Anarcho Communists

"According to the world's highest medical authorities, burns extending over 75 per cent of a person's body are regarded as likely to prove fatal. The burns of these two patients were not only extensive but also deep, even involving their muscles in many places. Therefore all the experienced surgeons frowned, shook their heads, and expressed their utter inability to save the lives of these men. One of them said, "It is only a matter of three or four days." Another suggested, "At most three days." Still a third one said, "Whether medicine is used or not is immaterial, for in spite of all efforts the patients will die." Everybody seemed to agree on one conclusion "death." In this way the joint consultation was concluded in a very pessimistic and hopeless atmosphere. On the basis of mortality statistics in international medical literature it seemed that these badly burned patients were doomed to die. But the Party organization of the hospital would not agree to such a pessimistic view. The secretary of the general Party branch and the assistant secretary of the medical department branch immediately summoned the doctors treating the patients for a talk, and following that a meeting of all the responsible doctors was convened. The problem was analysed from a class viewpoint, and it was stressed that in capitalist countries it was impossible to obtain the full use of all resources to save the lives of burned workers, but that in our socialist country it was possible to mobilize everything available to save them. For this reason we should not always accept the medical statistics of capitalist countries and allow them to influence us. The Party secretary called the attention of the doctors specially to the following points: First, that they must try to rid themselves of their blind reliance on established bourgeois medical experience, and they must try to think, speak and act in bold new ways. Secondly, they must follow the mass line and depend more upon the power of the people. Finally he said, "The Party will do everything possible to save these steel workers who have created vast wealth for the nation.""

"When they accepted their assignments they were not very confident, especially the assistant head surgeon who simply believed in his own past experience, in the statistics of international medical literature, and in the medical equipment and resources of the hospitals in capitalist countries. Therefore when he first heard the talk of the vice-superintendent, who was the secretary of the general Party branch, he had some inner feeling of resistance. He thought to himself, "This is simply coercing people to try and do the impossible! But since I have accepted the assignment I'll do what I can. At any rate, the patients will die either in the shock stage or later." With such downhearted feelings he entered the ward to see his patients."

"Today I read your autobiography in two volumes, Living My Life. These two books full of life, shocked me greatly. Your roaring of forty years like spring thunder, knocked at the door of my living grave throughout the whole book. At this time, silence lost its effect, the fire of my life was lit, I want to come to life and go through great anguish, immeasurable joy, dark despair and enthusiastic hope, throughout the peak and the abyss of life. I will calmly go on living with an attitude you taught me until I spend my whole life."

"I have spent myself on all kinds of things … I have advanced much politically but I have written little and moreover have written it badly."

"Now my education, life and consciousness are talked about by those who cannot understand what I wrote, what I think, what is my life. They make me up from their subjective imagination and attack me publicly as well as secretly. Because my novels completely obscure my behaviour and ideas, and result in a lot of misunderstandings, my name is related to nihilism or humanism, although I have written a book of over three hundred pages to explain my ideas (this book is very easy to understand and without a metaphysical term). Those who talk about me never read it. They judged my ideas according to one of my short stories, then deduced a variety of strange conclusions and decided which doctrine I belong to. I have been caught in this predicament all these years and cannot get rid of it..."

"Every town in China should establish a museum about the Cultural Revolution."

"Looking at this immensely swollen face in front of him the doctor gently consoled the patient, "Comrade, don't worry and you will recover." As a matter of fact, he was thinking quite the opposite, "You will die. I can be of no more help.""

"Nobody would say the cowshed was heaven and nobody would say the inhuman torture of so many victims be called a revolution of the proletariat. … A museum should be established to remind China of the follies and disasters that had fallen from 1966 to 1976. We cannot forget what had happened and history should not repeat itself."

"Loving truth and living honestly is my attitude to life. Be true to yourself and be true to others, thus you can be the judge of your behavior."

