Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid
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[1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/petr-kropotk...
[2] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutua...
[3] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-memoi...
https://librivox.org/conquest-bread-2-by-peter-kropotkin/
https://librivox.org/anarchy-by-errico-malatesta/
https://librivox.org/god-and-the-state-by-mikhail-bakunin/
https://librivox.org/mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution-by-pet...
At its core, it’s the position of being against hierarchies of power where humans dominate those with less power. In simple terms, it’s being against humans dominating each other.
The big question is can we have a functioning society with less human domination and how far can we reduce it? That’s a deep question that involves everything from economics to the study of human nature.
In terms of human nature, I think people are far too quick to ascribe certain behaviors to human nature.
I was learning recently about Christopher Columbus and his encounters with native peoples and it’s fascinating how differently these people thought. The natives had a hard time understanding the colonizers and their endless need for gold and things.
Eventually some of them theorized that the European’s god is actually gold lol.
but to your point of the new soviet man, how is that any different than the certain set of standards that we mold humans into today? we're raised to fit the status quo and be operatives for capital. we're compelled to look and dress a certain way, etc.
For example we know that reducing poverty, increasing access to education, and increasing access to nutritious food increase IQ, and reduce crime.
In terms of culture, there is no such thing as a society without culture so why not build a culture based on kindness and mutual aid?
Our capitalist society makes us think the only answer is greed but it isn’t.
I wonder if late American capitalism is doing the same with entrepreneur worship. Mainstream culture celebrates people who are self starters, constantly grinding, always on the lookout for unfulfilled human desires and new markets, sensitive to customers' feelings and individuality while somehow also completely indifferent to urgent systemic catastrophes like environmental destruction or the end of democracy (which require collective effort)...
This is not an ideology like Soviet dogma. But in capitalism's funny way, it's an omnipresent and coherent archetype nevertheless.
No, not with any scale. This has been tried and tried and tried. It's a nice idea, but like most of leftism, only works on paper.
I wish the people that argue for things like the destruction of the family would instead push for universal healthcare. That's at least doable.
Humans are hierarchical creatures. It's emergent behavior, not forced upon us.
At most, I've encountered calls to abolish the dependence on traditional family structures, in particular the assumption of a "nuclear family" baked into a lot of societal interactions. That doesn't mean abolishing families (nuclear or otherwise) themselves, but rather making it so that people who lack familial support systems (nuclear or otherwise) are not disadvantaged as a result of that lack.
There's been number of historic personalities, such a Napoleon Bonapart that gave rise to a though that maybe individual have no power over historic process and history is pre-determined.
Anarchism is about denying that fatalism and branching your own fork in history where no historic processes have any power over you.
That's a leftist idea, that gave birth to anarcho-capitalism which in turn is fundamental idea in crypto-anarcho-capitalism (hello libertarians).
Really those schism and isms gone a long mile with original idea, I'd recommend reading classical thinkers and figuring out if their ideas are still relevant today.
Anarchism != chaos
And anarcho-capitalism has nothing to do with anarchism since capitalism is a system of domination. It’s just rebranded laissez-faire capitalism.
Just a right wing group co-opting left wing terminology to try and give their abhorrent beliefs credence.
I wonder how often this particular instance of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon happens on HN, i.e. what's the intersection of regulars here and people familiar with names like Kropotkin, Makhno, etc.
[1] PM press edition: https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1272
Kropotkin is a major figure of anarchism that you’ll found revered even in some Russel's books. Surely hackernews readership red all Russel works — both color, didn’t it?
Don’t you search for a Wikipedia biography each time you cross an antonomastic street, creating it if needed?
We have a square named after indian city of Bangalore - the Bangalore square. I was sure for a long time that's just another (jewish?) surname. Even though I knew that city, in context of street names I simply assume surnames, it didn't occur to me to think anything else.
pro-russian tankies hate him
I'm not sure what's going on in https://youtu.be/LffLqUwlY2Y?t=200 , but would not be surprised if it's something to do with rehabilitating Stalin (of the eponymous tanks)?
Actually I was surprised when I wanted to find a straight forward equivalent to "entre aide". It seems that "interhelp" is sufficiently obvious for having an organization taking this name, but this apparently not an idiomatic word per se.
https://www.lpm.org/news/2022-11-27/eastern-ky-mutual-aid-gr...
I observe that mutual aid between well-structured and stable organizations of well-trained people is even more effective than mutual aid between lone actors and temporary self-organizing cliques.
(to some degree, one might argue that back in the day, Silicon Valley was an example of successfully recombining groups of well-trained people, each of whose career-length might involve participation in over a dozen different hierarchal entities; in the 1970s this promiscuity was considered radical.)
