He made them realize what could be done immediately, and how easy it was to do it; he induced them to sacrifice whatever of their ideals could not be immediately realized, and to demand only what was practically possible at the time.
He critiques the tendency to sacrifice ideals for immediate practical demands, highlighting a tension in reform movements.
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More from Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin
The amount of interest in socialism and all sorts of schemes of reform and reconstruction of society was very great in all layers of society.
Already during my stay at Clairvaux I saw the necessity of completely revising the formula itself of ‘struggle for existence’ in the animal world, and its applications to human affairs.
It is only the distribution which is defective; and if a social revolution took place, nothing more would be required than for everyone to return to his factory or workshop, Society taking possession for itself of the ‘surplus value’ or…
However, I found that the comprehension of ‘struggle for life’ in the sense of a war-cry of ‘Woe to the weak,’ raised to the height of a commandment of nature revealed by science, was so deeply inrooted in this country that it had become…
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