The Conquest of Bread

The Conquest of Bread is an argument for anarchist communism built on a single moral claim: the riches of civilization are a collective creation. Roads, drained marshes, cleared forests, mines, machines, cities, and even ideas are the inherited labour of millions of the dead and the living. Because each part owes its value to the whole, Kropotkin holds that no individual can justly claim a private right to seize and tax it.

From this he draws the book's central demand. The means of production are the common work of humanity, so their product should be the common property of the race. The slogan is repeated throughout: all is for all. The book contrasts this with the existing order, in which a few appropriate most of what labour produces and then squander or restrict it, keeping prices up by destroying goods and idling willing workers while others go without.

Kropotkin argues that well-being for all is not a dream but a present possibility. Even now, he says, a minority of actual producers supply enough for general comfort, while a growing swarm of middlemen and idlers consumes the surplus. The book proclaims the right to well-being rather than the narrower right to work or to the whole product of one's own labour, since in an interdependent economy no one's separate share can be measured.

Turning to method, the book distinguishes expropriation from mere redistribution. The goal is not to share out overcoats or divide a fortune, but to arrange things so that every person can learn a useful trade and work at it without surrendering the lion's share to landlord or capitalist. Kropotkin traces great fortunes back to the poverty they exploit, arguing that when destitution ends, the power to exploit ends with it.

The later chapters develop the positive program and answer objections. Kropotkin rejects representative government and the wages system alike, including the collectivist labour-cheque, as forms that cannot survive the abolition of private property. He insists that work can be made agreeable through shorter hours and variety, that society must secure not only bread but leisure, art, and the satisfaction of varied individual tastes, and that the whole is to be coordinated by free agreement among federated groups rather than by a central authority.