Well-being for all is not a dream. It is possible, realizable, owing to all that our ancestors have done to increase our powers of production.

We know, indeed, that the producers, although they constitute hardly one-third of the inhabitants of civilized countries, even now produce such quantities of goods that a certain degree of comfort could be brought to every hearth. We know further that if all those who squander today the fruits of others' toil were forced to employ their leisure in useful work, our wealth would increase in proportion to the number of producers, and more. Finally, we know that contrary to the theory enunciated by Malthus – that oracle of middle-class economics – the productive powers of the human race increase at a much more rapid ratio than its powers of reproduction. The more thickly men are crowded on the soil, the more rapid is the growth of their wealth-creating power.

Thus, although the population of England has only increased from 1844 to 1890 by 62 per cent, its production has grown, even at the lowest estimate, at double that rate – to wit, by 130 per cent. In France, where the population has grown more slowly, the increase in production is nevertheless very rapid. Notwithstanding the crises through which agriculture is frequently passing, notwithstanding state interference, the blood-tax (conscription), and speculative commerce and finance, the production of wheat in France has increased fourfold, and industrial production more than tenfold, in the course of the last eighty years.

After the Napoleonic wars Britain had nearly succeeded in ruining the main industries which had sprung up in France at the end of the preceding century. She also became mistress of the seas and had no rivals of importance. She took in the situation, and knew how to turn its privileges and advantages to account. She established an industrial monopoly, and, imposing upon her neighbours her prices for the goods she alone could manufacture, accumulated riches upon riches.

But as the middle-class Revolution of the eighteenth century had abolished serfdom and created a proletariat in France, French industry, hampered for a time in its flight, soared again, and from the second half of the nineteenth century France ceased to be a tributary of England for manufactured goods. Today she too has grown into a nation with an export trade. She sells far more than 60 million pounds' worth of manufactured goods, and two-thirds of these goods are fabrics. The number of Frenchmen working for export or living by their foreign trade, is estimated at 3 million.

France is therefore no longer England's tributary. In her turn she has striven to monopolize certain branches of foreign industry, such as silks and ready-made clothes, and has reaped immense profits therefrom; but she is on the point of losing this monopoly for ever, just as England is on the point of losing the monopoly of cotton goods.

In their plans for the reconstruction of society the collectivists commit, in our opinion, a twofold error. While speaking of abolishing capitalist rule, they intend nevertheless to retain two institutions which are the very basis of this rule – representative government and the wages' system.

As regards so-called representative government, we have often spoken about it. It is absolutely incomprehensible to us that intelligent men – and such are not wanting in the collectivist party – can remain partisans of national or municipal parliaments after all the lessons history has given them – in France, in England, in Germany or in the United States.

While we see parliamentary rule breaking up, and from all sides criticism of this rule growing louder – not only of its results, but also of its principles – how is it that the revolutionary socialists defend a system already condemned to die?

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. The most intelligent among them know that this is impossible. The middle classes have simply used the parliamentary system to raise a protecting barrier against the pretensions of royalty, without giving the people liberty.

If a society, a city, or a territory, were to guarantee the necessaries of life to its inhabitants (and we shall see how the conception of the necessaries of life can be so extended as to include luxuries), it would be compelled to take possession of what is absolutely needed for production; that is to say – land, machinery, factories, means of transport, etc. Capital in the hands of private owners would be expropriated, to be returned to the community.

The great harm done by bourgeois society, as we have already mentioned, is not only that capitalists seize a large share of the profits of each industrial and commercial enterprise, thus enabling themselves to live without working, but that all production has taken a wrong direction, as it is not carried on with a view to securing well-being to all. There is the reason why it must be condemned.

It is absolutely impossible that mercantile production should be carried on in the interest of all. To desire it would be to expect the capitalist to go beyond his province and to fulfil duties that he cannot fulfil without ceasing to be what he is – a private manufacturer seeking his own enrichment. Capitalist organization, based on the personal interest of each individual employer of labour, has given to society all that could be expected of it: it has increased the productive force of labour.

It is told of Rothschild that, seeing his fortune threatened by the revolution of 1848, he hit upon the following stratagem: ‘I am quite willing to admit’, said he, ‘that my fortune has been accumulated at the expense of others; but if it were divided tomorrow among the millions of Europe, the share of each would only amount to four shillings. Very well, then, I undertake to render to each his four shillings if he asks me for it.’

