The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin (the best electronic book reader .TXT) ๐
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The Conquest of Bread is a political treatise written by the anarcho-communist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. Written after a split between anarchists and Marxists at the First International (a 19th-century association of left-wing radicals), The Conquest of Bread advocates a path to a communist society distinct from Marx and Engelsโs Communist Manifesto, rooted in the principles of mutual aid and voluntary cooperation.
Since its original publication in 1892, The Conquest of Bread has immensely influenced both anarchist theory and anarchist praxis. As one of the first comprehensive works of anarcho-communist theory published for wide distribution, it both popularized anarchism in general and encouraged a shift in anarchist thought from individualist anarchism to social anarchism. It was also an influential text among the Spanish anarchists in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, and the late anarchist theorist and anthropologist David Graeber cited the book as an inspiration for the Occupy movement of the early 2010s in his 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
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- Author: Peter Kropotkin
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And yetโ โlet us not tire of repeatingโ โthese are not fancy dreams. We have only told what is, what has been, obtained by experience on a large scale. Agriculture could be reorganized in this way tomorrow if property laws and general ignorance did not offer opposition.
The day Paris has understood that to know what you eat and how it is produced, is a question of public interest; the day when everybody will have understood that this question is infinitely more important than all the parliamentary debates of the present timesโ โon that day the Revolution will be an accomplished fact. Paris will take possession of the two departments and cultivate them. And then the Parisian worker, after having laboured a third of his existence in order to buy bad and insufficient food, will produce it himself, under his walls, within the enclosure of his forts (if they still exist), and in a few hours of healthy and attractive work.
And now we pass on to fruit and vegetables. Let us go outside Paris and visit the establishment of a market-gardener who accomplishes wonders (ignored by learned economists) at a few miles from the academies.
Let us visit, suppose, M. Ponce, the author of a work on market-gardening, who makes no secret of what the earth yields him, and who has published it all along.
M. Ponce, and especially his workmen, work like niggers. It takes eight men to cultivate a plot a little less than three acres (2.7). They work twelve and even fifteen hours a day, that is to say, three times more than is needed. Twenty-four of them would not be too many. To which M. Ponce will probably answer that as he pays the terrible sum of ยฃ100 rent a year for his 2.7 acres of land, and ยฃ100 for manure bought in the barracks, he is obliged to exploit. He would no doubt answer, โBeing exploited, I exploit in my turn.โ His installation has also cost him ยฃ1,200, of which certainly more than half went as tribute to the idle barons of industry. In reality, this establishment represents at most 3,000 workdays, probably much less.
But let us examine his crops: nearly ten tons of carrots, nearly ten tons of onions, radishes, and small vegetables, 6,000 heads of cabbage, 3,000 heads of cauliflower, 5,000 baskets of tomatoes, 5,000 dozen of choice fruit, 154,000 salads; in short, a total of 123 tons of vegetables and fruit to 2.7 acresโ โ120 yards long by 109 yards broad, which makes more than forty-four tons of vegetables to the acre.
But a man does not eat more than 660 pounds of vegetables and fruit a year, and two and one-half acres of a market-garden yield enough vegetables and fruit to richly supply the table of 350 adults during the year. Thus twenty-four persons employed a whole year in cultivating 2.7 acres of land, and only five working hours a day, would produce sufficient vegetables and fruit for 350 adults, which is equivalent at least to 500 individuals.
To put it another way: in cultivating like M. Ponceโ โand his results have already been surpassedโ โ350 adults should each give a little more than 100 hours a year (103) to produce vegetables and fruit necessary for 500 people.
Let us mention that such a production is not the exception. It takes place, under the walls of Paris, on an area of 2,220 acres, by 5,000 market-gardeners. Only these market-gardeners are reduced nowadays to a state of beasts of burden, in order to pay an average rent of ยฃ32 per acre.
But do not these facts, which can be verified by everyone, prove that 17,300 acres (of the 519,000 remaining to us) would suffice to give all necessary vegetables, as well as a liberal amount of fruit to the 3,500,000 inhabitants of our two departments?
As to the quantity of work necessary to produce these fruits and vegetables, it would amount to 50,000,000 workdays of 5 hours (50 days per adult male), if we measure by the market-gardenersโ standard of work. But we could reduce this quantity if we had recourse to the process in vogue in Jersey and Guernsey. We must also remember that the Paris market-gardener is forced to work so hard because he mostly produces early season fruits, the high prices of which have to pay for fabulous rents, and that this system of culture entails more work than is necessary for growing the ordinary staple-food vegetables and fruit. Besides, the market-gardeners of Paris, not having the means to make a great outlay on their gardens, and being obliged to pay heavily for glass, wood, iron, and coal, obtain their artificial heat out of manure, while it can be had at much less cost in hothouses.
IVThe market-gardeners, we say, are forced to become machines and to renounce all joys of life in order to obtain their marvellous crops. But these hard grinders have rendered a great service to
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