I

That anarchists have always taken interest in the peasantry is not new information. Bakunin was perhaps one of the few people (with the exception of the Social Revolutionaries, later mockingly labelled ‘Populists,’) to argue that the peasantry would play a leading role in the coming revolution. In Italy and in Spain, anarchists were, at various different historical moments, successful in their work among the peasantry. In this sense, at least some strands of anarchist doctrine were different from Marxist thought, where the industrial working class/proletariat was named as the carrier of revolution.

Classical anarchism, like most classical ideologies of that period was plagued by a certain rationalist drive, an implicit faith in progress and the apparatuses of modernisation. This was perhaps a little less true of a figure like Bakunin, who E.H Carr has called an instinctive Romantic; one who’s thoughts and actions were like a wrecking ball battering the lives of those he came in contact with. Those actors who ran the show after the 1848 revolutions claimed for themselves a mantle of realism and scientificity, condemning previous conceptions of socialism as, famously, ‘Utopian.’ In this lot we place not just (most if not all) Marxists, but also many anarchists- apart from others. The liberating power of the modern was widely accepted by a majority of these ‘new’ socialist. For a large part of their careers, the professional revolutionaries at the helm of affairs in 1917 and after displayed a deep fascination with many aspects of the modern world. Lenin’s own enthralment with both Taylorist principles of human resource management and electricity are well documented. The latter became a metaphor for the reorganisation of society.

Towards the ebb of the nineteenth and the flow of the twentieth century, one of the doyens of classical Anarchist thought, Petr Kropotkin, produced an account of progress in Western Europe and the rest of the world which was deeply sceptical of the way things were going. His critique of rampant industrialisation and the discarding of agriculture to the dustbin of history is important partly from the perspective of the context I outlined above. In that age of rationalist championing of modernity, nuanced arguments like Kropotkin’s were not very common. The hold that a certain idea of progress had over ideologies and imaginations of socialists and communists in that period generally meant they didn’t have much time to think about agriculture. The industrial proletariat would steal the show because, after all, they were the future of the world, the march of history did always happen from country to city, and all that. Even among anarchists, Kropotkin often comes across as an idealist, a Romantic reborn. This is how he’s spoken of by Daniel Guerin in his wonderful account of anarchist theory and practice. But I wish to argue that Kropotkin’s idealism (which is undeniable,) was part of a larger package. His work on the industry/agriculture question combines stunning amounts of minute research and empirical work with an overall vision of society that is, from where we stand, rather prophetic and important. Perhaps his idealism acts as counterbalance to his deep commitment to a somewhat flawed faith in the innate rationality of society.

The other reason why Kropotkin’s account is very significant is our present malaise. In a country where the battle over land has suddenly exploded, attempts have been made to rescue alternate readings of Left history from a Left perspective. Among Marxists in India, the zeal to hand over agricultural land to corporate lobbies has been at times perplexing, at times perfectly rational in keeping with their general ‘line’ on historical development. However, the common aspect of nearly all these critiques, important as they are, has been their point of divergence: Marxism. It might be an unfair generalisation to make, but I’m not sure it’s an erroneous one to say that the predominant experiments in Left politics in this country have hovered around the central tenet of Marxism and various departures from it. Marx, Lenin and Mao are probably the three most important thinkers here. And- depending on one’s larger inclinations- sometimes Rosa Luxemburg or Kautsky or Hilferding are given honourable mentions. Consequently, the valuable shift from Marxism to post-Marxism or post-Structuralism has been coded in some ways by this specific lineage. This is unfortunate because it seems to me that in many respects, the anarchist position, often caricatured by vulgar Marxists (and I’m using the term ‘vulgar’ in its most literal sense here,) has offered over the years many different ways of thinking about capitalism, socialism and society- not to mention about Marxism itself. Harking back to the nineteenth century, Bakunin’s stinging criticism of the Marxist idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat (in Statism and Anarchy and elsewhere,) proved disturbingly accurate. Guerin writes:

The Russian exile showed himself equally clear-sighted about the danger of state control under a communist regime. According to him, the aspirations of “doctrinaire” socialists would “put the people into a new harness.” They doubtless profess, as do the libertarians, to see any State as oppressive, but maintain that only dictatorship - their own, of course - can create freedom for the people; to which the reply is that every dictatorship must seek to last as long as possible. Instead of leaving it to the people to destroy the State, they want to “transfer it . . . into the hands of the benefactors, guardians, and teachers, the leaders of the Communist Party.” They see quite well that such a government, “however democratic its forms, will be a real dictatorship,” and “console themselves with the idea that it will be temporary and short-lived.” But no! Bakunin retorted. This supposedly interim dictatorship will inevitably lead to “the reconstruction of the State, its privileges, its inequalities, and all its oppressions,” to the formation of a governmental aristocracy “which again begins to exploit and rule in the name of common happiness or to save the State.” And this State will be “the more absolute because its despotism is carefully concealed under obsequious respect… for the will of the people.”

