The new times (Piotr Kropotkin)

On March 5th, 1893, Peter Kropotkin, the world’s leading and most famous anarchist, spoke on “Anarchism” in London. The lecture was a fund raiser for the newspaper he had co-founded in 1886, Freedom. It was serialised in La Révolte before being revised as a pamphlet. It remained amongst the few of Kropotkin’s pamphlets which have never been available in English – until now.

Aiming to be an introduction to anarchism, Kropotkin’s lecture covers a wide-range of issues – including developments in science, the history of anarchism, its aims and tactics, its critique of capitalism and the State as well as the anarchist-communist alternative to both:

“civilised societies must return to the conception that the production of food, shelter, and the rest is a social interest. That everything that serves this purpose: the land, the instruments of production, and the means of existence during production, must belong to society… The expropriation of all wealth and the use of that wealth for a social purpose – that is the revolution.”

As in other works, he stresses the importance of working class struggle in both anarchism and in changing the world: “If the capitalist, aided by his faithful servant, the government, did not succeed, by law and by hunger, in reducing the worker to serfdom, it is because the worker has his times of revolt; it is because he fought, at the cost of nameless privations and innumerable victims.”

As with Kropotkin’s other works, it informs and inspires with power and persuasiveness.