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11 - Free Agreement - The Conquest of Bread - Peter Kropotkin · The Philosophy Insights Collection

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  Chapter eleven free agreement. Accustomed as we are by hereditary prejudices and absolutely unsound
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  education and training to see government legislation and magistracy everywhere around, we have come
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  to believe that man would tear his fellow man to pieces like a wild beast
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  the day the police took his eye off of him, that chaos would come
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  about if authority were overthrown during a revolution, And with our eyes shut we
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  passed by thousands and thousands of human groupings which form themselves freely without any intervention
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  of the law, and attain results infinitely superior to those achieved under government tutelage.
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  If you open a daily paper, you find its pages are entirely devoted
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  to government transactions and to political jobbery. A Chinaman reading it would believe that
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  in Europe nothing gets done save by order of some master. You find nothing
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  in them about institutions that spring up, grow up, and develop without ministerial
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  prescription. Nothing or hardly nothing. Even when there is a heading sundry events,
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  it is because they are connected with the police. A family drama and
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  act of rebellion will only be mentioned if the police have appeared on the scene.
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  Three hundred and fifty million Europeans love or hate one another, work or
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  live on their incomes, but apart from literature, theater or sport, their
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  lives remain ignored by newspapers if governments have not intervened in some way or other.
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  It is even so with history. We know the least details of the
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  life of a king or of a parliament. All good and bad speeches pronounced
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  by the politicians have been preserved. Quote speeches that have never had the least
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  influence on the vote of a single member. Quote, as an old parliamentarian
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  said, Royal visits, good or bad humor of politicians, jokes or intrigues
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  are all carefully recorded for posterity. But we have the greatest difficulty to reconstitute
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  a city of the Middle Ages, to understand the mechanism of that immense commerce
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  that was carried on between Hanseatic cities, or to know how the city of
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  Ruen built its cathedral. If a scholar spends his life in studying these questions,
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  his works remain unknown. In parliamentary histories, that is to say,
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  the defective ones, as they only treat one side of social life. Multiply
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  are circulated are taught in schools, and we do not even perceive the prodigious
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  work accomplished every day by spontaneous groups of men, which constitutes the chief work
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  of our century. We therefore propose to point out some of these most striking
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  manifestations, and to prove that men, as soon as their interests do not
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  absolutely clash, act in concert harmoniously, and perform collective work of a very
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  complex nature. It is evident that in present society, based on individual property,
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  that is to say, on plunder, and on a narrow minded and
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  therefore foolish individualism, facts of this kind are necessarily few in number. Agreements
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  are not always perfectly free, and often have a mean, if not execrable
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  aims. But what concerns us is not to give examples which we could blindly
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  follow, and which moreover, present society could not possibly give us. What
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  we have to do is prove that, in spite of the authoritarian individualism which
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  stifles us, there remains in our life taken as a whole, a great
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  part in which we only act by free agreement, and that it would be
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  much easier than we think to dispense with government. In support of our view,
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  we have already mentioned railways, and we are about to return to them.
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  We know that Europe has a system of railways one hundred and seventy five
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  thousand miles long, and that on this network you can nowadays travel from north
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  to south, from east to west, from Madrid to Petersburg, and from
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  Calais to Constantinople without stoppages, without even changing carriages when you travel by express.
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  More than that, a parcel thrown into a station will find its address
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  see anywhere in Turkey or in Central Asia, without more formality needed for sending
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  it than writing its destination on a bit of paper. This result might have
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  been obtained in two ways. A Napoleon, a bit or some potentate having
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  conquered Europe, would from Paris, Berlin or Rome draw a railway map and
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  regulate the hours of the trains. The Russians are Nicholas the first dreamt of
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  taking such action. When he was shown rough drafts of railways between Moscow and
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  Petersburg. He seized a ruler and drew on the map of Russia a straight
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  line between these two capitals, saying, here is the plan, and the
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  road as was built in a straight line, filling in deep ravines, building
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  bridges of a giddy height, which had to be abandoned a few years later,
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  at a cost of about one hundred and twenty thousand to one hundred and
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  fifty thousand pounds per English mile. This is one way, but happily things
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  were managed differently. Railways were constructed piece by piece, The pieces were joined
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  together, and the one hundred diverse companies to whom these pieces belonged came to
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  an understanding concerning the arrival and departure of their trains and the running of carriages
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  on their rails from all countries, without unloading merchandise as it passes from one
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  network to another. All this was done by free agreement, by exchange of
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  letters and proposals, by congresses at which delegates met to discuss certain special subjects,
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  but not to make laws. After the congress, the delegates returned to
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  their companies not with a law, but with the draft of a contract to
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  be accepted or rejected. There were certainly obstinate men who would not be convinced,
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  but a common interest compelled them to agree without invoking the help of armies
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  against the refractory members. This immense network of railways connected together, and the
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  enormous traffic it has given rise to, no doubt, constitutes the most striking
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  trait of our century, and it is the result of free agreement. If
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  a man had foreseen or predicted it fifty years ago, our grandfathers would have
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  thought him idiotic or mad. They would have said, never will you be
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  able to make the shareholders of one hundred companies listen to reason? It is
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  a utopia, a fairy tale. A central government with an iron director can
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  alone enforce it. And the most interesting thing in this organization is that there
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  is no European central government of railways nothing, no Minister of Railways, no
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  dictator, not even a continental parliament, not even a directing committee. Everything
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  is done by contract. So we ask the believers in the state who pretend
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  that we can never do without a central government. Were it only for regulating
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  the traffic, we ask them, but how do European railways manage without them?
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  How do they continue to convey millions of travelers and mountains of luggage across
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  a continent. If companies owning railways have been able to agree, why should
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  railway workers who would take possession of the railways not agree likewise? And if
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  the Petersburg Warsaw Company and that of the Paris Belfort can act in harmony without
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  giving themselves the luxury of a common commander. Why, in the midst of
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  our societies, consisting of free groups of workers, should we need a government?
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  End of Chapter eleven.