14 ms·

Kropotkin's 'The Conquest of Bread'

193 points by awanderingmind 5y ago

1-more 5y ago
What sucks in reading the bread book is when you get to the bit where he talks about productivity. He has some great figures on the productive output of every industry in France, and what it would take for everyone in France to have enough down to the per capita consumption of meat, grain, etc. And he pointed to the industrial changes that had done so much already: surely the age of plenty for all and copious leisure is right around the corner, if we can just muster the political will! But it doesn't work out like that. We still work a lot. In fact there's a loosely negative correlation between difficulty of a job and standard of living in the U.S. So every time a futurist talks about how AI or automation or whatever is going to give everyone so much free time we won't know what to do with ourselves, I can't help but think back to the facts and figures of this dude writing before we'd even harnessed electricity at scale.
- teg4n_ 5y ago
  >copious leisure is right around the corner, if we can just muster the political will! But it doesn't work out like that. We still work a lot. 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.
  - galaxyLogic 5y ago
    I think the issue is we are all mortals. No matter how much wealth we have we will all die. Sorry to crash the party. But wealth can prolong life and make it more enjoyable. People will never have enough so they will work more even when they don't have shortage of food. 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.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      I think you underestimate the number of people who'd accept a relatively comfortable life. Not everyone wants to max things out.
      - galaxyLogic 5y ago
        > number of people who'd accept a relatively comfortable life 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.
        germinalphrase 5y ago
        That “having enough” requires enlightenment speaks volumes about our cultural disease.
        gretch 5y ago
        Why is it necessarily a disease and not a natural part of the human condition? It seems to me like if we were the sort of beings to say “this is enough”, we would have never made it out of hunter-gatherer.
        beaconstudios 5y ago
        Ambition and curiosity are separate instincts from greed. If you think all innovation comes from greed, that itself is a cultural belief and cannot explain the greatest innovators in history like Einstein, Newton, Da Vinci or Tesla. 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.
        dgb23 5y ago
- Animats 5y ago
  "copious leisure is right around the corner, if we can just muster the political will! But it doesn't work out like that. We still work a lot." 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-group.htm https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-major-occupational-gro...
  - Scoundreller 5y ago
    > Farmers complain that they capture only a small fraction of the value of food as eaten 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.
    - nine_k 5y ago
      Production is cheap because it's massive and economies of scale apply, but distribution is not because it works with every customer inevitably. Every customer in a supermarket needs to interact with a cashier. 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.
- nine_k 5y ago
  Have you read Clay Shirky's "Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus" [1]? 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. [1]: https://gist.github.com/jm3/6724931 https://gist.github.com/jm3/6724931
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    People like Marshall Sahlins (Graeber's mentor) woudl strongly disagree that leisure like this is recent, in the sense that he believe(d) that pre-agricultural human societies had lots of free time available to (almost) everyone.
    - nine_k 5y ago
      Yes, much like gorillas. 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.
      - AutumnCurtain 5y ago
        The memoir "Indian Boyhood" by Dr. Charles Eastman gives excellent examples of this. He describes life in his native American tribe as alternating between the best life can offer and desperation / extreme discomfort. They did little to no work in spring and summer but faced constant warfare and often bitter winters, not to mention the risks involved in hunting large game. He notes how they lived at all times just moments from calamity but didn't live in fear per se.
- dgb23 5y ago
  Other anarchists have been talking about this issue specifically. A interesting example would be David Graeber[0]. His books Debt and especially Bullshit Jobs were discussed on HN quite a bit. 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/David_Graeber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber
  - 1-more 5y ago
    Yeah, I'm a big fan of his. Bullshit Jobs kinda changed me, honestly.
- neilparikh 5y ago
  The law of rent[0] means that broad increases in productivity[1] will eventually just be captured by land. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent 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
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    Also applies to the iron law of wages where productivity gains are captured in profit and wages are held as low as the market can sustain.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  See Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class.
- darthrupert 5y ago
  Difference is that they had to work all the time to generate enough wealth to produce enough to stay alive. 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.
mikl 5y ago
Considering the obesity epidemic, I think we can consider bread well and truly conquered. That aside, this is “Hacker News”, not really the venue for discussion of political philosophy.
- akimball 5y ago
