Peter Kropotkin inspired Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day by Joe Peabody
This is the eleventh article in a series on the roots of the Catholic Worker movement, the saints and philosophers who influenced Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in the development of the movement. It features Peter Kropotkin, whose works were known and studied by both Peter and Dorothy even before they met each other. Over ten tears ago Mark and Louise Zwick made a presentation to a group of church people who formed a committee to dole out funds collected for help for the homeless--no strings attached, i.e., no grantsmanship required. The diocese really wanted us to receive a portion of these funds, since the majority of funds were collected in Catholic parishes. In attempting to describe Casa Juan Diego, Mark talked about Catholic Worker values of voluntary poverty and pacifism, but made an egregious error by mentioning that a core value of the Catholic Worker was anarchism. People gasped! The Catholic representative who supported our getting the money fell off his chair! "Wait a minute, wait a minute!" What we meant to say was that Casa Juan Diego is a voluntary non-bureaucratic organization where Catholics exercise their freedom to work without pay to better serve the poor. That was what was meant by anarchism. Needless to say, we got some money, but the Catholic representative was very slow in recovering. The founders of the Catholic Worker movement preferred to use the word personalism instead of anarchism because of the confusion of the word anarchy with chaos. By 1913 Dorothy Day, still a teenager, had read Kropotkin. She and Maurin were twenty years away from their first meeting, and she had no explicit religious faith. Yet, like Maurin, she was drawn to Kropotkin's vision of how society could be reorganized so as to eliminate the injustice of wage slavery. She describes Kropotkin's influence on her in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness: "Kropotkin especially brought to my mind the plight of the poor, the workers, and though my only experience of the destitute was in books, the very fact that The Jungle (by Upton Sinclair) was about Chicago where I live, whose streets I walked, made me feel that from then on my life was to be linked with theirs, their interests were to be mine; I had received a call, a vocation, a direction to my life." Dorothy Day describes later in The Long Lonelines (Harper San Francisco) what the Catholic Worker had in mind as it embraced many of the ideas of Peter Kropotkin, who was known as an anarchist: "Kropotkin wanted much the same type of social order as Father Vincent McNabb, the Dominican street preacher, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and other distributists advocated, though they would have revolted at the word anarchist, thinking it synonymous with chaos, not 'self-government,' as Proudhon defined it. Distributism is the English term for that society whereby man has sufficient of this world's goods to enable him to lead a good life. Other words have been used to described this theory, mutualism, federalism, pluralism, regionalism; but anarchism--the word, first used as a taunt by its Marxist opponents, best brings to mind the tension always existing between the concept of authority and freedom which torments man to this day." Peter Kropotkin was born on December 21, 1842, in Moscow. His direct descent from the tsars of the ancient Rurik dynasty meant that he bore the title of prince. He led a life of privilege and security from birth, pursuing a military career in obedience to his father, although Peter's real interests were in science, especially geography. In Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Kropotkin relates that his awareness of social injustice dates from his childhood. He witnessed the poor treatment the family serfs received, and heard of the truly brutal practices common among the nobility. After military school, Peter Kropotkin chose to be assigned to an army regiment in Siberia. He then spent five years as an officer, during which time he was allowed to explore unknown parts of the Chinese--Russian border, and do geographical research. He was already showing little or no concern for the pursuit of conventional success or a place in the political system. He was also displaying an absolute faith in the basic goodness of the common people--a quality that would make his ideas attractive to Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day. He developed much of his social theories by studying the medieval village communes of Russia. He also developed a close relationship with the members of a Swiss watchmaking cooperative which was organized along non-authoritarian lines. Dorothy Day said in The Long Loneliness that, "He lived and worked so closely with peasants and artisans that his writings are practical handbooks." His books and pamphlets made him the world's best known and most respected anarchist by the turn of the century. From 1886 to 1917 Kropotkin lived in London. Dorothy Day recounted that, "Kropotkin and Tolstoi, the modern proponents