The Conquest of Bread is a book by the anarchist communist

Anarchist communism

Anarchist communism is a theory of anarchism which advocates the abolition of the state, markets, money, private property, and capitalism in favor of common ownership of the means of production, direct democracy and a horizontal network of voluntary associations and workers' councils with...

 Peter Kropotkin

Peter Kropotkin

Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was a Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, economist, geographer, author and one of the world's foremost anarcho-communists. Kropotkin advocated a communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations between...

. Originally written in French, it first appeared as a series of articles in the anarchist journals Le Révolté

Le Révolté

Le Révolté was an anarcho-communist journal started by Peter Kropotkin, along with François Dumartheray and Georg Herzig, in February 1879. The journal was partially funded by Elisée Reclus, Kropotkin's mentor. At the time of the journal's founding, Reclus and Kropotkin were living in the village...

and La Revolté (both edited by Kropotkin). It was first published as a book in Paris in 1892 with a preface by Élisée Reclus

Élisée Reclus

Élisée Reclus , also known as Jacques Élisée Reclus, was a renowned French geographer, writer and anarchist. He produced his 19-volume masterwork La Nouvelle Géographie universelle, la terre et les hommes , over a period of nearly 20 years...

, who also suggested the title. Between 1892 and 1894 it was serialised, in part, in the London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 journal Freedom

Freedom newspaper

Freedom is a London-based anarchist newspaper published fortnightly by Freedom Press.The paper was started in 1886 by volunteers including Peter Kropotkin and Charlotte Wilson and continues to this day as an unpaid project. Originally, the subtitle was "A Journal of Anarchist Socialism." The title...

, of which Kropotkin was a co-founder. It has been translated and reprinted numerous times: it was translated into Norwegian already in 1898, and in Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

, for example, by Kotoku Shusui in 1909. It has been reprinted by Elephant Editions (1985), Cambridge University Press

Cambridge University Press

Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...

 (1995), Vanguard Press

Vanguard Press

The Vanguard Press was a United States publishing house established with a $100,000 grant from the left wing American Fund for Public Service, better known as the Garland Fund. Throughout the 1920s, Vanguard Press issued an array of books on radical topics, including studies of the Soviet Union,...

 (1995), Freedom Press

Freedom Press

The Freedom Press is an anarchist publishing house in Whitechapel, London, United Kingdom. Founded in 1886, it is the largest anarchist publishing house in the nation and the oldest of its kind in the English speaking world. It is based at 84b Whitechapel High Street in the East End of London...

, AK Press

AK Press

AK Press is a worker-managed independent publisher and book distributor that specialises in radical left and anarchist literature. It is collectively owned and operated.-History:...

 (2007), and BiblioBazaar

BiblioBazaar

BiblioBazaar is, with Nabu Press, an imprint of the historical reprints publisher BiblioLife which is a based in Charleston, South Carolina and owned by BiblioLabs LLC....

 (2008).

In this work, Kropotkin points out what he considers to be the defects of the economic system

Economic system

An economic system is the combination of the various agencies, entities that provide the economic structure that defines the social community. These agencies are joined by lines of trade and exchange along which goods, money etc. are continuously flowing. An example of such a system for a closed...

s of feudalism

Feudalism

Feudalism was a set of legal and military customs in medieval Europe that flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries, which, broadly defined, was a system for ordering society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.Although derived from the...

 and capitalism

Capitalism

Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...

, and how he believes they thrive on and maintain poverty

Poverty

Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...

 and scarcity

Scarcity

Scarcity is the fundamental economic problem of having humans who have unlimited wants and needs in a world of limited resources. It states that society has insufficient productive resources to fulfill all human wants and needs. Alternatively, scarcity implies that not all of society's goals can be...

, in spite of being in a time of abundance thanks to technology

Technology

Technology is the making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, machinery, and procedures. The word technology comes ;...

, while promoting privilege

Privilege

A privilege is a special entitlement to immunity granted by the state or another authority to a restricted group, either by birth or on a conditional basis. It can be revoked in certain circumstances. In modern democratic states, a privilege is conditional and granted only after birth...

. He goes on to propose a more decentralised economic system based on mutual aid

Mutual aid

Mutual aid may refer to:*Mutual aid , a tenet of organization theories.*Mutual aid , an agreement between emergency responders.*Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, a biology book by anarchist Peter Kropotkin...

 and voluntary cooperation, asserting that the tendencies for this kind of organisation already exist, both in evolution

Evolution

Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

 and in human

Human

Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...

 society. He also talks about details of revolution

Revolution

A revolution is a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time.Aristotle described two types of political revolution:...

 and expropriation

Confiscation

Confiscation, from the Latin confiscatio 'joining to the fiscus, i.e. transfer to the treasury' is a legal seizure without compensation by a government or other public authority...

 in order not to end in a reactionary

Reactionary

The term reactionary refers to viewpoints that seek to return to a previous state in a society. The term is meant to describe one end of a political spectrum whose opposite pole is "radical". While it has not been generally considered a term of praise it has been adopted as a self-description by...

 way.

External links

• The Conquest of Bread – plain text and HTML format at Project Gutenberg
  Project Gutenberg
  Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books...