The article links to a few book pages scanned as PDFs and an HTML version of Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Also worth mentioning is that there is a very large collection of Kropotkin's writing at the Anarchist Library[1], including an epub version of Mutual Aid[2] and his autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionist[3], which was also mentioned in the article.
Why hello my hacker anarchist sisters & brothers. If anyone would like to listen to Mutual Aid and many, many other FREE anarchist audio-books as you drive or workout, have got the plug for you!
Anarchism is an interesting topic, and learning about it has lead me down some interesting paths of learning and thought.
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.
agreed. the human nature argument is a lazy one against something like anarchism or any other alternative system. if we can be socialized to seek money (it starts with the piggy bank when we're like 4 years old), we can be socialized to not seek those things and instead seek something else. replace "money" or "greed" with any negative way that humans behave, like power or domination.
where does the ability to mold humans to fit a certain set of standards end? incentives, culture, norms, etc. I think can shape someone's default mode of thinking and actions on the margin, but eventually you reach some point like the "New Soviet Man" where you're asking someone not to be human?
> like the "New Soviet Man" where you're asking someone not to be human?
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.
Collectively held norms and expectations are commonplace across cultures, otherwise how would we effectively cooperate? They are kinda like protocols. There are many ways to raise people to uphold those sets of customs without falling into the domination and homogenization traps.
i'm talking more about incentive structures as a way to encourage people to act towards the greater good within society, rather than having an individual fit a certain type. anarchism is all about individual self-determination, i.e. not trying to make everybody fit a certain set of standards.
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.
Yes, the environment we grow up in plays a huge part in our development. Everything from nutrition during development to culture, values, etc. All shape how we think.
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.
As most things in life, it's just the surface meaning. The actual idea is denying that history have any power over an individual.
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.
"Anarcho"-Capitalism has nothing at all to do with the Anarchism of Pyotr Kropotkin, in the same way the "National Socialists" aren't actually Socialists.
Just a right wing group co-opting left wing terminology to try and give their abhorrent beliefs credence.
I think that anarcho-capitalism, and to a lesser degree even libertarianism, is a fundamentally flawed philosophy because of it being against hierarchies that "suppress" their followers and in support of hierarchies that bolster them. In other words capital owners down playing the state and propping up "free market economics".
There's much changed since the inception but the core idea of anarchism is abolishing central powers (and single truth) in favor of their own homemade belief system where government has no power over them and can't enforce their laws, because, hey, they're (anarchists) moved away from main stream.
I'm pretty active in anarchist (of the left-leaning variety) spaces and this is literally the first I've heard of family-abolitionism. That doesn't necessarily mean it ain't common, to be clear, but it does mean that this assertion that it is "common in anarchist communities" should probably be taken with a neighborhood-clearing and hydrostatically-equilibrious grain of salt.
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.
Incidentally, I've just been unpacking moving boxes, and put the beautifully illuminated [1] print of Mutual Aid on my "to-read" bookshelf.
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.
I’m rather surprised he might not be not better known here.
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?
In some countries almost every street is named after a person, so it would be too much trouble to research every street name.
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.
If you consider the ideological philosophy of anarchy as 'leftism terror', then you only serve to out yourself as having no idea of the tenets of anarchism itself.
He is also not saying HN readers should lean that way, but having an intellectual and enlightened view on life, often means having read up on multiple ideologies, theories or philosophies. Which if the HN reader base would generally consider themselves well read, then it is quite possible many would know about one of the most famous political and philosophical minds in history, Petr Kropotkin.
> one of the most famous political and philosophical minds in history, Petr Kropotkin.
That's rather a stretch. What's your threshold for "most famous"? Top ten? Top one hundred? Top thousand? Top ten thousand? If it's top ten, no way. If it's top ten thousand, yes, he's definitely in. Top thousand? Probably in. Top hundred? Probably out.
But if your definition of "most famous" is "top thousand", I suspect that your threshold is in a different place than most peoples'...
I would ultimately say he is top one hundred (probably top 20 for me), but that's a personal opinion. If we look at the impact his ideas, beliefs and teachings had on the first half of the 20th century then he was a giant. Anarchism, and specifically how he taught it grabbed hold of much of the disparate political movements that occurred in that part of time. Anarchist movement's and mutual aid, take a grip in many parts of the third world even today.