"Later the assistant chief surgeon told people that he had been a surgeon for eleven years, had seen not a few patients die and consequently had become quite cold and indifferent. He was interested only in diseases as such and had no feelings for his patients as people. But what Chiu Tsai-kang had said impressed him deeply. Even after he left the patient's room he thought it over for quite a long while. Here was a man awaiting death who had to clench his teeth to endure the searing pain of his whole body, but who constantly had the nation's steel production on his mind and who wholeheartedly desired to return to his furnace. In the past, he had read of people with such public spirit and unselfish character only in novels. He had regarded them as nothing but ideal, imaginary creations of literary writers. Now he has seen such a hero in the flesh with his own eyes."

"I am a person always full of contradictions... It was hard to choose whether to devote myself to revolution as a soldier or as a writer."

"Only by not forgetting the past can we be the master of the future."

"I believe in the future a new Dante will write a new Divine Comedy."

"I've lived on royalties all my life. It is the readers who have supported me."

"You have your thoughts and I have mine. This is the fact and you can't change it even if you kill me."

"I write just because the fire of my emotion is burning. Had I not, I would not have been able to find peace."

"Victory is for them, not for us. We have not made profit out of our country's misfortune. Victory does not bring us luck."

"The unreasonable social system, the marriage without freedom, the yoke of traditional ideas, and the family autocracy, destroyed we don't know how many young souls. In my twenty eight years, I already had it accumulated so many, so many shadows. In that autumn smile, in that smiling which was the same as crying, I saw the young people's corpses in the whole past generation. It was as if I heard a painful sound saying: "This must be ended.""

"I felt a joy in my heart, which seemed filled with love, love for the sun, the snow, the wind and the hills, love for everything around me. It was in this mood that I walked down the snow-covered path dotted with black footprints. Further down the footprints mingled and made dirty little puddles. I picked my way over the thickest snow because I loved the crunching of snow underfoot. With the sunlight pouring down and a breeze in my face I felt that balmy spring was coming to meet me."

"Before my eyes are many miserable scenes, the suffering of others and myself forces my hands to move. I become a machine for writing."

"He had never disagreed with anyone in his life, no matter how unfairly they may have treated him. He preferred to swallow his tears, suppress his anger and bitterness; he would bear anything rather than oppose a person directly. Nor did it ever occur to him to wonder whether this forbearance might not be harmful to others."

"In the past several years, my hard work, my books which I wrote through blood and tears, and the purpose of my life all has been focused on: helping everyone to have a spring, so that everyone's heart will be bright, everyone will have a happy life, and everyone will have the freedom to develop in any way they want. I aroused people to have thirst for, thirst for brightness; I put a cause in front of people, a cause which is worthy of people's devotion. But all of my hard work was destroyed by another power. After arousing a young soul, it only made him or her suffer more unbearable trampling torment."

"The desire to link theory with practice is evident in almost all Kropotkin's contributions to Le Révolté. He is considering the revolution, not in the apocalyptic form of a vast inferno of destruction which so often haunted Bakunin, but as a concrete event in which the rebellious workers must be aware of the consequences of their actions, so that revolt will not end in the establishment of new organs of power that will halt the natural development of a free society. … Revolution cannot be made with words alone; a knowledge of the necessary action and a will toward it must also exist."

"To those who knew Kropotkin, the man seemed more important than his works, and throughout our account we have had to record the strong impressions of amiability and goodness left by him. He had many ideological enemies, but few men of celebrity in their own time have had so few personal foes; even those bitterly opposed to his teachings usually found his modesty and sincerity difficult to resist. … His ideal of human solidarity was no vague conception, nor his amiability a superficial virtue. They were continually manifested in his daily life, and, although he may at times have fallen into error, there is nothing in Kropotkin's acts or writings of intellectual dishonesty. He always spoke what he thought to be right, and was ready to take the consequences, whether it meant imprisonment or — what was much worse to a man of his character — the loss of old and respected friends. He was always kind, anxious to avoid giving pain or inconvenience, and conscious of the needs of others. His hospitality was wide, his sympathy abundant, his generosity as unlimited as his resources allowed."

"… the purest and most upright apostle of individualism … the righteous man (tsadik) of the new world … a pure and crystalline soul."

"Two of the most perfect lives I have come across in my own experience are the lives of Verlaine and of Prince Kropotkin: both of them men who have passed years in prison: the first, the one Christian poet since Dante; the other, a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which seems coming out of Russia."

