By Peter Kropotkin
Born a Russian prince, Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) rejected his name and wealth to spend his existence in pursuit of social justice and equality. His final significant paintings, The Conquest of Bread, surveys monetary tools for the delight of human wishes. The 1892 treatise additionally outlines the progressive route to his imaginative and prescient of utopia: an anarchist communist society.
Kropotkin criticizes the consequences of feudalism and capitalism, noting that either structures exacerbate poverty and advertise privilege, even in instances of abundance. bringing up the human propensity towards voluntary cooperation, he proposes the institution of unfastened, self-sufficient anarchic communes and descriptions functional issues of construction and distribution. the writer helps his theories with examples from the French rebellions of 1789, 1848, and 1871, and his reasoning anticipates elements of twentieth-century revolutions in Russia, Germany, and Spain. At a time while many thinkers hired the recent Darwinian suggestion of “survival of the fittest” to justify their capitalist and imperialist objectives, Kropotkin mentioned the old styles of humanity's top luck lower than cooperative situations. A century later, his monetary research is still clean and relevant.
Reprint of the Chapman & corridor, London, 1906 variation.
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Additional resources for The Conquest of Bread
Example text
These scholars argue that the distinction between oral and literary societies is misleading because, as the continuation of the oral component in literary societies illustrates, the possession of writing does not mean that a society has ceased to be an oral culture as well. The majority of researchers agree that the rise of literacy does not necessarily bring the devalourization of memory and that learning by hearing material and reciting it does not necessarily imply an ignorance of reading. The reliance on living memories, associated with the oral transmission of a living past persisted long after the advent of print, and indeed continues to the present day (Ong 1983).
The oral transmission of the past means that the past is bound to the present for its survival. The past exists only in so far as it continues to be held in living memory, and it is so remembered only as long as it serves present needs. Due to the limitations of memory in oral cultures, such societies’ response to time is limited to an annual cycle and therefore cannot be used to differentiate longer periods than seasons. In oral societies, time is not a continuum as it is ‘an order of events of outstanding significance to a group’ (Evans-Pritchard 1968: 109).
In the Renaissance, the art of memory expressed the period’s expanded power of imagination and harmonized intellectually with its geometric architecture (Yates 1966: 152–69). Although the humanist philosophers rejected the art of memory, for the hermetic philosophers it still had a special appeal as it allowed for the revival of the belief in the magical power of memory, alchemy, astrology, cabalism, and magic. In this mystical tradition of occult science, the magical practice of memory was conceptualized as a kind of ‘ascent to the stars’ (Samuel 1994: ix) and became connected with METAMORPHOSIS OF MEMORY 35 the issue of human immortality, with the result that spiritual theories of memory gained in significance (Draaisma 2000: 60–4).