Explore "The Conquest of Bread" by Peter Kropotkin on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Nowadays, whoever can load on others his share of labour indispensable to existence does so, and it is believed that it will always be so.
Now, work indispensable to existence is essentially manual. We may be artists or scientists; but none of us can do without things obtained by manual work -- bread, clothes, roads, ships, light, heat, etc. And, moreover, however highly artistic or however subtly metaphysical are our pleasures, they all depend on manual labour. And it is precisely this labour -- the basis of life -- that everyone tries to avoid.