This letter to the syndicalist newspaper The Voice of Labour (9th February 1907) sees Kropotkin stressing the importance of a revolutionary labour movement. He places developments in Britain into an international context.
Dear Friends,
To my great regret I am again in bed and cannot be present tomorrow at the Voice of Labour meeting. I am the more sorry for it, as I wanted to tell you why my warmest greetings and hopes go to the new paper, founded by our English comrades.
The free organisation of Labour, independent of all Parliamentary parties, and aiming at the DIRECT solution—by the working men themselves, and through their own Unions—of the immense social problem which now stands before civilised mankind, such a Labour organisation, wide and powerful, has become the necessity of the moment.
This is why the same idea which prevailed in 1830 at the foundation of the Great [Grand National Consolidated] Trades’ Union of Robert Owen, in “the [International] Working Men’s Association” of the sixties, has again been revived in France, in Switzerland, in Spain (where it survived all prosecutions), and now it grows even in Germany. The working men realise the great mistake they committed when they substituted Parliamentary politics for the Direct Action of the Labour organisations in enforcing their demands upon the land and capital owning classes. And the working men of all these countries return once more to that type of Labour organisation which was formed for a direct pressure in the Socialist direction upon landlordism and capitalism in these isles at three different periods during the last hundred years. Labour returns to it, after having lost forty years in trying to use in its service the various forms of advanced parties in Parliament, and ascertained that this was a failure. They don’t turn their backs on Radicalism, but while they see in it a weapon to oppose Toryism in politics, they will have their own weapon to fight capitalism.
The English Voice of Labour is thus a sign of movement which is going on all over Europe, and our English paper will take its place by the side of the series of French, Swiss, and Spanish Syndicalist and Labour papers, bearing the same, or very similar names.
A fortnight ago I saw in Paris several of the active members of the great Labour movement, and on all sides I saw the greatest hopes being based on that new force which is known as the Revolutionary Syndicalist movement.
All the active energies of the young generation go to it. This movement has certainly its dangers, but one thing is certain. If such a movement had attained a serious development at the time when the Chartist agitation began in this country, or when the Revolution of 1848 broke out in France, both movements would not have ended as fruitlessly as they did—in France, in fantastical “National workshops” which drove the Paris proletarians to despair and ended in the June massacres; and in this country in the supremacy of the middle classes and the postponement of social reforms for generations to come.
The whole history of Europe would have taken a different turn if the proletarians had come then to the definite idea of a direct action through their own Unions for the solution of the great problem of labour and supply.
Let us greet, then, this new movement which permits the workers to work out themselves the main lines upon which the emancipation of Labour will have to be accomplished.
Let us hope, also, that the Voice of Labour, finding an echo amongst the British working men, will accomplish its part of the great work that devolves upon us.
Yours fraternally,
P. Kropotkin
Bromley, Kent Feb.1