A friend of mine described this as "essentially the same as every conversation between anarchists and communists today", which seems largely accurate. In particular, I enjoyed one comment:
> “No, no,” Kropotkin replied, “if you and your comrades think in this way, if the power is not going to their heads, and if they feel that they will not be going in the direction of oppression by the state, then they will achieve a lot. Then the revolution is truly in good hands.”
Draw your own conclusions.
Много городов у вас в России))
This is wrong on so many levels...
You've correctly defined diaeresis, but it's not actually used in English except in articles that get published in The New Yorker. There is a reason the common English name for the diacritic is "umlaut".
The normal use in English is to show that a word comes from German. There are some old relics like naïve (commonly spelled naive, now) and Laocoön (again, now usually spelled Laocoon). To the best of my knowledge a diaeresis has never been applied to the name "Menelaus" even though it "needs" one just as badly as Laocoon does.
> Naïve is one example, where it is pronounced na-ive, not nive.
The diaeresis there really just shows you that the word is borrowed from French, where it has a diaeresis for internal French reasons. (Because, again, English spelling does not include the concept of diaeresis.) It certainly doesn't tell you not to pronounce the word as "nive" (I assume you're referring to the PRICE vowel) -- the ordinary reading of the written vowel sequence "ai" would use the FACE vowel, as in plain, main, strain, vain, tail, wail, pail, sail, mail, plaice, taint, and waive.
Note that the Russian letter Ё does not feature a diacritic - the two dots are an integral part of the letter, and it is not related to the visually similar Russian letter E. As noted upthread, it is the iotified form of the letter O. (Russian has five or six non-reduced vowels, but for historical reasons the Russian alphabet has eleven vowels, including a / e / i / o / u plus ya / ye / y / yo / yu.)
Well, it is very much related to it historically, but it's beyond the point. Just nitpicking, sorry
> Sorry mate, but an umlaut does not represent the same thing as a diaeresis!
You're going to need to decide what you're talking about. The diacritic of two dots positioned above a letter is most often called "umlaut" in English. It is not normally called "diaeresis", but sometimes it is.
There is a phonological phenomenon also called "umlaut", which is related to the name for the mark in that the mark was historically used in German to indicate the phenomenon. The relationship is dead now; German ö is just a different letter from German o.
Don't get confused between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut_(linguistics) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut_(diacritic) .
I can't think of any such examples similar to "naïve". Stuff like "ü" shows up in German names - and that's because the modern English convention is to not transliterate names that are already spelled in some kind of Latin script, even if it means dealing with weird digraphs, diacritics, or letters like ð. This doesn't work for Cyrillic, though.
For cyrillic a fixed transliteration is both more needed. "o" and "ö" sound different, but even if you pronounced any "ö" as "o" everybody would understand what you meant. This is different for cyrillic where there are many letters where typical western readers wouldn't even know how to pronounce them. A "Щ" would look like a weird "W", but is romanized as "shch" or "sch".
Even more extreme examples would be the romanization of japanese.
If you’re going to use Ë just because it looks the same as the original Cyrillic, then logically you’d also use P instead of R, X instead of Kh, etc.
In your other examples, all the sounds would be considered "o-like" (rather than "e-like") in most languages with a 5-vowel phonology or similar. A reader might not be able to parse the diaresis, but if they say it with a plain "o", it's a reasonable approximation.
But then "ё" in "Пётр" is really just [ʲo] phonetically, so it should, ideally, be reflected by "o" or some derivative glyph in transliteration for readers to be able to understand and pronounce it with any semblance of accuracy. Something like "Pötr" would probably be best, actually, since in most alphabets that have "ö", it's used for [ø] or similar, which would give a more accurate approximation of [ʲo] than just [o].
OTOH the Latin "ë" (when present in the alphabet, which is much rarer to begin with) tends to stand for [ə], so it would be most logical to use it to distinguish "э" from "е". Note that this can be treated as a consistent pattern: a diaresis over the vowel inverts its "default" frontness (front vowels become back, back vowels become front) to simulate the corresponding presence or absence of [ʲ]. Thus we can then also write "ä" for "я", "ü" for "ю", and "ï" for "ы".
It’s also common to see it in loan words and proper names, even with a different meaning.
It’s not, for the varied reasons I gave. I know that this is yet another variant. I agree there is a problem with it in that its meaning is not well-known (so you may want to use more well-known alternatives), but not that the diacritic itself is “weird” or foreign to English language users.
Anyway, it is very common to transliterate Пётр as Peter, though Pyotr seems even more common.
