I spent weeks under arrest for that frankness, and perhaps should have been excluded from the school, were it not that the inspector of the classes, his assistant, and even our old director, judged that after all I had only expressed aloud what they all used to say to themselves.
He recounts the consequences he faced for speaking out against authority, illustrating the tension between honesty and institutional power.
Share
More from Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin
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…
But in all civilized countries the production, both agricultural and industrial, ought to and easily might be immensely increased so as to secure a reign of plenty for all.
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.
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.
Other voices in this conversation
