Peter Kroptokin's The Conquest of Bread: An Informal Review

I’m not even going to grace this book with a photo, and it’s totally not because my nails are overgrown and I need to get them redone. I alluded earlier to the online proxy war between J. Sakai’s Settlers and Peter Kroptokin’s The Conquest of Bread, a.k.a. “The Breadbook”, around 2016. It turned out that Settlers was excellent, so why not also give the anarchist offering a taste? It’s only fair!

Y’all. It was not good. At least in my opinion. Not good at all.

Also need to preface this by saying that I've been out of town lately, and so I can't respond to comments for the time being. But I really appreciate all y'all's thoughts, and will reply once I'm able. :)

The Plan

Kroptokin offers a plan for how to enact a “social revolution” and transform the state of things from capitalism (or feudalism) to anarchist communism. What is that plan? Overthrow the state and all the firms in one go, as quickly and as definitely as possible. Revolution for Kroptokin is like a band-aid in that the longer it takes for you to pull it off, the more painful it will be. Besides, any part of the revolution will be incomplete without the other parts—what’s the point of overthrowing firms without overthrowing the state, or vice versa? Plus too, the longer it takes, the more uncertain that people’s livelihoods are in the meantime—and, Kroptokin says, it should take no time at all for them to get adjusted if the revolution is committed.

This is because Kroptokin imagines a society built upon mutual agreements between individuals and companies of individuals. We already have the means of producing vast amounts of food and goods, and everyone is already familiar with how to produce them; they will just no longer be restrained by capital’s demands, and can both produce and consume as much as they want or within limitations set by the community. The country will freely give food to and take tools from the town, and the town will freely give tools to and take food from the country. People seek out collaboration by their social nature, and it is in fact capitalism which prevents them from doing so. They just need to be freed from the formal political structures which restrain their desired activity.

Kroptokin’s basic argument is that it is formal structures of power, like the state or the firm, which exert their desire on an unwilling human population. Meanwhile, it offends human nature since the demands of power—competition and centralization—are contrary to the human desire for collaboration and liberty. This is why, he says, history’s path is progressive as the natural tendency of people to seek out a freer situation for themselves. Anarchist communism is the completion of a long-term historical project whereby humanity attains liberty once and for all. This is all to say that if you were to just get rid of the state and the firm, humanity would have no reason not to seek its own good. They would only finally be free of the structures that have only served to constrain them.

The Problem

The Marxist break with anarchism was the realization that formal power structures, like the state or the firm, are ultimately reflections of unconscious social forces. Marx says in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach, “[…] the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.” This means that the Marxist investigation of capitalism and critique of political economy has nothing to do with an essential human nature, but with the development and increasing complexity of social relations—which only, in turn, shape human nature in their own image and to its own ends. Even critiques of Marx’s predictions, especially that the proletariat would imminently overthrow capitalism, work within the discourse of social relations in order to argue whether the proletariat’s living conditions would align with such a desire (especially in the era of imperialism).

In comparison, Kroptokin’s argument not only takes for granted a specific vision of human nature, but it also takes for granted that formal social organizations are responsible for its repression. This informs the economic and political dimensions of Kroptokin’s anarchist-communist theory, both being defined by a repressive “before”-revolution state-of-things, and then a liberating “after”-revolution state-of-things, where the interim is a revolution that swiftly and certainly sweeps over all of society. Is it necessarily true that, once freed from the centralized violence of the state and the firm, people will cooperate for the good of each other, productivity and consumption will improve, and this can all occur on the flip of a switch?

Come on now. The only theory of human nature that I accept is that people do whatever comes easiest to them; the parameters of that vary by society and individual, but it’s hard to get someone to go out of their way to do anything that they would not usually do. So, after a socially traumatic revolution, after incredible senseless loss and social upheaval, do we expect people to shift gears into the new way of things overnight, especially when our society is so stratified and divided? The division of labor, and the imperialism of the world, are not historical constants, but they will not disintegrate upon their formal aspects being eliminated. That all requires an intentional and effortful mass reorganization of society, at least while not every place can support everyone’s needs. I need my meds.

