n the mass. If you can only get used to this logical
process, you meet with no more difficulties, and you can boast that you
are neither "authoritarian" nor "Utopian." What could be easier, what
more pleasant?

But in order to consume, it is necessary to produce. Kropotkine knows
this so well that he reads the "authoritarian" Marx a lesson on the
subject.

"The evil of the present organisation is not in that the 'surplus value'
of production passes over to the capitalist--as Rodbertus and Marx had
contended--thus narrowing down the Socialist conception, and the general
ideas on the capitalist regime. Surplus value itself is only a
consequence of more profound causes. The evil is that there can be any
kind of 'surplus value,' instead of a surplus not consumed by each
generation; for, in order that there may be 'surplus value,' men, women,
and children must be obliged by hunger to sell their labour powers, for
a trifling portion of what these powers produce, and, especially of what
they are capable of producing" (poor Marx, who knew nothing of all these
profound truths, although so confusedly expounded by the learned
Prince!)... "It does not, indeed, suffice to distribute in equal shares
the profits realised in one industry, if, at the same time, one has to
exploit thousands of other workers. The point is to _produce with the
smallest possible expenditure of human labour power the greatest
possible amount of products necessary for the well being of all_."
(Italicised by Kropotkine himself.)

Ignorant Marxists that we are! We have never heard that a Socialist
society pre-supposes a systematic organisation of production. Since it
is Kropotkine who reveals this to us, it is only reasonable that we
should turn to him to know what this organisation will be like. On this
subject also he has some very interesting things to say.

"Imagine a Society comprising several million inhabitants engaged in
agriculture, and a great variety of industries--Paris, for example, with
the Department of Seine-et-Oise. Imagine that in this Society all
children learn to work with their hand as well as with their brain.
Admit, in fine, that all adults, with the exception of the women
occupied with the education of children, undertake to work _five hours a
day_ from the age of twenty or twenty-two to forty-five or fifty, and
that they spend this time in any occupations they choose, in no matter
what branch of human labour considered _necessary_.