Ep. 256: Kropotkin’s Anarchist Communism (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 256 is something like what's the relationship between egalitarianism and state? When we read Peter Kropotkin's Conquest of bread from 1892. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer participating in this voluntary association of podcasters in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:33 Seth: This is Seth Paskin experiencing the white terror where blood is flowing like water and the guillotine is never idle. In Austin, Texas.

0:41 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, for whom idleness is a supreme ideal in Warrenton, Virginia, in a mansion.

0:48 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey wondering about agrarian communes and whether or not it is the right basis for our collectivism in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:59 Mark: And I am Borat. I come from a communist state here to put in my words of how the no, we have no guest. This has been long requested. We have quite a anarchist following on this podcast. I think maybe the whole I'm going to get knowledge straight from the ether rather than from the man. There's something that's appealing to anarchists. Maybe anarchism and podcasting go together, but we were also encouraged most recently to do this without a guest that I guess the anarchism committee is kind of closed and at least one person who wrote to us said they'd like to hear just what we think of it rather than getting a quote expert on. So that is my preemptive strike.

1:40 Seth: Can three straight white males actually talk about anarchism without an anarchist on the podcast?

1:47 Mark: Can Seth count?

1:48 Dylan: I maybe not all of us are avowedly liberals.

1:53 Wes: Can 3 non 19th century white males talk about an anarchism?

1:57 Mark: Yeah. So Kropotkin, he's not the first of the big anarchists. Bakunin I guess is, but Kropotkin I think is lauded as the sort of most philosophical. I don't know, I really en the writing style. It goes between being somewhat grandiose and poetic and doing spreadsheets basically like actuarial tables of we really can feed everyone in the land with the amount of farms that we have available if we just use our resources properly.

2:23 Wes: So he's a one of a few and the last of about four well known anarchists, right? Starting with William Godwin in the late 18th century, early early 19th century. He was the father of Mary Shelley of Frankenstein fame and the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft of Vindication for Rights of Women and feminism. And there was Proudhon. Right. French thinker and Bakunin. So he's the fourth and, and the last and I think the, in a way the most systematic of the four major figures in anarchism. And we should say that in some ways he's responding to previous anarchists in his writing. He's making a few emendations, but more importantly he's responding to, I guess what he calls collectivism or collectivist communism. So he's advocating a particular brand of communism over and against what we typically think of communism, which involves some sort of government. Right.

3:25 Dylan: Well, particularly in transition. Right. The transition to a full communist society involves state ownership for things.

3:33 Wes: He wants collective ownership of everything, it seems like. But there's also a strong emphasis on individual liberty, which makes this seem reminiscent of Orwell, who I think fought for the anarchists when he was in Spain fighting in the Spanish Civil War and is sometimes classified as a libertarian socialist. And if you look up libertarian socialism, it's kind of hard to distinguish from anarchism. But the difference is, like Orwell, he's wary of the authoritarianism that can accompany communism when it involves a strong central authority. And he thinks we can do without that strong central authority. To me it's fascinating and I think to most of us it will seem on its face, really difficult to imagine how that's possible. Which Kropotkin will tell us. Well, that's just because you've kind of been brainwashed to think that way, but it really is possible and he's going to show us how.

4:23 Dylan: One of the things for me that was particularly helpful was, you know, reading the introductions here, then also getting some of it from Kropotkin as well, to set the sort of context of the time that he's writing. You know, this is late 1800s, this was 1880s, and there are some gigantic things that are going on in the world stage and it's not so far after some big things. So he's tracing a set of social revolutions from the French Revolution to a Revolution in 1848, also in France and the end of serfdom in Russia. And for him all of these things just feel pretty new.

That was something I hadn't really thought about so much, but the way in which even something like the idea of private property that you have with Locke and the beginning of capitalist economy, he is going right for the jugular and saying that the foundation of the capitalist economy with wage based system for remuneration for individuals that's based upon private property ownership is basically the Same thing as slavery, straight up. And his point of view comes very, very deeply from a huge disparity between the poor, think serfdom In Russia, think 90% of the population are barely making above subsistence living and the wealthy.

And he thinks that the power of our individual tendencies to get along together and work together, as evidenced by things like agrarian communes and other kinds of collective working, plus capitalizing on the technological advances that we as a human community have made ought to make all of those things not a problem feeding people, clothing people, having people realize their own free desires. But fundamental to that is just getting rid of what we normally think of as the backbone of our modern life, private property.

