Kropotkin - The State - Medieval Communes

'Their commercial and craft relations extended beyond the city, and their agreements were made without taking into account nationality. and when in our ignorance we boast of our international workers' congresses, we forget that by the fifteenth century international congresses of trades and even apprentices were already being held.'

'In short there is a massive and varied documentation to show that mankind has not known, either before or since, a period of relative well-being assured to everybody as existed in the cities of the Middle ages. the present poverty, insecurity, and physical exploitation of labour were then unknown.'

'Was it not in fact the rule of the guild that two brothers should sit at the bedside of each sick brother - a custom which certainly required devotion in those times of contagious diseases and the plague - and to follow him as far as the grave, and then look after his widow and children?'

'Abject poverty, misery, uncertainty of the morrow for the majority, and the isolation of poverty, which are the characteristics of our modern cities, were quite unknown in those free oases, which emerged in the twelfth century amidst the feudal jungle.
In those cities, sheltered by their conquered liberties, inspired by the spirit of free agreement and of free initiative, a whole new civilization grew up and flourished in a way unparalleled to this day.'

'In the commune, the struggle was for the conquest and defence of the liberty of the individual, for the federative principle for the right to unite and to act; whereas the States' wars had as their objective the destruction of these liberties, the submission of the individual, the annihilation of the free contract, the uniting of men in a universal slavery to king, judge and priest -to the State.

'In the course of the sixteenth century, the modern barbarians were to destroy all that civilization of the cities of the Middle Ages. These barbarians.......subjected the individual. They deprived him of all his liberties, they expected him to forget all his unions based on free argument and free initiative. their aim was to level the whole of society to a common submission to the master. They destroyed all ties between men, declaring that the State and the Church alone, must henceforth create union between their subjects; that the Church and the State alone have the task of watching over the industrial, commercial, judicial, artistic, emotional interests, for which men of the twelfth century were accustomed to unite directly.'