Perhaps that's because I have taken note of these movements that I see him as one of the most famous, perhaps you see it differently which is fair. I see him as a contemporary to arguably the most famous political mind of all time, Karl Marx, and was regarded along similar lines for his impact.
Sure there are a range of people on the left and right of political ideological thought who could be considered famous, but not many who have produced what he has.
If anyone's unaware: famous Ukrainian anti-anti-semitist/anarchist revolutionary who lead a peasant revolt that supported farmer communes in much of Ukraine before getting crushed by both the White and Red Army
fwiw, even Lyube has a song memorialising Makhno, Батька Махно, and I don't know if they're considered tankies, but they're definitely tankie-adjacent (they sang at the pro-"Z" concert at the start of the invasion, ffs).
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)?
I'd say that it could be confusing, since people often "Stand in solidarity" without any actions, but "Giving mutual aid" is something active, like protesting, monetary aid, a large scope if things.
Anarchists seem to think they have a monopoly on mutual aid, but it turns out that police agencies are all about it as well. At least where I’m at, people think that mutual aid is the secret sauce they have to defeat the efforts of the state, not realizing that just in Portland they have the city, multiple counties, Metro, and several neighboring suburbs strategically sharing resources and cooperating, even across state lines.
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.
that seems to be a crux: how to get (and utilise) well-trained people while avoiding long-lived organisations.
(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.)
In French you would translate solidarité and entre-aide respectively each term, so they worth having each a dedicated word.
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.
Solidarity usually means a specific action - e.g. joining a strike action, critical support, organizing, etc. Mutual aid usually means intra class action.
Mutual aid is right now innocuous enough to act as a pretty good left-wing shibboleth. Depending on whether a group refers to their activities as "charity", "service", or "mutual aid", you can get a pretty good idea of how left-wing the general consensus of the group is.
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.”
Kropotkin would weep to what has become Jura's anarchist dream. We may have reached independance from Bern but at the cost of a parlement filled with liberals and conservatives.
It's really weird seeing letter ё in English language title. I'd rather spell his name as "Pyotr Kropotkin" or even "Peter Kropotkin", following a commong convention to spell Russian tzar Pyotr Romanov's as Peter.
Fully agree with the view that ё seems out of place and looks like TETЯIS of atari days.
Never the less I think you should be careful when generalizing monarch's name conventions more widely. For example King Charles III is called Karl in Russia according to tradition of using german names for monarchs. I never saw this convention applied to common folk names, and any other Charles would be called Charles e.g. Charles Darwin is never called Karl Darwin.
When it comes to English kings, Charles becoming Karl is not that bad, comparing to James, which somehow becomes Яков (Iakov?!). It is also a mostly one way effect, as Russian names are usually transliterated into English without some special weirdness, even royal names.
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"
I actually like it, it's a great idea. You wouldn't be surprised if you saw words like Köln or Malmö (or even Malmø) in an English text, right, so how is this different?
Good transliteration is not arbitrary; it's supposed to make it possible for the reader who doesn't know the original language to reasonably approximate the pronunciation.
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 different because in English, a diacritic of two dots (diaeresis) is used to show that a vowel is pronounced separately from the vowel that came before it, not as a mix. Naïve is one example, where it is pronounced na-ive, not nive. That said, I also like it, but it means something different here.
> in English, a diacritic of two dots (diaeresis) is used to show that a vowel is pronounced separately from the vowel that came before it, not as a mix.
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.)
It absolutely is used in English, although not commonly, and it was more common in older texts. Nowadays it’s mostly used in proper nouns like Zoë, Chloë, and in some spellings of my own name, Coën.
> The normal use in English is to show that a word comes from German.
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.
Sorry mate, but an umlaut does not represent the same thing as a diaeresis! I don't know what you're arguing for other than that the diaeresis is archaic, which does not conflict with what I said at all. My argument was that the ë used in Russian is different from the ë used in English (and French) because they represent different things, which is exactly what you said too.
A diaeresis mark is not used in English. You claimed that it was. That's what I'm saying. There is no ë used in English.
> 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.
In older texts the notation appears on other words like coöperation. Some Americans use dieresis in their names as well (Zoë and Chloë are increasingly common for example). Furthermore the dieresis (trema in French) in naïf is doing the same job as a dieresis in English, so it can be easy to make the claim that we got all dieresis from French, but in reality it seems to have been borrowed from Ancient Greek as late as the 1600s, and gone directly from Ancient Greek texts to the languages that use the notation today (Galician, English, French, Occitan, Dutch)
AFAIK when going from one language to another you often have known transliterations. Sometimes that can be a mapping from "Ö" to "Ö".