of anarchism, were sincere and peaceful men. Kropotkin's classic Memoirs of a Revlutionist, was published first in the Atlantic Monthly in 1898. After the Russian Revolution Kropotkin went back to Russia and, revered by workers and scholars, lived in a country place outside of Moscow until the early twenties. He in no way sympathized with the revolution which had set up a dictatorship in the name of the proletariat, which would bring about by terroristic force what Kropotkin had hoped to attain through brotherly love. Wage Slavery Kropotkin lived through a period of European history that featured barbaric exploitation of the poor by the wealthy--in particular, of workers by their employers. Entire generations were forced to leave their farms and small workshops to work in factories. There were, for the most part, no minimum wage laws, no child labor laws, no regulation of the length of the workday, no days off, and no laws governing workplace health or safety. Workers became "wage slaves," making only enough money to keep alive until they could produce the next generation, so that the system could continue. Kropotkin traced the source of this problem to the factory system of production. One man, because he owned the factory and the machines, could profit by the work of many laborers, without having to actually produce anything himself. The workers, by contrast, produced all the wealth of the society, but were allowed to keep almost none of it, because they did not control the means of production, (namely the factory and the raw materials). Individual artisans could not make things as cheaply as factories could, so they were forced to go out of business and seek work in the factory, for a wage. Under this system, a small minority were allowed to attain fabulous wealth, while the vast majority of people endured grinding poverty, malnutrition, hellish working conditions, and a polluted environment. (This description might have been written today of the maquiladoras, factories of companies of the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Europe placed in many Third World countries to take advantage of cheap labor). Urbanization One thinks of the decline of the family farm as a recent phenomenon, but Kropotkin was aware of it over 100 years ago, and warned of its dangerous implications for society. In The Conquest of Bread, he blamed the poverty of peasant farmers on three groups: "We know in what a wretched condition European agriculture is. If the cultivator of the soil is not plundered by the landowner, he is robbed by the State. If the State taxes him moderately, the moneylender enslaves him by means of promissory notes, and soon turns him into the simple tenant of a soil belonging in reality to a financial company." The landlord, the State, and the moneylender (today read the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization), by compelling the farmer to overwork himself to pay their share, made it impossible for him to experiment with new, improved farming techniques. Thus farmers, unable to make a decent life on their farms, were tempted to try their luck in the urban factories. Once the social revolution had freed farmers from these three "vampires," as Kropotkin called them, and advanced soil preparation practices were put into general use, each small farm would be able to produce a balanced diet for many times the number of people who lived on it. Farm families wouldn't have to move to the city in search of wage-paying jobs. Nor would they have to grow market crops to be shipped to the cities and for export. Rather, the cities and their surrounding suburbs could grow enough food to feed their populations. Other countries, even the poorest, or those that had the worst climates, could be self-sufficient by using up-to-date agricultural methods. The World Food Summit which was held in Rome in November of 1996 provides striking evidence that Peter Kropotkin's theories about agriculture and hunger were far ahead of their time. In his article, "The Hungry Seventh of the World," which appeared in America magazine on May 3, 1997, Martin M. McLaughlin reports on the Nongovernmental Organizations Forum that met in conjunction with the Summit. In its statement, "Profit for Few or Food for All," the Forum rejects market- and trade-based efforts to solve the problem of world hunger. Instead, point one of the statement's six-point model reads: "The capacity of family farmers, including indigenous peoples, women, and youth, along with local and regional food systems, must be strengthened." With regard to trade-driven efforts to improve access to food, McLaughlin writes that, "in fact, the accelerated and unregulated activities of the food production and trading companies have had a great deal to do with reducing that access and therefore with limiting food security for both poor farmers and poor consumers. The Forum affirmed the Kropotkinian ideal of local, small-scale agriculture producing food for local consumption. Kropotkin saw urbanization (the process by which millions of people were being jammed into tiny tenements, amid filth, pollution, and noise, going