Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

In agriculture, as in everything else, associated labour is the only reasonable solution.

Two hundred families of five persons each, owning five acres per family, having no common ties between the families, and compelled to find their living, each family on its five acres, almost certainly would be an economical failure.

Whatever improvement upon the present conditions such an organisation might be, that improvement would not last; it would have to undergo a further transformation or disappear.

It would be accessible to everyone, strong or weak, town bred or country born; it would also have many charms besides.

And its total amount would be far smaller than the amount of labour which every thousand persons, taken from this or from any other nation, have now to spend in getting their present food, much smaller in quantity and of worse quality.

The amount of labour required to grow food under a rational culture is so small, indeed, that our hypothetical inhabitants would be led necessarily to employ their leisure in manufacturing, artistic, scientific, and other pursuits.

From the technical point of view there is no obstacle whatever for such an organisation being started to-morrow with full success.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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…

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.

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

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…

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

We thus find it endowed with an astonishing vitality.

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

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

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.