  Hacking society has a long and rich tradition, albeit primarily composed of a long series of failures. A lot of us are looking for that one weird trick which allows one to end-run the various socioeconomic impediments to a forward leap in the realization of human potential inherent in contemporary regimes.
  - PhileinSophia 5y ago
    [dead]
- drekk 5y ago
  Obesity and malnutrition are two ends of the same coin. In industrial societies we subsidized calorie-dense products (in the US these are corn based), and mostly lead sedentary lifestyles even as children. Kropotkin would have a lot to say about how children of the lower and even middling American classes are both overweight & malnourished at the same time. That's without even getting to the fact that 20% of children are "food insecure" in the wealthiest capitalist liberal democracy on the planet. I hack because some rules were made to be broken. The rule that some children get to eat while others don't is barbarism. I never knew about "school lunch debt" until I immigrated to the US. How could I not hack in a society where many dogs lead better lives than the children (domestic & abroad)?
- dang 5y ago
  You may have an overly narrow idea of what HN is for. As you'll see if you check https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, the site is for anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity. Kropotkin was a fascinating figure and certainly counts.
  - 5y ago
kmeisthax 5y ago
>There appears to have been something in the air in 19th century Russia that lent itself to the formation of socialist and anarchic activity. I’m not sure what it was, but it appears to have subsided. 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.
- Jedd 5y ago
  > 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. 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.
- PixyMisa 5y ago
  "Pre-USSR Russia is almost a poster child for the harms of the state." Also, as you note, during-USSR Russia and post-USSR Russia.
prvc 5y ago
Meanwhile, today's poor have a surplus of accessible carbohydrates, and this ends up being harmful to them! Such a thing would have been utterly beyond the imagination of the 19th century intellectuals whose radical views are directly taken up by many young people today (and many more, young and old, powerful and not, in some implicit or indirect form).
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  Oh, the irony! Right? Not really. Carbohydrates in particular have been sold as the top staple of a good diet (bread/pasta/etc. was at the top of the old food pyramid after all) by commercial interests for almost a century. Fats were of course villified for a good while. Why? Probably because it is easier to gorge yourself on carbo-heavy foods and drinks than on other types of food (also less processed foods). Thus you can sell more of it. (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.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    Hmm. I thought that meat was always on the prized top. A steak, for instance, or at least some good poultry. Bread used to be very much the base, so basic that it ended up being mentioned in the daily prayer.
    - smitty1e 5y ago
      I thought we had reached a "Meat Considered Harmful" stage due to climate change. All the carbon management an effort to boost Beyond Burger sales? In any case, I'll die a carnivore.
nimbius 5y ago
Available free on project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23428/23428-h/23428-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23428/23428-h/23428-h.htm
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  And nicely formatted from standard ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/peter-kropotkin/the-conquest-of-bread/chapman-and-hall https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/peter-kropotkin/the-conque...
smitty1e 5y ago
I submit that the chief difference between capitalism and Socialism/Communism is one of cardinality: 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."
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  Did you read the article in the least? Anarchism literally opposes both a “single public sector overlord” and “multiple private sector overlords”
  - PixyMisa 5y ago
    And works about as well as any other perpetual motion machine.
  - petrocrat 5y ago
    What good is being opposed to both of those things if there is no way to implement a situation without at least one of them? The single public sector monopoly on violence is the least bad alternative, because if it were to vanish the vacuum it leaves would quickly and inevitably be filled by the first strongmen who can raise an army via whatever means at their disposal. And that would be far worse than the single public sector overlord.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Who are my capitalistic overlords in America?
  - thescriptkiddie 5y ago
    literally the owners of the the company you work for how are you this dense
    - dang 5y ago
      Attacking another user like that will get you banned here, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please review the rules and don't do anything like this on HN again: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. In addition, would you please stop posting flamewar comments generally (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28749013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28749013)? That's not what HN is for, and we've already had to ask you about this more than once.
abbassi 5y ago
I do understand why "people" do not recommend Lenin to you, and they recommend Kropotkin. Since they belong to a layers of classes that benefit from the interests resulting from imperialist force of your homeland. Lenin will analyze it with scientific rigor and will show how the reality works, and he will not talk about abstract ideas! Ideas are the reflections of movements in the material reality. There are classes! There are layers in each class! Read Lenin for science's sake! We are in a phase that we are preparing for a horrible world war over repartition of the world market. Don't end up in one the trenches!