Quoting Wikipedia: "It is a modern descendant, through Old French James, of Vulgar Latin Iacomus, a derivative version of Latin Iacobus, Latin form of the Hebrew name Jacob"
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.
Wherever you look we see constant evidence of humanity's ability to cooperate to achieve grand accomplishments. I mean we're on the internet ffs. Ever heard of Wikipedia? Or how most modern tech companies are only possible because of the massive efforts of the open source communities? These aren't really new behaviors for humanity. In fact, I'd argue that if you take a look at the way language evolved you'd find a lot of support for the idea that it's actually a defining characteristic of humanity
[^0]: https://documents.saa.org/container/docs/default-source/doc-...
The best laid plans of mice and men, therefore, would seem to be those that (a) allow Cooperators to combine with at least linear effect, and (b) are resistant to sizeable Defecting populations.
But there absolutely are edit wars and battles of authority and admin bans etc.
(having seen humanity's response to Covid, I'm not willing to admit "the spirit of full cooperation will bloom as defecting behaviour withers away" as axiomatic. But I am curious as to what you have in mind?)
In a "one hand washes the other" model of cooperation, the right hand would be defecting if it was frequently washed by the left, while never (or infrequently) washing in return.
This is simultaneously terrifying and a source of optimism.
His work on this subject was in large part a response to the influence of "darwinism" at the time, where it became commonplace to think that "evolution" meant that we were evolved to compete with each other viciously, that selfish competition was our evolutionary inheritance, that this was somehow proven by darwin that we were "naturally" inclined to brutal competition between individuals. (I think a lot of this thought is still commonplace, including in "evolutionary psychology.")
Kropotkin argued that this is a misreading of natural history and the effects of evolution, that in fact cooperation is just as much/more a factor in natural selection, in survivability, that all creatures were in fact "evolved" to cooperate -- including humans, and for sure there are many many places where intensive cooperation is visible in human history.
(He specifically wrote about "indigenous" societies being based on cooperation -- which I think is an over-simplification, "indigenous" societies historical and present are very diverse rather than uniform on this axis -- see _Dawn of Everything_ for a contemporary anarchist scholarly take on this diversity -- but that was Kropotkin's scholarly anarchist take at the time). (If humans have in modern times often chosen on a mass scale to mistreat and kill each other even though they are "naturally" cooperative, it is not because of some evolutionary predestination).
Is what I get as a summary of one of Kropotkin's theses. I think he would fully agree that cooperation is one of the defining characteristics of humanity, would fully agree that humans are "built for cooperation". Cooperation as fundamental and foundational to evolution, and to animal as well as human life (humans understood as animals in the post-darwin world) was, like, his whole thing.
Check out the wikipedia section in his entry, for confirmation that my interpretation is common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kropotkin#Cooperation_an...
I think GP's comment here is a mischaracterization. I am worried that y'all are going to get the wrong idea about Kropotkin here!
[He was thinking and writing in the Victorian era, and his approach to "science" is characteristic, it wouldn't be accepted as a proper "scientific" approach today. It is still, though, I agree with OP article, interesting and useful philosophy, which provides a challenge to what we can realize are some assumptions not scientifically validated of even contemporary "evolutionary psychological" thinking].
So this means that you would cooperate most with your parents then your siblings, then your family, tribe, race and species.
I don't really want to get into the whole argument here -- it's one of those that we will go on forever with.
But the Kropotkin point of view would probably point out that humans as a species (and any species, in fact) have improved survivability and natural selection when we cooperate with those in our communities/populations without regard for family relations.
There's plenty of cooperation between population members not directly related observed in nature, that's literally what Kropotkin's whole book is about.
In the realm of "thought experiment", which is what "evolutionary psychology" seems to love these days: If game theory says that "tit for tat" is often the best strategy, then it's not hard to explain how creatures might evolve to do that. And if creatures are doing "tit for tat" then it is simple to explain how they might evolve to help other members of the popuation, regardless of genetic relation -- who would then help them. Thereby improving the genetic success of both participants. Organisms cooperating with other members of their population mutually improves the survival rate of all of their genes.
but here I am having the argument I said I wouldn't. You know the way to get me -- dropping statements about what "we observe" as if it is universally agreed upon and settled and not subject to debate or question -- without even a citation!
