Audiobooks by Pyotr Kropotkin

The Birth of Anarchism: 1849-1887 Audiobook

Mankind can rule itself without the force of top-down authority, and freedom is more than just choosing how to meet the needs and demands of capital. Inequality is structural and intentional, not inevitable and necessary. It does not have to be this way. In solidarity, we are better. Think for yourself, and question authority. This is the essence of anarchism, which has a bad name and reputation because it attacks the necessity of centralised power and authority. The media archetype is Tyler Durden, filled with violence and nihilism – yet anarchism is the most positive of political philosophies, one that Jesus and Buddha both preached, stating that empathy and a rejection of authority were key to human flourishing. Neither would disagree with most early anarchists. Proudhon, whose “property is robbery” is perhaps the most well-known anarchist slogan, lays out the conceptual foundation for key anarchist ideas. He argues that usury (charging interest) is a fundamental harm to society, that there is enough for everyone if we simply take other values to be higher than capital gain, that mutualism is inevitable, and that all governments and ideologies make the same mistake, in trying to change society from the top. Positive change must arise from the great masses of humanity, not from their rulers. Bakunin's speeches are about solidarity arising from the masses, and the ground for a global reconfiguration. Louis Lingg was convicted to death with six others, for being one of the ‘Chicago Anarchists’. They were executed to make a political point, based on corrupted evidence and perjury. His statement is one of contempt for the powers that be, and his belief that mankind should be free and should fight until it is. We end with Kropotkin, who firmly believed in decentralized society. He believed that the greatest strength of mankind lies in the masses, not their rulers, and exhorts us to “Act for Yourselves”.

Louis Lingg, Mikhail Bakunin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Pyotr Kropotkin (Author), Charles Featherstone (Narrator)

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Fields, Factories, and Workshops: Industry Combined with Agriculture and Brain Work with Manual Work

Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921) was one of the most interesting figures to emerge from the Russian Communist movement, developing the path of Communist Anarchism: he was not associated, either in theory or practice with the violence associated with that time of great change. Born into a Russian aristocratic land-owning family, he was affected by the injustice he saw as a young man on his father's estate and committed himself early to social change; but his study and interest in science, geography, anthropology and philosophy enriched and broadened his political views. Fields, Factories, and Workshops (1898) was one of his three most important texts (along with The Conquest of Bread and Mutual Aid - also available on Ukemi Audiobooks). Its subtitle - Industry Combined with Agriculture and Brain Work with Manual Work - indicates that although he starts from a Marxist standpoint, concerned with the exploitation of the wage labourer and the inequality suffered by the majority of the social classes, he was equally concerned with the 'human needs of the individual'. Kropotkin argues that science of political economy should acknowledge that the life of the human being went beyond the narrow presentation of him as a wage-earning, labouring worker. ‘Man shows his best when he is in a position to apply his usually varied capacities to several pursuits in the farm, the workshop, the factory, the study or the studio, instead of being riveted for life to one of these pursuits only.' A crucial observation in Kropotkin's time, this is equally relevant to the 21st century! Fields, Factories, and Workshops is a collection of essays written between 1888-1890. It opens with ‘The Decentralisation of Industries' and continues with ‘The Possibilities of Agriculture' and ‘Small Industries and Industrial Villages' and concludes with ‘Brain Work and Manual Work'. Kropotkin discusses in some detail statistics of economic activity in the UK and Russia as well as mainland Europe - Germany, France, etc. He looks at trade and manufacturing, import and export, its growth and change during the 19th century and its effect as industrial development takes an increasingly strong hold on societies. And in his conclusion, he warns, ‘Are the means now in use for satisfying human needs, under the present system of permanent division of functions and production for profits, really economical? Do they really lead to economy in the expenditure of human forces ? Or, are they not mere wasteful survivals from a past that was plunged into darkness, ignorance and oppression, and never took into consideration the economical and social value of the human being?'