Having given due publicity to his promise, our millionaire proceeded as usual to stroll quietly through the streets of Frankfort. Three or four passers-by asked for their four shillings, which he disbursed with a sardonic smile. His stratagem succeeded, and the family of the millionaire is still in possession of its wealth.

It is in much the same fashion that the shrewd heads among the middle classes reason when they say, ‘Ah, expropriation! I know what that means. You take all the overcoats and lay them in a heap, and everyone is free to help himself and fight for the best.’

But such jests are irrelevant as well as flippant. What we want is not a redistribution of overcoats, although it must be said that even in such a case, the shivering folk would see advantage in it. Nor do we want to divide up the wealth of the Rothschilds.

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.

Look at the village smith, said Adam Smith, the father of modern political economy. If he has never been accustomed to making nails he will only succeed by hard toil in forging two or three hundred a day, and even then they will be bad. But if this same smith has never made anything but nails, he will easily supply as many as two thousand three hundred in the course of a day. And Smith hastened to the conclusion – ‘Divide labour, specialize, go on specializing; let us have smiths who only know how to make heads or points of nails, and by this means we shall produce more. We shall grow rich.’

Political economy has often been reproached with drawing all its deductions from the decidedly false principle, that the only incentive capable of forcing a man to augment his power of production is personal interest in its narrowest sense.

The reproach is perfectly true; so true that epochs of great industrial discoveries and true progress in industry are precisely those in which the happiness of all was inspiring men, and in which personal enrichment was least thought of. The great investigators in science and the great inventors aimed, above all, at giving greater freedom of mankind. And if Watt, Stephenson, Jacquard, etc., could have only foreseen what a state of misery their sleepless nights would bring to the workers, they certainly would have burned their designs and broken their models.

Another principle that pervades political economy is just as false. It is the tacit admission, common to all economists, that if there is often overproduction in certain branches, a society will nevertheless never have sufficient products to satisfy the wants of all, and that consequently the day will never come when nobody will be forced to sell his labour in exchange for wages. This tacit admission is found at the basis of all theories and all the so-called ‘laws’ taught by economists.

One of the current objections to communism, and socialism altogether, is that the idea is so old, and yet it has never been realized. Schemes of ideal states haunted the thinkers of ancient Greece; later on, the early Christians joined in communist groups; centuries later, large communist brotherhoods came into existence during the reform movement. Then, the same ideals were revived during the great English and French Revolutions; and finally, quite lately, in 1848, a revolution, inspired to a great extent with socialist ideals, took place in France. ‘And yet, you see’ we are told, ‘how far away is still the realization of your schemes. Don't you think that there is some fundamental error in your understanding of human nature and its needs?’

At first sight this objection seems very serious. However, the moment we consider human history more attentively, it loses its strength. We see, first, that hundreds of millions of men have succeeded in maintaining amongst themselves, in their village communities, for many hundreds of years, one of the main elements of socialism – the common ownership of the chief instrument of production, the land, and the apportionment of the same according to the labour capacities of the different families; and we learn that if the communal possession of the land has been destroyed in Western Europe, it was not from within, but from without, by the governments which created a land monopoly in favour of the nobility and the middle classes.

The intellectual commerce between Russia and the West in the nineteenth century for the most part flowed in an easterly direction. Russian Marxism, for example, was only one of a long series of political, social and philosophical systems imported from Western Europe and adapted to Russian circumstances, often undergoing considerable alteration in the process. One notable exception, which helped to redress Russia's intellectual balance of trade, so to speak, was anarchism. Anarchism had Western roots, to be sure, specifically in the thought of William Godwin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, but for over half a century it derived much of its vitality, both as a social theory and as a revolutionary movement, from the efforts of two Russians, Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. (Meanwhile, yet another Russian, Leo Tolstoy, would create a distinctive variety of religious anarchism.)

Both Bakunin and Kropotkin, however, spent long years as émigrés in the West, and it was in Western Europe that they formulated their anarchist ideology. The interaction of Russian and Western elements was particularly complex in the case of Kropotkin, for unlike Bakunin he actively participated in the Russian revolutionary movement before he emigrated, spent even longer in the West, and then returned to Russia in his final years. Kropotkin's anarchism therefore was the product of a lifetime of interplay between his Russian and Western experiences.

