Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

That so small an area of land can produce so much wealth is nothing short of astonishing.

Every farmer is more or less of a gardener, and he gives free scope to his inventive powers for devising some cheap type of greenhouses.

And at the same time we learn that immense quantities of land go every year out of culture, to be transformed into game reserves for rich Englishmen and foreigners.

He can do it; and in so doing he would save an immense quantity of the work which is now given for buying his food abroad, and for paying all the intermediaries who live upon this trade.

For improving our methods of culture to that extent, we surely need not divide the land into one-acre plots, and attempt to grow what we are in need of by everyone’s separate individual exertions, on everyone’s separate plot with no better…

They are entirely in our institutions, in our inheritances and survivals from the past--in the “Ghosts” which oppress us.

Altogether, the worker is much more at the mercy of the dealer or the employer, and the employer is at the mercy of the wholesale dealer.

The figures show, on the contrary, what an immense number of small factories and workshops resist the absorption by the big factories, and how they multiply by the side of the great industry in various branches, especially those of recent…

The small industries are as much a distinctive feature of the British industry as its few immense factories and ironworks.

The small bicycle workshops, with the hundreds of small improvements which they introduced, have been under our very eyes the primary cells out of which the great industry of the motor cars, and later on of the aeroplanes, has grown up.

And wherever the village-community spirit is maintained, the small industries persist, while no effort is spared to bring the small plots under higher culture.

Cottons, plain linen, and machine-made lace are now produced at such a low cost by machinery that hand-weaving evidently becomes an anachronism for the plainest descriptions of such goods.

To every house a garden is attached, and none of the misery of big cities is to be seen.

At Oyonnax, a small town on the Ain, we have a big centre for the fabrication of combs, an industry more than 200 years old, which took a new development since the last war through the invention of celluloid.

Thus, when the rural making of plain chairs became unprofitable, articles of luxury and stylish chairs began to be fabricated in the villages, and similar transformations are found everywhere.

These figures speak for themselves and show what an immense importance the small industry has in France.

As to the large deductions about “concentration” made by certain economists, they are mere hypotheses--useful, of course, for stimulating research, but becoming quite noxious when they are represented as economical laws, when in reality…

It is evident that a number of petty trades are already now doomed to disappear; but there are others, on the contrary, which are endowed with a great vitality, and all chances are in favour of their continuing to exist and to take a…

To keep the peasant at the lowest possible level, by means of taxation, serfdom, and the like, has been, and is still, the policy of most continental States.

Their present successes, on the contrary, are fully accounted for by the network of distributive societies which they have at their command.

But at the same time, handwork very probably will extend its domain in the artistic finishing of many things which are now made entirely in the factory; and it will always remain an important factor in the growth of thousands of young and…

But in both spheres the ideal of the centralisers badly needs revision.

Why should the countless Whitechapel petty trades remain where they are, instead of being spread all over the country?

But that is the capitalist’s view of the matter, not the community’s view.

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.