The Manifesto of the Sixteen: Kropotkin’s rejection of anti-war anarchism and his critique of the politics of peace
The Manifesto of the Sixteen: Kropotkin’s rejection of anti-war anarchism and his critique of the politics of peace
Most attention has been paid to anarchist opposition to the First World War. There were, however, anarchists who supported the Entente powers, wished to see Germany defeated, and opposed the anti-war movement. Peter Kropotkin and his French supporters were the most prominent of these. This chapter examines Kropotkin's challenge to the radical orthodoxies of his day and places it in the context of the development of thinking about war and peace in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It engages with the debate between him and his most prominent antagonist, Errico Malatesta, and suggests that Kropotkin's arguments, mainly based on the right to self-defence, his rejection of non-intervention, and his opposition to moral equivalence, were coherent and persuasive then and are still relevant for thinking about war and peace today.
Keywords: Kropotkin, Malatesta, Peace movements, Anti-pacifism, Militarism, Self-defence, Moral relativism, Non-intervention
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