> 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

> 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.