Mutual Aid
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution is a 1902 collection of anthropological essays by Russian naturalist and anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. The essays, initially published in the English periodical The Nineteenth Century between 1890 and 1896, explore the role of mutually-beneficial cooperation and reciprocity (or "mutual aid") in the animal kingdom and human societies both past and present. It is an argument against theories of social Darwinism that emphasize competition and survival of the fittest, and against the romantic depictions by writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thought that cooperation was motivated by universal love. Instead Kropotkin argues that mutual aid has pragmatic advantages for the survival of human and animal communities and, along with the conscience, has been promoted through natural selection. Mutual Aid is considered a fundamental text in anarchist communism. It presents a scientific basis for communism as an alternative to the historical materialism of the Marxists. Kropotkin considers the importance of mutual aid for prosperity and survival in the animal kingdom, in indigenous and early European societies, in the Medieval free cities (especially through the guilds), and in the late 19th century village, labor movement, and poor folk. He criticizes the State for destroying historically important mutual aid institutions, particularly through the imposition of private property.
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What Hacker News says
- Great works on this subject, to my mind refuting your nebulous thesis, include Debt by Graeber, Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow, and Mutual Aid by Kropotkin.
- I produced a free ebook edition of Mutual Aid for Standard Ebooks last year: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/peter-kropotkin/mutual-aid
It's very readable and quite interesting. It aimed to have a veneer of science, when the science of animals and nature was still fairly undeveloped; and it succeeded in a sense, because its observations are still held in regard, but I think it succeeded much better as a work of philosophy.
In any case, it suffers a little for what I think is the naive thesis of "if only mankind could cooperate like the animals do, we would live in a utopia." Of course, mankind has demonstrated through thousands of years of history that tribes of men can't really cooperate in any grand sense, so the point seems rather moot.
- I recommend Kropotkin's book about Mutual Aid regarding this topic. Disregarding his obvious political affiliation he is one of the first critics of the then-emerging social-darwinist readings of animal behaviour with regards to Evolution and therefore deals with this topic quite extensively.
He was a zoologist apart from all the other topics he had time to deal in because of his noble heritage. Here is the wikipedia article [0] since I do not know how HN regards links to e.g. libgen.
- Fiction: The City of Brass - epic fantasy based on the medieval Islamic world (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32718027-the-city-of-bra...)
Nonfiction: Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis (and the Next) - self-explanatory title (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54654726-mutual-aid)
Crying in H-Mart: memoir by Michelle Zauner (leader of the band Japanese Breakfast) about her mother and how food wove through their relationship (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54814676-crying-in-h-mar...)
- Another classic work from Kropotkin is Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. It's more anthropology than economics, but it is an absolutely fundamental work for anarchism.
- >We are competitive because our survival depends on it
Says who? Our survival, as does the survival of almost all life, actually depends on Cooperation. I'd highly recommend checking out the book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by Pyotr Kropotkin. You can find it for free online (legally, its public domain) https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/4341 .
