I began to tell the peasant that he must not pay taxes, that the functionaries plunder the people, and I tried to convince him by quotations from the Bible that they must revolt.
Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin: “I began to tell the peasant that he must not pay taxes, that the functionaries plunder the people, and I tried to…”
Editor's note · Context
Kropotkin recounts his conversation with a peasant about tax resistance and revolt.
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We have already, in the facts mentioned in this chapter, an experimental basis for quite a number of means of improving our present methods of culture and of largely increasing the crops.
They are entirely in our institutions, in our inheritances and survivals from the past--in the “Ghosts” which oppress us.
As to the honest longing for more technical education--surely let us all have as much of it as possible: it will be a boon for humanity; for humanity, of course--not for a single nation, because knowledge cannot be cultivated for home use…
But force is reciprocal; and if the god of war always sides with the strongest battalions, those battalions are strongest which fight for new rights against outgrown privileges.

