Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets - Libcom

NOTE FOR. "ANAR.CHISM : ITS PHILOSOPHY AND IDEAL"
This lecture, reprinted and widely distributed in many languages
as a pamphlet, answers the question as to whether
anarchism has a philosophy, and what that philosophy is.
Kropotkin answers the criticism that anarchism is merely
destructive, by tracing analogies with the natural sciences.
in which he shows that progress takes place by violent
changes in the equilibruim established at any period, followed
by new adaptations, and a new harmony arising out of the
reacting parts. An ever-changing equilibruim rather than
forms fixed by law is the harmony he regards as natural.
This natural growth of society he sees balked by powerful
minorities, holding it in bonds made for their advantage.
Against them he pits the power of the aroused workers
who see the appropriation of their labor and their liberties,
but who are prevented from a revolutionary seizure of land
and wealth by diversion to war and the mistakes in policy of
the socialist movement.
To bring the workers' revolutionary movement to the
anarchist conception of free federation, and to arouse the
initiative of the people to a seizure of property he regards as
essential to restoring the natural process of growth. "Variety
is life, uniformity is death," is a principle which applies
to the revolutionary movement as to all of life. Complete
individual liberty is of course the goal. To aid in developing
these natural tendencies is the practical task of anarchism.
These are not dreams for a distant future, nor a stage to be
reached when other stages are gone through, but processes of
life about us everywhere which we may either advance or
hold back.
ANARCHISM: ITS PHILOSOPHY AND IDEAL
THOSE who are persuaded that anarchism is a collection of
visions relating to the future, and an unconscious striving towards
the destruction of all present civilization, are still very
numerous. To dear the ground of such prejudices as maintain
this view we should have to enter into many details
which it would be difficult to cover briefly.
Anarchists have been spoken of so much lately that part
of the public has at last taken to reading and discussing our
doctrines. Sometimes men have even given themselves the
trouble to reflect, and at the present time we have at least
gained the admission that anarchists have an ideal.
Their
ideal is even found too beautiful, too lofty for a society not
composed of superior beings.
But is it not pretentious on my part to speak of a philosophy.
when according to our critics our ideas are but dim
visions of a distant future? Can anarchism pretend to possess
a philosophy when it is denied that socialism has one?
This is what I am about to answer with all possible precision
of dearness. I begin by taking a few elementary illustrations
borrowed from natural sciences. Not for the purpose
of deducing our social ideas from them-far from it;
but simply the better to set off certain relations which are
easier grasped in phenomena verified by the exact sciences
than in examples taken only from the complex facts of
human societies.
What especially strikes us at present in exact sciences is
the profound modification which they are undergoing in the
whole of their conceptions and interpretations of the facts of
the universe.
There was a time when man imagined the earth placed in
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