Peter Kropotkin

Peter Kropotkin was a Russian revolutionary, anarchist, and activist. An advocate for a decentralized society based on self-governing communities and worker-run enterprises. He was very skeptical of capitalism and believed it to create poverty, scarcity, and wealth for the privileged. He believed that surplus value was itself the problem, holding that a society would still be unjust if the workers of an industry kept their surplus to themselves, rather than redistributing it for the common good.

His observations of cooperative tendencies in indigenous peoples led him to conclude that not all human societies were based on competition. He concluded that most pre-industrial and pre-authoritarian societies actively defend against the accumulation of private property by distributing a person's possessions to the community when they died. In his 1892 book,” The Conquest of Bread,” Kropotkin proposed a system of economics based on mutual exchanges made in a system of voluntary cooperation. He believed that in a society that is socially, culturally, and industrially developed enough to produce all the goods and services it needs, there would be no obstacle, such as preferential distribution, pricing, or monetary exchange, to prevent everyone to take what they need from the social product. He supported the eventual abolition of money or tokens of exchange for goods and services.