In the last few years, interacting with Marxists on the Delhi University campus has left me with the feeling that the time Marxists spend imagining different ways of seizing power (whether to ‘smash’ the state or to merely cuddle it into non-existence,) might be better spent reimagining both the state and power. For all Left-leaning people, 1917 has remained a significant moment. As the Soviet Union came into its own, various voices of criticism did emerge from within the Left. But the anarchist experience of 1917 had been an unhappy one from the very initial phases of the revolution. James Joll has excavated this history with considerable skill and impartiality. Errico Malatesta, an important figure in the movement and an associate of Kropotkin, recorded his intense feeling of betrayal at the way 1917 had been squandered. On Lenin’s death he wrote “[...] But, even with the best intentions, he was a tyrant who strangled the Russian revolution - and we who could not admire him while alive, cannot mourn him now he is dead. Lenin is dead. Long live Liberty!” For Kropotkin, Joll writes, the sense of despondence was far greater. His saw the revolution as a pathway to a new society that antagonists had always claimed impossible. When he returned to Russia after forty years, he found is illusions shattered. By then he had been largely isolated from some radical circles because of his support for the First World War. He met with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman- both of whom were to put down in writing their own disillusionment with the revolution. His critique was tempered by his fundamental support for what 1917 could have been: “The revolution will advance in its own way, in the direction of the least resistance, without paying the slightest attention to our efforts. At the present moment the Russian revolution is in the following position. It is perpetrating horrors. It is ruining the whole country. In its mad fury it is annihilating human lives. [...]I see one thing: we must gather together people who will be capable of undertaking constructive work in each and every party after the revolution has worn itself out.” The anger towards the Bolsheviks was born, partly, from that party’s swift squashing of any form of worker-oriented organisation other than their own. Consequently, whenever anarchists managed to organise in a factory, they would face Bolshevik wrath. Joll writes that on occasion, even if they wanted to organise public meetings, the Party would inform them no halls were available. Berkman and Goldman opposed the imprisonment of anarchists in revolutionary Russia. The former, according to Joll, even refused to translate State and Revolution because he did not agree with it. When the duo left Russia for Germany, their isolation increased because, as Joll explains, criticising the dream was not yet welcome in Left circles of Europe.

I am not waxing eloquent about this for no reason. My intention is to try and retrieve a different history of the Left which has been systematically written out of memory, theory and practice. Of course ‘classical’ anarchism was not without problems, and to this extent my objective is not to present an alternative pantheon on the altar of the gods. But, just as mainstream Marxism has led to radical reinterpretations, so has anarchism. Recently, what is known as post-structuralist anarchism has attempted to very rigorously synthesise anarchism, Marxism and post-structuralist thought. This kind of analysis, undertaken in recent years by scholars like Todd May, Richard F. Day, and Saul Newman produces a complex understanding of contemporary society, capitalism, and radical politics. In effect, the approach I’m tentatively advocating is close to what Feyerabend called an “anarchist theory of knowledge,” or, more polemically, “anything goes.” To come back to our present conundrum, the crux of the matter is this: at a time when the meaning of the Indian Left is in deep crisis, and when Stalinists in power are trying to control definitions of Marxism, (re)discovering other histories of the Left can help us reclaim and refine our own positions. And in this project, Kropotkin’s critique of industrial society plays a small but vital part.

