Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

As to the cheapness of the produce manufactured in the villages, which is really astonishing, it cannot be explained in full by the exceedingly long hours of labour and the starvation earnings, because overwork and very low wages are…

Another most suggestive feature is the following: although the unfertile provinces of Central Russia have been from time immemorial the seat of all kinds of petty trades, several domestic industries of modern origin are developing in those…

On the contrary, it gave a new impulse to their extension; they grew and developed precisely in those regions where the factories were growing up fastest.

The most striking feature of the Russian domestic trades is that the sudden start which was made by the factories in Russia did not prejudice the domestic industries.

A highly concentrated industry, and a high productivity, as well as a considerable export trade, which all testify to a high industrial development of the country, thus go hand in hand with a high development of the domestic trades and…

Belgium is certainly a country of centralised industry, and a country in which the productivity of the worker stands at a high level, the average annual productivity of each industrial workman--men, women, and children--attaining now the…

Such a book would also offer a great interest in that it would show to what an extent that mingling together of agriculture with industry, which I described in the first edition of this book as “the factory amidst the fields,” has…

A separate book of the greatest interest and value could be written on this subject, especially on the impulse given to a number of petty trades, old and new, by means of a cheap supply of motive power.

Every step that may be taken, either for awakening intellectual life in the villages, or for assuring the peasants’ or the country’s rights upon the land, will necessarily further the growth of industries in the villages.

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

When the markets for such commodities came to be Asia on the one side, and the New World on the other side, such was fatally the case; since commerce had ceased to be communal, and had become individual, the cities became a prey for the…

Altogether, it may be taken as one of the fundamental facts of the economical life of Europe that the defeat of a number of small trades, artisan work and domestic industries, came through their being incapable of organising the sale of…

The great concern would thus find its advantages not in such factors as are imposed by the technical necessities of the trade at the time being, but in such factors as could be eliminated by co-operative organisation.

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.

As to combinations in the villages, co-operation and the like, one must never forget how jealously the German, the French, the Russian and the Austrian Governments have hitherto prevented the workers, and especially the village workers…

Knowing that in most cases the advent of the factory would mean no work at all for most men, and the taking of the children and girls to the factory, they do the utmost to prevent it from appearing at all in the village.

To idealise the modern factory, in order to depreciate the so-called “mediæval” forms of the small industries, is consequently--to say the least--as unreasonable as to idealise the latter and try to bring mankind back to isolated…

Moreover, everyone knows to what extent the labour of children and girls is resorted to, even in the most prosperous factories--even in this country which stands foremost in industrial development.

To welcome all these sufferings, seeing in them the action of a “natural law” and a necessary step towards the necessary concentration of industry, would be simply absurd.

It is only after they have undergone all sorts of sufferings in their struggles against their employers that some factory workers succeed, more or less, here and there, to wrest from their employers a “living wage”--and this again only in…

They work eleven hours a day, and they also are subject to the extra misery thrown upon them during the frequently recurring crises.

They live upon wages of from nine to eleven shillings a week, in town slums instead of the country.

The reality is, however, that when we compare the miserable conditions of the workers in the petty trades with the conditions of the wage workers in the factories, in the same regions and in the same trades, we see that the very same…

But where the spirit of initiative has been awakened in one way or another, we see the petty industries taking a new development in Germany, as we have just seen that being done in France.

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…