Kropotkin's 'The Conquest of Bread'
awanderingmind.blog
awanderingmind.blog
I don't think we've ever mustered the political will to even give it a shot, so the fact that we work more than ever is not really a point against Kropotkin, IMO.
Even if you are rich and think you have more than enough, you SHOULD think you want to earn more just to be able to give it away to the less fortunate.
Congratulations to those who have achieved that level of spiritual enlightenment.
Of course we "accept" what we have since it is what we have. What you're gonna do file a complaint?
People in need think they would be more than happy to "accept" a "relatively comfortable life". Who wouldn't? The point is the word "relatively". Once they achieve that level then relatively happy will mean the next thing.
The icon of innovative greed would be someone like Edison who was a profoundly cruel and greedy man who stole the ideas of others more tab he created himself. There's your icon of capitalistic innovation.
Today the general worker in developed countries is more productive than 40/50 years ago but gets less for it. Less and less middle class workers can afford to by their own house or apartment and those with lower paying jobs are barely getting by often under harsh conditions.
Life should be getting better for all due to overall increase in productivity, but it's getting worse for many or is stagnating, while there are few who have been amassing obscene amounts of wealth and power.
The stereotypical hard working SV entrepreneur is in a very tiny minority.
Interviews to people in hospices show that one of the most common regrets is having worked too much.
Teaching to fish and all.
This is worth thinking about. What do people actually do?
Well, this is what.[1]
- Farming is tiny. Under 1% of the labor force. In 1900, it was around 40%. (That's typical of most developed countries. Since the US is a net food exporter, that's not due to imports. Food preparation is 10x the size of farming. (Farmers complain that they capture only a small fraction of the value of food as eaten, but they're not doing more than a small fraction of the labor involved.)
- US manufacturing is around 5% of the labor force. Some of that is due to imports.
In Kropotkin's day, those two categories covered most of the workforce.
- Health care, broadly defined, consumes a sizable fraction of the labor force.
An interesting question to ask is how much other employment is not really necessary. How much is zero-sum activity?
- If advertising was no longer a tax-deductible business expense, there would be a lot less of it.
- If insurance was standardized (as it is for Medicare), the insurance industry could be far smaller.
- If finance faced a tax on financial transactions and was restricted to the product set of 1980, finance would be far smaller.
This would look a lot like China's policies today, or US policies of the 1950s.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-major-occupational-gro...
They’re still not wrong. The difference between what they get paid for a potato and what I pay for a bag is quite extreme.
I think it’s quite a bit different than say, gasoline vs barrel of oil, or iPhone at Bestbuy vs what Apple gets paid, or lower-end clothing.
I get that potato is low value/lb, but I’m thinking the same applies as you go up the value/lb for raw things.
Also, transporting, washing, sorting, storing are all scalable but not free, and these are important parts of the easy availability for the end customer. Then, storage is not preserving 100% of produce, some of it inevitably withers or spoils, and handling this is also not free.
Potatoes are only dirt cheap if you buy them in bulk on the farm, then store in your basement, and sort and handle yourself. This is a lot of work and time spent, I've seen such an approach firsthand.
Financially efficient. Trucking a ton of food 100 miles is worse for the environment than trucking it 10 miles.
> There is no where near enough farms close to NYC to meet NYC’s food demands.
It doesn't have to be just within the nearest few miles. My general point is that shortening logistic chains is a good thing. Is this a controversial idea? Just because its cheaper to ship products from China or food from Latin America, doesn't mean its better for the environment. It means that capitalism's cost model is completely detached from the actual environmental costs.
(This is part of why I'm so strongly in favor of carbon taxes:. It means businesses can continue to be optimizing for lowest cost, and the tax reconciles places where cost and environmental impact currently diverge)
Even then distance is a terrible measure on it’s own. Suppose a local farmer drives 100 lb of food 25 miles to a farmers market in a 25 MPG truck. They just spent 1 gallon per 100lb of food. A semi driving 2000 miles at 6.5 MPG is moving 34,000 pounds is at 1 gallon per 110 lb of food. And that’s just the surface a farmer needs to drive his truck home, where semi’s try to have useful cargo on the return trip. Granted the farmer might haul more food etc, but the semi could haul more and probably isn’t traveling that far etc.
