Fields, Factories and Workshops is a landmark anarchist text by Peter Kropotkin, and arguably one of the most influential and positive statements of the anarchist political position. It is viewed by many as the central work of his writing career. His inspiration has reached into the 20th and 21st centuries as a lasting vision of a more harmonious way of living, of a new world. It is often positioned as a counter to the thinking of Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin which tended to imply centralised planning and control. To a large degree Kropotkin's emphasis is on local organisation, local production obviating the need for central government. Kropotkin's vision is also on agriculture and rural life making it a contrasting perspective to the largely industrial thinking of communists and socialists. Peter Kropotkin Prince Peter Alexeevich Kropotkin (In Russian Пётр Алексе́евич Кропо́ткин) (December 9, 1842 - February 8, 1921) was one of Russias foremost anarchists and one of the first advocates of what he called anarchist communism: the model of society he advocated for most of his life was that of...
His focus on local production leads to his view that a country should manufacture its own goods and grow its own food, making import and export unnecessary. To these ends he advocated irrigation and growing under glass to boost local food production ability. The book contains logical arguments to its ends and is generally persuasive rather than being dogmatic. 255 pages long, it is structured as a series of essays, together with a large number of appendices of supporting evidence. Critics say he is rather optimistic in the work, however the problems arising from industrialisation and its reliance on fossil fuels has shown his ideas to be far sighted and possibly appropriate for the post-fossil fuel age.
There is a remarkable similarity between some of Kropotkin's views and those of the architect Christopher Alexander, for the example the elimination of vast buildings and the introduction of workshops in or attached to the home. A professor-emeritus (the University of California, Berkeley) and licensed contractor as well as architect, Christopher Alexander (born October 4, 1936 in Vienna, Austria) is famous mostly for his popular appeal, and his theoretical contributions. ...
Fields, Factories and Workshops is a landmark anarchist text by Peter Kropotkin, and arguably one of the most influential and positive statements of the anarchist political position.
Critics say he is rather optimistic in the work, however the problems arising from industrialisation and its reliance on fossil fuels has shown his ideas to be far sighted and possibly appropriate for the post-fossil fuel age.
There is a remarkable similarity between some of Kropotkin's views and those of the architect Christopher Alexander, for the example the elimination of vast buildings and the introduction of workshops in or attached to the home.
Such a work was only possible when the British Factory Inspectors had published (in 1898, in virtue of the Factories Act of 1895) their first reports, from which I could determine the hitherto unknown numerical relations between the great and the small industries in the United Kingdom.
The part which belongs in progressive evolution to differentiation, and the part which belongs in it to an integration of aptitudes and activities, were discussed by the Russian author with depth of thought, and Spencer's differentiation-formula was accordingly completed.
The conditions under which the factory system asserted itself, as well as the obsolete forms of agriculture which prevailed at that time, prevented such a union from being feasible.
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