through their lives without any contact with nature or growing things) as totally unnecessary. Division of Labor One of the greatest evils associated with the factory system was the endless division of labor for the sake of efficiency. Instead of training workers in the whole process of making something, from beginning to end, the factory owner or superintendent insisted on having each worker specialize in one small task, to be done over and over. Kropotkin wrote, in Fields, Factories, and Workshops: "The modern ideal of a workman seems to be a man or a woman, or even a girl or a boy, without the knowledge of any handicraft, without any conception whatever of the industry he or she is employed in, who is only capable of making all day long and for a whole life the same infinitesimal part of something: who from the age of 13 to that of 60 pushes the coal cart at a given spot of the mine or makes the spring of a penknife, or 'the eighteenth part of a pin.' Mere servants to some machine of a given description; mere flesh-and-bone parts of some immense machinery; having no idea how and why the machinery performs its rhythmical movements. Skilled artisanship is being swept away as a survival of a past condemned to disappear. The artist who formerly found aesthetic enjoyment in the work of his hands is substituted by the human slave of an iron slave." He conceded that, from the standpoint of the profit motive alone, the division of labor made sense. Goods could be manufactured in mass quantities much more cheaply in big factories than in small workshops. But, Kropotkin insisted, it was not in the best interest of society for individuals to be treated this way. Besides its being hurtful to the human spirit, Kropotkin saw a purely commercial disadvantage in the division of labor. He noted that where small factories did exist, either using running water to turn a wheel, or obtaining power by some other method, they were often the source for new inventions and technologies. When the workers were familiar with the entire manufacturing operation, and understood what was going on, they were able to perceive ways to improve the system. The only valid reason for the existence of huge factories, in Kropotkin's analysis, was for the production of huge commodities like locomotives and ocean liners. Everything else that a free people might need could be produced in small factories and workshops, for local consumption, not for trade or export. Instead of competition between manufacturers driving the prices down, and tempting them to mistreat workers for the sake of their profit margin, each cooperative would (to the absolute best of its ability) produce its own food, clothing, shelter, and luxury items. Each local group could have its own set of small factories to meet its own needs. Clothing could be made, from raw material to finished garment. Homes and furnishing could be made. Metals could be smelted and tools could be forged. In short, there was no barrier to total self-sufficiency, and therefore no need for speculators, middlemen, or brokers. Dorothy Day described Kropotkin's vision of cooperatives in The Long Loneliness: "Kropotkin looked back to the guilds and cities of the Middle Ages, and thought of the new society as made up of federated associations, co-operating in the same way as the railway companies of Europe or the postal departments of various countries co-operate now." Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day and Pope Leo XIII Kropotkin felt that some religious leaders focused too much on eternity (no danger today) rather than on basic human dignity and human rights. However, by the turn of the century the Catholic Church was finding its voice with regard to the "social question". In 1891, Pope Leo XIII's encyclical, Rerum Novarum, called for employers to pay a just, living wage, and certified that workers had the right to organize unions. There are many similarities in the idea of subsidiarity endorsed so strongly in the papal encyclicals and the ideas of Kropotkin. It was also around this time that a young French peasant first brought his thoroughly Catholic perspective to the problem of poverty. Peter Maurin was born and grew up in a small mountain village in France, on a family farm. He didn't have much experience of city life until he joined the Christian Brothers and went to Paris to study, and later teach. It's possible that the contrast between healthy, happy village life, and the miserable conditions he found in the Paris slums, caused Maurin to look for ways to reconcile his Catholicism with economic reform. As Maurin was obtaining his teaching certificate and beginning his classroom work, Prince Kropotkin was publishing his most important books. The Conquest of Bread, Fields, Factories and Workshops, and Mutual Aid all came out while Maurin was in Paris. By 1907, having left the Christian Brothers, Peter Maurin had read Kropotkin, and adopted some of his ideas. Peter Maurin agreed with Kropotkin's condemnation of 19th Century labor practices, and shared the Russian's vision of independent farming communes in place of authoritarian, centralized