Further distribution chains aren’t about a single good, grocery stores for example get bulk delivery of multiple goods from distributors. When you include people driving to a farmers market who also drive to a grocery store, farmer’s markets often become much worse for the environment than the giant logistics chain their trying to improve upon.
The real solution is to add taxes for the externalities you care about not simply wing it via feel good assumptions.
As for economies of long distance transportation, this is as a result of investment into those forms of transport as a result of centralised bargaining power and economies of scale. It's not like long distance transport has an inherent efficiency benefit over short distance, it's just more amendable to centralization.
Efficiency in long distance transportation is inherently a function of scale. Very quickly you find it’s often more environmentally friendly to do longer distances with full loads than short distances with nearly empty or much smaller trucks/trains/boats/ etc. A farmer > collection point > train to regional distribution points > truck to local distributor works. A farmer isn’t going to say fill up a train on his own, and a train stop per farm isn’t going to work.
At the outer end N to M transactions between distributors with one product sending to different distributors with multiple products works. A grocery store getting deliveries from hundreds of farmers runs into issues especially when people want out of season fruits and vegetables.
The downsides of this model is it’s difficult to supply goods that decay quickly. A farmers market physically next to the farm can sell fresh food that would never work in a grocery stores supply chain. But people driving to every farm is a different inefficiency thus seasonal farmers markets.
True - I think we're better-served in some areas by consciously avoiding pure market competition in service to ideals like fair compensation or environmentalism.
> Efficiency in long distance transportation is inherently a function of scale. Very quickly you find it’s often more environmentally friendly to do longer distances with full loads than short distances with nearly empty or much smaller trucks/trains/boats/ etc. A farmer > collection point > train to regional distribution points > truck to local distributor works. A farmer isn’t going to say fill up a train on his own, and a train stop per farm isn’t going to work.
True. What I'm talking about is shortening logistic chains though, not increasing distribution of logistics. Maybe a farmer's market is a bad example because typically the farmers drive their own crops to market - I was thinking an alternative to supermarkets where rather than the accumulate-transport-distribute pipeline that you described, sale happens directly after accumulation of goods into a locally-central store or market. That accumulation can happen the same way it does now, but you remove or reduce the international shipping and distribution from ISO containers that's inherent to a global market with subsidised transport.
Not only extreme, but also obscene.
I recall in the late 90's someone described the poor profitability of potato growing in large tracts of the USA, and it sounded impossibly low - in the order of hundreds of dollars per acre.
Sad but true -- while revenue per acre may be ~$2500, costs are ~$2000 [0]
There's probably an on-topic observation to be made here about the past century or so spent driving subsistence farmers off arable land, monoculture, soil destruction, leading to an objectively unsustainable potato farming industry (in the sense of throwing more Joules into the working of the land, than you are getting out of it).
[0] https://www.farmprogress.com/story-potatoes-profitable-risky...
He argues that technology does free us from more and more work, and we find ways to spend this time, by wasting it, or by fitting other things into it.
E.g. the lazy Saturday when people can just do sweet nothing, watch TV, play games, or maybe feel bad about nothing good to do is a very recent development.
The problem is the same as with gorillas: habitats supporting such leisurely life are rare, and cannot support density required for any kind of technological and most forms of social advancement. This makes life leisurely but full of peril.
Many of us in software and tech in general understand what he was saying on some level, some even make a huge buck out of it by cutting away the cleric and managerial work. We haven't figured this out completely but the general drive I observe from people who think deeply about process and information is that we tend to be allergic against bureaucracy and the thing we call accidental complexity.
