Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

But we also knew that in preaching change in both these directions we should be working with the tide of human progress.

None of us minimized the importance and depth of the change which we looked for.

There will be full freedom for the development of new forms of production, invention, and organization; individual initiative will be encouraged, and the tendency toward uniformity and centralization will be discouraged.

Our main activity, however, was in working out the practical and theoretical aspects of anarchist socialism, and in this direction the federation has undoubtedly accomplished something that will last.

A great deal of sympathy was won to the cause during the trial; it was understood that all liberties have to be defended jealously, in order not to be lost.

We all went to Bern on the anniversary of the Paris Commune, to carry the red flag in the streets, notwithstanding the prohibition.

It was necessary, therefore, to show that at least here and there the workers would not have their rights trampled underfoot, and would offer resistance.

And when we meet him again, released from a prison or escaped from an island, we find him just as we saw him last; always renewing the struggle, with the same love of men, the same absence of hatred toward his adversaries and jailers, the…

Without even so much as a room that he could call his own, he would sell sherbet in the streets of London to get his living, and in the evening write brilliant articles for the Italian papers.

His gift of taking a difficult economic or political question, and, after much thought about it, considering it from the working-man’s point of view, without divesting it of its deepest meaning, was wonderful.

Consequently, the Jura Federation, with its papers printed in French, became the centre for the maintenance and expression in the Latin countries of the spirit which--I repeat it--saved Europe from a very dark period of reaction.

The Spanish papers were very well edited, and some of the manifestoes of their congresses were admirable expositions of anarchist socialism; but who knows anything of Spanish ideas outside of Spain?

The monarchy was kept under continual menace of being upset should the middle-class republicans appeal to the revolutionary elements among the workers.

It was this permanent menace which prevented the Spanish monarchy from suppressing all the workers’ and peasants’ organizations, and from inaugurating a frank clerical reaction.

I can speak of these organizations from personal knowledge, gained on the spot, and I know that they were ready to proclaim the United States of Spain, abandon ruling the colonies, and in some of the most advanced regions make serious…

In Catalonia alone there were over one hundred thousand men in strongly organized trade unions, and more than eighty thousand Spaniards belonged to the International, regularly holding congresses, and punctually paying their contributions…

As soon as the clerical and aristocratic surroundings of the king drove him to turn the screws of reaction, the republicans menaced him with a movement in which, they knew, the real fighting element would be the workers.

Speaking from personal knowledge, I may venture to say that the radical middle-class leaders would have hesitated in case of an emergency, while the workers would have seized the first opportunity for an uprising which, beginning with the…

But the real strength of those committees was in the workers, many of whom had formerly belonged to the International and had retained the old spirit.

The Jura Federation, at the time when I came to Switzerland, was the centre and the leading voice of the international federations.

Federalist by their history, hostile to the idea of a centralized state, and possessed of revolutionary traditions, the Latin workers could not follow the evolution of the Germans.

Every popular outbreak, every revolutionary agitation in any country of Europe, was received by the social democratic leaders with even more animosity than by the capitalist press.

Trade unions were treated with contempt and strikes were met with disapproval, because both diverted the attention of the workers from electoral struggles.

Gradually, all the life and activity of the German social democratic party was subordinated to electoral considerations.

The state management of the land and of the leading industries, and even of the consumption of riches, would be the next step in a more or less distant future.