Kropotkin, Peter (1842–1921)

Like many 19th-century socialists, Peter Kropotkin identified power with the machinery of government [Page 367]and the instruments of repression, on the one hand, and the emancipatory force of the oppressed, on the other. His interest in power was sociological rather than philosophical and his concern was to understand the state's historical rise, outline its likely future development, and suggest the means of its abolition. When he considered power in the state, he broadly followed Jean-Jacques Rousseau, arguing that state formation could be explained as a result of force and fraud exercised by the combined strength of a military, religious, and economic elite. Kropotkin used this analysis in two ways. First, he developed a functional view of the state. Like Karl Marx, Kropotkin argued that the state was an instrument of exploitation in which power was used to secure the interests of the economically dominant class. Second, he developed an organizational theory of the state. In state systems, he argued, power was concentrated in particular ways: centralized, militarized, and hierarchical. Although states might meet their function in different ways, sometimes resorting to open force and at other times relying on fraud, the historical development of the state suggested that the tendency was toward the increasing concentration of power. In the years leading to World War I, Kropotkin used the term Caesarism to describe the likely development of European states. His fear—which ultimately led to his controversial backing of the Allied cause (Britain and France) against Germany—was that states would be “Prussianized.” Were this to happen, he argued, the cause of liberty would be set back, and European states would enter into a new phase of near-constant war.

Kropotkin understood nonstate, or popular, power as the inverse of state power. Functionally, power was the instrument of liberation, and it could take different forms, depending on the historical and political contexts in which the oppressed operated: insurrections, strike actions, individual acts of revolt, resistance, or rebellion. Organizationally, it could only be exercised in decentralized, acephalous, non-hierarchical environments. Kropotkin's concern with the organizational aspects of power led him to suggest that the key to the state's destruction was the ability of individuals to cooperate in the construction of new ways of living. He explored the prospects for such cooperation in the theory of mutual aid. In The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops, he tied this use of power to the process of revolution. In finding ways to secure the means of well-being, he argued, individuals would bypass the power of the state and, in acting for themselves, present it with a revolutionary challenge. Kropotkin's revolution would end with the abolition of the state and the relocation of power.