Kropotkin's autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, was first serialized in the American magazine Atlantic Monthly in 1898–9 and appeared in book form in 1899. Kropotkin composed both Russian and English versions of the memoirs, which differed somewhat from each other, and never completed the Russian text. Some passages contained in the Russian version, however, were omitted from the 1899 publication, including an entire chapter entitled ‘Western Europe’. This chapter, which Kropotkin left unfinished, recounts his activities in the Jura Federation in Switzerland in the late 1870s. (The book as published treats the subject briefly and in different form in Part Six, also entitled ‘Western Europe’.) It is illuminating in regard both to his anarchism and to his personality. On the one hand, it details his strong objections to Marxism and Social Democracy, and on the other it paints a series of characteristically warm-hearted portraits of his fellow anarchists.

The Russian text, first published in 1924, is from the seventh Russian edition of Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Zapiski revoliutsionera), edited by N. K. Lebedev (Moscow: Politkatorzhan, 1929), 11, 235–66. It has been translated and annotated for this volume by Marshall Shatz.

In 1876, it must have been in November, I made it to Switzerland, to the Jura, and renewed my acquaintance with Guillaume, Schwitzguebel, and the other Jurassians.

I had written to James Guillaume as soon as I landed in England in the summer of 1876, and since then we had corresponded frequently.

Every society, on abolishing private property will be forced, we maintain, to organize itself on the lines of communistic anarchy. Anarchy leads to communism, and communism to anarchy, both alike being expressions of the predominant tendency in modern societies, the pursuit of equality.

Time was when a peasant family could consider the corn it sowed and reaped, or the woollen garments woven in the cottage, as the products of its own soil. But even then this way of looking at things was not quite correct. There were the roads and the bridges made in common, the swamps drained by common toil, the communal pastures enclosed by hedges which were kept in repair by each and all. If the looms for weaving or the dyes for colouring fabrics were improved by somebody, all profited; and even in those days a peasant family could not live alone, but was dependent in a thousand ways on the village or the commune.

But nowadays, in the present state of industry, when everything is interdependent, when each branch of production is knit up with all the rest, the attempt to claim an individualist origin for the products of industry is absolutely untenable. The astonishing perfection attained by the textile or mining industries in civilized countries is due to the simultaneous development of a thousand other industries, great and small, to the extension of the railroad system, to inter-oceanic navigation, to the manual skill of thousands of workers, to a certain standard of culture reached by the working classes as a whole – to the labours, in short, of men in every corner of the globe.

Looking at society and its political organization from a different standpoint than that of all the authoritarian schools – for we start from a free individual to reach a free society, instead of beginning by the state to come down to the individual – we follow the same method in economic questions. We study the needs of the individuals, and the means by which they satisfy them, before discussing production, exchange, taxation, government, and so on.

At first sight the difference may appear trifling, but in reality it upsets all the canons of official political economy.

If you open the works of any economist you will find that he begins with production, i.e., by the analysis of the means employed nowadays for the creation of wealth: division of labour, the factory, its machinery, the accumulation of capital. From Adam Smith to Marx, all have proceeded along these lines. Only in the latter parts of their books do they treat of consumption, that is to say, of the means resorted to in our present society to satisfy the needs of the individuals; and even there they confine themselves to explaining how riches are divided among those who vie with one another for their possession.

Perhaps you will say this is logical. Before satisfying needs you must create the wherewithal to satisfy them. But, before producing anything, must you not feel the need of it?

Those who have closely watched the growth of socialist ideas among the workers must have noticed that on one momentous question – the housing of the people – a definite conclusion is being imperceptibly arrived at. It is a fact that in the large towns of France, and in many of the smaller ones, the workers are coming gradually to the conclusion that dwelling-houses are in no sense the property of those whom the state recognizes as their owners.

This idea has evolved naturally in the minds of the people, and nothing will ever convince them again that the ‘rights of property’ ought to extend to houses.

The house was not built by its owner. It was erected, decorated and furnished by innumerable workers – in the timber yard, the brickfield and the workshop, toiling for dear life at a minimum wage.

The money spent by the owner was not the product of his own toil. It was amassed, like all other riches, by paying the workers two-thirds or only a half of what was their due.