If you look at this things through the lens of a radical, then you might come to the conclusion that the underlying problem is systemic. We have a economic system that is optimized for growth and competition, while most of our big challenges today require maintenance and collaboration. And we have a political system that is rigid, bureaucratic and often violent, when people long for self-determination and peace.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent
[1] - ie. increases in productivity of everyone in the region rather than just a few individuals or industries
We just fill up the day to 8 hours because "everyone has to work 8 hours a day" -- even when the productive parts could be done in 30 minutes per day.
It's now presented as a material utopia, and the first time I read it, I found it to be in many ways as oppressive a way of life as the other forms presented in the novel. But, it has the benefit of feeling plausible and realistic, and as I have aged I find it more compelling than I did in my youth.
In any case. A great novel that should be more widely read.
(You can also salten soft drinks a bit in order to induce more thirst… since all you have to do to hide that salty flavor is to add more sugar.)
We live in a consumer society now, where apparent “abundance” gets turned into new ailments and problems in order to sell more stuff (not necessarily more food—could be exercise equipment or whatever else).
And it’s of course no coincidence that wealthier people have more and better access to whole foods and other supposed “lifestyle choices”.
There’s nothing ironic here at all. Just new problems being invented in order to sell more stuff.
Bread used to be very much the base, so basic that it ended up being mentioned in the daily prayer.
All the carbon management an effort to boost Beyond Burger sales?
In any case, I'll die a carnivore.
Also, beef need not vanish, it could just go expensive, like, say, foie gras.
I personally am totally fine with chicken, fish, and shrimp providing the bulk of animal protein in my diet, and relegating a steak to rare festive occasions, as it was historically.
An unfortunate reality I had to break to my sister in law, Beyond Burgers are not all that "healthy" and they never marketed it as such. People, such as bloggers, media, and friends on facbeook/twitter, jumped to the conclusion it was.
This is one of the secret priviliged pleasures in my life - having zero income yet eating whole foods like some rich person. The sheer social altruism of nordic countries is nothing short of amazing.
But it's really cold here in winter. If we didn't take care of each other, those left starving and homeless would revolt violently, refusing to freeze and die (or die then freeze).
Around the 90ies the "fats are bad" narrative was mostly a marketing ploy from the sugar industry.
Secondly, in some countries there are food deserts or a small selection of healthy food among a lot of unhealthy one (e.g. stuffed with oil, sugar, fats etc)
Finally, the ratio of carbohydrate-to-vitamins is increasing in many foods due to artificial selection and increased CO2 in the atmosphere.
That something in the air would probably have to do with a decrepit monarchy and deeply corrupt church working together to utterly screw over the people and deplete the country's wealth. Pre-USSR Russia is almost a poster child for the harms of the state.
The revolutionaries that followed[0] didn't actually care about abolishing the state, though. They[1] were just better at keeping people angry at things other than themselves. After all, they had a benchmark to compare against - as long as they weren't any worse than before, they could still claim to be continuing "the revolution", whatever that meant.
This even extended past the fall of Communism. There was a brief period of genuine interest in a free market, which was almost immediately followed by the country getting fleeced by fraudulent Ponzi schemes, and then a network of kleptocrats taking power.
[0] Once the revolutionaries genuinely interested in progress had been unpersoned and replaced with authoritarians willing to parrot Stalinist slogans. Auth-left loves to do this to the rest of the left wing.
[1] Or the de-Stalinized bureaucratic mess that followed.
Yes but ...
That's a description of most European states since, say, Charlemagne defined the subsequent millennium of European control structures -- but pragmatically that broad description likely also applies to most parts of the world for most of the past several millennia.
I suspect it's more a combination of Gutenberg tech adoption, and (in retrospect quite torpid) increases in education and state-tolerance towards humanism.
Also, as you note, during-USSR Russia and post-USSR Russia.
None of his structuralist analysis has played out accurately. Indeed it was discredited long before the Soviet Union collapsed. Marx's ideas of historicism have been largely abandoned decades ago.
