Mutual Aid

Contents

1. Preface to the 1914 Edition 7 min 5

   Written at Brighton in November 1914, the preface presents the popular reprint as an answer to those who excused the atrocities of the war as a “struggle for existence”. Kropotkin notes that biologists have begun to accept the importance of mutual aid among animals, but not his second thesis: that the masses, not their leaders, created humanity’s progressive social institutions. The war was prepared by rulers, he argues, while peasants, nurses, co-operative kitchens and relief workers show spontaneous mutual aid that will seed new institutions.

2. Introduction 25 min 11

   Kropotkin explains how the book arose. In Siberia he saw nature’s harshness and scarcity, but little competition within species and much mutual support. Kessler’s 1880 lecture on the law of mutual aid gave him his theme, and Huxley’s 1888 essay on the struggle for existence provoked the Nineteenth Century articles of 1890–96. He distinguishes sociability, an instinct of solidarity and justice, from love or sympathy; admits that he stresses sociable instincts at the expense of self-assertion; and outlines the plan, from animals through savages and barbarians to the mediaeval city and modern society.

3. I Mutual Aid among Animals 56 min 31

   Kropotkin argues that Darwin meant the struggle for existence in a wide, metaphorical sense, and that his followers, above all Huxley with his “gladiator’s show”, narrowed it into a war of each against all. Following Kessler, he presents mutual aid as a law of nature as important as mutual struggle and probably more important for progressive evolution. He illustrates it with burying beetles, crabs, ants and bees, hunting and fishing associations of birds, small birds mobbing birds of prey, and the especially sociable and intelligent cranes and parrots.

4. II Mutual Aid among Animals (continued) 1 h 19 min 53

   The survey continues with bird migrations, breeding colonies and autumn flocks, then mammals: wolves, rodents, horses, ruminants and monkeys, most of them social. Sociability, Kropotkin concludes, is the chief advantage in the struggle for life and the basis of intelligence and a rudimentary sense of justice. He then examines Darwin’s and Wallace’s evidence for competition within species and finds it thin. Climate, disease and other natural checks keep numbers below what food allows; new varieties arise by migration and new habits, not extermination; and nature’s tendency is to avoid competition.

5. III Mutual Aid among Savages 1 h 9 min 56

   Turning to humans, Kropotkin rejects the Hobbesian picture revived by Huxley. Drawing on Morgan and the new anthropology, he argues that humans lived from the first in tribes and clans, the family being a late product. Archaeology and accounts of the Bushmen, Hottentots, Australians, Papuas, Fuegians, Eskimos, Aleuts and Dayaks show sharing, mutual support and strict tribal morality. Infanticide, abandonment of the old, cannibalism and blood revenge he explains by necessity and later superstition. Tribal ethics are double, solidarity within and hostility without, and the separate family, priestly knowledge and warrior castes begin to undermine tribal unity.

6. IV Mutual Aid among the Barbarians 1 h 5 min 53

   History seems to show only wars, but Kropotkin argues that chroniclers record conflict and neglect everyday cooperation. When the clans of the migrating barbarians broke up, they rebuilt themselves as village communities based on common territory, holding land in common, working together, and settling disputes in folkmotes through arbitration and compensation instead of revenge. He finds the village community among all peoples and illustrates it from the Buryats, Kabyles, Caucasian mountaineers, Africans, Americans and Malays. The state, when it came, took over functions the community had exercised for all.

7. V Mutual Aid in the Mediæval City 56 min 67

   Kropotkin traces how authority grew among the peaceful barbarians: through debt to armed brotherhoods and through the fines paid to the judges who kept the peace. Then, in the tenth to twelfth centuries, fortified villages and market towns threw off their lords. Their sworn communes federated two kinds of union: territorial neighbourhoods descended from the village community, and guilds, brotherhoods of mutual support and self-jurisdiction for every trade and purpose. With charters, elected judges, communal buying of food and city-run trade, the mediaeval city appears as an attempt at mutual aid on a large scale without the fetters of the State.

8. VI Mutual Aid in the Mediæval City (continued) 59 min 51

   The mediaeval cities, Kropotkin argues, shared a common structure despite their variety. The craft guilds were sovereign units in which manual labour was honoured, work was judged by standards of “justice”, and wages and hours compare well with the nineteenth century. Leagues of cities kept the peace, and the cities’ cathedrals, crafts and science changed Europe within four centuries. They fell for several reasons. They left the peasants in serfdom and the newcomers without rights, neglected agriculture for trade and colonies, and gave in to Roman-law ideas of a centralized State, which the Church and the rising monarchies enforced.

9. VII Mutual Aid amongst Ourselves 1 h 4 min 56

   After the Reformation-era risings were crushed, Kropotkin argues, the States spent three centuries destroying the institutions of mutual aid: guilds, city liberties and above all the village community. He traces the seizure of communal lands in France, England, Germany and Austria and denies that commons died a natural death. Yet communal property and customs survive across Europe: Swiss commons, French and German village work-bees, new agricultural syndicates and co-operatives after the laws of 1884–88, and Russian peasants who chose communal ownership freely and used the commune to introduce new ploughs, rotations and drainage.

10. VIII Mutual Aid amongst Ourselves (continued) 54 min 33

    Among industrial workers, Kropotkin shows mutual aid reviving despite the State’s destruction of the guilds and its laws against combination. Trade unions survived prosecution to win legal standing. Strikes depend on the solidarity of hungry families, and socialist activists make unpaid sacrifices. Co-operatives, Russian artels, friendly societies, lifeboat crews, rescue miners and countless clubs and learned societies show the same tendency. Above all he finds it in the everyday help the poor give each other in sickness, childbirth, death and unemployment, and, within family and friendship, among the rich as well.

11. Conclusion 14 min 4

    Kropotkin sums up: the most sociable animal species are the most prosperous, and human progress rose with clan, village community and mediaeval city. Mutual aid also reasserted itself against the centralized State. He grants that individual self-assertion is a second factor of evolution but leaves it for later study. He argues that mutual aid, not competition, made possible the periods of greatest progress, the Greek and mediaeval cities, and underlies even the industrial revolution. It is also the origin of ethics, which widens over time towards the whole of humanity.

12. Appendix 55 min 12

    The Appendix of the 1902 edition, restored here, adds notes keyed to the first edition’s pages. They cover swarms of butterflies and dragon-flies, ants, bird colonies, sociable animals and checks to over-multiplication (disease and human hunting rather than competition), and the ways species avoid competition. Kropotkin also defends Morgan and Bachofen against Westermarck on the early family and discusses property destroyed on the grave, the zadruga and the origin of guilds as artificial clans. Further notes take up the market theory of the mediaeval city and mutual aid in Dutch and Belgian villages.