Pyotr Kropotkin (Author), Peter Kenny (Narrator)

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Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), one of the most individual political figures of his time, is best known as an influential anarchist communist. But he was also a scientist, geographer and philosopher, a man who, having grown up on his aristocratic father's extensive country estate in Russia, had a deep understanding of and love for animals (wild and domesticated), the countryside and wildernesses. And all this was underpinned by a life committed to work for the good of humanity. Though his two best-known works, The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops, are revolutionary economic texts, Mutual Aid, a collection of essays published in 1902, is a jewel of another kind. In it, Kropotkin argues that Darwin's views on evolution and the survival of the fittest show only one aspect of life on planet Earth. Taking a kindlier - but equally scientific - look at the existence and growth of societies, both animal and human, Kropotkin takes great pains to demonstrate that the principal of mutual aid is just as important a feature in life on Earth - in fact, even more important. In this most engaging, absorbing and even endearing book, Kropotkin shows that societies evolve and develop better though the principle of mutual aid than by challenge, conflict and conquest. His chapter headings provide the overview: 'Mutual Aid Among Animals', 'Among Savages', 'Among the Barbarians', 'In the Medieval City', and 'Amongst Ourselves'. His positive and uplifting conclusion is clear: ‘In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of man, mutual support - not mutual struggle - has had the leading part. In its wide extension, even at the present time, we also see the best guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race.' This humane attitude was the driver behind his politics, because Kropotkin the scientist was also very much a political personality. But Mutual Aid is endlessly entertaining and informative because it contains thousands of well-documented examples of his thesis, whether drawn from colonies of ants and bees, or ‘mutual protection among small birds; or rodents and ruminants; Bushmen, Eskimos, Caucasian mountaineers; village life in Switzerland, Germany; or from the history of Guilds and trade unions.' Mutual Aid - A Factor of Evolution is a classic that should be far more widely known and appreciated.

Pyotr Kropotkin (Author), Peter Kenny (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Conquest of Bread

Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (1842-1921) was the leading - and the most widely admired - anarchist Communist in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th. He lived long enough to see the establishment of Communism in Russia under Lenin, who acknowledged Kropotkin's commitment to political change. However, Kropotkin was a very different kind of revolutionary figure, for he argued not only for Communism but anarchist Communism, distrusting and even despising central government control in favour of a more individual sense of responsibility and civic duty. In The Conquest of Bread, first published in 1892, Kropotkin set out his ideas on how his heightened idealism could work. It was all the more extraordinary because he was born into an aristocratic land-owning family - with some 1,200 male serfs - though from his student years his liberal views and his fixation on the need for social change saw him take a revolutionary path. This led rapidly to decades of exile. Even today, The Conquest of Bread is fascinating listening. It is a passionate, even a fierce polemic for dramatic social change. Kropotkin looks at the European revolutions, from the French Revolution to the upheavals of 1848 and later 19th-century events, commenting on why they were ultimately unsuccessful. Like Karl Marx he was convinced that major social upheaval was inevitable, but he argued for a different social structure - one where innate human goodness would not only overcome individualist capitalist greed but obviate the necessity of overbearing government control. Kropotkin's faith in humanity and the reasonableness of man may seem naive, but his slogans are persuasive. ‘All belongs to all'; 'well-being for all'; ‘anarchist Communism, Communism without government - the Communism of the free: it is the synthesis of the two ideals pursued by humanity throughout the ages - economic and political liberty.' His views encompassed further ideals: wealth should not hoarded by the few but distributed to each according to his need; women must be released from traditional domestic drudgery (he predicted that new machines would lightening the domestic load); the working day could easily be reduced to five hours a day, allowing more leisure time. With these innovations, Kropotkin argues, the future would be very different. The Conquest of Bread is a classic political text of an idealistic vision that may never come to pass but which contains views which are difficult - theoretically - to dismiss.

Pyotr Kropotkin (Author), Peter Kenny (Narrator)

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