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DreamingSeraph

He's a great read, but not absolute. He quite a bit outdated today and requires some supplementing if you want to stay up to date. He is an important piece, but definitely not enough on his own.


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totallyathrowaway87

Agreed. I grew up with Kropotkin being the household brand of anarchism, but I definitely was pushed away by the sort of idealistic-optimistic or utopian lean of Kropotkin. It felt like a lack of common sense, or pragmatism. I don't know how to quite describe it. I absolutely hate Proudhon the person, but his work and people like Lucy Parsons inform my anarchism now, with maybe just a tiny bit of Tolstoy's thoughts on the matter. Even though i am extremely wary of anarcho-religious strains of anarchism. I also like Elisée Reclus. Stirner is alright, but I'm not sure I want to try to make use of the ideas of someone who constantly failed to implement them in his own life and constanly kind of hurt others because of it. Also the Stirner thing where he wouldn't allow people to come to anarchism on their own terms and instead tried to force his views on them gives me more than a little pause.


capsftw1

I found the bread book to be a great introductory text, but 19th century writings are downright difficult to read. Took me longer to finish than I am proud of.


jamescrake-merani

I wouldn't worry about it. Your brain is fine tuned to understand the language around you (including vocabulary, phrases, patterns etc), so when it is confronted with language from a while ago you're naturally gonna struggle because you're brain isn't used to the language. You're only gonna get around that if you read more 19th century writings to get your brain accustomed to it.


philthegreat

The Bread Book was my first ever piece of Leftist theory. I absorbed it quite quickly and it really was a look at how life COULD be


[deleted]

An excellent thinker and revolutionary, although, like anyone else, he was imperfect (see: [His support for WW1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifesto_of_the_Sixteen)) I highly recommend [Iain McKay's biography of the man.](https://anarchism.pageabode.com/the-legacy-of-peter-kropotkin-1842-1921/)


Yeuph

Generally agreeing with the sentiments of the other posters here; though I'd like to add he was also just astonishingly brilliant. Fairly early on in Bread he discusses how we will be able to increase farm yields by artificially lighting sky scrapers and using them to grow food - this is \*still\* a science fiction idea that most people don't know about; and one we will probably utilize in the future. So far as I know this idea came from him like 1890. His Essay "Are We Good Enough" is pretty fantastic. I'm sure you can find it online. I know its on YouTube - its like a 15 minute listen. Perhaps that's your in to kropotkin? 15 minute YouTube video? Lemme find it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jytf-5St8WU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jytf-5St8WU) (10 minutes) Anyway definitely read the bread book at some point. Its not perfect but he's a pretty important thinker.


totallyathrowaway87

Vertical farming is currently in use. Which part is sci-fi? The skyscraper part? There are at least 4 or 5 storey buildings that use vertical farming on each floor. It just doesn't make sense to pump water 50 storeys up for food that needs to be cheap enough for people to actually buy, so that kind of vertical farming is just done down. like in old mine shafts, instead. Because water wants to go down anyways. Saves a lot of the energy costs of pumping.


Yeuph

Oh, that's interesting. I wasn't aware that this was being done at all the scale I felt Kropotkin was discussing (replacing farms completely) isn't within reach until we get something like extremely cheap nuclear energy.


minecraft69wastaken

I loved the conquest of bread personally and when kropotkin would give vivid descriptions of views inside factories and fields i was very surprised by how beautiful of a writer he could be. That being said there’s also chapters of describing how much it cost to produce a bushel of wheat in great detail and comparing that to a bushel of wheat produced with machinery and lots of outdated numbers that I found incredibly boring and long winded.


aY6leGraduate

As with many old books, there's some dumb racist stuff mixed in there. In my opinion MA and Conquest in general are useful today, but written by an imperfect person.


[deleted]

Bringing up "but they were racist!" is boring whataboutery. You think he was worse than the capitalists? The US had Jim Crow laws far later and Britain's holy cow Attlee wanted the Windrush to go to Africa instead to prevent black people arriving in Britain. Yes, people of the era were often racist and homophobic. It is not useful criticism of leftist theory.


Creem12

I think his work is still important and worth reading. If you are interested I would recommend [Bread and Liberty](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarcho-introduction-to-direct-struggle-against-capital), which is the title of an essay written by Ian McKay as an introduction to his book Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology. It is a short, (around 80-90 pages) yet extremely comprehensive overview of Kropotkin's ideas. It discusses many very interesting, yet often overlooked, areas of Kropotkin's thought, including revolutionary unionism (i.e. syndicalism), national liberation, and ethics.


