By the end of the nineteenth century, two figures had become the best known faces of anarchism: a Russian scientist living in exile in England, and a Russian-born immigrant to the United States whose speeches filled halls and alarmed governments.

Peter Kropotkin

Peter Kropotkin (1842 to 1921) was born a prince in Russia's high nobility. As a young army officer in Siberia he worked as a geographer and explorer, and he was struck by how animals and remote village communities survived harsh conditions by cooperating rather than competing. Imprisoned for revolutionary activity, he escaped in 1876 and spent most of the next four decades in exile, mainly in England.

Mutual aid

In 1888 the biologist Thomas Huxley published an essay presenting nature, and by extension human society, as a ruthless struggle for existence. Kropotkin replied with a series of articles collected as Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). He argued that cooperation within a species is a major factor in survival and evolution, alongside competition. He gathered examples from animal behavior, village communities, medieval guilds and modern trade unions and clubs. Kropotkin did not reject Darwin; he argued that Darwin himself had recognized sociability, and that writers who stressed only struggle had distorted the theory.

The political lesson was that people do not need a state to make them cooperate. Mutual aid, Kropotkin believed, is a deep and natural human tendency that states and markets often suppress.

Anarchist communism

In The Conquest of Bread (1892), Kropotkin set out anarchist communism. Goods should be shared according to need, not according to work done. His reason was that production is social: every product depends on generations of inventors, builders and workers, so no one can measure what any single person contributed. He imagined free communes, joined in federations, combining farming and industry on a human scale. This differed from Bakunin's collectivism, which still rewarded each worker according to labor.

Kropotkin's later life brought controversy. He supported the Allies in the First World War, seeing German militarism as the greater threat, a stance that split the anarchist movement; the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta denounced it. Kropotkin returned to Russia in 1917, criticized the Bolsheviks, and died in 1921.

Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman (1869 to 1940) was born in Kovno in the Russian Empire, now Kaunas in Lithuania, and emigrated to the United States in 1885. She said that the execution of anarchists after the Haymarket affair in 1887 turned her to anarchism. She defined anarchism in 1910 as “the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law.”

Goldman broadened anarchism beyond economics. Through lectures and her magazine Mother Earth (founded 1906), she championed free speech, access to birth control, women's freedom in love and marriage, and opposition to militarism. She was jailed several times. In 1917 she and her companion Alexander Berkman were convicted of conspiring to obstruct the military draft, and in 1919 both were deported to Soviet Russia. What she saw there, including the crushing of the Kronstadt sailors' revolt in 1921, led her to leave and write My Disillusionment in Russia (1923). She later supported the anarchists of the Spanish Revolution and died in Toronto in 1940.

A popular slogan about dancing and revolution, often printed under her name, does not appear in her writings, though it loosely echoes a story in her autobiography.

Worked example: three bakeries

The anarchists in this course agreed that bosses and the state should go. They disagreed about what should replace them. Imagine a bakery run by its workers under three different anarchist plans.

• Mutualist bakery (Proudhon). The bakers own their shop as a cooperative. They sell bread at a fair price, borrow cheaply from a people's bank, and divide their income among themselves. Market exchange continues, but without landlords or investors taking a share.
• Collectivist bakery (Bakunin). The ovens and building belong to the wider workers' association. Each baker is credited according to the hours or effort they put in, and those credits buy goods from other collectives.
• Communist bakery (Kropotkin). Bread is baked for everyone and taken freely from the common store according to need. A baker with five children takes more than a baker who lives alone. No one tries to measure each baker's share, because the bread also depends on farmers, millers, carters and the inventors of the oven.

Each plan raises its own questions. The mutualist bakery keeps markets, which some anarchists feared would recreate inequality. The collectivist plan needs someone to measure work, which could become a new authority. The communist plan depends on people working willingly without direct reward, which critics doubt and Kropotkin defended by pointing to mutual aid. Goldman would add one more question for all three: will the bakers be free in their personal lives, or only at work? Anarchism, for her, had to liberate the whole person.