Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [47]
The next year at an Anarchist Congress in the Swiss Jura, Kropotkin specifically advocated propaganda of the Deed, if somewhat less explicit as to method. Though never recommending assassination in so many words, he continued during the eighties to urge a propaganda by “speech and written word, by dagger, gun and dynamite.” He sounded an inspiring summons in the pages of La Révolte to “men of courage willing not only to speak but to act, pure characters who prefer prison, exile and death to a life that contradicts their principles, bold natures who know that in order to win one must dare.” Men such as these must form an advance guard of revolution long before the masses were ready, and in the midst of “talking, complaining, discussing,” must do the “deed of mutiny.”
“A single deed,” Kropotkin wrote at another time, “is better propaganda than a thousand pamphlets.” Words are “lost in the air like the sound of church bells.” Acts are needed “to excite hate for the exploiters, to ridicule the Rulers, to show up their weakness and above all and always to awaken the spirit of revolt.” The acts he loftily called for on paper were performed, but not by him.
In the nineties, when he was in his fifties, Kropotkin, though never altering his demand for revolt, subdued a little his enthusiasm for the individual Deed. Although “the revolutionary spirit gains immensely through such deeds of individual heroism,” he wrote in La Révolte of March, 1891, “nevertheless it is not these heroic acts that make revolutions. Revolution is above all a mass movement.… Institutions rooted in centuries of history are not destroyed by a few pounds of explosives. The time for such action has passed and the time for the anarchist and communist idea to penetrate the masses has come.” Disclaimers, however, rarely have the same force as the original proposition.
In London, in a restaurant in Holborn during the coal strike of 1893, Kropotkin was arguing with Ben Tillett and Tom Mann, two tough-minded trade unionists. “We must destroy! We must pull down! We must be rid of the tyrants!” shouted Mann.
“No,” said Kropotkin in his foreign accent, with the eyes of a scientist gleaming behind his spectacles, “we must build. We must build in the hearts of men. We must establish a kingdom of God.”
He had the plans for the kingdom already drawn. After the revolution—which he calculated would take three to five years to accomplish the overthrow of governments, the destruction of prisons, forts and slums and the expropriation of land, industries and all forms of property—volunteers would take inventory of all food stocks, dwellings, and means of production. Printed lists would be distributed by the million. Everyone would take what he needed of the things which existed in plenty and there would be rationing of the things of which there was shortage. All property would be community property. Everyone would draw upon the community warehouse for food and goods according to his needs and would have the right “to decide for himself what he needs for a comfortable life.” As there would be no more inheritance, there would be no more greed. All able-bodied males would enter into “contracts” with society through their groups and communes by which they would engage to do five hours’ daily work from the age of twenty-one to about forty-five or fifty, each in a labour of his choice. In return, society would guarantee them the enjoyment of “houses,