Prince Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist, visited England in 1876, again in 1881-2, and then from 1886 he lived much of the time in London and in Brighton.
From William Godwin he took the idea that property was a ‘mouldy patent’, from Proudhon, that it was ‘theft’, and from Bakunin, that the free co-operation of individual groups should supplant the state.Society, Kropotkin asserted, would be restored by establishing free village communities.In response to Social Darwinism and T H Huxley’s Struggle for Existence (1888) with its insistence on the survival of the fittest, Kropotkin published a series of articles, including ‘The Coming Reign of Plenty’ and ‘The Industrial Village of the Future’, showing how the guilds and free communes of medieval Europe afforded examples of non-political institutions freely co-operating.[1]
In 1892 he published a series of these articles in book form as Conquete du Pain (translated in 1906 as The Conquest of Bread).Here and elsewhere he argued for ‘a society without a state’, a federation of free communes.
An anarchist colony at Norton Hall near Shefffield was set up by followers of the socialist Edward Carpenter, much influenced by Kropotkin’s ideas.The colonists were teetotal, vegetarian, non-smoking, grew lettuce and manufactured sandals.
A further attempt to test the theories propounded by Kropotkin took place at Clousden Hill near Newcastle.Here in 1895 four men, two with small families, took a farm consisting of 20 acres of poor land.They pooled their money into a common fund, there were no wages, and each received pocket money according to how the fund stood.Eating was communal.They sold produce to the Sunderland and Newcastle Co-operatives and traded with the Newcastle Green market.The settlement was visited by the trade unionist Tom Mann, Kropotkin himself, and others, and kept going until the turn of the century.
Sources
W H G Armytage, Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England 1560-1960, 1961.
Dennis Hardy, Alternative Communities in Nineteenth Century England,1979.
[1] See Armytage pp 305-315.