6:34 Seth: We should preface this by saying that the anarchists who have reached out to us have let us know that when we've used the term previously that we've been giving some kind of a straw man or a cardboard cutout of what anarchism is. So there was a desire to have a serious and robust treatment of the subject. It's not just. But his characterization of it in the book even goes a little bit further than Wes and Dylan have characterized it. It's not simply that we're talking about a collectivist type of activity. He's going further in saying that there's a fundamental approach to human community that's respecting the individual, that there's a certain set of basic needs that should be provided for.

And so the mechanism is, it's not about, yes, we're going to have conversations about private property and wages and centralized versus decentralized and yada yada. But his notion of anarchistic collectivism starts with a fundamental recognition of everybody's right to the basic necessities of life. And so everything flows from the ways in which you satisfy all those basic necessities. Everything flows from that. And the fact that there's not going to be private property or we're not going to move to a centralized economy or something is simply a function of that, of recognition of that principle as opposed to positing some kind of, you know, anti capitalist kind of mechanism.

8:01 Dylan: I mean, another way that I would add to that is he unequivocally makes equality primary and that he has lots of attention to liberty and individual liberty. But I think part of his argument is effectively a proper orientation towards equality will give us the liberty that we want, as opposed to the other way, which is more common, is that a proper attention to liberty will give us the equality we want.

8:25 Mark: So it's nice that we're doing this right after the sandel Because I mean, when he's talking about equality, he is talking about equality of basic material conditions, that he believes if you get rid of an overarching government, you're still going to have a lot of organizations. Like that's how things actually get done is voluntary agreements. And if you don't like how somebody in your voluntary co op is performing, you can kick them out. And if you don't like how things are going, you can leave a lot that's in common with like right wing, you know, individual oriented libertarians or, you know, to the point of anarchists. But when you get rid of private property as something that I guess for a right wing anarchist would have to just be something that is still revered as custom. But I think that Kropotkin thinks that that is probably not going to be likely.

9:12 Dylan: It's more than that.

9:13 Wes: Right?

9:13 Dylan: He's absolutely against it.

9:14 Mark: He's very much like, we should start instead of doing economics by examining how we produce things, we should examine what people's needs are. So of like, the immediate reason that this came back on our radar was this Simone Weil episode that we just did on the analysis of human needs. So that's interesting to kind of look at how she had a role for private property, but also for communal property. And when Kropotkin is pushed on this, like, are you really going to take the coat off people's back and put it in a big pile and then pass out the pile?

He's going to say, well, no, I mean, it's a matter of the excess, it's a matter of the surplus. It's a matter if you have a giant closet full of coats. Yeah, we're probably going to come and take those as long as there are people that need coats. But there's no reason necessarily, I guess this is something I want to explore here is how serious he is. It seems like there is something to that Lockean argument that compares property to ownership of your own body, that there is something about having personal possessions immediately around you that almost seems, you know, where these things become, these tools become essentially extensions of your body, where if you can't call those yours, there would be some sort of attack on your integrity.

And I just don't see him dealing with that objection in a really straightforward way. He just says to satisfy the needs of the many, we wouldn't have to dive in that deep.

10:31 Wes: Most likely, maybe at some point we can say who he is. Maybe we can fit in a little of his biography.

10:37 Mark: Yeah, I think it's important to understand who he was, that he was born a Russian prince and, you know, very much could have been in the high echelons of Russian society. He became scientists. He was very interested when he went out to Siberia to do scientific work in how the peasants were living out there. Came to think that joining the military and getting what would have been his birthright was actually immoral. And so became an anarchist. Was jailed and escaped out of Russia. Spent time in France, Was kicked out of there.

11:09 Seth: Yeah.

11:09 Wes: Was imprisoned again in France.

11:11 Mark: Yep.

11:12 Wes: And then was shortly out of prison when he wrote this book. He had just gotten out of prison, I think.

11:16 Mark: Okay. Yeah. So he wrote this and a number of other major works in England, where he was kind of a senior statesman by then. And then, you know, interestingly, after the Russian Revolution actually took place, then he went back to Russia. He was kind of revered as a major thinker there, but he was also critical at the same time of the totalitarian regime that was growing there. Was very much not in line with what he's pushing here. It's just apparently he was old enough and frail enough and had little enough influence that it didn't actually get him into more trouble there. But the end of the story, according to the intro to this version of this book that we read, is once he died, there were purges of anarchists in Leninist Russia. So this was kind of the death of his strain of communism.

