The Conquest of The Conquest of Bread: Preface and Chapter 1

Welcome to the first episode of my examination of Peter Kropotkin's book "The Conquest of Bread."

Kropotkin is a prominent example of the so-called anarchist strain of communists, which believed that social revolution would lead to the abolishment of private property in the means of production, further leading to a stateless method of organization through communes and labor associations.

The preface and first chapter, however, do not begin by explaining how to enforce the abolishment of private property without a coercive state. Kropotkin instead decides to open his book with a combination of bad economics, misread history, blindness to incentives, rhetorical flourish, and misunderstanding stemming from over-aggregation of the capital structure.

It isn't a good start, but we'll see where he goes from here!

Cited articles: Ludwig von Mises, "The Rise of Capitalism" https://mises.org/mises-daily/rise-capitalism

Lipton Matthews, "The Problem with Guilds: They're Monopolistic and Wasteful" https://mises.org/mises-wire/problem-guilds-theyre-monopolistic-and-wasteful

Robert P. Murphy, "Why Austrians Stress Ordinal Utility" https://mises.org/mises-wire/why-austrians-stress-ordinal-utility

Murray N. Rothbard, "Ten Great Economic Myths" https://mises.org/mises-wire/ten-great-economic-myths

Ludwig von Mises, "Planned Chaos" https://mises.org/library/book/planned-chaos

Friedrich A. Hayek, "The Use of Knowledge in Society" https://mises.org/mises-daily/use-knowledge-society

For a PDF of my notes for this part: https://marginalnonhermit.com/?p=703

Intro music edited from a piece by Paul Yudin, courtesy Unsplash: https://pixabay.com/users/paulyudin-27739282/

#economics #libertarian #philosophy