You no longer hear people talk of "historical necessity" of socialism, nor do people believe that man goes through stages of capitalism to socialism to communism. And with the collapse of the Iron curtain and China abandoning communism, all that is left of modern marxist-lennist thought is the actual Lenninist part -- e.g. party dictatorship, which has proven resilient in some cases as a form of authoritarian control. Even the modern has left has abandoned class conflict as the source of ressentiment and is now pushing racial conflict - in fact one can argue that the modern left is firmly rooted in the professional classes, viewing the working class with great suspicion as a source of reactionary beliefs. That was always the problem with Marx, whose focus was on the politics of the city - real poverty lies in the rural countryside, which tended to be religious and conservative, wanting to honor God and King. This bothered Marx to no end, accusing the poor of having a false consciousness and not knowing what was in their best interests, whereas the urban leftists knew what was good for them. It was the failure, for example, of the republicans in Spain to win over the farmers that was the death knell of the left in the Spanish Civil war. And it was the farmers that were slaughtered first whenever lefist revolutions succeeded, from the Vendee in 18th C France to Ukraine in the 1920s to China in the 1950s. Marxism itself was always a bit phoney with the class conflict -- it is, at the end, a cultural conflict, and the economic stuff was tossed overboard like a used glove the moment a better one was found.
It's true that the world is discovering how fragile democracies are, especially racially diverse democracies[1], but that insight is available even in Plato, and really has nothing to do with Marx. That is, while Marx's notions of some economic end-state turned out to be false, the larger framework of the cycles of history as outlined by the Greeks still hold some sway.
But that does not mean that all of Marx is worthless. He did a good job describing the economic history of the English industrial revolution and was a keen observer of the urban reality of his day. It's just that his recipes didn't work and his predictions didn't pan out.
[1] My favorite trilemma is that you can have liberty, diversity, or centralization. Pick two.
It's interesting historical commentary on some specific events in England, but not "mankind". Capitalism arose out of feudalism in England yes, but Capitalism also predated Feudalism in Rome and other societies. In fact, Feudalism arose out of capitalism!
If you look at the history of Feudalism, it came to be from the efforts by Rome to fight inflation, which required moving away from taxation via currency and starting to tax goods in kind. They then created lists of people with certain occupatons, and they froze the economy -- you needed to do what your father did. People didn't like that, so they started preventing people from moving. That was the origin of capitalism devolving to feudalism.
In other words, the ideas that there are these "historical laws" is the most discredited part of Marxism (other than the pure economic stuff). That idea is called "historicism", and is no longer advocated even by those who really like marxist economics. The reason is that we know a lot more about economic history than Marx did, and especially about non-european economic history, where some societies never experienced feudalism and jumped straight into capitalism with the domestication of cattle in the neolithic era. Fun Fact: The word "capital" comes from cattle. I recommend reading A History of Interest Rates by Sydney Homer.
So as long as Marx sticks to commentary on 18th Century England then he's golden. Alienation of factory workers, economic surplus, rapacious financiers -- it's all good stuff to describe that society. But the moment he starts declaiming universal laws for all societies and economic history in the middle ages or even tribal societies, that's when he doesn't have a lot of evidence for his thesis and ignores lots of counter-examples and most economic historians no longer take it seriously.
In some societies, that capital was cattle (and also other livestock, like sheep). Cattle create other cattle and are a store of value, so that's all you need. Labor without capital isn't worth very much -- you can walk around picking berries. But combine labor with capital and you can feed yourself well and have some surplus left over. So those who owned the capital would attract people who want to work for them and improve their life over picking berries, and they become servants of the cattle owners, and you develop nomadic tribes of cattle owners.
You can start out with just a pair of cattle sold to you in exchange for doing some valuable service to someone else and with a little luck and wise husbandry, your great-grandson owns thousands of head of cattle and is also attracting lots of people work for your clan. This, for example, is the story of Jacob in the Bible, except he got sheep and two brides from Laban in exchange for working for him for 14 years. Or Abraham, who in old age became extremely wealthy in cattle. It's similar to people like Warren Buffet today who are both lucky and well-tempered and they end up with ridiculous amounts of capital. Some get really rich, others get really poor -- their cattle die, or they can't find good pastureland, or their children end up wasting their inheritance.