States. Later, after moving first to Canada and then to the U.S., Maurin gave up working for wages. But he, as a Catholic and a pacifist, had to reconcile Kropotkin's anarchism with the Kingdom of God. He had to find a system that combined social transformation and fidelity to the Gospel. This system, formally expressed by Emanual Mounier in his Personalist Manifesto, was part of a personalist literature including the works of Nicholas Berdyaev, G.K. Chesterton, and others going back to St. Francis. Personalism starts with the idea that society and all of its institutions and organizations, both public and private, should be ordered to the material and spiritual good of all persons. While the communist, the fascist, and the laissez faire capitalist might speak of the common good, they seek to achieve it at the expense of persons. The person must suffer and be sacrificed for the sake of some large abstract agglomeration like the Nation, or the Corporation, the Party, or the Economy. Under Personalism, such constructs have value only to the extent that they facilitate the dignity and freedom of each person, and do not harm any person--not even one. As Marc H. Ellis writes in his essay, "Peter Maurin: To Bring the Social Order to Christ", Peter Maurin "thought that the social order had a singular mission: to protect and nurture the person's journey toward the mystery of God, thus promoting the possibility of salvation" (A Revolution of the Heart, Orbis Books). The second tenet of Maurin's Personalism is that, while the society as a whole is to "protect and nurture" each individual, the actual work of salvation, including the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, is accomplished by Jesus Christ through persons, not structures Personalism is personal involvement with the life and problems of those around us, especially the poor. Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day emphatically did not want to set up an agency or bureau to shelter the homeless and feed the hungry. They had sharp criticism for the government's social service efforts, because these efforts were so impersonal. Dorothy gave details in an article for Commonweal in 1949: "[Peter] pointed out that we have turned to state responsibility through home relief, social legislation, and social security, that we no longer practice personal responsibility, but are repeating the words of the first murderer, 'Am I my brother's keeper?'" (Selected Writings of Dorothy Day, Orbis Books) In The Long Loneliness, she recounts a conversation with Peter: "He always reminded me...that we are our brother's keeper, and the unit of society is the family; that we must have a sense of personal responsibility to take care of our own, and our neighbor, at a personal sacrifice. 'That is a first principle', he always said. 'It is not the function of the state to enter into these realms...Charity is personal. Charity is love'...While other papers, monthly, weekly, and daily, displayed the 'blue eagle' of the National Recovery Administration, he would have no part in cooperating with the state." The Personalist/Anarchist Alternative to the State In a column that appeared in the Catholic Worker in January, 1936, entitled "To Christ--To the Land!," Dorothy announced that the New York group was going to begin a farming commune that March. She wrote: "For those who have put to us the question "What have you to offer in the way of a constructive program for a new social order?" we have replied over and over, "Peter Maurin's three-point program of Round-table Discussions, Houses of Hospitality, Farming Communes." It is important to notice the reference to a new social order. The CW's were not merely seeking a way to live out their own faith--they were advancing Maurin's three-point program as a way of life for everybody. They were calling for the entire world to embrace their vision, just as Jesus called for everyone to embrace his vision of the Kingdom. In The Long Loneliness, Dorothy added, "Ours was a long-range program, looking for ownership by the workers of the means of production, the abolition of the assembly line, decentralized factories, the restoration of crafts and ownership of property. This meant, of course, an accent on the agrarian and rural aspects of our economy and a changing of emphasis from the city to the land." This program of socio-economic reform sounds like that of Kropotkin, because the Russian, for all his atheism, had a very Christian committment to the dignity and worth of the person. He saw the dehumanizing effects of industrialization, and denounced the political systems that created and promoted them. But Kropotkin was hazy about the best way of making his vision real. He put a lot of faith in education (as did Peter Maurin), but he expected the transformation to happen spontaneously. One day, enough of the workers would just stop cooperating with the corrupt system, band together in functional, regional communes, and begin living without benefit of arbitrary authority. The CW's, by contrast, had a much more realistic idea of their role in changing the world. Poor Means, Pure Means Their