The Conquest of Bread
Glossary
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- "Scientific Socialism" (Marx)
- Kropotkin's skeptical label for the Marxist theory of value he argues underlies the collectivist wage scale — the claim that goods exchange "in proportion to the quantity of work socially necessary for their production," following Ricardo. Kropotkin rejects the theory's application to human labour, arguing pay differences reflect monopoly and state privilege, not objectively measurable production costs.
- Related: Qualified vs. Simple Work, The Collectivist Wages System
- "Well-Being for All Is Not a Dream"
- The opening claim of Chapter III, and one of the book's central theses: that existing industrial productivity, even confined to roughly a third of the population who actually produce, already generates enough for comfort for all — and that the real obstacles are deliberate restriction of output (idle mines, unused factories) and waste on luxury, armaments, and unproductive middlemen, not any natural scarcity.
- Related: Malthus and the Limits of Production, Expropriation
A
- Adam Smith's Nail-Smith
- The example from The Wealth of Nations that opens Kropotkin's chapter on the division of labour: a smith who specializes only in nails can forge "two thousand three hundred in the course of a day" versus a few hundred by a generalist. Kropotkin uses it to show how classical economics turned a narrow productivity gain into a universal principle, ignoring that the specialized worker "would lose all interest in his work" and become easily replaceable and impoverished.
- Related: The Division of Labour
- Agreeable Work
- Kropotkin's argument, developed across Chapters XI–XII, that work can be reorganized to be attractive rather than compulsory once freed from wage pressure — combining manual and intellectual, agricultural and industrial labour rather than confining a person to one task for life. It is his answer to the standard objection that without wages or coercion, no one would choose to work.
- Related: The Division of Labour, Free Agreement
- Anarchist Communism
- Kropotkin's name for his proposed system, defined directly in Chapter IV: "ours is neither the Communism of Fourier and the Phalansteriens, nor of the German State Socialists. It is Anarchist Communism, Communism without government—the Communism of the Free. It is the synthesis of the two ideals pursued by humanity throughout the ages—Economic and Political Liberty." He argues "Anarchy leads to Communism, and Communism to Anarchy, both alike being expressions of the predominant tendency in modern societies, the pursuit of equality."
- Related: Expropriation, Free Agreement, The Collectivist Wages System
B
- Bread for All
- Kropotkin's watchword for Chapter VI's argument that the revolution must solve the question of daily bread before any political question: "We have the temerity to declare that all have a right to bread, that there is bread enough for all, and that with this watchword of Bread for All the Revolution will triumph." He contrasts this with 1793, 1848, and 1871, when revolutionary governments occupied themselves with constitutions and church-state separation while "forgot to discuss the question of bread," and each revolution starved and collapsed as a result.
- Related: The Right to Well-Being, The Paris Commune
E
- Expropriation
- Kropotkin's proposed first act of revolution: seizing land, factories, and stored wealth outright rather than merely redistributing wages. He insists it cannot be partial — "on the day a nation will strike at private property, under any one of its forms, territorial or industrial, it will be obliged to attack them all" — because expropriating land while leaving factories and middlemen untouched, or vice versa, leaves the interdependent economic machine broken without reorganizing it.
- Related: Anarchist Communism, The Right to Well-Being, Rothschild's Stratagem
F
- Fourier and Fourierism
- One of the "three great theoretical founders of modern Socialism" alongside Saint-Simon and Owen, whose ideas about phalansteries and attractive, freely chosen labor Kropotkin draws on for his own chapters on agreeable work, while explicitly distinguishing his "Anarchist Communism" from "the Communism of Fourier and the Phalansteriens" as lacking the abolition of government.
- Related: Robert Owen, Anarchist Communism, Agreeable Work
- Free Agreement
- Kropotkin's proposed substitute for law and representative government: voluntary coordination between individuals and groups, on the model of "the International Postal Union, the railway unions, and the learned societies," where delegates are sent "to come to an agreement on such or such a question, and then return, not with a law in your pocket, but with a proposition of agreement which we may or may not accept."
