Kropotkin Mutual Aid Quotes

Don’t compete! — competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!

The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.

in the long run the practice of solidarity proves much more advantageous to the species than the development of individuals endowed with predatory inclinations.

The species in which peace and mutual support are the rule, prosper, while the unsociable species decay.

Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual and moral.

under any circumstances sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life.

In The Descent of Man he gave some powerful pages to illustrate its proper, wide sense. He pointed out how, in numberless animal societies, the struggle between separate individuals for the means of existence disappears, how struggle is replaced by co-operation, and how that substitution results in the development of intellectual and moral faculties which secure to the species the best conditions for survival.

Mutual aid [called this in Kropotkin's 1902 Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution means that every participant is both giver and recipient in acts of care that bind them together, as distinct from the one-way street of charity. 86

No, Kropotkin never described black women's mutual aid societies or the chorus in Mutual Aid, although he imagined animal society in its rich varieties & the forms of cooperation & mutuality found among ants, monkeys & ruminants. Impossible, recalcitrant domestics weren't yet in his view or anyone else's.

Mutual aid [called this in Kropotkin's 1902 Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution] means that every participant is both giver and recipient in acts of care that bind them together, as distinct from the one-way street of charity.

Man is a result of both his inherited instincts and his education. Among the miners and the seamen, their common occupations and their every-day contact with one another create a feeling of solidarity, while the surrounding dangers maintain courage and pluck. In the cities, on the contrary, the absence of common interest nurtures indifference, while courage and pluck, which seldom find their opportunities, disappear, or take another direction. Moreover,

and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life:

The radical economist J K Gibson-Graham (two women writing under one name) portray our society as an iceberg, with competitive capitalist practices visible above the waterline and below all kinds of aid and cooperation by families, friends, neighbors, churches, cooperatives, volunteers, and voluntary organizations from softball leagues, to labor unions, along with activities outside the market, under the table, bartered labor and goods, ad more, a bustling network of uncommercial enterprise. Kropotkin's mutual-aid tribes, clans, and villages never went away entirely, even among us, here and now.

The primitive man has one quality, elaborated and maintained by the very necessities of his hard struggle for life – he identifies his own existence with that of his tribe; and without that quality mankind never would have attained the level as it has attained now.

The truth, however, is that – to speak only of what I know personally – if I had kept a diary for the last twenty-four years and inscribed in it all the devotion and self-sacrifice which I came across in the Socialist movement, the reader of such a diary would have had the word “heroism” constantly on his lips. But the men I would have spoken of were not heroes; they were average men, inspired by a grand idea. Every Socialist newspaper – and there are hundreds of them in Europe alone – has the same history of years of sacrifice without any hope of reward, and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, even without any personal ambition.

In fact, I don't know myself which most to admire, the unbounded devotion of these few, or the sum total of petty acts of devotion of the great number. Every quire of a penny paper sold, every meeting, every hundred votes which are won at a Socialist election, represent an amount of energy and sacrifices of which no outsider has the faintest idea. And what is now done by Socialists has been done in every popular and advanced party, political and religious, in the past. All past progress has been promoted by like men and by a like devotion.

Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic “libertarianism” of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism’s principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.

As soon as we study animals — not in laboratories and museums only, but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains — we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Of course it would be extremely difficult to estimate, however roughly, the relative numerical importance of both these series of facts. But if we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: “Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?” we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization. If the numberless facts which can be brought forward to support this view are taken into account, we may safely say that mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle, but that, as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far greater importance, inasmuch as it favours the development of such habits and characters as insure the maintenance and further development of the species, together with the greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment of life for the individual, with the least waste of energy.

As one of the leading French anarchist thinkers and friend of Bakunin, Élisée Reclus, put it: “The external form of society must alter in correspondence with the impelling force within; there is no better established historical fact. The sap makes the tree and gives it leaves and flowers, the blood makes the man, the ideas make the society” (8). That is but one formulation of the anarchist notion of deterministic idealism, a belief that slavery and oppression must be overcome by first changing fundamental habits of the mind, which goes, of course, directly against Marxist materialism. Anarchists argue that the slave mentality can be exchanged for the revolutionary mentality if one is sufficiently exposed to the ideas of liberation and social change. (p. 49) ,... crucial to conveying the anarchist doctrine that the struggle for liberation begins in the mind and that the true subversion of authority consists in the recognition that we as individuals create the mental preconditions for the existence of bondage or freedom. (p. 50-51) But arguably, anarchism is the most misunderstood of all political theories. Although it is sometimes aligned with concepts of nihilism and terrorism, the philosophical anarchism of Proudhon, Kropotkin, Bakunin, and the Reclus brothers is essentially a pacifist, utopian, and liberal theory of voluntary association and mutual aid. The “propaganda by the deed” is not at all a recipe for terror, although some isolated anarchists have invoked this principle to justify their resort to violence, especially in Russia in the later part of the nineteenth century and in the Spanish Civil War. In general, however, anarchism’s rejection of centralized state power and institutionalized authority has ironically limited the political effectiveness of this philosophy, which stands in direct contrast to communism and socialism, both of which have traditionally embraced hierarchical structures of power. (p. 79)

In olden times, when a king sent his vogt to a village, the peasants received him with flowers in one hand, and arms in the other, and asked him--which law he intended to apply: the one he found in the village, or the one he brought with him?

As seen from the above, the war of each against all is not the law of nature. Mutual aid is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle, and that law will become still more apparent when we have analyzed some other associations of birds and those

In The Descent of Man he gave some powerful pages to illustrate its proper, wide sense. He pointed out how, in numberless animal societies, the struggle between separate individuals for the means of existence disappears, how struggle is replaced by co-operation, and how that substitution results in the development of intellectual and moral faculties which secure to the species the best conditions for survival. He intimated that in such cases the fittest are not the physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but those who learn to combine so as mutually to support each other, strong and weak alike, for the welfare of the community.

We know at the present time that all animals, beginning with the ants, going on to the birds, and ending with the highest mammals, are fond of plays, wrestling, running after each other, trying to capture each other, teasing each other, and so on. And while many plays are, so to speak, a school for the proper behaviour of the young in mature life, there are others, which, apart from their utilitarian purposes, are, together with dancing and singing, mere manifestations of an excess of forces — “the joy of life,” and a desire to communicate in some way or another with other individuals of the same or of other species — in short, a manifestation of sociability proper, which is a distinctive feature of all the animal world.

Moreover, it is evident that life in societies would be utterly impossible without a corresponding development of social feelings, and, especially, of a certain collective sense of justice growing to become a habit.