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  There’s nothing scientific about Lenin, nor about Marxism. We’ve learnt a lot more about how capitalism works, and how our economy works, in the last 100 years. Plenty of better analyses of capitalism in the mean while, such as the “Capital as Power” framework
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    Marx was a social scientist, much of his structural analysis of capitalism still plays out accurately today. Given that science is about building predictive models, that makes him a pretty successful scientist.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      > Marx was a social scientist, much of his structural analysis of capitalism still plays out accurately today. 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.
incompatible 5y ago
The communist-anarchist concept is interesting, to somebody like me, who tends to be frugal (not wasting resources) and willing to work without some kind of carrot-stick mechanism. I can easily imagine living in a community of like-minded people. However, I'm not sure that it's for everybody, and it would be contradictory to try to force such a system on people against their will. What I'd like to see is more experimentation with different social and economic models, perhaps in special economic zones, instead of the prevailing notion that everybody must be forced into a particular model, just because a dominant group has decided that this is best. 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.
- culi 5y ago
  > What I'd like to see is more experimentation with different social and economic models 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
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  > What I'd like to see is more experimentation with different social and economic models, perhaps in special economic zones, instead of the prevailing notion that everybody must be forced into a particular model, just because a dominant group has decided that this is best. 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.
djokkataja 5y ago
> Similarly, there is nothing to prevent a tyrant from arising who will create a system that is horrible in completely novel ways; or some clique gaining power and doing the same. I almost can’t believe Kropotkin doesn’t address this; but I have had the benefit of the history of the 20th Century to draw on, which produced e.g. Animal Farm. The Bolshevik revolution was still more than two decades away when the Conquest of Bread was written, and while Kropotkin did not live to see the formal declaration of the creation of the USSR in 1922, he himself was apparently not impressed by the dictatorial tendencies of the Bolsheviks. 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 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 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_North_and_East_Syria 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.
thescriptkiddie 5y ago
Another classic work from Kropotkin is Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. It's more anthropology than economics, but it is an absolutely fundamental work for anarchism.
- arpanetus 5y ago
  yes, but at the same time quite meaningless
  - Synaesthesia 5y ago
    Not really, it shows that nature is not just a bunch of individual animals competing for resources, as Darwin has sometimes been interpreted. Eg by the Nazis or Capitalists. Rather mutual aid is a fundemental property of nature.
    - Applejinx 5y ago
      That is indeed fundamental. Thing is, there's that AND there is competition. To overlook either, is to miss something significant.
interfixus 5y ago
Presumably, the submission can trace some lineage back to the link below, where John Walker of Fourmilab had this to say of Elon Musk: "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-intellectual-property/421 https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/elon-musk-on-patents-and-in...
epistasis 5y ago
I think one of the best expositions of a possible world based on similar philosophies is The Disposessed by Ursula K LeGuin. 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.
fithisux 5y ago
Number 6 in the analysis hints towards Walter Benjamin argument that capitalism is a religion. This is extremely important that characterizes capitalism as cult. Also the "wage slavery" is indirectly referenced in Apocalypse.
JasonCannon 5y ago
Love the amount of Anarchist thought being posted on HN lately. First people discussing Graeber recently due to the release of his new book, and now the Bread Book.
azubinski 5y ago
The only one thing is interesting in this - why "hackers" are so fond of the moldy delirium of completely useless schizophrenics?
rmanolis 5y ago
The problem with capitalism is that is so good to produce what you really desire that it causes addictions. These addictions change your character from a good kid to a bad boss, bad banker or a corrupt government official, just to keep your addictions to continue. The only solution to the problem is a state cryptocurrency that tax all transactions the same and let the people vote where the taxes will go. This way, we destroy bad bankers and corrupt officials and we will be left dealing with bad bosses when they will come to us to request investments
beaconstudios 5y ago
> This resonates with me, and it certainly seems that something like this is true. But it is unclear to me to what extent this actually is true, or even if it is true, to what extent this is truly due to intentional, planned behaviour on the part of ‘capitalists’, versus the afore-mentioned emergent effects of Smith’s invisible hand. It's the emergent one. That's why this is a systemic critique of capitalism and not an individual critique of an individual capitalist.

