Mutual Aid
Preface to the 1914 Edition
Section summary
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.
When the present war began, involving nearly all Europe in a terrible struggle, and this struggle assumed, in those parts of Belgium and France which were invaded by the Germans, a never yet known character of wholesale destruction of life among the non-combatants and pillage of the means of subsistence of the civil population, “struggle for existence” became a favourite explanation with those who tried to find an excuse for these horrors.
A protest against such an abuse of Darwin’s terminology appeared then in a letter published in the Times. It was said in this letter that such an explanation was “little more than an application to philosophy and politics of ideas taken from crude popular misconceptions of the Darwinian theory (of ‘struggle for existence’ and ‘will to power,’ ‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘superman,’ etc.)”; that there was, however, a work in English “which interprets biological and social progress not in terms of overbearing brute force and cunning, but in terms of mutual co-operation.” It was suggested, therefore, that a cheap reprint of this book should be published without delay.
Such a reprint is now before the reader. It is a full reprint of the first edition, from which the Appendix only has been omitted as it contains matter of a rather special character.
Twelve years have passed since the first edition of this work was published, and it can be said that its fundamental idea—the idea that mutual aid represents in evolution an important progressive element—begins to be recognized by biologists. In most of the chief works on evolution which have appeared lately on the Continent, it is already indicated that two different aspects of the struggle for life must be distinguished: the exterior war of the species against the adverse natural conditions and the rival species, and the inner war for the means of existence within the species. It is also admitted that both the extent of the latter and its importance in Evolution have been exaggerated, much to the regret of Darwin himself; while the importance of sociability and social instinct in animals for the well-being of the species, contrarily to Darwin’s teaching, was underrated.
However, if the importance of mutual aid and support among animals begins to win recognition among modern thinkers, this is not yet the case for the second part of my thesis—the importance of these two factors in the history of Man, for the growth of his progressive social institutions.
The leaders of contemporary thought are still inclined to maintain that the masses had little concern in the evolution of the sociable institutions of man, and that all the progress made in this direction was due to the intellectual, political, and military leaders of the inert masses.
The present war, having brought the majority of the civilized nations of Europe into a close contact, not only with the realities of war, but also with thousands of its side effects in daily life, surely will contribute to alter the current teachings. It will show how much the creative, constructive genius of the mass of the people is required, whenever a nation has to live through a difficult moment of its history.
It was not the masses of the European nations who prepared the present war-calamity and worked out its barbarous methods: it was their rulers, their intellectual leaders. The masses of the people have nowhere had a voice in the preparation of the present slaughter, and still less so in the working out of the present methods of warfare, which represent an entire disregard of what we considered the best inheritance of civilization.
And if the wreckage of this inheritance will not be complete; if notwithstanding the crimes committed during this “civilized” war, we may still be sure that the teachings and traditions of human solidarity will, after all, emerge intact from the present ordeal, it is because, by the side of the extermination organized from above, we see thousands of those manifestations of spontaneous mutual aid, of which I speak in this book in the chapters devoted to Man.
The peasant women who, on seeing German and Austrian war prisoners wearily trudging through the streets of Kieff, thrust into their hands bread, apples, and occasionally a copper coin; the thousands of women and men who attend the wounded, without making any distinction between friend and foe, officer or soldier; the French and Russian peasants—old men left behind in their villages and women—who decide in their village folkmotes to plough and to sow the fields of those who are “there,” under the enemy’s fire; the co-operative kitchens and popottes communistes which sprang up all over France; the spontaneous aid to the Belgian nation which comes from England and the United States, and to devastated Poland from the Russian people—both these undertakings implying such an immense amount of voluntary, freely organized labour and energy that all character of “charity” is lost in them, and they become mere neighbours’ help—all these facts and many more similar ones are the seeds of new forms of life. They will lead to new institutions, just as mutual aid in the earlier ages of mankind gave origin later on to the best progressive institutions of civilized society.
To the chapters of this book which deal with the primitive and mediæval forms of mutual aid I should like especially now to draw the attention of the reader.
I do so in the earnest hope that in the midst of the misery and agony which this war has flung over the world, there is still room for the belief that the constructive forces of men being nevertheless at work, their action will tend to promote a better understanding between men, and eventually among nations.