Historical Cherry-Picking and Non-Arguments | The Conquest of The Conquest of Bread, Part 3

Chapter 3 of the book is titled "Anarcho-Communism," so I was expecting to finally get Kropotkin's great argument for how to establish communes without a state apparatus forming.

What I got was a series of weird historical cherry-picking and declarations pretending to be arguments.

He makes a bunch of declarations that he pretends are arguments. He grabs isolated examples of state-funded research organizations that barely existed for a blip of history. He makes the New Soviet Man argument. He mistakes instances of momentary cooperation in non-productive situations for evidence that perpetual parasitism will be both economically insignificant and socially acceptable. He even confuses the existence of special prices as evidence of conquest of scarcity.

He even brings up something practically identical to Marx's idiotic historical determinism, but somehow manages to be even less convincing.

Unfortunately, this pretty much confirms that Kropotkin's conception of anarchism is largely held together by mistakes and inappropriate hopes.

And supposedly he's going to justify expropriation in the next chapter. Yikes.

Links: My blogpost for this episode, including detailed notes: https://marginalnonhermit.com/?p=720

Jo Ann Cavallo, "Feudalism and Cronyism in Machiavelli's Italy" https://mises.org/mises-daily/feudalism-and-cronyism-machiavellis-italy

Murray N. Rothbard, "Man, Economy, and State" Discussion on Discounted Marginal Value Product (DMVP) https://mises.org/online-book/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/7-production-general-pricing-factors/1-imputation-discounted-marginal-value-product

Rothbard, "The Progressive Era" https://mises.org/online-book/progressive-era

Intro music edited from a piece by Grand Project, courtesy Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/users/grand_project-19033897/