The Conquest of Bread is Peter Kropotkin's most detailed description of the ideal society, embodying anarchist communism, and of the social revolution that was to achieve it. Marshall Shatz's introduction traces the evolution of Kropotkin's thought, and the volume also includes a number of his shorter writings.

The Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin was the world's foremost spokesman of anarchism at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The Conquest of Bread is his most detailed description of the ideal society, embodying anarchist communism, and of the social revolution that was to achieve it.