11:57 Dylan: I definitely maybe have previous podcasts. We talked about the fact that we're going to do anarchism. I fall into that camp of my knee jerk reaction is a kind of deep skepticism of the idea of not having a constitution and not having processes that formally govern the way in which we rule ourselves and have a stake of the community that has explicit values for balancing the roles of the individual and the needs of the community together. And the idea that. And sort of pejorative version of anarchism, of just sort of being, you know, no rules or whatever. And certainly reading this made me understand a lot more about the way in which it's not that

12:43 Seth: that's fair. Yeah.

12:44 Wes: And historically you think of it as involving violence and terrorism and, you know, the associations you might get from it in popular culture or from history textbooks perhaps have to do with the sort of violent stuff that it was associated with.

12:58 Dylan: Part of that's well earned in the sense of Kropotkin's anarchism as well as Marxian communism or for that matter, the American Revolution. Revolutions talk about having to overthrow the current regime. And a lot of them Anarchism included, often acknowledge that that activity is not going to be nonviolent. Kropotkin is a little bit ambivalent about it in that he basically doesn't want to spend a lot of time talking about the violent part of the revolution, though I think he basically thinks it doesn't have to be nearly as violent as people think it is and that it's going to be easier to make this transition.

And that's what a big part of the book is, is talking about, well, how do we make this transition to a collectivist economy and social construction and trying to belie people's fears in that regard. But like lots of revolutionaries, they don't think it's going to happen within the system. He thinks there's a fundamental change that is required, at least as big, if not bigger than going from a monarchy to a parliament.

14:02 Seth: You talk about violence and revolution. It's a validation of his point and an indictment of the way in which the conversation's been framed. So we think of anarchism as no government and no government means the war of all against all. Right? It's the state of nature.

14:19 Dylan: It's Hobbes interpretation, which he completely disagrees with.

14:22 Seth: Very clearly and early on, he points out, he says people come into voluntary associations where they self regulate without government or adjudicating authority to generalize it. And this happens all the time. And this is the way he says, you know, nine out of 10 business disputes never go to the courts. Right. It's just the damage to your reputation or the threat of this or whatever. And so he's trying to make the point that to even utter the phrase, and I don't know how anarchism as a term was loaded at the time he was writing, you know, compared to now.

But the idea that anarchism represents a violent overthrow of the existing authority as opposed to, let's say a smooth jazz blending into a more self regulated, you know, self managed kind of thing. And I think that's why he doesn't want to spend a lot of time dwelling on the revolutionary violence. And part of it is because from his perspective, the revolutionary violence, all it did was substitute one form of oppression or governmental authority of one sort. You know, so we, in the case of the French Revolution, he's, when he's talking about the terrors, and again, you'd have to spend a lifetime studying the French Revolution to be able to understand all the nuances.

But he's basically saying the bourgeoisie supplanted the monarchy. You had the Monarchy, it was overthrown. There was the reign of terror. But instead of collectivism, what you got was a small group of bourgeoisie who identified themselves as the leaders and they paid themselves more and they took over the means of production, and all they did was substitute. So there's a suggestion. I don't know if it's fully developed because I didn't read every single line of this text, but that violent overthrow ultimately results in the supplanting of one system with another system that perpetuates the same problems.

And he's trying to drive towards something else. And when he starts talking about the practical implementation, and specifically in my mind, when he starts talking about production and the volume of production and satisfying the needs of people and all that stuff, it's a lot more interesting than having an argument about whether this revolution or that revolution was closer to achieving the. I do think there are some tangible suggestions that he's making. I don't know how realistic they are to implement, but at least he's providing a framework for thinking about how to approach this in a way that would be nonviolent or less violent.

16:38 Mark: The reason I think this is philosophy is because it has to do with an idea of the nature of man. Right? It's very much Rousseau rather than Hobbes. That society that comes in and messes up everything and specifically the state. He wrote this book, Mutual Aid. It came out after this one, but it was based on essays that were written, some of them before this, which is an outgrowth of his scientific interest. And it is very much like reading Darwin's Origin of Species or I have some book, a recent book, that is like trying to show that animals have emotions.

And it just goes after anecdote after anecdote. And so this Mutual Aid, I listened to a little bit of the audiobook. It, you know, starts with lower animals and is trying to just stress that there's a natural teleology within all species to help members of the same species. And that is the exception rather than the rule that there is competition between species for places in the ecosystem and things, but that you see quite a lot, even in nature, before you get humans coming along, of cooperation. And that is an excellent survival strategy for a species.