- Related: Anarchist Communism, Representative Government
I
- Intensive Small-Scale Agriculture
- The closing argument of Chapter XVIII, built from contemporary figures on French and Channel Islands market gardening, that carefully worked small plots can feed a free society without the coercion of factory-style farming. Kropotkin ends the book on the image of a society organized around "the working in common of the soil," finding in it the same solidarity that could "obliterate the hatred and oppression which has hitherto divided" people.
- Related: The Decentralization of Industry, Well-Being for All
L
- Labour-Notes
- The collectivist currency Kropotkin describes and rejects: a cheque "inscribed with these words: Eight hours' work," divisible so a worker can buy "an hour's-work worth of meat, ten minutes' worth of matches, or half an hour of tobacco." He traces the idea to Robert Owen's early attempts to reconcile capital and labour without revolutionary expropriation, and to Proudhon's Mutualism, and argues it cannot survive contact with the fact that services rendered to society "cannot be valued in money."
- Related: The Collectivist Wages System, Robert Owen, Proudhon and Mutualism
M
- Malthus and the Limits of Production
- The economic "Oracle" Kropotkin sets out to refute in Chapter III, arguing that contrary to Malthusian pessimism, "the productive powers of the human race increase at a much more rapid ratio than its powers of reproduction" — citing England's population growing 62% between 1844 and 1890 while production grew 130%, as evidence that scarcity is manufactured by capitalism, not dictated by nature.
- Related: Well-Being for All
- Municipal Communism (1793)
- One of three near-socialist experiments Kropotkin credits to the French Revolution in his Preface: municipalities buying necessities and selling them to citizens at cost price, alongside progressive taxation to equalize fortunes and a national attempt to set rationally calculated prices for commodities — a scheme the Convention "had nearly completed" before reaction crushed it.
- Related: The Paris Commune, State Socialism
P
- Proudhon and Mutualism
- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's system, which Kropotkin credits with working out "the idea of Anarchism... without State interference" but criticizes for trying "to make Capital less offensive" while retaining private property, which Proudhon "believed to be necessary to guarantee individuals against the State." Kropotkin nonetheless closes the book on a Proudhon quotation — "In demolishing we shall build" — turned toward Communism and Anarchy.
- Related: Labour-Notes, The Collectivist Wages System
Q
- Qualified vs. Simple Work
- The distinction some collectivists (Kropotkin cites Grönlund) wanted to preserve under a new system — an hour of a doctor's or engineer's labour paid as the equivalent of several hours of a navvy's. Kropotkin rejects it as "reviving one of the distinct peculiarities of present society and giving it the sanction of the Social Revolution," arguing that pay differences under capitalism reflect "a monopoly of education" rather than any real difference in the cost of producing a skilled versus unskilled worker.
- Related: The Collectivist Wages System, The Division of Labour
R
- Representative Government (Parliamentarianism)
- The political system Kropotkin argues is bound up with the wage system and cannot survive expropriation: "A society founded on serfdom is in keeping with absolute monarchy; a society based on the wage system and the exploitation of the masses by the capitalists finds its political expression in parliamentarianism." He calls the nineteenth century the era that will be remembered for parliamentarianism's failure, and dismisses proposed fixes like the referendum and proportional representation as "parliamentary Utopias."
- Related: Free Agreement, The Collectivist Wages System
- Robert Owen
- The British socialist pioneer Kropotkin credits with founding "schemes of communist villages, agricultural and industrial at the same time" and the Great Consolidated Trades' Union, "the forerunner of both the Labour Parties of our days and the International Working-men's Association." Kropotkin also traces the collectivist labour-note system he rejects back to Owen's early attempt to reconcile capital and labour peacefully.
- Related: Labour-Notes, Fourier
- Rothschild's Stratagem
- The anecdote Kropotkin opens Chapter V with: threatened by the Revolution of 1848, Rothschild publicly offered to repay each European his "four shillings" share of a divided fortune, knowing few would actually collect. Kropotkin uses it to distinguish his own program from a caricature of expropriation as simply redistributing existing wealth: "What we do want is so to arrange things that every human being... shall be free to work at his trade without... handing over to landlord or capitalist the lion's share of what he produces."
