Was there ever before in history, I ask myself, a youthful band engaging in a fight against so formidable a foe, so deserted by fathers and even by elder brothers, although those young men had merely taken to heart, and had tried to realize in life, the intellectual inheritance of these same fathers and brothers?
Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin: “Was there ever before in history, I ask myself, a youthful band engaging in a fight against so formidable a foe, so…”
Editor's note · Context
Kropotkin reflects on the isolation felt by youth in their revolutionary efforts due to the lack of support from older generations.
Share
More from Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin
I took a lively part in this movement, and with a few English comrades we started, in addition to the three socialist papers already in existence, an anarchist-communist monthly, ‘Freedom,’ which continues to live up to the present day.
None of these are produced in greater quantities than would be required to secure well-being for all; and the over-production, so often spoken of, means nothing but that the masses are too poor to buy even what is now considered as…
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…
Most socialists had hitherto said that in our present civilized societies we actually produce much more than is necessary for guaranteeing full well-being to all.

