Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

But the real strength of those committees was in the workers, many of whom had formerly belonged to the International and had retained the old spirit.

Speaking from personal knowledge, I may venture to say that the radical middle-class leaders would have hesitated in case of an emergency, while the workers would have seized the first opportunity for an uprising which, beginning with the…

As soon as the clerical and aristocratic surroundings of the king drove him to turn the screws of reaction, the republicans menaced him with a movement in which, they knew, the real fighting element would be the workers.

In Catalonia alone there were over one hundred thousand men in strongly organized trade unions, and more than eighty thousand Spaniards belonged to the International, regularly holding congresses, and punctually paying their contributions…

I can speak of these organizations from personal knowledge, gained on the spot, and I know that they were ready to proclaim the United States of Spain, abandon ruling the colonies, and in some of the most advanced regions make serious…

It was this permanent menace which prevented the Spanish monarchy from suppressing all the workers’ and peasants’ organizations, and from inaugurating a frank clerical reaction.

The monarchy was kept under continual menace of being upset should the middle-class republicans appeal to the revolutionary elements among the workers.

The Spanish papers were very well edited, and some of the manifestoes of their congresses were admirable expositions of anarchist socialism; but who knows anything of Spanish ideas outside of Spain?

Consequently, the Jura Federation, with its papers printed in French, became the centre for the maintenance and expression in the Latin countries of the spirit which--I repeat it--saved Europe from a very dark period of reaction.

Without even so much as a room that he could call his own, he would sell sherbet in the streets of London to get his living, and in the evening write brilliant articles for the Italian papers.

And when we meet him again, released from a prison or escaped from an island, we find him just as we saw him last; always renewing the struggle, with the same love of men, the same absence of hatred toward his adversaries and jailers, the…

It was necessary, therefore, to show that at least here and there the workers would not have their rights trampled underfoot, and would offer resistance.

We all went to Bern on the anniversary of the Paris Commune, to carry the red flag in the streets, notwithstanding the prohibition.

A great deal of sympathy was won to the cause during the trial; it was understood that all liberties have to be defended jealously, in order not to be lost.

Our main activity, however, was in working out the practical and theoretical aspects of anarchist socialism, and in this direction the federation has undoubtedly accomplished something that will last.

There will be full freedom for the development of new forms of production, invention, and organization; individual initiative will be encouraged, and the tendency toward uniformity and centralization will be discouraged.

None of us minimized the importance and depth of the change which we looked for.

But we also knew that in preaching change in both these directions we should be working with the tide of human progress.

Fifty years ago the workers were ready to sell their personal liberty to all sorts of rulers, and even to a Cæsar, in exchange for a promise of material well-being, but now this was no longer the case.

The sentence which was put in the statutes of the International Association: ‘The emancipation of the workers must be accomplished by the workers themselves,’ had met with general sympathy and had taken root in minds.

For the very success of socialism, the ideas of no-government, of self-reliance, of free initiative of the individual--of anarchism, in a word--had thus to be preached side by side with those of socialized ownership and production.

But we trusted--and experience has proved that we were right--that social life itself, supported by a frank, open-minded criticism of opinions and actions, would be the most effective means for threshing out opinions and for divesting them…

We acted, in fact, in accordance with the old saying that freedom remains still the wisest cure for freedom’s temporary inconveniences.

There is, in mankind, a nucleus of social habits, an inheritance from the past, not yet duly appreciated, which is not maintained by coercion and is superior to coercion.

Robert Owen and Fourier had given the world their ideals of a free, organically developing society, in opposition to the pyramidal ideals which had been copied from the Roman Empire or from the Roman Church.