- Related: Expropriation
S
- State Socialism
- The rival current Kropotkin distinguishes his anarchism from throughout the book, noting in the 1913 Preface that "State Socialism has certainly made considerable progress" through state railways, banking, and trade — but that "every step made in this direction... was found to be a new obstacle in the struggle of the working-men for their emancipation," since it substitutes state ownership for the free federations of producer groups he favors.
- Related: Anarchist Communism, Representative Government
T
- The Collectivist Wages System
- The rival socialist scheme Kropotkin devotes Chapter XIV to refuting: workers paid in labour-notes redeemable for goods, with an hour's note earned per hour worked. He calls it a contradiction in terms — "They say, 'No private property,' and immediately after strive to maintain private property in its daily manifestations" — since it keeps the wage relation intact even after the instruments of production are declared common property.
- Related: Anarchist Communism, Qualified vs. Simple Work, Labour-Notes
- The Decentralization of Industry
- Kropotkin's Chapter XVII argument that industrial monopoly — Britain's postwar dominance, then France's, then Germany's, each briefly enriching itself by manufacturing what others could not — is inherently temporary, as technical knowledge spreads and "all civilized nations" learn to manufacture for themselves. He treats this spreading of industrial capacity as evidence against the case for permanent national specialization.
- Related: The Division of Labour, Adam Smith's Nail-Smith
- The Division of Labour
- The principle Kropotkin attacks in Chapter XVI, tracing it to Adam Smith's example of the specialized nail-smith who can forge two thousand nails a day versus a generalist's few hundred. Kropotkin argues lifelong specialization — "a child tending a machine that he cannot and must not understand" — stunts intelligence and inventiveness, and extends the critique to nations assigned permanent specialties ("Russia... was destined by nature to grow corn; England to spin cotton"), a division he says industrial history is already dissolving.
- Related: Decentralization of Industry, Agreeable Work
- The Feudal Baron's Fortune
- Kropotkin's parable of how landlord wealth originates: a baron who seizes an empty valley is not rich until destitute peasants, lured by rent-free years marked with crosses on a sign-board, settle and improve his land — after which he raises their rent. Kropotkin uses the story, and its industrial-age parallel of the factory owner who profits because "the towns and villages swarm with workers who have not the wherewithal to live," to argue that "the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor."
- Related: Expropriation, Rothschild's Stratagem
- The June Insurrection (1848)
- The Paris workers' uprising four months after the 1848 Republic was proclaimed, crushed in blood after the promised "right to work" turned out to mean drudgery in national workshops for 1s. 8d. a day. Kropotkin cites the "wholesale shooting of the working-men" and mass deportations that followed as proof that partial, wage-based reforms cannot satisfy revolutionary demands and instead prepare the ground for reaction.
- Related: The Right to Well-Being, The Paris Commune
- The Paris Commune (1871)
- The 1871 uprising Kropotkin treats as historically pivotal — proclaiming Paris's autonomy from the rest of France and, in his reading, pointing toward federations of free communes as the vehicle for socialism, rather than seizure of the state. He also cites it as a cautionary example: it paid Council members 12s. 6d. a day while Federates on the ramparts received 1s. 3d., an inequality he says the Commune should never have ratified, and it collapsed after seventy days partly because fighters could not feed their families on rampart wages.
- Related: Bread for All, Municipal Communism (1793), The June Insurrection
- The Right to Well-Being (vs. The Right to Work)
- Kropotkin's rallying principle for the coming revolution, opposed to the 1848 slogan he considers a trap: "The 'right to well-being' means the possibility of living like human beings... whilst the 'right to work' only means the right to be always a wage-slave, a drudge, ruled over and exploited by the middle class of the future." He recalls how workers who demanded the right to work in 1848 were fobbed off with municipal workshops paying 1s. 8d. a day, then massacred that June when patience ran out.
- Related: Expropriation, Bread for All, The June Insurrection