What sucks in reading the bread book is when you get to the bit where he talks about productivity. He has some great figures on the productive output of every industry in France, and what it would take for everyone in France to have enough down to the per capita consumption of meat, grain, etc. And he pointed to the industrial changes that had done so much already: surely the age of plenty for all and copious leisure is right around the corner, if we can just muster the political will! But it doesn't work out like that. We still work a lot. In fact there's a loosely negative correlation between difficulty of a job and standard of living in the U.S. So every time a futurist talks about how AI or automation or whatever is going to give everyone so much free time we won't know what to do with ourselves, I can't help but think back to the facts and figures of this dude writing before we'd even harnessed electricity at scale.

teg4n_ 5y ago
>copious leisure is right around the corner, if we can just muster the political will! But it doesn't work out like that. We still work a lot. 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.
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  I think the issue is we are all mortals. No matter how much wealth we have we will all die. Sorry to crash the party. But wealth can prolong life and make it more enjoyable. People will never have enough so they will work more even when they don't have shortage of food. 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.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    I think you underestimate the number of people who'd accept a relatively comfortable life. Not everyone wants to max things out.
    - galaxyLogic 5y ago
      > number of people who'd accept a relatively comfortable life 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.
      - germinalphrase 5y ago
        That “having enough” requires enlightenment speaks volumes about our cultural disease.
        gretch 5y ago
        Why is it necessarily a disease and not a natural part of the human condition? It seems to me like if we were the sort of beings to say “this is enough”, we would have never made it out of hunter-gatherer.
        beaconstudios 5y ago
        Ambition and curiosity are separate instincts from greed. If you think all innovation comes from greed, that itself is a cultural belief and cannot explain the greatest innovators in history like Einstein, Newton, Da Vinci or Tesla. 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.
      - dgb23 5y ago
Animats 5y ago
"copious leisure is right around the corner, if we can just muster the political will! But it doesn't work out like that. We still work a lot." 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-group.htm https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-major-occupational-gro...
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  > Farmers complain that they capture only a small fraction of the value of food as eaten 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.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    Production is cheap because it's massive and economies of scale apply, but distribution is not because it works with every customer inevitably. Every customer in a supermarket needs to interact with a cashier. 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.
nine_k 5y ago
Have you read Clay Shirky's "Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus" [1]? 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. [1]: https://gist.github.com/jm3/6724931 https://gist.github.com/jm3/6724931
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  People like Marshall Sahlins (Graeber's mentor) woudl strongly disagree that leisure like this is recent, in the sense that he believe(d) that pre-agricultural human societies had lots of free time available to (almost) everyone.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    Yes, much like gorillas. 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.
    - AutumnCurtain 5y ago
      The memoir "Indian Boyhood" by Dr. Charles Eastman gives excellent examples of this. He describes life in his native American tribe as alternating between the best life can offer and desperation / extreme discomfort. They did little to no work in spring and summer but faced constant warfare and often bitter winters, not to mention the risks involved in hunting large game. He notes how they lived at all times just moments from calamity but didn't live in fear per se.
dgb23 5y ago
Other anarchists have been talking about this issue specifically. A interesting example would be David Graeber[0]. His books Debt and especially Bullshit Jobs were discussed on HN quite a bit. 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/David_Graeber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber
- 1-more 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm a big fan of his. Bullshit Jobs kinda changed me, honestly.
neilparikh 5y ago
The law of rent[0] means that broad increases in productivity[1] will eventually just be captured by land. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent 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
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  Also applies to the iron law of wages where productivity gains are captured in profit and wages are held as low as the market can sustain.
dredmorbius 5y ago
See Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class.
darthrupert 5y ago
Difference is that they had to work all the time to generate enough wealth to produce enough to stay alive. 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.

mikl 5y ago

Considering the obesity epidemic, I think we can consider bread well and truly conquered. That aside, this is “Hacker News”, not really the venue for discussion of political philosophy.

