Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

But, precisely in proportion as the work required from the individual in modern production becomes simpler and easier to be learned, and, therefore, also more monotonous and wearisome--the requirements of the individual for varying his…

The narrow conception of life which consisted in thinking that profits are the only leading motive of human society, and the stubborn view which supposes that what has existed yesterday would last for ever, proved in disaccordance with the…

They proclaimed the necessity of dividing the whole of humanity into national workshops having each of them its own speciality.

Dazzled with the results obtained by a century of marvellous inventions, especially in England, our economists and political men went still farther in their dreams of division of labour.

He is an anachronism, we are told; he must be substituted, in a Bonanza farm, by an occasional servant hired for the summer, and discharged as the autumn comes: a tramp who will never again see the field he has harvested once in his life.

Nay, even the agricultural labourer, who formerly used to find a relief from the hardships of his life in the home of his ancestors--the future home of his children--in his love of the field and in a keen intercourse with nature, even he…

The artist who formerly found æsthetic enjoyment in the work of his hands is substituted by the human slave of an iron slave.

Skilled artisanship is being swept away as a survival of a past condemned to disappear.

We have, first, the broad division into producers and consumers: little-consuming producers on the one hand, little-producing consumers on the other hand.

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.

It has become an article of faith; and the economical history of the century which has elapsed since Adam Smith wrote has been, so to speak, an actual commentary upon it.

Even those of our contemporary economists who seldom revert to the works of the father of political economy, and often forget the ideas which inspired them, know that chapter almost by heart, so often has it been copied and recopied since.