Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

And Reybaud remarked that the horrible dwellings in town, and the general condition of the factory hands, stood in a wonderful contrast with the relative welfare of the rural weavers.

But, as is seen already from the preceding, new small industries have grown up instead, and this is also the case in many other parts of France.

On the contrary, in an industry which supplies the home market--namely, in the fabrication of linen handkerchiefs, which itself is of a quite recent growth--we see that cottage-weaving is, even now, in full prosperity.

Thousands of women are employed now in their houses in sewing the “uppers” and in embroidering fancy shoes.

In Brittany, in the neighbourhood of Quimperlé, a great number of small workshops for the fabrication of the felt hats which are worn by the peasants is scattered in the villages; and rapidly improving agriculture goes hand in hand with…

But the factory has created “quite a world of tiny workshops” in this purely agricultural region: small tin-ware workshops, tanneries, potteries, and so on, while the slags are transformed in small factories into manure.

Agriculture and industry are thus going here hand in hand, the importance of not severing the union being perhaps best seen at Loudéac, a small town in the midst of Brittany (department of Côtes-du-Nord).

All sorts of hardware and locks are fabricated by the peasants during the time they can spare from agriculture, and real works of art, some of which were much admired at the exhibition of 1889, are produced by these humble peasant…

In the woody regions of the Perche and the Maine we find all sorts of wooden industries which evidently could only be maintained owing to the communal possession of the woods.

When I visited these villages between the Swiss frontier and Besançon in the year 1878, I was struck by the high degree of relative well-being which I could observe, even though I was perfectly well acquainted with the Swiss villages in…

In the neighbourhoods of Nantua and Cluses silks are woven in nearly all villages, the peasants giving to weaving their spare time from agriculture, while quite a number of small workshops (mostly less than twenty looms, one of 100 looms)…

And it is remarkable to notice that as soon as electricity gave the possibility to return to domestic work, 300 workers left at once the small workshops and took to work in their houses.

In short, we have here quite a world of industries of modern origin, and with them of inventions made to simplify the work of the hand.

Woe to Europe, if on the day that the steam engine invades China she is still relying on foreign customers!

The true consumers of the produce of our factories must be our own populations.

And they can be that, once we organise our economical life so that they might issue from their present destitution.

No use to send floating shops to New Guinea with British or German millinery, when there are plenty of would-be customers for British millinery in these very islands, and for German goods in Germany.

Under the present conditions of division into capitalists and labourers, into property-holders and masses living on uncertain wages, the spreading of industries over new fields is accompanied by the very same horrible facts of pitiless…

To return to a state of affairs where corn is grown, and manufactured goods are fabricated, for the use of those very people who grow and produce them--such will be, no doubt, the problem to be solved during the next coming years of…

Each region will become its own producer and its own consumer of manufactured goods.

The industrial and commercial history of the world during the last fifty years has been a history of decentralisation of industry.

It was not a mere shifting of the centre of gravity of commerce, such as Europe witnessed in the past, when the commercial hegemony migrated from Italy to Spain, to Holland, and finally to Britain: it had a much deeper meaning, as it…

It has shown the growth of quite new conditions, and new conditions require new adaptations.

To endeavour to revive the past would be useless: a new departure must be taken by civilised nations.

And the division and subdivision--the permanent subdivision--of functions has been pushed so far as to divide humanity into castes which are almost as firmly established as those of old India.