II

Two texts written by Petr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops: or, Industry Combined with Agriculture and Brain Work with Manual Work, are extended ruminations on the state of industrialised Western (and to a lesser extent global) society. Kropotkin’s reading of history centres on the search for what we might today call sustainable futures. It is this search that informs both these works, which call for a rethinking of progress. Kropotkin’s emphasis is on finding ways in which agriculture and industry can coexist in an increasingly globalising world where economies are more interconnected, and fates more interdependent than ever before. He argues for the need to disengage from this universal playing field and bring the focus back to the nation, and within it, to communities and localities. Self-sustained economies driven by intensive agriculture and ‘sensitive’ industry is the thrust of his vision. In this sense his call is also an anarchist one, for it is explicitly removed from concerns of state. Medieval states, he writes in Conquest, were centres of economic growth, artistic production and progress. However, their central flaw was their inability to synthesise the needs of village and city, peasant and citizen in an alliance against emerging states and militaries, which eventually conquered free cities. The transhistorical implication of this view is that existing forms of socialistic existence have always been ripped apart from “without” by states and governments, as in Western Europe, where communal lands were destroyed by the class interest of emerging modern states. Although he never comes out against large scale industrialisation, his account of the violence on which British industries were founded betrays Kropotkin’s considerable discomfort with the process. The contemporary obsession with and for industry has ensured, he writes in Fields, that we condemn all that is not a “big factory” as somehow of secondary importance. Such condemnation is not only ahistorical, it is also harmful for the future for it means the discarding of non-industrial forms of life. ‘Modern’ is an absent presence specially in Conquest. For here, Kropotkin takes aim at one of the holiest cows of the nineteenth century radical left: The French Revolution. Although he refers continuously to the “great French Revolution,” this qualifier seems to serve as a disclaimer prefacing the critique he makes of Jacobin ideas of progress. In 1973 as famine ruined the French countryside, Robespierre sat in the opulence of Champ Elysées demanding reactions to his “treatise on the British Constitution.”  The “question of bread” was lost in the Jacobin state where the concerns reflected were invariably those of a (paranoid, insecure) middle-class revolutionary government. Hence, even as enemies were ‘purified’ and churches cleansed peoples’ most pressing demands went unnoticed. Even as the Jacobins did their best to smash communes in the countryside, for Kropotkin, those communes which continued to exist on the principle of ‘take what you need and leave the rest’ were models of community organisation outside the realm of state and government. Surprisingly, Kropotkin takes his critique a step further than even this when he comes out almost in support of the Vendeé rebellion (by most accounts a royalist affair.) Calling it the country rebelling against the city, “We have had too much of Jacobin Utopias!” he writes.

Kropotkin calls for an end to this inherent antagonism between town and country, structured by hierarchical relations of power where the former dictates to the latter what to produce, how to produce, when to produce. Instead, the countryside has to be made partly autonomous of the city; and partly it is the city which has to be made reliant on the country: “Let factories and foundries turn out agricultural implements, spades, rakes, and such-like…” This kind of inequality is built into the very nature of the capitalist system, which exploits villages and colonies alike. His analysis of this and of the inherent problem of surplus-value is worth quoting at length:

This is not merely accidental, it is a necessity of the capitalist system. In order well to remunerate certain classes of workmen, peasants must become the beasts of burden of society; the country must be deserted for the town; small trades must agglomerate in the foul suburbs of large cities, and manufacture a thousand little things for next to nothing, so as to bring the goods of the greater industries within reach of buyers with small salaries. That bad cloth may be sold to ill-paid workers, garments are made by tailors who are satisfied with a starvation wage! Eastern lands in a backward state are exploited by the West, in order that, under the capitalist system, workers in a few privileged industries may obtain certain limited comforts of life.

The evil of the present system is therefore not that the “surplus-value” of production goes to the capitalist, as Rodbertus and Marx said, thus narrowing the Socialist conception and the general view of the capitalist system; the surplus-value itself is but a consequence of deeper causes. The evil lies in the possibility of a surplus-value existing, instead of a simple surplus not consumed by each generation; for, that a surplus-value should exist, means that men, women and children are compelled by hunger to sell their labour for a small part of what this labour produces, and still more so, for what their labour is capable of producing.

One of the major concerns that Kropotkin had about rampant industrialisation (and history has proved him right on this count) had to do with the pleasure of work. He opposed a crass division of labour between those who think and those who work. The industrial model (what we might call Taylorism or Fordism) tries systematically to eliminate the joy of work, to deintellectualise labour. Those who work in the fields and those who work in factories both merely “tend” to machinery; they don’t understand how it works. These forms of organising labour seek to eliminate the agricultural labourer and reduce her to just another babysitter of machinery. Two points need to be flagged here: first, in a tentative sense what Kropotkin gestures towards is a redefinition of the aesthetics of work. Second, some of these challenges have since Kropotkin wrote been addressed by capitalism via post-Fordism.

The context in which Kropotkin makes his argument is the ‘decentralisation of industries’ across the world. All nations, he postulates, will soon begin to develop their own industries and accelerate economic growth. Colonisation will not help the subjugation of nations, for these colonies will power their own economies and soon become competitors. Kropotkin writes, with some accuracy, that China will never become slave to Europe. She can always supply for herself, even the most European of desires. Wait, he cautions, till the steam engines enter China. The central important of agriculture in an economy like this is precisely that no one seems to think it important. His contemporaries scoffed at the thought of investing in agriculture because to them, it was an open and shut case: we get all our finest quality grain from outside, through trade with colonies and other independent nations. In exchange we give them technical and commercial knowledge. The dependence is mutual. But, argued Kropotkin, monopoly of technical knowledge will not hold up forever. As industries become decentred, knowledge will spread, technology will democratise. We neglect agriculture at our own peril. Two other objections were made against focusing on agriculture. Some argued that the countries of Western Europe were too densely populated and had no available land to utilise in agriculture. Others said investing in agriculture was senseless in a situation where grains could be procured cheap from abroad. Kropotkin argued that in fact, fertile lands did exist to be exploited for agrarian purposes. But the ideology that has already decided what is good for the people cares little about what is good for the people. Strangely- and more strangely for us, who are witnessing a similar phenomena now- droves of people abandoned fertile lands and headed for cities where they found jobs in factories causing a labour shortage in the fields, even as economists encouraged this flight claiming land can never sustain people anyway!