"He (Jack London) wrote an essay called "What Life Means to Me" which takes its place with Kropotkin's "Appeal to the Young" and Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," and its closing sentence rings with his faith in the rise of the common man. "The stairway of time is ever echoing with the wooden shoe going up, the polished boot descending.""

"A lot of anarchists had a major role in influencing my political thinking, especially the individualist anarchists. … I find a lot of Kropotkin compatible even though he was a communist anarchist. Nothing wrong with communist anarchism as long as it remains voluntary. Any one that wants to go make a commune, go ahead, do it. I got nothing against it. As long as there's room to the individualist to do his or her own thing."

"It was the development of the theory of anarchist communism that Kropotkin believed to be his main contribution to the theory of anarchism. Indeed, what had the economic ideal of the anarchist movement been before Kropotkin published a series of his famous articles in the Le Révolté newspaper in 1879, articles which eventually made up his book Words of a Rebel?"

"the very existence of the commons implies the reality of cooperative management and ownership. It is important to recognize that competition has not always been a driving force in human societies. The scientist and philosopher Peter Kropotkin writes: "If we... ask Nature: "who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?" we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization.""

"He was probably one of the noblest souls that ever lived. He writes in his book that he'd been away in the Urals-he was a geographer-and he was discovering that the mountains really ran in a different direction than everybody had thought. When he came back, he said, "There seems to be nothing left of our movements. The only movement that seems to have any power at all is the Women's Movement. And I think maybe the reason for this is that these young women are going about teaching the serfs to read." (These are inexact quotes.) He said that it might be because they were thinking not only of themselves, but also of how to share the earth with others. It was very thrilling to me to think about; it brings us back to the seventies and what was happening then.-Was everything falling apart? No, no. There was the Women's Movement growing."

"I once asked Prince Kropotkin, the Russian nihilist, how he endured his long years in prison, deprived of books, pen, ink, and paper. “Ah,” he said, “I thought out many questions on which I had a deep interest. In the pursuit of an idea I took no note of time. When tired of solving knotty problems I recited all the beautiful passages in prose or verse I had ever learned. I became acquainted with my self and my own resources. I had a world of my own, a vast empire, that no Russian jailor or Czar could invade.” Such is the value of liberal thought and broad culture when shut from all human companionship, bringing comfort and sunshine within even the four walls of a prison cell. As women ofttimes share a similar fate, should they not have all the consolation that the most liberal education can give?"

"Inspired by Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread, Mollie Steimer joined the anarchist group Freedom in 1917...Steimer's conversion to anarchism derived less from an emotional response to a crisis situation than from her acceptance of the basic tenets of anarchist ideology. As a disciple of Kropotkin, Steimer possessed an intellectual and moral vision of the future."

"Kropotkin, while expecting women to engage in active political work, expressed impatience with those women who put feminism ahead of their devotion to the (male) working class. His own family relationships were almost stereotypically conventional. Proudhon, Kropotkin, and the other anarchist theorists who viewed women in such conventional ways argued that certain behavior patterns were natural for each sex. Since nature provided woman with a dependent personality, a nurturing instinct, and a desire for motherhood, to have her act in accord with those feelings would not violate her freedom because they would be an expression of her natural self. Many anarchist women, from Emma Goldman to the unassuming Helena Born, disagreed with this notion of woman's nature."

"The chief inspiration of the anarchist communism of the 1880s and 1890s, Peter Kropotkin, encouraged women's activism within the movement but disapproved of feminism. He saw the struggle of the working class for liberation as primary; women's specific interests were to be subordinated to the achievement of this goal."

"A scientist, humanitarian and of royal birth, Kropotkin is a genius of the age; not only does his colossal intellect cause him to stand in bold relief, but his personality is one of indescribable and unduplicated power."

"Kropotkin’s communism stems from two sources: on the one hand, from the study of economic phenomena and their historical development, and, on the other, from the social ideal of equality and freedom. His objective scientific research and his passionate search for a social formation into which maximum justice can be embodied consistently led him to the same solution: anarchist communism."

