Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

Consequently, up to the present time all the statements made by economists about the so-called “concentration” of the industry in this country, and the consequent “unavoidable” disappearance of the small industries, have been based on mere…

When I began to study the subject some thirty years ago, I never guessed, from the little attention devoted to it by the orthodox economists, what a wide, complex, important, and interesting organisation would appear at the end of a closer…

How can we then explain the persistence of the petty trades?

Now, the advantages offered by a large factory in comparison with hand work are self-evident as regards the economy of labour, and especially--this is the main point--the facilities both for sale and for having the raw produce at a lower…

As a whole, the transformation of the petty trades into great industries goes on with a slowness which cannot fail to astonish even those who are convinced of its necessity.

Even in the textile industries--especially in consequence of the wide use of the labour of children and women--which offer so many advantages for the factory system, the hand-loom still competes with the power-loom.

In some industries the factory is undoubtedly victorious; but there are other branches in which the petty trades hold their own position.

It undergoes various modifications, it adapts itself to new conditions, it struggles without losing hope of better times to come.

We thus find it endowed with an astonishing vitality.

And yet, notwithstanding the gloomy predictions, and the still gloomier prospects of the workers, that form of industry does not disappear.

Anyone who has lived among, let us say, the watch-makers in Switzerland and knows their inner family life, will recognise that the condition of these workers was out of all comparison superior, in every respect, material and moral, to the…

In some of the petty trades, especially in the fabrication of the plain textiles, the workers are in dreadful misery.

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 industrial nations are bound to revert to agriculture, they are compelled to find out the best means of combining it with industry, and they must do so without loss of time.

We were thus driven into a corner; and while a thorough change in the present relations between labour and capital is becoming an imperious necessity, a thorough remodelling of the whole of our industrial organisation has also become…

But they proved terrible as regards the millions of human beings who were plunged into misery and had to rely upon precarious means of living in our cities.

We doomed to disappearance all those branches of industry which formerly used to prosper in the villages; we condemned in industry all that was not a big factory.

And we, in our admiration of the prodigies achieved under the new factory system, overlooked the advantages of the old system under which the tiller of the soil was an industrial worker at the same time.

Millions of labourers, driven away by sheer force from the land, gathered in the cities in search of labour, and soon forgot the bonds which formerly attached them to the soil.

But then came the water-motors, steam, the development of machinery, and they broke the link which formerly connected the farm with the workshop.

If the mediæval city was the cradle of those industries which bordered upon art and were intended to supply the wants of the richer classes, still it was the rural manufacture which supplied the wants of the million, as it does until the…

There was a time, and that time is not so far back, when both were thoroughly combined; the villages were then the seats of a variety of industries, and the artisans in the cities did not abandon agriculture; many towns were nothing else…

A nation cannot let its land be transformed into hunting reserves at the rate it is being done in this country without having to send the best and the most enterprising portion of its population overseas, and without relying for its daily…

The industry of dried fruit, and especially of dried vegetables, has not yet developed in this country, the result being that during the Boer War Britain paid a weekly tribute to Germany for dried vegetables, which attained many thousands…

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