And that humans naturally have this as well. And it's only because we've got. Well, he doesn't really say exactly what the counterforce is. You know, why is. There's also seems like a natural power vacuum, power rises to the top. But he does say in a lot of individual circumstances, how that does work that given that we have the system of money of stratified classes with an inherited division of labor, basically a caste system, in the era that he's writing here, he thinks that you could see why individuals as soon as you get a leg up, you use that to sort of establish your place higher in the hierarchy rather than bringing everybody up with you.

If we could just get rid of that overall superstructure, then our natural tendency would emerge. I found this to be a real epistemological puzzle how you could say there's both a natural tendency for us to cooperate, but clearly there's also a natural tendency for power to come in and smash everybody down.

18:40 Dylan: I think you're right, Mark that he is pointing towards exactly the way in which Lockean notions of private property that make are an extension of yourself exacerbate the problem. So once we institutionalize the notion of private property and we make it even more possible for individuals to expand the sphere of their egos at some level it exacerbates the problem of solving the problem of getting along together with our natural communitarian tendencies. It's sort of like bringing a bazooka to an arm wrestling match. And I'm interpreting now he doesn't say it this way, but I think that he sees that those fundamental aspects of private property and wage based solutions for divvying up the goods of our economy and participating in it as actually contributing to and exacerbating the problem of our challenges with getting along with one another.

Maybe that is in part a way to get started on. I mean the very first chapter of the book is called Our Riches, which is sort of his salvo into Look, I mean this is 1880 even, right? We have so much stuff and so much capability to take care of ourselves as a community. There should be no one who goes unclothed or unsheltered or unfed.

19:55 Wes: We have riches surpassing the dreams of the fairy tales of the thousand and one nights.

19:59 Mark: And of course, how much more so today. It's interesting to read this at this remove when things were quite different and you know, we're dealing with a different starting point, but certainly that point that have we not gotten beyond scarcity? I accept that part of his diagnosis without question. What you can do about that? I guess we can't forget the reason that we have the scarcity, the reason that we have these riches at least it seems like it came through this process that he's critiquing that it came through. If you look at, you know, Adam Smith's formulation or something that everybody acting in their own self interest and by magic, then this enables this overall benefit to accrue.

And as Hayek pointed out after this, of course, we have things like the magical price system that you don't have to have. His objection to a central organization that would set prices or determine who needs what or whatever is just because you couldn't possibly get all that information. Well, well, Kropotkin actually shares that analysis. That's one of the reasons he's against the state, against central planning. I guess the question is, can you have something that gives you the advantage of the distributed knowledge base that a free market capitalist would approve of without having free market capitalism at all, that people are going to get up and work hard and work together because it's for the common good, because it will give their lives meaning, because we will structure work so that it is pleasant and doing manual labor is no longer going to have the stigma that it's going to have because you're not going to be in dank, horrid, disgusting factories.

Once we free the profit motive that makes the managers try to be as cheap as possible in how things are produced, we're going to suddenly have this great excess of production that we never had before because everybody will be firing on all cylinders. You know, he does deal with the possibility of laziness. He does deal with as an objection, but he thinks again, it's sort of human nature to want to work and work together and feel good about that.

21:58 Seth: I think to just dial it back a little bit, Mark, before we dive into what you were just saying, this fundamental proposition is it's not the case that what we're doing here is engaging in a struggle over scarce resources. The bottom line is that even today, and it's as true today as it was then, there is enough production of food, clothing, et cetera for everybody on Earth. But the reality is the productive capacity is not deployed to satisfy the needs of everybody on Earth. The point he's trying to make is this is not a resource or a technical problem, it's a political problem.

And very, very quickly, just the way he's talking about it, and he says it more explicitly later, but just the way he's talking about it, he's taking a global view which is in line with the world proletariat kind of Marxist position. But his point is we have the capability to feed and clothe everybody on earth and satisfy those basic needs, and yet we don't do it. And if you think that's okay, then we don't have anything to talk about. But if you think that's not okay, and you think it's a function of inefficiency or, you know, he's going to go on and criticize the notion of economic efficiency as a driver for.

