in type was a development that took place after the Quixotic beginnings of Le Revolte. The three editor-publishers started with 15 francs left over from L'Avant Garde and scraped up another 10 francs between them. (The franc was then valued at about 5 to the US dollar.) Yet they decided boldly to print 2,000 copies of the first issue even though no local anarchist paper in the past sold more than 600 copies. They begged another 50 francs and the paper appeared; there were new troubles, for very soon the printer told Kropotkin that he had been informed he would lose his lucrative government 4 printing contracts if he continued to produce La Revolte, and when he visited all the other printing houses in Geneva and in the towns of the Jura, Kropotkin came away every time with the same answer. Dumartheray immediately suggested that they should buy a plant on credit and set up their own printing establishment. In spite of Kropotkin's misgivings they did so, establishing the Imprimerie Jurasienne and very quickly working themselves out of debt. The arrangement could not have been more eccentric, for the compositor in the tiny room where they edited and set up their type, which a printing house ran off clandestinely for them, was a little Russian who worked for 60 francs a month and knew no French, less of a disability than it might appear, for the worst typographical errors occur when a language is known at a functional level and the compositor-typographer inserts a familiar but wrong word or spelling, or substitutes a homonym when in doubt. With vigilant correction, Kropotkin, Dumartheray, Herzig and their White Russian managed well. But Kropotkin himself also learned to compose type and indeed, as Dumartheray remembered, played his full part in producing as well as writing Le Revolte. He never wasted a moment at the printing establishment, either working as compositor or handling a little hand-press for the printing of our small pamphlets. When the forms of the journal had to be carried to the printing house, he was the first to seize the shafts of the cart.