Similarly, things do not start out as slavery, slavery is what happens as a result of historical processes. Maybe you agree to work for someone for 10 years, but then after you are done you don't have many good options so you sell yourself to them and they feed you and promise to protect your offspring. Then, a few generations later, you have one class and another.
Here, I am talking about nomadic societies. In other societies, things like land and slavery could be the result of conquest by rival tribes. Most nobility in the world originally were some conquering tribe that subdued the local population, and maintained traditions that discouraged intermarriage and encouraged family wealth preservation. You could enter this system by performing some act of valor or conquest, and be rewarded with a title and entrance into the nobility for your children.
Other examples are possible.
But there are many different paths. It is important to remember that all early societies had the notion of private property. Maybe not the exact same notion we have today, but even chimpanzees believe in private property, and will fight to defend a rival taking something away from them. So ownership + the existence of capital goods => capitalism.
The question I have about communist-anarchism in practise is about how well it would manage supply-demand issues. I can imagine that you'd get massive overproduction in some areas, e.g., perhaps a lot of people would fancy themselves as artists. In other areas, needs would probably not be met, e.g., a lot of people might like to have all their meals in a nice restaurant, but there may not be enough people willing to operate the number of restaurants required. Or perhaps there's not enough land for everybody to get all they want, but some guy is farming 100 hectares with some crop that nobody wants, or getting very low productivity, but perhaps he has every right to carry on doing it. I remember in the classic anarchist novel "The Dispossessed" that some of these issues are considered, such as communal eating places which perhaps aren't especially fancy.
You should check out the late David Graeber and David Wengrow's latest book The Dawn of Everything. It came out this year. It does a really amazing job of showing how a defining characteristic of many nonindustrial societies was radical experimentation with self-organization models. Something that many feel is lost today in the way we organize ourselves politically
This happened a lot in the 20th century, and often resulted in a visit from the CIA at the behest of international corporations. The US does not let experiments in political structures play out, it just kills the leaders and replaces them with puppets. See: Chile, attempted in Cuba, and all over Latin America.
If you haven't already, look into Catalonia in the Spanish civil war. It's perhaps the closest thing we've seen to libertarian socialism at scale. It's said to have worked pretty well until it was smothered between fascists states on one side and the USSR on the other.
There's also present-day Rojava, which AFAIK isn't as far along the path as Catalonia was, but still is really inspiring.
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/peter-kropotkin/the-conque...
It's the emergent one. That's why this is a systemic critique of capitalism and not an individual critique of an individual capitalist.
"Darned if he doesn’t sound a bit like Peter Kropotkin, who wrote in The Conquest of Bread 1 in 1906"
https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/elon-musk-on-patents-and-in...
Also the "wage slavery" is indirectly referenced in Apocalypse.
Animal Farm is a critique of authoritarianism generally and Stalinism more specifically. Orwell was in revolutionary Spain, which inspired him to write Homage to Catalonia:
> I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life – snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc. — had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money – tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master.
> — George Orwell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Revolution_of_1936
> I expect that in almost all circumstances the type of anarcho-communism he espouses will eventually lead either to a form of authoritarianism, or to a chaotic state of semi-barbarism in the medium to long term, and to incredible suffering and violence in the short term. That doesn’t mean I disagree with him on principle - I disagree with his analysis of how the type of revolution he outlines, e.g. one based on expropriation, would progress.
Well, the Spanish anarchists were killed by fascists, and the Makhnovists before them were killed by the Bolsheviks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makhnovshchina).
But people seem to like anarchist ideas and especially direct democracy, so we have things like AANES aka Rojava (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_Administration_of_N...). I gather it's not considered real anarcho-communist or anarcho-syndicalist or anarcho-whatever, but it's definitely influenced by those ideas.
Either we have a single public sector overlord, or a variety of private sector ones.
As someone's slashdot sig held, years ago: "Under capitalism, man oppresses man; under Communism, it's the other way around."