faith taught Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, and the first Catholic Workers that whatever good they hoped to do in the world had to be accomplished by pure means. No matter how bad the system was, or how badly they wanted to change it, they could not use or advocate violence. They could not coerce. Furthermore, they committed themselves to "poor means." They could not propagandize in the way that Kropotkin suggested without taking the initiative in their own lives. As long as anyone was suffering poverty and want, the Catholic Workers would embrace voluntary poverty. Further, they would work to alleviate the involuntary poverty of others. While Prince Kropotkin deplored the conditions under which the poor had to live in his day, there is no record of his actually providing material assistance to poor people as part of his program. Maurin's personalism, by contrast, combined propaganda with direct action from the beginning, for two reasons. First, because Jesus did not just teach and exhort, but also fed, healed, exorcised, and ultimately died for us on the Cross. The leaders of the Catholic Worker Movement felt that they should do the same to the best of their abilities. They saw themselves as continuing Jesus's work, and decided to use his methods, including direct action. The second reason was that Peter Maurin had recognized that the revolution was primarily a matter of personal transformation, not mass conversion. Everyone must make their own unique break with the dominant culture. Another of the poor means that the CW used to try to bring about their revolution, and which played no part in Kropotkin's plan, was prayer. The CWs had their own version of historical determinism, based on the Gospel idea of the Kingdom of God. There is no question that Peter Maurin saw his program as a step toward the Kingdom. However, when they began running Houses of Hospitality and operating breadlines, the Catholic Workers were made painfully aware of just how far God's plan was from completion. Though idealistic, they had to deal with the harsh reality of sin, suffering, injustice, and destitution. The problems, they saw, were far more complex and difficult than any mere theorist, even as insightful a one as Kropotkin, could realize. In the face of the hugeness of the task they had set themselves, the Catholic Workers did not only work for the coming of Peter Maurin's personalist revolution. They prayed for it too, taking their examples from the saints, who "worked as though all depended on them, but prayed as though all depended on God". The Situation Today The Catholic Worker began with propaganda--the first issue of the paper came out before the first house of hospitality was opened. However, by October 1933--three months later--people were being fed, housed, and clothed in community. Houses were quickly begun all over the country. In a way, the Catholic Workers were realizing Kropotkin's dream of free, federated communes replacing the domination of government. However, these free communes departed from Kropotkin's vision in several important respects. First, they were not self-sufficient. They did not grow enough food to support themselves, nor did they supply their own needs by setting up small factories and workshops. The houses of hospitality offered food, shelter, and clothing to the poor, but relied on newspaper sales, donations, and divine intervention to pay the bills. The farms that were set up later provided some food, but functioned more as retreat centers and sanctuaries from urban life than as working farms. Second, the communal lifestyle of the Catholic Worker did not attract large numbers of people. Kropotkin expected whole towns and cities to be reorganized into free communes. Instead, handfuls of people came together in semi-permanent communal groups. Hundreds or even thousands of the poor were helped each year, but the vast majority did not stay and join in the work. For these reasons, the houses of hospitality did not replace government. Kropotkin's voluntary associations, by performing all the worthwhile tasks of the state, were supposed to make the state superfluous and obsolete. When there was no need for a government, it would be disbanded. What happened was just the opposite. Throughout the century, the size and power of the state continued to grow. Despite these discouraging signs, though, the personalism of the Catholic Worker continued to spread, and the workers themselves remained joyful. Kropotkin's lofty goals--the end of poverty and war, and the replacement of the coercive state with free communes, seemed farther away than ever. Yet some poor people were helped, some voices were raised against war, and some who placed their trust in the state were converted to the ideal of Christian community. And this ideal, based on the principle of mutual aid and support, remained alive and is still flourishing in the Catholic Worker Movement today. Peter Maurin's goal of a society in which "it is easier to do good" is still being pursued and attained on a small, but growing, scale. Houston Catholic Worker, Vol. XVII, No. 4, July-August 1997.  |