There is a curious ambivalence is Kropotkin’s thought, rather uncharacteristic of progressive radicals in that period. At no point in either of these volumes does the author condemn a faith in the innate rationalism of people and society. But in flashes throughout both works scepticism with science and rationality can be seen periodically. He is critical of science for misleading farmers, for not understanding that “physiology not chemistry” is what the soil needs. He opposed Liebig’s theories, promoted by his followers, that call for more and more “chemical drugs” pumped into the soil. Science does not understand how practice leads to invention. Farmers do not need men in white robes telling them about crop rotation and regeneration of soils because as practioners who work on and with the soil they have a relationship with it that the detached mind cannot understand. They know how to “make” the soil, how to exploit it without ruining it or making it artificial. One has to pause and take note of this. Kropotkin is attacking two bizarre logics which somehow combine as part of a progressive ideology predisposed to singing praises of industry: one which urges people to abandon fields since agriculture has no future, the other which encourages through the vocabulary of mighty science, people to invest in artificial chemicals to supposedly enrich their produce. What is at play here is pure and simple ideology. As Kropotkin points out, scientists and economists know all the facts, they just believe something contradictory. To this extent, the malaise is not a purely Marxist one, but one which all capital-adoring progressivists share; a lot in which we can club Marxists of some sorts and corporates of all sorts. Kropotkin was perceptive enough to pick up on this affinity between two otherwise warring sides: a common dislike for the small industry untied socialists of various hues and the economists they spent much time ranting against. The socialist polemic against small industries was embedded in a logic put for by Marx in the 1840s, according to which, the disappearance of these units would pave the way for “concentration of capital,” leading eventually to the destruction of capitalism. However, unlike Marx, his followers were not all thinkers, Kropotkin mused. In a footnote to this chapter of Fields he expressed admiration for Marx’s methods and argued that were he alive to see how impossible a task it would be to wipe out small industries, he might modify his stand on the issue like he had on the question of the Russian communes. The question of small industries was a complex one. Kropotkin himself believed that these industries must wither away. But he held that to argue for the destruction of these centres of production as a result of a belief in “natural law” was erroneous on many counts. Such a position misread existing economic conditions and merely stuck to a preordained view of history. The facts of the matter were these: large factories, much praised by socialists were not the ideal centres of working class resistance they were made out to be. In fact, Kropotkin wrote, it was common knowledge that even in highly industrialised countries, a large section of the factory labour consisted of children who could be browbeaten and paid excessively cheap wages. Workers of small industries consequently had little desire to migrate to large factories where they knew jobs would be hard to come by. The undoing of small industries or petty trades was not that production decreased and they became inefficient but that in a situation where large factories were idealised by all, these smaller produces had no market to sell their produce in.

The model Kropotkin proposes to rejuvenate agriculture too, is relevant for our purposes today. The commonsense idea that small plots of land mean unsustainable agriculture ought to be questioned. The objection one often hears in the context of Singur- and other projects- is that small pieces of land can never deliver the farmer from grinding poverty, that large (”mammoth”) farms must bring salvation to poor farmers on tiny bits of earth. Still, as we know Singur was/is highly fertile, producing up to five crops a year. Kropotkin uses the instance of American agricultural practices to argue against extensive farming (which is done on huge plots of land and exhausts the soil) and in favour of a more intensive practice where small plots of land are cultivated. “Making the soil” becomes an increasingly essential part of the argument as does the defying of climate in cultivation once Kropotkin takes aim at Malthusian “pseudo-philosophy.” Many other empirical and practical methods are outlined in Fields for the initiation of a new stage of human life. Kropotkin’s future is a future free of the terrors unleashed by massive factories, where childhoods are stolen from children and the working class never becomes everything it is expected to become. His future is one in which small, dispersed industries coexist alongside farmlands, where local populations generate wealth on the basis of collective decision-making, combining brain and manual work. We do not have to go along with such a vision. We are free to call it utopian and overly optimistic (which is it is.) But at a time when the ideological grip of industrialisation continues to be what it was a century ago, at a time when thousands of farmers are being told to evict their lands in the service of historical progress, it falls upon us to resurrect a critique of the industrial model that questions these views. And in the process we might reinvent both left politics and ways of living (though not necessarily in that order!)