"Kropotkin … created a dichotomy within the general notion of struggle — two forms with opposite import: (1) organism against organism of the same species for limited resources, leading to competition; and (2) organism against environment, leading to cooperation. … Kropotkin did not deny the competitive form of struggle, but he argued that the cooperative style had been underemphasized and must balance or even predominate over competition in considering nature as a whole. … I would hold that Kropotkin’s basic argument is correct. Struggle does occur in many modes, and some lead to cooperation among members of a species as the best pathway to advantage for individuals. If Kropotkin overemphasized mutual aid, most Darwinians in Western Europe had exaggerated competition just as strongly. If Kropotkin drew inappropriate hope for social reform from his concept of nature, other Darwinians had erred just as firmly (and for motives that most of us would now decry) in justifying imperial conquest, racism, and oppression of industrial workers as the harsh outcome of natural selection in the competitive mode."

"We must shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers furtively stalking about city streets at night. Kropotkin was a genial man, almost saintly according to some, who promoted a vision of small communities setting their own standards by consensus for the benefit of all, thereby eliminating the need for most functions of a central government. … I confess that I have always viewed Kropotkin as daftly idiosyncratic, if undeniably well meaning. … he was a man of strange politics and unworkable ideals, wrenched from the context of his youth, a stranger in a strange land …"

"Odonanism is roughly identifiable with anarchism. I think it is a fairly identifiable form of the anarchist lineage of Kropotkin, Emma Goldman and, to a large extent, Paul Goodman. It's pacifist anarchism, an identifiable tradition, not Bakhunism. It's just that nobody else had ever used it for fiction-it seemed such a pity."

"His appeal to the youth of the poor struck home to me personally, as if he were speaking to us there in our shabby poverty-stricken Bronx flat: "Must you drag on the same weary existence as your father and mother for thirty or forty years? Must you toil your life long to procure for others all the pleasures of well-being, of knowledge, of art, and keep for yourself only the eternal anxiety as to whether you can get a bit of bread?""

"It is difficult, however, to avoid the feeling that in this mild latter-day anarchism of Kropotkin something has been lost of that fierce dynamic of revolt which animated the anarchism of Bakunin. Bakunin's indignation at the wickedness of the tyrant was no doubt accompanied by a naive faith in the constructive capacity and untutored goodness of the masses. In Kropotkin this faith has got mixed up with the Victorian belief in the inevitability of progress. His anarchism, no less than Marx's communism, claimed to have a scientific foundation. It was "more than a mere mode of action or a mere conception of a free society"; it was "part of a philosophy, natural and social", and "must be treated by the same methods as natural sciences". In pursuit of this conception Kropotkin wrote what was once probably the most famous of all his works, Mutual Aid, in which he demonstrated, in contradiction to the Darwinian theory of progress through the struggle for existence, that animal life, as well as primitive human societies, survived not through processes of mutual destruction but through processes of cooperation. Towards this conception human society was constantly and continuously evolving. To-day such conceptions seem as faded and irrelevant as the pseudo-scientific political applications of Darwinism which they were intended to refute. And with them goes the pseudo-scientific optimism about the progressive evolution of human nature which was the basis of Kropotkin's anarchist creed."

"have we made progress? Oh, we certainly have, we certainly have, in spite of all the difficulties, in spite of all the problems, the labor movement has made tremendous progress. There is a new role and a new outlook for youth today. One of the pamphlets that I read years ago, I don't know if any of you have ever heard of it, is Peter Kropotkin's Appeal to the Young and it was a beautiful appeal to the young to carry forward their responsibility to make this world a better world to live in. Now, I feel in our way we did our best but the time comes when you know, they say old age isn't a disease but I say it is. The time comes when you have to slow down and lay off and give the benefit of your experience to a younger generation, if they want it."

"I read Goodman and Kropotkin and Emma and the rest, and finally found a politics I liked. But then I had to integrate these political ideas, which I'd formulated over a good year's reading, into a novel, a utopia. The whole process took quite a while, as you might imagine, and there were hundreds of little details that never found their way into the novel."