He's trying to say, if you think there's a problem that we could take care of everybody on earth and we don't, I'm telling you, this is my solution for how to do that. And then there's the secondary piece about how did we get to the point where we have the productive capability to do that, where one person is taking credit for it, The CEO or the capitalist right that you were talking about. But it's actually built on the backs of 200 years worth of land clearing and yeoman work and miners and all these. The railway guy who takes credit for being able to ship the goods, but, you know, doesn't give credit to the 40 years of people laying track, you know, and that sort of thing.

And I actually think his discourse around the notion of not just the historical basis for productivity, but the way in which productivity is interrelated. So he says, what good would it be to have a really productive mind if there wasn't a railroad that could take the ore and run it on the rail to this place where it could be refined and then it could be put on trucks to go here and it could be used? He's like, you know, he talks about. He's like, there's no point in being good at one thing if you're not part of a value chain. If there's nobody to buy what you produce, then production is pointless.

And so he's simultaneously talking about the historical and cumulative roots of productivity that capital takes credit for, but capital doesn't have the right to take credit for. And also simultaneously, the notion of commerce and how commerce is the only thing that actually makes any of this activity worthwhile. So if there's no ships, then what's the point of having China produce all these laptops that we buy in the United States? Because if you can't get them from China, you know. And so the shippers become part of the story of the production of laptops in China, just like the consumers on the, you know, in Europe and America and so forth.

25:01 Mark: Yeah, it's interesting that he very much affirms Adam Smith's analysis of what goes into making a pin, that everything is interconnected. He derives such different conclusions from that, as Seth was just saying, that the entire capitalist structure of one Person essentially getting the money first and being able to keep the lion's share of it and trying to pay as little to everybody else as possible. That there's something fundamentally immoral about that, that it really is that. But I'm surprised that it didn't come up in our discussion with Michael Sandel because it's in his book the Obama's.

You didn't build that thing. I think we brought up in this podcast before that Kropotkin is really taking that very, very seriously. That, you know, it's hard to think of that your house. That seems to be the kind of thing that they. And Kropotkin acknowledges this. You know, that we have the need for privacy. He doesn't want us all living in big communal houses. Nobody wants to live that way. That that might be necessary in some circumstances and for some people at certain times, but that would not be the norm. We seem to think that everybody, you know, having your own private place, your own private dwelling, that seems like a fundamental need.

But just think about how much work went into your house and can you really, even if for certain purposes we want to say it's yours. You know, there's just so many years of architecture, so much work that individuals put into it to get all those materials that's just like much more so than the pencil in front of you. Like a house is just so much bigger than your individual contribution. So that if it did come down to it, we want to say that, well, your house is sort of yours, it's assigned to you. You can keep all your stuff there. We're not just going to kick you out on the street.

In fact, there's no we like there's no state that would be able to come in with guns and force you to do that. But if a bunch of refugees come in or there's a big flood or a fire and half the town is destroyed, it would be your obligation to let in some of those people. If there's need, you should acknowledge that there's something even about your own house that is not really yours.

26:54 Dylan: He definitely agrees with that. I feel like we should try to get through a little bit more of his details before we try to judge too much about the relative naivete of the interpretation of the human soul he has here. That's the route we're going to go down here very quickly I think is whether he's faintly being naive or not about our needs for something like our property in the scope of human community, how we can deal with scarcity. He many Many times in here, basically says, look, there's just enough stuff. He doesn't take seriously the notion of scarcity and different kinds of scarcity and what we do in the event, even of temporal scarcity.

Let's say it is the refugee case where you have 200,000 refugees come in and how are we going to deal with that urgent of a situation in this environment where we don't have a collective voice for adjudicating those problems. There's a lot for us to talk about there, but I think we probably have to get more stuff on the table from him.

28:00 Mark: I mean apart from the private property issue, just the not having a state issue, which he doesn't talk about as much as you would think that in later chapters he's talking about how we can just see that the attempt to, you know, replace monarchy with parliamentary representative government has just failed. That time after time it is, as someone was saying about the French Revolution, it's the middle class that has made inroads on the power of the nobility, gotten rid of maybe the king, but they're just representing themselves. They are not trying to get the bourgeois are not trying to get food out to everyone.

Everything is on the backs of the worker. And this is exactly the kind of thing that we're even seeing now that people feel that our democracy, our representative government doesn't work because the needs of the poor just can't move the needle. I mean, I guess the difference is that the poor are I guess a minority now here in a place like this. Whereas in the time that he's writing, I feel like everywhere he's pointing the so called peasants as he calls them, are the vast majority. And it's just amazing that they haven't risen up and taken over already.