akimball 5y ago
Hacking society has a long and rich tradition, albeit primarily composed of a long series of failures. A lot of us are looking for that one weird trick which allows one to end-run the various socioeconomic impediments to a forward leap in the realization of human potential inherent in contemporary regimes.
- PhileinSophia 5y ago
  [dead]
drekk 5y ago
Obesity and malnutrition are two ends of the same coin. In industrial societies we subsidized calorie-dense products (in the US these are corn based), and mostly lead sedentary lifestyles even as children. Kropotkin would have a lot to say about how children of the lower and even middling American classes are both overweight & malnourished at the same time. That's without even getting to the fact that 20% of children are "food insecure" in the wealthiest capitalist liberal democracy on the planet. I hack because some rules were made to be broken. The rule that some children get to eat while others don't is barbarism. I never knew about "school lunch debt" until I immigrated to the US. How could I not hack in a society where many dogs lead better lives than the children (domestic & abroad)?
dang 5y ago
You may have an overly narrow idea of what HN is for. As you'll see if you check https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, the site is for anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity. Kropotkin was a fascinating figure and certainly counts.
- 5y ago

kmeisthax 5y ago

>There appears to have been something in the air in 19th century Russia that lent itself to the formation of socialist and anarchic activity. I’m not sure what it was, but it appears to have subsided. 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.

Jedd 5y ago
> 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. 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.
PixyMisa 5y ago
"Pre-USSR Russia is almost a poster child for the harms of the state." Also, as you note, during-USSR Russia and post-USSR Russia.

prvc 5y ago

Meanwhile, today's poor have a surplus of accessible carbohydrates, and this ends up being harmful to them! Such a thing would have been utterly beyond the imagination of the 19th century intellectuals whose radical views are directly taken up by many young people today (and many more, young and old, powerful and not, in some implicit or indirect form).

avgcorrection 5y ago
Oh, the irony! Right? Not really. Carbohydrates in particular have been sold as the top staple of a good diet (bread/pasta/etc. was at the top of the old food pyramid after all) by commercial interests for almost a century. Fats were of course villified for a good while. Why? Probably because it is easier to gorge yourself on carbo-heavy foods and drinks than on other types of food (also less processed foods). Thus you can sell more of it. (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.
- nine_k 5y ago
  Hmm. I thought that meat was always on the prized top. A steak, for instance, or at least some good poultry. Bread used to be very much the base, so basic that it ended up being mentioned in the daily prayer.
  - smitty1e 5y ago
    I thought we had reached a "Meat Considered Harmful" stage due to climate change. All the carbon management an effort to boost Beyond Burger sales? In any case, I'll die a carnivore.

nimbius 5y ago

Available free on project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23428/23428-h/23428-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23428/23428-h/23428-h.htm

ZeroGravitas 5y ago
And nicely formatted from standard ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/peter-kropotkin/the-conquest-of-bread/chapman-and-hall https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/peter-kropotkin/the-conque...

smitty1e 5y ago

I submit that the chief difference between capitalism and Socialism/Communism is one of cardinality: 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."

Ar-Curunir 5y ago
Did you read the article in the least? Anarchism literally opposes both a “single public sector overlord” and “multiple private sector overlords”
- PixyMisa 5y ago
  And works about as well as any other perpetual motion machine.
- petrocrat 5y ago
  What good is being opposed to both of those things if there is no way to implement a situation without at least one of them? The single public sector monopoly on violence is the least bad alternative, because if it were to vanish the vacuum it leaves would quickly and inevitably be filled by the first strongmen who can raise an army via whatever means at their disposal. And that would be far worse than the single public sector overlord.
oh_sigh 5y ago
Who are my capitalistic overlords in America?
- thescriptkiddie 5y ago
  literally the owners of the the company you work for how are you this dense
  - dang 5y ago
    Attacking another user like that will get you banned here, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please review the rules and don't do anything like this on HN again: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. In addition, would you please stop posting flamewar comments generally (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28749013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28749013)? That's not what HN is for, and we've already had to ask you about this more than once.

abbassi 5y ago

I do understand why "people" do not recommend Lenin to you, and they recommend Kropotkin. Since they belong to a layers of classes that benefit from the interests resulting from imperialist force of your homeland. Lenin will analyze it with scientific rigor and will show how the reality works, and he will not talk about abstract ideas! Ideas are the reflections of movements in the material reality. There are classes! There are layers in each class! Read Lenin for science's sake! We are in a phase that we are preparing for a horrible world war over repartition of the world market. Don't end up in one the trenches!

