Peter Kropotkin’s opposition to the state was sparked while working for Alexander II’s tsarist regime. Its crushing of the Polish rebellion of 1863 demonstrated its inherent violence, while its inability to improve the lives of the peasantry exposed its humanitarian limitations. Kropotkin was a collectivist anarchist who believed in anarcho-communism and mutual aid, and is often said to be ‘utopian’.
Kropotkin argued that under capitalism, wealth is accumulated by owners of private property, to the impoverishment of everyone else. Nation states underpinned this, oppressing wage slaves at home and abroad, and fighting wars among themselves for the privilege of doing so. He therefore rejected capitalism, and also the state in any form. He saw the representative parliamentarian state as a mere tool of the bourgeoisie, which protected its own selfinterest. Likewise, the socialist state was a dictatorship of the working classes, whose appropriation of the means of production would significantly magnify state power.
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