Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

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…

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…

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.

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.

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…

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…

Therefore, all manufactured goods used by the Russian peasantry, save the printed cottons, are the production of the rural manufacturers.

But many articles of luxury, too, are made in the villages, especially around Moscow, by peasants who continue to cultivate their allotments.

The silk hats which are sold in the best Moscow shops, and bear the stamp of Nouveautés Parisiennes, are made by the Moscow peasants; so also the “Vienna” furniture of the best “Vienna” shops, even if it goes to supply the palaces.

Much more ought to be said with regard to the rural industries of Russia, especially to show how easily the peasants associate for buying new machinery, or for avoiding the middleman in their purchases of raw produce--as soon as misery is…

In fact, the most prominent feature of the petty trades is that a relative well-being is found only where they are combined with agriculture: where the workers have remained in possession of the soil and continue to cultivate it.

Even amidst the weavers of France or Moscow, who have to reckon with the competition of the factory, relative well-being prevails so long as they are not compelled to part with the soil.

On the contrary, as soon as high taxation or the impoverishment during a crisis has compelled the domestic worker to abandon his last plot of land to the usurer, misery creeps into his house.

Whenever a saving of human labour can be obtained by means of a machine, the machine is welcome and will be resorted to; and there is hardly one single branch of industry into which machinery work could not be introduced with great…

But the question arises, Why should not the cottons, the woollen cloth, and the silks, now woven by hand in the villages, be woven by machinery in the same villages, without ceasing to remain connected with work in the fields?

Why should not hundreds of domestic industries, now carried on entirely by hand, resort to labour-saving machines, as they already do in the knitting trade and many others?

There is no reason why the small motor should not be of a much more general use than it is now, wherever there is no need to have a factory; and there is no reason why the village should not have its small factory, wherever factory work is…

There is no reason why the factory, with its motive force and machinery, should not belong to the community, as is already the case for motive power in the above-mentioned workshops and small factories in the French portion of the Jura…

But under a more rational social organisation the factory would find no such obstacles: it would be a boon to the village.

The moral and physical advantages which man would derive from dividing his work between the field and the workshop are self-evident.

As to those countless descriptions of goods which derive their value chiefly from the intervention of skilled labour, they can be best fabricated in smaller factories which employ a few hundreds, or even a few scores of operatives.

This is why the “concentration” so much spoken of is often nothing but an amalgamation of capitalists for the purpose of dominating the market, not for cheapening the technical process.

Even under the present conditions the leviathan factories offer great inconveniences, as they cannot rapidly reform their machinery according to the constantly varying demands of the consumers.

The progress achieved of late in toy-making, as also the high perfection attained in the fabrication of mathematical and optical instruments, of furniture, of small luxury articles, of pottery and so on, are instances in point.

Art and science are no longer the monopoly of the great cities, and further progress will be in scattering them over the country.