I mean that's the primary thing why we're calling it anarchy as opposed to communism or some different form of communism, why it's anarchist. There is no state.

29:17 Dylan: He doesn't say anything about that aspect of it because he basically thinks that there's plenty of evidence that it'll just work. And I think the most basic criticism of him on that is that he's sanguine about the ability of self organized groups not to self organize into fighting factions that basically lead to chaos rather than anarchism. The problem of factions that are going to fight for with one another and not have stability. He's sanguine about Hobbes criticism.

29:51 Wes: He's assuming that anarchy is a default or natural position and that it's the state that really interferes with it. And in a sense, statism or whatever you want to call it has to defend itself. That if you look at the nature of human beings in this chapter called Anarchist Communism, he's pointing out that even in so called individualist societies you see all sorts of collectivist tendencies. And so I think he thinks if you look at the way society actually works, and if you look at the way human beings actually work, you'll see that anarchism is kind of the fundamental tendency and that the social structures we have are the alien and foreign things that holds us back from reaching that.

I want to say telos here, but it's kind of Mark's word now. But no, take it, you know, that's the direction in which we naturally tend. But yeah, you know, and then he does, in his objections, he does address himself to some of our concerns about anarchy. I guess I haven't read all of that, so I don't know how far he goes. But I know that for instance, if we're worried that not everyone will work, for instance, some people will tend to just be parasites. We can think about the fact that actually people are highly motivated to work. And I think he's right about this.

Although I don't think he's right about the fact that there are a lot of people who wouldn't or even couldn't work. But. But I think he's right that for most people you're much more productive when you think that you have a real stake in the outcome and that you are your own person. You're not simply a wage slave or something like that. The psychology of it. There are some interesting arguments there. But I think what we don't get is, you know, he uses the word we a lot. We should do this, we should do that. But what does that mean? If you're stateless, what does that mean?

Who's doing that? So there seems to me to be an implied authority or an implied representative authority that's required to get things done. I think the subtle idea that is behind some of this is that really authority can be a kind of emergent effect. You know, the way for Smith, you know, our looking out for ourselves is an invisible hand and it's to the benefit of everyone. There's this emergent effect. I think with Kropotkin you can almost think of authority as an emergent effect of people doing what it is they do naturally and associating in certain ways, as long as it's not interfered with.

But I think if you think about the details of how Even how we're supposed to execute the revolution and how we're supposed to do various other things. You start to wonder if some sort of hierarchy or some sort of authority is not needed.

32:30 Seth: Can I push on that just a little bit? Is the term authority the right word that you're looking for there, Wes? Is it that authority emerges or is it that association and social norms.

32:42 Mark: Leadership.

32:43 Dylan: Yeah, and also the authority of social norms. Right. So there's. Kropotkin definitely believes in the self organizing power of human communities. And then I think you're right, said that something like norms are going to be the authority. And to the extent that in Kropotkin's analysis we sort of work those out and people argue about them and stuff like that, but it'll work out because look, agrarian communes work out and families work out and small communities work out and they have disagreements, but nine times out of 10 they don't go to court.

That means they don't need an authority to help them decide. And he would, I think, probably go as far to say you don't need to have a constitution in the state to have people agree to have somebody else, you know, in the community naturally arise as the person who adjudicates stuff that would work out fine from his perspective. It's this formal authority that the state has to coerce people in a legal way. And again, this is brought back to the role of private property and wages and how people get their sustenance. Basically that's his far and away his primary concern.

To me it's a kind of extrapolation from saying, okay, look, I have, you know, in my neighborhood or in my family, things basically work out. And I think that he probably is sanguine about that, about how often things sort of work out. And part of that is, I think he is often sanguine about the problem of scarcity.

34:05 Mark: One thing he's not sanguine about is how revolutions actually go. That he's again has these three the French Revolution and two other things in France where there were peasant uprisings or the Parisian commune that then were smacked down. So he does not think that these things naturally happen. In fact, what naturally happens is some. The leaders of the revolution move in, they declare themselves the leaders and they get in a room and debate what the future society should be. And as soon as something happens, all industry grinds to a halt. Right.