I also need to not get lynched. I’ve talked about it once or twice, but I live in one of the most violently reactionary states in America—and it’s not just because of the government, but because of the people who live here. There are dozens of sundown towns in Texas, where after dark the white inhabitants will intimidate, harass, and even assault non-white as well as queer people. There's also, I think, more than one "sanctuary for the unborn", where locals voted in public referendums to ban abortion in their city. You can overthrow the federal and state governments, you can disband the military and all the police departments, you can tell everyone to go home and be a good neighbor, and you wouldn’t even scrub the surface of the social  rot which has so penetrated these areas. All the formal institutions which enforce patriarchy and racism only enforce things which already exist outside of themselves. They are mere reflections and extensions of society at large.

Marxism on the State

Let me be clear that, once society has been remade from the ground up, the state would have no function and (we would hope) that it would become obsolete and disintegrate. However, this is because Marx’s analysis of the state ties it intrinsically to the economy as a state-of-things that the state maintains by way of force. In other words, the state serves the ruling class by repressing dissent, and it is only in this dimension that a state qua state exists (who cares if an organization, in general, exists?).¹ The state thus cannot be abolished without the abolition of class society, and the abolition of class society also entails the destruction of the state—not as the essence of that society, but as a reflection and extension of it.

I say this because I don’t want to give the impression that Marxists think the state will always exist. Sometimes, anarchists and communists talk past each other because the former have a trans-historical notion of the state, and the latter sometimes assume that what is being talked about is organization in general rather than organized class violence in particular. That’s the key difference, though: states have always been in the service of the dominant economic class, and there cannot be a state without there being a class to repress, speaking abstractedly and practically. It’s a contradiction of terms.

That being said, if a revolution were to fail and a class society to reemerge, we would of course expect a state to emerge in tandem. There would not be any bullshit about how ackchually it’s something or other. However, in this situation, I hope it’s clear—at least from our language—that the state is an effect of the society rather than its generator. If a repressive state emerges from a post-revolutionary society, it’s because a new ruling class has also emerged. If you put it the other way around, you’ve put the cart before the horse.

Tangentially: is there a comparison to be made between the state with respect to an economy, and the superego as the regulatory function of desire? Especially if we are to follow Lacan in that the superego does not itself instantiate desire, but is basically a side effect of it?

Marxism on Value

I’ve wanted to bitch about this so bad, you have no idea. By far, the very most persistent misconception about Marx is that he had a labor theory of value like Smith and Ricardo. Let me just start by saying, no. It’s false. It’s fiction. It never happened. And so on. You can check out my handy dandy guide to Marx’s critique of value, but let me try to summarize from that blog's conclusion:

If labor is the source of value—and such a statement must be levied with caveats given the different ways in which value appears to society—it is only insofar as labor itself is already valued by society, and is thus already subject to all kinds of abstraction and social pretenses. Marx therefore does not really suppose a labor theory of value, but he critiques the very notion as something which contains social presuppositions about what constitutes value and thus ‘valuable’ labor (and vice versa, given the circular nature of value). Value is ultimately a social relation which governs capitalist production, circulation, and society. It is not an intrinsic product or substance of labor itself, but something imposed onto it by capitalist economy.

Kroptokin speaks of Marx’s analysis as if Marx were saying that the value of a commodity should be determined by socially necessary labor time, rather than Marx describing that as how commodities are valued under capitalism (or rather, due to exchange on a social scale, which develops into capitalism once labor-time itself becomes a commodity that can also be purchased at scale,² yadda yadda yadda). The problem is not that workers are not paid for the full value they produce—in fact, Marx acknowledges that workers are not paid for their produce at all, but for their time, and that this is an equal exchange in capital logic—but precisely that the value of (socially necessary) labor time, on which everything rests, is socially determined by the struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Economy always slips into blood.

I think that’s why I’m unimpressed with Kroptokin acting as if Marx were a stand-in for Ricardo, while also reiterating a much weaker version of Marx’s analysis: one that does not really criticize capital as an self-driven social relation, but one that lays the blame for capitalism at the feet of its institutional representatives.

Conclusion

I didn’t like it. I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s everything that people said it wasn’t.

Read something else. Maybe read Settlers if you had to pick between the two. 

Debt was better, for what it was.

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1. I also subscribe to Heinrich’s reading that the state may not necessarily serve the bourgeoisie directly, as much as serving the continuation of capitalism in general—sometimes to the detriment of individual bourgeois, but never to that of (national) capital in aggregate. ↩︎

2. Kroptokin doesn’t have a bad description of what Marx calls primitive accumulation, where masses of people fall into poverty and have no choice but to accept wages in order to live, but it’s also nothing I haven’t already read about—and without the rigor we get from other authors. ↩︎