In the 1990s a cholera outbreak in South America created an interesting natural experiment. In some countries it was a deadly disease that spread through waterways. But in places with better hygiene, it couldn't spread through those typical pathways. So it eventually evolved into a much milder form in order to allow people to go out and socialize so it can continue to spread
This is why every single deadly pandemic has been zoonotic in origin. The black plague, covid, hiv, etc all came from other animals. It's a matter of maladaption. All the diseases that have been closely associated with humans for thousands of years have instead evolved to... not kill us. Some of them even became an essential part of our microbiome. Even herpes, a rather ancient human "parasite", actually plays some beneficial roles in our immune system. The microbial universe is a prime example of how organisms need not only replicate themselves but also the environments in which they thrive
I'd argue the fact that humans can live in reasonably stable polities of more than a billion people proves, and in an economic space of practically the entire planet (globalisation!) proves we absolutely can cooperate at grand, epic scales.Whether or not that means Kropotkin is right is another thing, but we're built for cooperation.
What's the point of lifting anyone out of poverty if we are actively ruining our environment through obviously unsustainable behaviour?
How many more billions of people could we have brought out of poverty if the goal wasn't to improve bottom lines? What about all the displaced people due to wars for oil?
The point of lifting people out of poverty - which doesn't mean they have now have money; it more means they have more access to education, healthcare, and capital - is that those people are now in a better position to help us deal with the future challenges, climate change being one of them. In addition to their quality of life being much better. There is a significant bootstrapping effect.
>How many more billions of people could we have brought out of poverty if the goal wasn't to improve bottom lines?
We don't know. It is difficult to say what would happen in a different timeline. But if Mao-era China and the Soviet Union are any indication, what we decided upon was a much better outcome than that. If you can design a system where wealth is allocated in a way that creates more wealth than it does currently, plenty of folks are all ears. Lots of people in positions of influence like creating more wealth.
We did not have good alternatives, until we did; and
We suppressed progress, had people killed, and squashed all attempts at public ownership of the goods, launched defamation campaigns, buried people in lawsuits, had them locked in their homes or jail for no reason other than being a block at corporate earnings.
If you have to slave away your life to pay for access to education, you clearly don’t have access to it, you are paying with your life for it.
What wall street and the rich are asking for is absurd. Gains on top of gains, chasing growth on rate of growth.
People in places of influence care about creating more wealth for themselves. They clearly don’t care about the average person because they are not the average person.
lets assume for a moment that we don’t have access to space, we are confined on earth, and have finite resources to work with. Certain people by virtue of chance end up consuming orders of magnitude more resources by virtue of their lineage and the place they were born it.
By said virtue, they impose onto the rest of us their will, and make it so they don’t face any repercussions for their wastefulness.
Can you argue, in good conscience, that all the resources spent on and by somebody like Musk, are better spent on Musk than feeding families in Africa, building infrastructure and providing top notch education to have more doctors and researchers do stuff like, idk find cures to all the different forms of cancer that we have?
I suspect humans, over tens of thousands of years, have successfully domesticated not only b taurus and c familiaris, but also h sapiens.
If you already have a blog post or something I'd love to read it :)
Dawn of Everything shares the latest anthropology and archeology about prior societies. Spoiler: Science indicates a whole lot more cooperation than was previously assumed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything
I'm quite bullish on the future of cooperatives. Perhaps like the worker directed social enterprises advocated by Richard Wolfe.
One missing "technology" is better, more durable governance. Cooperatives have been vulnerable to corporate capture (or transmutation). Like the farmer's cooperatives of yore. And they need better protection against coups, usurpers.
But surely that's solvable. We have 1,000s of successful examples to learn from.
Imagine a world where participating in a home owner association, local government council, or a volunteer org's executive board wasn't considered cruel and unusual punishment.
The person critiquing generally agrees that humans are cooperative but he takes issue with the author’s general position that people kinda just decide to organize culture in a certain way. Instead the video creator offers a materialist perspective that I find a lot more compelling.
I'm assuming this is satire, but it's hard to tell via text.
In one paragraph you say that his biological observations are still held in high regard. (Nothwithstanding that the science of such things was farily “underdeveloped”, he protested… you know, like how people massively protest against Darwin’s theories, from about the same era?) Then you take a dump on those same observations in the next paragraph because people who have lived in class societies, under strict hierachies (that’s all of recorded history, yes) weren’t nice to each other? Well… why do you think anarchists proposed an alternative to that?
You know what is utopian? To build a society on such a flawed human nature as what we have, centred around our selfish shortcomings—basing socity on on subjugation, oppression, and exploitation, so that (predictably) the ones who are vile and strong will take as much for themselves as they can and exploit the rest—see history—and for us collectively to doom ourselves by ruining the planet by pillaging it of its resources and all kinds of ecological balance. That’s utopian!
But congrats on your ebook project. Your pathetic little gloss demonstrates how classic literature is often wasted like pearls before swine.