Prince Piotr Alekseïevitch Kropotkin (1842-1921) was a famous geographer and one of the great theorists of anarchism. For some, he also is the founder of anarcho-communism.
Cossacks
From a high aristocracy background, Kropotkin has had an extraordinary and tumultuous life. Aged fifteen, he joins the Russian Imperial army, enters a Cossack regiment in Siberia. He studies mathematics and geography at Saint-Petersburg University, and as early as 1872, he joins the Jura federation of the International Workingmen’s association .
An underground activist, he is put in jail, escapes, and finds refuge in Great Britain, joining other anarchists. He goes back to France, is arrested in Lyons, is put in a French jail for three years, which inspires his comparative essay on prisons: In Russian and French prisons. He is freed in part thanks to Victor Hugo.
Back in England, he writes Mutual aid: a factor of evolution, whose principles, which recommend the disappearance of the State, Government, and the collectivisation of the means of production inspire Nestor Makhno’s anarchist-led insurrection in Ukraine.
Anarcho-communism...
For some, anarcho-communism is anarchism, and for others, such as for Les Éditions de Londres, it is a branch of anarchism whose juxtaposition to communism weighs so much on that branch that it bends, breaks and falls to the ground in a sound of wet green wood. One has to admit that anarcho-communism is a term which does not sound great. Hold on, Les Éditions de Londres have nothing against creative or curious word associations, as long as they carry meaning and disrupt the monotony of accepted sequences of words. Quite the opposite, we encourage that form of creativity. Les Éditions de Londres are genuine fans of Surrealism and Dadaïsm. But anarcho-communism is a bit of a PRI-sounding oxymoron, or RMI, ie concepts where theory reflects such a denial of reality that those concepts seem to make fun of what they aim to represent. If this statement seems undeniable in RMI’s case (the word “insertion” is an insult to the benefit-seeker as he has no hope of “inserting” anywhere except in the dole queue in order to get his tiny cheque), or in PRI’s case (nothing revolutionary, definitely institutional, especially corruption, organised orgies and mandated political murders), this statement has to be softened in anarcho-communism’s case. Kropotkin follows Bakunin’s lead but tries to compensate for the latter’s so-called deficiencies, similarly to many of the orphan anarchists who abound in late Nineteenth century Europe (not so many anarchists in the United States at the same time). Still, there are obvious points of commonality between Kropotkin and Bakunin: love of freedom, importance of revolt, hatred for the centralising State, and disgust at the brutality that power without control always ends up exerting on those who had the foolishness of abandoning absolute power to them.
Kropotkin rebuilds a well-meaning dogmatism, like most socialists, but influenced by his unilateral vision of a human world similar in its structures to the animal world, he forgets the most important, he forgets a fact that is often missed by anarchist critics, a fact that Orwell seems to observe when he describes Barcelona in his first and second trips in 1936: the hard and irreconcilable contradiction between social empathy which binds human beings and the unconditional love for freedom, whose manifestations sometimes contradict the interests of the community at large.
Kropotkinskaïa
One then understands why Kropotkin’s got his tube station. It was the highlight of Les Éditions de Londres’s visit to Moscow. It was a highlight and a question: why, unlike Bakunin, does Kropotkin have his tube station? Kropotkinskaïa is one of the most beautiful stations of the Moscow underground, and the Moscow underground probably is the nicest underground system in the world. In the midst of Stalin’s purges, a station called Dvorets Sovetov was opened in 1935, and then renamed Kropotkinskaïa in 1957. We think that Kropotkin, because of his late life attempt at systemising his anarchist thinking, somehow contradicts some of the principles which constitute the anarchist spirit, and that is not missed by the Soviet Union which sees in anarcho-communism a good opportunity of recuperating some of the leftovers of anarchism.
This is what a tube station tells us…
Kropotkin is a great writer. We have published numerous essays and pamphlets of his. We don’t always agree with his ideas and theories. But the beauty of some of his essays is simply breath-taking. In French or in English, let’s discover them.
© 2013- Les Éditions de Londres