As soon as you're threatening private property or whatever, of course everybody's gonna go to ground. They're gonna just wanna wait until things calm down until somebody new so things can go back to normal. I mean, he's going to acknowledge there is a de facto leadership to the revolution. It's just what are those people supposed to do? Those people need to immediately start organizing people volunteers to make sure everybody is fed. Is the immediate thing that what happens is that when the middle class revolutionaries are in there conspiring about their long term plans, meanwhile the peasants are starving and then when a Napoleon or somebody rises up and says I'm going to knock down all these revolutionaries that are making you starve, then everybody says yay.

And there's a huge reaction and everything about the revolution gets undone. So he is very, very practical about learning from those mistakes. He wants to point to all these, not only existing communes, but just all these associations that people have. Apparently he gives this long thing about the way the railroad grew up, that it was not a matter of a top down kings ordering this and that. It's individual corporations and things making deals with one another and just setting up this really, really complex infrastructure that you wouldn't think could even happen unless there was some people at the top directing things.

But the people at the top, at least in this case, were not government officials. So I think he counts anything that is not a governmental organization to be good evidence that voluntary organizations are the way to go. But he thinks that if you were to get rid of the profit motive that the people engaged in these things would just get along all the better, that you'd have less waste through competition, you'd have more ability to interact in productive ways. Whereas I think the average economist or American looking at this is going to say no. The only reason some large scale thing like that happened, the only reason you have these organizations is because you have some ultimately organizations that are representing individuals with a profit motive.

36:37 Dylan: A good counter example is the postal service, right? The postal service arose out of government and out of the community need to transmit information. Now maybe part of that was a commercial need, sort of like the Internet. Growing up out of government originally as being an infrastructure that enabled individual parts of the economy to participate with one another. So sort of fertilizer and sun for the economy. That's something that's sort of, you point to as naturally arising as output for the common good out of the government.

37:10 Seth: I think in his time national boundaries were also a lot more fluid. Like we tend to think of national boundaries and nation states that exist as being sort of what they always were. And we imagine that there are a different set of rules, right? Like if you're on this square patch, you're subject to the laws of X. And if you take six steps to the right, you're on the. You're subject to the laws of. Yeah, but human interaction and commerce and all that stuff is agnostic to artificial national boundaries. In his day, those things were much more fluid.

I'm sure there are people that live in Alsace Lorraine, for example. There are long histories of trade and commerce and communication and participation in sharing between German speaking and French speaking people and what have you. And it's really somewhat arbitrary that it's only been in the last less than 200 years or whatever that you have now a German nation state and a French nation state that establish the conditions by which those people are allowed to interact with each other in certain sorts of ways. And in that light, I think it makes more sense if he's talking about trusting the historical congress that people generally form amongst each other without respect to the governmental authority that just happens to be in charge at the time or happens to draw the lines here or there.

38:35 Dylan: There is a lot of context that matters here. And I think you're right that the fluidity of boundaries, the prevalence of revolution that's going on even at his time, the fact that the fight is still on between with whether or not, you know, something we sort of take for granted, liberal democracy is one is still a big fight going on. And there's a reason why we hear about the American experiment right here. It really still feels like an experiment. You know, he points to a number of things as being like the power of America as being an example in this regard.

39:08 Mark: I couldn't help but thinking of Tocqueville's take on look at the number of associations among Americans. Like that's entirely what he's talking about. It's just that we have such a rich tradition of the interaction between society and societies, the associations and government, that I think there's a lot you could try to do to optimize that. But it just always seems like certainly we are used to there having to be some ultimate boundaries, infrastructure set so that if there is not motivation among the individual pieces, then somebody is picking up the slack.

39:45 Wes: Right?

39:46 Mark: If there are externalities so much that he's going to blame on the profit motive that if you didn't have, you wouldn't get pollution, you would get attention toward climate change and things like that, if you didn't have the profit motive to keep doing horrible things that are messing up the environment. But I'm not totally clear on that. Like just imagine if you got rid of the profit motive, but you still had people who were very excited about for other reasons, for status reasons, for their business empires. Right. There's something that is very satisfying about getting a large group of people together, you know, maybe thinking like whoever it is that created Wikipedia and has that army of volunteers working for them.

And you could imagine, as Kropotkin imagines, that you would have this in all sorts of areas that you would have in technology, you know, the growth of a university and then all the scientists who might gather at the university and scientific societies that then go appeal to try to get the resources to build the super collider or something like these huge things that are still under the governance of one individual. I can still picture there being externalities that, you know, you would have these people who are not run by profit motives, but still own, you know, something like the oil companies, and who are then out of enthusiasm for their own activity, out of blindness to the externalities, are still not doing what they need to do to keep the environment clean.