Ar-Curunir 5y ago
There’s nothing scientific about Lenin, nor about Marxism. We’ve learnt a lot more about how capitalism works, and how our economy works, in the last 100 years. Plenty of better analyses of capitalism in the mean while, such as the “Capital as Power” framework
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  Marx was a social scientist, much of his structural analysis of capitalism still plays out accurately today. Given that science is about building predictive models, that makes him a pretty successful scientist.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    > Marx was a social scientist, much of his structural analysis of capitalism still plays out accurately today. 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.

incompatible 5y ago

The communist-anarchist concept is interesting, to somebody like me, who tends to be frugal (not wasting resources) and willing to work without some kind of carrot-stick mechanism. I can easily imagine living in a community of like-minded people. However, I'm not sure that it's for everybody, and it would be contradictory to try to force such a system on people against their will. What I'd like to see is more experimentation with different social and economic models, perhaps in special economic zones, instead of the prevailing notion that everybody must be forced into a particular model, just because a dominant group has decided that this is best. 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.

culi 5y ago
> What I'd like to see is more experimentation with different social and economic models 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
beaconstudios 5y ago
> What I'd like to see is more experimentation with different social and economic models, perhaps in special economic zones, instead of the prevailing notion that everybody must be forced into a particular model, just because a dominant group has decided that this is best. 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.

djokkataja 5y ago

> Similarly, there is nothing to prevent a tyrant from arising who will create a system that is horrible in completely novel ways; or some clique gaining power and doing the same. I almost can’t believe Kropotkin doesn’t address this; but I have had the benefit of the history of the 20th Century to draw on, which produced e.g. Animal Farm. The Bolshevik revolution was still more than two decades away when the Conquest of Bread was written, and while Kropotkin did not live to see the formal declaration of the creation of the USSR in 1922, he himself was apparently not impressed by the dictatorial tendencies of the Bolsheviks. 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 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 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_North_and_East_Syria 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.

thescriptkiddie 5y ago

Another classic work from Kropotkin is Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. It's more anthropology than economics, but it is an absolutely fundamental work for anarchism.

arpanetus 5y ago
yes, but at the same time quite meaningless
- Synaesthesia 5y ago
  Not really, it shows that nature is not just a bunch of individual animals competing for resources, as Darwin has sometimes been interpreted. Eg by the Nazis or Capitalists. Rather mutual aid is a fundemental property of nature.
  - Applejinx 5y ago
    That is indeed fundamental. Thing is, there's that AND there is competition. To overlook either, is to miss something significant.

interfixus 5y ago

Presumably, the submission can trace some lineage back to the link below, where John Walker of Fourmilab had this to say of Elon Musk: "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-intellectual-property/421 https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/elon-musk-on-patents-and-in...

epistasis 5y ago

I think one of the best expositions of a possible world based on similar philosophies is The Disposessed by Ursula K LeGuin. 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.

fithisux 5y ago

Number 6 in the analysis hints towards Walter Benjamin argument that capitalism is a religion. This is extremely important that characterizes capitalism as cult. Also the "wage slavery" is indirectly referenced in Apocalypse.

JasonCannon 5y ago

Love the amount of Anarchist thought being posted on HN lately. First people discussing Graeber recently due to the release of his new book, and now the Bread Book.

azubinski 5y ago

The only one thing is interesting in this - why "hackers" are so fond of the moldy delirium of completely useless schizophrenics?

rmanolis 5y ago

The problem with capitalism is that is so good to produce what you really desire that it causes addictions. These addictions change your character from a good kid to a bad boss, bad banker or a corrupt government official, just to keep your addictions to continue. The only solution to the problem is a state cryptocurrency that tax all transactions the same and let the people vote where the taxes will go. This way, we destroy bad bankers and corrupt officials and we will be left dealing with bad bosses when they will come to us to request investments

beaconstudios 5y ago

> This resonates with me, and it certainly seems that something like this is true. But it is unclear to me to what extent this actually is true, or even if it is true, to what extent this is truly due to intentional, planned behaviour on the part of ‘capitalists’, versus the afore-mentioned emergent effects of Smith’s invisible hand. It's the emergent one. That's why this is a systemic critique of capitalism and not an individual critique of an individual capitalist.