JONTILLMAN.COM | part of the problem since 1976

Review

Rating: 9

Other than being amazed by the new technology of the day (electricity) instead of the new technology of my day, this book could have been written now, which is to say that most everything Kropotkin had to say about society still holds true a century or more later.

The book contains much of interest for present day libertarians (not Libertarians or “anarcho-capitalists”, though it is a thorough rebutting of them a century before their genesis). Kropotkin touches on “integral education”, agricultural production in cities, international trade, the decentralisation of industry and much else of importance currently. It is, to reiterate, one of the great constructivist anarchist works and one of the few readily available in English. It should be read and studied by every serious anarcho-syndicalist. Kropotkin had his weaknesses - he failed to link the anarchist communist goal to the organisational strength of the revolutionary unions, as the Spanish libertarians had always done and as the French were in the process of doing by the 1890’s. Had he done so, perhaps Maximov and his Russian comrades would have been in a better position to influence events in the revolutions of 1917.