For many people capitalism is just a reincarnation of feudalism for the industrial age
Possibly concentrating all the power worsens the situation.
Dictatorships, monarchies, oligarchies, and corrupt politicians worsen situations. Putting power back into the hands of the community and it’s workers shouldn’t do that.
Neither Communism and anarchism seem to model well the requirement for a management layer, or its effects.
These negatives are only transparent in capitalism, somehow.
At a narrower scale, who decides how many hours you work? Did you elect that person, or were they forced upon you? Sure, you could quit & move to another company, but I could say the same of a citizen living in a tyrannical country. It doesn't make that country any less tyrannical. And at whichever company you switched to, you still wouldn't have any democratic input in the workplace. If you don't like your overlord, you can take a mulligan, but it's not easy to switch jobs, and all you end up with is a new overlord.
Contrast this with a society in which investment was public and the workplace was democratic. Obviously it wouldn't be perfect, but it would be a substantial improvement on the current state of affairs in terms of overlords or the absence thereof.
I during work contract negotiation?
> Sure, you could quit & move to another company, but I could say the same of a citizen living in a tyrannical country.
That is not really true, for two reasons:
First, many tyrannical countries forbade that, with border guards shooting people trying to flee the country. That was common e.g. in eastern bloc communist countries.
Second, work is just one of many dimensions of life, so having multiple separate and independent 'domains' is better than all-encompasing state/community. Therefore, switching work is just switching one of several dimensions, not a complete change as leaving a country.
> but it's not easy to switch jobs, and all you end up with is a new overlord.
If you do not want overlords, you can just be independent contractor offering services to public. I do not know about US, but where i live there is permanent shortage of these (so no worry about getting customers) and i knew people who do that exactly because they would not fit to typical corporate structure.
> Contrast this with a society in which investment was public and the workplace was democratic.
Current society says a little about how corporations are internally organized. You could have democratic workers' cooperatives competing in the market. The fact that they make just a small part of economy suggest they are not really effective or interesting.
Actually there are a few reasons why we don't have many worker co-ops. First reason is, private investors want equity. VCs don't give out loans — they buy ownership shares, because that has the potential for a much bigger payout. That's incompatible with the co-op model. Similarly, banks are often tentative to give loans to co-ops, because they're so rare, despite co-ops tending to be slightly more stable than corporations when they do crop up. Thirdly, as a company grows, there's no incentive for the founders to give equal shares of ownership to new employees when it's acceptable for them to keep them for themselves. The less you can pay your employees, the better, obviously.
It's clear that in the absence of regulation, corporations are a more enticing business organization model than cooperatives. This doesn't mean that they're better — the free market sacrifices public well-being for private profit all the time. It just means that government intervention is required to promote them.
> many tyrannical countries forbade [emigration]
Do you think preventing your citizens from leaving is a prerequisite for tyranny? Because if not, then my point still stands, and the fact that an employee can quit doesn't make a corporation's governance just, in and of itself.
> you can just be independent contractor
The economy depends primarily on conventional employees. Some people can be independent contractors, but everyone can't, so even if being a contractor is more desirable, my critique of corporations is still very relevant. Besides, independent contractors often get treated even more poorly because of their unprotected status. Uber drivers are classified as "independent contractors," and this has led to Uber being able to treat them pretty poorly. So I'm not even convinced that contract work is necessarily better than regular employment.
A mob isn't a democracy; democracy is structured. If a democracy votes not to permit vandalism and then I vandalize something, I'm going to get sanctioned. A mob has no structure and no restrictions.
Democracy must be tempered with the recognition of individual rights. That, regardless of what the majority hold or believe, the individual has the sole prerogative to go far as his own ability allows him and on his own terms.
I've traced it to a couple of late-1950s books, though their content isn't available online or searchable. (The Polish Review is at the Internet Archive, but text search doesn't find the phrase in 1959: https://archive.org/search.php?query=%22the%20polish%20revie...)
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22under+capitalism%2C+man+e...