Yair’s Reviews > Fields, Factories, and Workshops > Status Update

"In the first editions of this book I did not venture to speak about the improvements that could be obtained in agriculture with the aid of electricity, or by watering the soil with cultures of certain useful microbes. I preferred to mention only well-established facts of intensive culture; but now it would be impossible not to mention what has been done in these two directions."

Kropotkin, Peter.

"These are the horizons which the above inquiry opens to the unprejudiced mind."

Kropotkin, Peter. Fields, Factories, and Workshops (p. 203). Kindle Edition.

And now, in the presence of all these conquests — what is the reality of things?

Kropotkin, Peter. Fields, Factories, and Workshops (p. 199). Kindle Edition.

"Certainly, I do not cherish the illusion that a thorough reform in education, or in any of the issues indicated in the preceding chapters, will be made as long as the civilised nations remain under the present narrowly egotistic system of production and consumption."

Kropotkin, Peter. Fields, Factories, and Workshops (p. 189). Kindle Edition.

"To keep the peasant at the lowest possible level, by means of taxation, serfdom, and the like, has been, and is still, the policy of most continental States."

Kropotkin, Peter. Fields, Factories, and Workshops (p. 161). Kindle Edition.

"We can thus say that nearly one-fourth (24 percent) of all the industrial workers of this country are working in workshops having less than eight to ten workers per establishment."

Kropotkin, Peter. Fields, Factories, and Workshops (p. 120). Kindle Edition.

“Don’t prove too much; beware of the landlord!” a practical gardener once wrote to me.

Kropotkin, Peter. Fields, Factories, and Workshops (p. 99). Kindle Edition.

"In short, America, which formerly took the lead in bringing “extensive” agriculture to perfection, now takes the lead in “intensive,” or forced, agriculture as well. In this adaptability lies the real force of American competition."

Kropotkin, Peter. Fields, Factories, and Workshops (pp. 74-75). Kindle Edition.

"Few books have exercised so pernicious an influence upon the general development of economic thought as Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population exercised for three consecutive generations."

Kropotkin, Peter. Fields, Factories, and Workshops (p. 75). Kindle Edition.

"All taken, there is thus no possibility of contesting the fact, that if the soil of Great Britain were cultivated only as the unfertile soil of Belgium is cultivated — notwithstanding all the social obstacles which stand in the way of an intensive culture, in Belgium as elsewhere — a much greater part of the population of these islands would obtain its food from the soil of its own land than is the case nowadays."