And so, like Kropotkin is going to have to say that there are then other societies that would come in and try to convince them and it will all be voluntary. It seems like there are just a lot of things like that, that you need somebody with a gun ultimately to say this has to happen.

41:20 Seth: What you're talking about, Mark, is what I think is commonly referred to as the problem of the commons, but something we've glossed that we need to bring back in, as far as Kropotkin's analysis goes, is that the notion of profitability. He is talking about capital and the diversion of capital for the purpose of profit, of. Of certain groups. But it's the notion again of this basic meeting human needs, which he repeats frequently throughout the entire text. I'm talking about satisfying these human needs. That our conception of what is or isn't possible in an association, as opposed to a regulated structure where the authority has the power of violence of one sort or another.

What we're doing from the perspective of where we stand, we're comparing this quote, unquote, idealist, collective anarchist society against our notion of traditional capitalist governmental structure. What he says is if you meet the basic needs of the people, if people are fed and clothed, if they're rested, they sleep, they're well fed, and they're not struggling to survive every day you create the foundation for a completely different kind of collective interaction which could theoretically supplant. And I like that you brought up De Tocqueville because what de Tocqueville points out, and this is, I think, really interesting, is when he traveled America and he was looking at all these communities in America where there are these associations, it was truly people who were at the time only nominally associated and sometimes not officially associated with the quote unquote, United States of America and who were out on the frontier.

Or maybe the government was a theoretical entity. They had no power to execute, to use violence to either protect those people or to enforce the laws. And so the people had to come together to determine their own future, to adjudicate situations, to collectively build. And that's a function of a sparsity of people in a large physical expanse. I don't want to discount the indigenous people who were there or anything like that, but that's not what de Tocqueville was studying. You know, that's a case that's probably most analogous to what he's trying to point out, where you don't have a situation of want.

There's not an exploitation of labor per se, in the same way. Although I'm sure there's a lot of that that existed. And there's probably plenty of people out there who get on me about it. But the idea that you have people who are in some sense using their labor to create the necessities of life and simultaneously trying to move beyond mere subsistence living to build something or do something or entertain a literary, you know, creative life, and they're joining together in order to be able to accomplish these goals. And I think if there's a model, and even at that time, that's what he's thinking at.

He mentions America in the text a couple of times, negatively, usually. But to Tocqueville's analysis is, in some sense, you can read it as a validation of what Kropotkin is proposing. Something that we don't see any examples of in Europe, as far as I can tell.

44:39 Mark: I think he even mentions American Native tribes as another example of they don't have a strong central government. They're just. They're tribal. But yet we shouldn't imagine whenever anything vaguely socialist or anarchist is brought up or, you know, when we had our New Work episode, oh, what you want is to go back to tribal, to everybody just living subsistence living. And he insists Kropotkin does that with our advanced. The fact that the land is already tilled, you know, that is already cleared with all the advanced technology, all the work that's gone into it.

We just don't have that problem. We have so much more Capacity for tools used by individuals, but for organizational structures that we've already worked out, that we've learned how to do so. That even if corporations were driven by evil profit motives before, we can take advantage of all that was learned through those organizational experiments over the years to engage in free associations that would be just as efficient, in fact much more so, because everybody again is working for something they believe in, rather than being wage slaves.

45:39 Dylan: He's arguing that we've already made the investment that there is enough labor already poured into the world that could feed everybody and continue to allow for the thriving society going forward. And it's just not distributed properly. This is in our riches. This beginning of the second part. All that is necessary for production. The land, the mines, the highways, machinery, food, shelter, education, knowledge, have all been seized by the few in the course of that long story of robbery and forced migration and wars of ignorance and oppression which has been the life of the human race before it had learned to subdue the forces of nature.

It is because, taking advantage of alleged rights acquired in the past, these few appropriate today two thirds of the products of human labor and then squander them in the most stupid and shameful way. It is because, having reduced the masses of to a point at which they have not the means of subsistence for a month or even a week in advance, the few can allow the many to work only on the condition of themselves receiving the lion's share. It is because these few prevent the remainder of men from producing the things they need and force them to produce not the necessaries of life for all, but whatever offers the greatest profits for the monopolists.

Is this the substance of all socialism?

46:55 Mark: I think we've given a lot of the high level stuff here. Let's in part two dive more into the details. The text for supporters that should already be on your feed as the next thing go jump to it.