Editing Anarcho-Communism (section)

==Variants==
===[[File:Kropotkin.png]] '''{{Colorlink|#202020|mh:philosophyball:Kropotkinism|Kropotkinism}}===
====Critique of capitalism====
Kropotkin critiqued the fallacies of feudalism and capitalism's economic systems. He believed they created poverty and artificial scarcity and promoted privilege. Alternatively, he proposed a more decentralized economic system based on mutual aid and voluntary cooperation. He argued that the tendencies for this kind of organization exist in evolution and human society.

Kropotkin partly disagreed with the Marxist critique of capitalism, including the labor theory of value, believing there was no necessary link between work performed and the values of commodities. His attack on the institution of wage labor was based more on employers' power over employees and not only on extracting surplus value from their labor. Kropotkin claimed this power was made possible by the state's protection of private ownership of productive resources. However, Kropotkin believed the possibility of surplus value was itself the problem, holding that society would still be unjust if the workers of a particular industry kept their surplus to themselves rather than redistributing it for the common good.
====Critique of state socialism====
Kropotkin believed that a communist society could be established only by a social revolution, which he described as, "... the taking possession by the people of all social wealth. It is the abolition of all the forces which have so long hampered the development of Humanity". However, he criticized forms of revolutionary methods (like those proposed by Marxism and Blanquism) that retained the use of state power, arguing that any central authority was incompatible with the dramatic changes needed by a social revolution. Kropotkin believed that the mechanisms of the state were deeply rooted in maintaining the power of one class over another and thus could not be used to emancipate the working class. Instead, Kropotkin insisted that private property and the state must be abolished together.

The economic change that will result from the Social Revolution will be so immense and so profound it must change all the relations based today on property and exchange that it is impossible for one or any individual to elaborate on the different social forms that must spring up in the society of the future. [...] Any authority external to it will only be an obstacle, only a trammel on the organic labor which must be accomplished, and beside that a source of discord and hatred.

Kropotkin believed that any post-revolutionary government would lack the local knowledge to organize a diverse population. Their vindictive, self-serving, or narrow ideals would limit their vision of society. To ensure order, preserve authority, and organize production, the state must use violence and coercion to suppress further revolution and control workers. The workers would be reliant on the state bureaucracy to organize them, so they would never develop the initiative to self-organize as they needed. This would lead to the re-creation of classes, an oppressed workforce, and eventually another revolution. Thus, Kropotkin wrote that maintaining the state would paralyze any true social revolution, making the idea of a "revolutionary government" a contradiction in terms:

We know that Revolution and Government are incompatible; one must destroy the other, no matter what name is given to the government, whether dictator, royalty, or parliament. We know that what makes the strength and the truth of our party is contained in this fundamental formula — "Nothing good or durable can be done except by the free initiative of the people, and every government tends to destroy it;" so the very best among us, if their ideas had not to pass through the crucible of the popular mind, before being put into execution, and if they should become masters of that formidable machine — the government — and could thus act as they chose, would become in a week fit only for the gallows. We know whither every dictator leads, even the best-intentioned — namely to the death of all revolutionary movements.

Rather than a centralized approach, Kropotkin stressed the need for a decentralized organization. He believed that dissolving the state would cripple counter-revolution without reverting to authoritarian methods of control, writing, "To conquer, something more than guillotines are required. It is the revolutionary idea, the truly wide revolutionary conception, which reduces its enemies to impotence by paralyzing all the instruments by which they have governed hitherto."[59] He believed this was possible only through a widespread "Boldness of thought, a distinct and wide conception of all that is desired, a constructive force arising from the people in proportion as the negation of authority dawns; and finally—the initiative of all in the work of reconstruction—this will give to the revolution the Power required to conquer."

Kropotkin applied this criticism to the Bolsheviks' rule following the October Revolution. Kropotkin summarized his thoughts in a 1919 letter to the workers of Western Europe, promoting the possibility of revolution and warning against the centralized control in Russia, which he believed had condemned them to failure. Kropotkin wrote to Lenin in 1920, describing the desperate conditions he believed would result from bureaucratic organization and urging Lenin to allow for local and decentralized institutions. Following an announcement of executions later that year, Kropotkin sent Lenin another furious letter, admonishing the terror that Kropotkin saw as needlessly destructive.

====Cooperation and competition====
In 1902, Kropotkin published his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which gave an alternative view of animal and human survival. At the time, some proponents of "Social Darwinism," such as Francis Galton, proffered a theory of interpersonal competition and natural hierarchy. Instead, Kropotkin argued that "it was an evolutionary emphasis on cooperation instead of competition in the Darwinian sense that made for the success of species, including humans". In the last chapter, he wrote:


In the animal world, we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense – not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavorable to the species. The animal species [...] in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits [...] and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development [...] are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and accumulating experience, higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.

Kropotkin did not deny the presence of competitive urges in humans but did not consider them the driving force of human history. He believed that seeking out conflict proved to be socially beneficial only in attempts to destroy injustice and authoritarian institutions such as the state or the Russian Orthodox Church, which he saw as stifling human creativity and impeding human instinctual drive towards cooperation.

Kropotkin claimed that the benefits arising from mutual organization incentivize humans more than mutual strife. His hope was that in the long run, mutual organization would drive individuals to produce. Anarcho-primitivists and anarcho-communists believe that a gift economy can break the cycle of poverty. They rely on Kropotkin, who believed that the hunter-gatherers he had visited implemented mutual aid. 
====Mutual aid====
In his 1892 book The Conquest of Bread, Kropotkin proposed a system of economics based on mutual exchanges made in a system of voluntary cooperation. He believed that in a society that is socially, culturally, and industrially developed enough to produce all the goods and services it needs, there would be no obstacle, such as preferential distribution, pricing, or monetary exchange, to prevent everyone from taking what they need from the social product. He supported the eventual abolition of money or tokens of exchange for goods and services.

Kropotkin believed that Mikhail Bakunin's collectivist economic model was just a wage system by a different name[70] and that such a system would breed the same type of centralization and inequality as a capitalist wage system. He stated that it is impossible to determine the value of an individual's contributions to the products of labor. He thought that anyone in a position of trying to make such determinations would wield authority over those whose wages they determined.

According to Kirkpatrick Sale, "[w]ith Mutual Aid especially, and later with Fields, Factories, and Workshops, Kropotkin was able to move away from the absurdist limitations of individual anarchism and no-laws anarchism that had flourished during this period and provide instead a vision of communal anarchism, following the models of independent cooperative communities he discovered while developing his theory of mutual aid. It was an anarchism that opposed centralized government and state-level laws as traditional anarchism did but understood that at a certain small scale, communities, communes, and co-ops could flourish and provide humans with a rich material life and wide areas of liberty without centralized control."
====Self-sufficiency====
Kropotkin's focus on local production led to his view that a country should strive for self-sufficiency by manufacturing its goods and growing its food, thus lessening the need to rely on imports. To these ends, he advocated irrigation and greenhouses to boost local food production.