Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - Modern Science and Anarchism (1912).pdf/89

 of common life and work, independent of and quite outside the State.

Knowing all this, we obviously cannot see an element of Progress in an ever-increasing submission to the State. On the contrary, we represent ourselves a forward movement of society as an approach to the abolition of all the authority of Government, as a development of free agreement for all that formerly was a function of Church and State, and as a development of free initiative in every individual and every group. And these are the tendencies which determine the tactics of the Anarchists in the life of both the individual and our circles.

Finally, being a revolutionary party, what we study in history is chiefly the genesis and the gradual development of previous revolutions. In these studies we try to free history from the State interpretation which has been given to it by State historians. We try to reconstitute in it the true role of the people, the advantages it obtained from a revolution, the ideas it launched into circulation, and the faults of tactics it committed.

Studying the beginnings of a revolution, we are not yet satisfied when we have read how miserable were the masses before the revolution. We want to know: how did they pass from their condition of inactivity and despair to their revolutionary activity? how did they wake up? what did they do after the awakening?

We understand, for instance, the Great French Revolution quite differently from a Louis Blanc, who saw in it a political movement directed by the Jacobinist Club. We see in it a great popular movement, which took place especially in the villages, among the peasants, for the abolition of feudal servitude and the return to the villages of the lands seized since 1669 in virtue of Enclosure Acts; and in the towns—for getting rid of the misery of the town proletariate by means of a national organisation of exchange and socialisation of production. (See my "Great French Revolution.")

We study the movement towards Communism which began to develop amongst the poorest part of the population in 1793–94, and the admirable forms of voluntary popular organisation for a variety of functions, economic and political, that they worked out in the "Sections" of the great cities and some of the small municipalities. On the other side, we carefully study the growth of the power of the middle classes, who worked with energy and knowledge at constituting their own authority, in lieu of the