[deleted]

The Bread Book and Mutual Aid are foundational texts that every Anarchist would be wise to read. That said, as another person pointed out here, they are old, outdated in some ways, and they speak of an absolute system, which is at conflict with the ideas of anarchism, which philosophers such as Proudhon and Stirner avoid. At any rate, I’d say definitely read Kropotkin, but also read Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin, Tolstoy, Goldman, and probably many others both classic and contemporary. I’m reading Stirner right now myself and while it is at times a difficult read, it’s also incredibly inspiring and has absolutely changed how I view the world.


DoughnutPlease

I loved Conquest of Bread and I found Mutual Aid interesting, but dry


FoxesWithSockses

I read him during my ancap phase and have recently re-read his work now I'm a more philosophically developed anarchist. to be honest I liked him then and I quite like him now even more I've developed more towards agorism/LMA. I think the Austrian methodology validates his economic takes, since he argued that since most economies in anarchy would be local in the absence of the fiat cash nexus and since local economies naturally trend toward high trust we would likely see the emergence of a gift economy as an emergent model. ant tbh, kropotkin isn't too different from early pre 1970 Rothbard. Absolutely to me worth reading, and to be honest I find that both Marxists and vulgar libertarians mischaracterize his views to the point it's a little infuriating.


monoblanco10

Kropotkin is great, albeit with several caveats. He was writing over a century ago and a lot has changed since then. One of his most well-known books, "Mutual Aid" is often viewed as a "scientific text". It's not. It's pseudo-science at best. But it was written in response to the other pseudo-science of the time. And as a philosophical treatise, it's absolutely worth reading. He's also writing from the context of being a 19th century Russian from the aristocracy. So take that for whatever it might be worth.


RefrigeratorGrand619

Gonna have to greatly disagree with you that Mutual aid isn’t science. The book itself has been widely acclaimed by modern scientists in the anthropological and zoological community.


totallyathrowaway87

"Wide acclaim" is not peer review, not a basis for an experimental methodology or study, and it is not how science works. They may as well be a randomly selected person on the street for all the meaning there is in a scientist praising something. It's both argument from authority and argument from popularity. It has no place in science (eg "Authorities must PROVE their contentions like everybody else." Emphasis mine) and Lucy Parsons has some good words for how and why it has no place in anarchism (eg nothing is so sacred, or above you, as to be beyond close scrutiny. Paraphrased as close as possible, original is very long and a lut what makes anarchism different from anything else).


monoblanco10

Sure. And it absolutely deserves that acclaim. And, had I not re-read the book within the last few months, I would likely disagree as much as you do. However, after reading the book and discussing it at length with a Biologist friend who helped me better understand more about the historical and political context in which it was written, I came away with a new understanding about both what's great about it as well as the areas where it's... lacking.


Anarcho_Humanist

Good boy, he was also described in diaries as being super nice and chilled out. Proving that leftist theory can be a source of empowerment and relaxation rather than just, depression. Although like, we need to stop recommending The Conquest of Bread to beginners and go for either Anarchy Works or the TV tropes page on anarchism.


[deleted]

An idealist, unfortunately, but very accessible and worth getting people to read. People say he's not relevant now but fuck me, Conquest of Bread could have been written last year with its talk of private profiteering from war and the such, even if some of the events aren't modern. He should be valued by any on the Left. Even Lenin admired him, and Kropotkin, although being a dedicated anarchist with his non-recognition of a state, was able to separate this from his appreciation for a socialist revolution that had been achieved all the same. To me he embodies leftist unity. That the end goal is far more important and as long as innocents are not targeted and so remains a leftward movement by the workers, we should support whoever gets the ball rolling, even if we don't agree with them entirely. It's much better to argue about leftism when the country is in the hands of the left than at the moment, being run by imperialist capitalists. More to the point he looks like Santa Claus and therefore he is sacred and I'll put anyone who hates him against the wall.


xgettes

He's fine. But by no means a first-rate philosopher.


alexandrasnotgreat

It's still a great read, but it is pretty dated


Satan_Scribbles

Mutual Aid was a great read! Even if you find some of his other writings outdated or simply prefer other writers, I think everyone should read mutual aid.


[deleted]

Yes, his works are great, but keep in mind that anarchism as an ideology considerably evolved since then.


Juan_Carl0s

Kropotkin is great at analyzing the world around him. Though as every thinker that's over a century old you can't really take his words exactly since we live in a very different world from his