"In this wonderful procession of revolutionists, Prince Kropotkin, or, as he prefers to be called, Peter Kropotkin, was doubtless the most distinguished. When he came to America to lecture, he was heard throughout the country with great interest and respect"

"Unless Socialists are prepared openly and avowedly to profess that the satisfaction of the needs of each individual must be their very first aim; unless they have prepared public opinion to establish itself firmly at this standpoint, the people in their next attempt to free themselves will once more suffer a defeat."

"Russia was our main point of discussion. The conditions were terrible, as everyone agreed, and the Dictatorship the greatest crime of the Bolsheviki. But there was no reason to lose faith, he assured me. The Revolution and the masses were greater than any political Party and its machinations. The latter might triumph temporarily, but the heart of the Russian masses was uncorrupted and they would rally themselves to a clear understanding of the evil of the Dictatorship and of Bolshevik tyranny. Present Russian life, he said, was an artificial condition forced by the governing class. The rule of a small political Party was based on false theories, violent methods, fearful blunders and general inefficiency. They were suppressing the very expression of the people's will and initiative which alone could rebuild the ruined economic life of the country. The stupid attitude of the Allied Powers, the blockade and the attacks on the Revolution by the interventionists were helping to strengthen the power of the Communist regime. But things will change and the masses will awaken to the realisation that no one, no political Party or governmental clique must be permitted in the future to monopolise the Revolution, to control or direct it, for such attempts inevitably result in the death of the Revolution itself. Various other phases of the Revolution we discussed on that occasion. Kropotkin particularly emphasised the constructive side of revolutions, and especially that the organisation of the economic life must be dealt with as the first and greatest necessity of a revolution, as the foundation of its existence and development."

"It is especially in the domain of ethics that the dominating importance of the mutual-aid principle appears in full. That mutual aid is the real foundation of our ethical conceptions seems evident enough. But whatever the opinions as to the first origin of the mutual-aid feeling or instinct may be whether a biological or a supernatural cause is ascribed to it — we must trace its existence as far back as to the lowest stages of the animal world; and from these stages we can follow its uninterrupted evolution, in opposition to a number of contrary agencies, through all degrees of human development, up to the present times. Even the new religions which were born from time to time — always at epochs when the mutual-aid principle was falling into decay in the theocracies and despotic States of the East, or at the decline of the Roman Empire — even the new religions have only reaffirmed that same principle. They found their first supporters among the humble, in the lowest, downtrodden layers of society, where the mutual-aid principle is the necessary foundation of every-day life; and the new forms of union which were introduced in the earliest Buddhist and Christian communities, in the Moravian brotherhoods and so on, took the character of a return to the best aspects of mutual aid in early tribal life. Each time, however, that an attempt to return to this old principle was made, its fundamental idea itself was widened. From the clan it was extended to the stem, to the federation of stems, to the nation, and finally — in ideal, at least — to the whole of mankind."

"As to the sudden industrial progress which has been achieved during our own century, and which is usually ascribed to the triumph of individualism and competition, it certainly has a much deeper origin than that. Once the great discoveries of the fifteenth century were made, especially that of the pressure of the atmosphere, supported by a series of advances in natural philosophy — and they were made under the medieval city organization, — once these discoveries were made, the invention of the steam-motor, and all the revolution which the conquest of a new power implied, had necessarily to follow... To attribute, therefore, the industrial progress of our century to the war of each against all which it has proclaimed, is to reason like the man who, knowing not the causes of rain, attributes it to the victim he has immolated before his clay idol. For industrial progress, as for each other conquest over nature, mutual aid and close intercourse certainly are, as they have been, much more advantageous than mutual struggle."

"In primitive Buddhism, in primitive Christianity, in the writings of some of the Mussulman teachers, in the early movements of the Reform, and especially in the ethical and philosophical movements of the last century and of our own times, the total abandonment of the idea of revenge, or of "due reward" — of good for good and evil for evil — is affirmed more and more vigorously. The higher conception of "no revenge for wrongs," and of freely giving more than one expects to receive from his neighbours, is proclaimed as being the real principle of morality — a principle superior to mere equivalence, equity, or justice, and more conducive to happiness. And man is appealed to to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which is always personal, or at the best tribal, but by the perception of his oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support — not mutual struggle — has had the leading part. In its wide extension, even at the present time, we also see the best guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race."