Hi, this is our preview of the partially examined life episode 256, part 2 on Peter Krapatkin's

The Conquest of Bread.

In this continuation of our previous discussion, we go way into more specific quotes from the

text, and here you are going to hear the first seven minutes of that discussion, starting

with the Preface of the Book.

This Preface written in 1913 that he added conveys one of the standard objections people

give to, if you want to say that mutual aid is just natural communism is sort of the natural

endpoint of the search for liberty.

Of course, we've been trying to get away from kings and other oligarchs to individual

rights, and that he thinks communism is just the natural endpoint of that.

People here might say, well, how come it's never worked that way?

How come whatever it's been tried, it's been a horrible messy dictatorship kind of thing.

Of course, this was written before.

Those things actually happened, but still he's asking, given that we've had thousands of

years of why have we not seen that?

And he wants to say, actually, we see evidence of that all over the place that you see all

sorts of these associations and individual small groups.

There's just this other countervailing force of authoritarianism that seems just people

rising up and taking over.

Did you find that convincing?

It's a little bit of a non-answer.

It's saying that, of course, we see evidence around it.

...