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.
english orthography is so fucked up it's kinda fun seeing people desperate try to hold together different conventions loosely mapped to the phonetics they're supposed to represent
Well it’s different as in this case it’s translated from a Cyrillic alphabet. Also, I would be surprised to read Köln in English as an English name exists for the city: Cologne.
This is not transliteration. It would be "pyotr" then. This is just using a German letter in an English text based on a purely visual similarity to a Russian letter.
Diaeresis is used in English as well. The New Yorker writes “coordinate” as “coördinate”. It has the same meaning as in many European writing systems — “pronounce independently”. So it’s like “co ore” not like “core”.
It’s also common to see it in loan words and proper names, even with a different meaning.
In Russian ë is a completely separate letter pronounced "yo". This is non-intuitive to English speakers, which is why the name in question is almost always anglicized as Pyotr, not "Pëtr".
> It's really weird seeing letter ё in English language title.
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.
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.
In what ways has mankind demonstrated that "tribes of men" can't cooperate? Humans have been able to live in large decentralized polities for millennia and modern archeology strongly backs this up. Göbekli Tepe (~11kya), the still-standing mammoth houses of North Eastern Europe (~15kya), or perhaps best exemplified by "the new archaic" or "monuments without kings"[^0] which is a term used by archeologists to describe the study of certain North American monument sites like Poverty Point where massive complex monuments were built by mobile groups of foragers without the need for permanent habitation. These massive geo-engineering projects were taken on by many different independent but connected tribes of peoples.
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
Mutual Aid Among Animals mentions the existence of Defectors. I would argue both that the existence of the internet in particular and civilisation in general is a sign that great numbers of people can cooperate effectively, and that the woeful Covid response is a sign that small numbers of people defecting can be ruinous.
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.
Defectors implies authoritarianism, and my way or the highway thinking. which have generally been the enemy of overall cooperation. Wikipedia and the internet work because they mostly aren't like that, and are at their worst when they are.
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.
OK, so what model of overall cooperation would avoid Wikipedia drama?
(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?)
I don't have an alternative for Wikipedia. I'm saying we shouldn't lean into any (always seductive) way of thinking that demonises people who disagrees with our one true way of doing things. People should be herded cats; neither wild cats nor herded sheep.
I think Kropotkin would agree with you rather than GP -- you are making arguments that would in fact be dear to Kropotkin. Check out his books for yourself if interested.
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.
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].
There would be no point in competing with someone who has the same genes as you since it is the genes that drive evolution. Going further, the more different the genes the more you would want to compete.
So this means that you would cooperate most with your parents then your siblings, then your family, tribe, race and species.
That is not Kropotkin's analysis; it is a very commonplace current "evolutionary psychology" analysis (as well as probably a common 19th century "social darwinism" analysis!)
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.
That may be true but we do not observe it in nature. Most mammals would prioritize their own offspring over others. "Without regard" is very rare to see
I think what "we observe in nature" is debatable. Kropotkin was taking part in that debate, although it was over 100 years ago.
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!
Nature ecologies are so full of examples of mutual aid across all types of life that we are still discovering new relationships everyday. I'd like to see an updated collation of all these findings since kropotkin's writigs. Any suggestions?
I think the main thing missing from this simplistic analysis (which I would tie back to Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" and the gene-centric view of evolution it proposed) is that organisms don't need to just replicate themselves, but also their environments. I mean look at lichen. A small colony of organisms from completely different domains of life and they would die without each other yet that algae would obviously prefer to replicate the fungi it partners with over some other species of algae. Bison need to keep grasslands healthy, worms need to keep the soil organisms alive, mycorrhizal fungi need to keep plants alive, plant roots have a large toolbelt of chemical dances it does JUST to cultivate the specific soil bacteria they like, our gut bacteria have it in their interest to keep us humans thriving and interacting socially, myrmecophyte trees attract and support ant life, capitalism needs to replicate artificial scarcity, parasitic plants like dodders actually provide a whole host of benefits to its hosts like acting as an above-ground communication network, beavers practice "niche construction", most "weeds" occupy a specific niche where they grow in disturbed soils only to "work themselves out of a job" by conditioning the soil to better health allowing for ecological succession to take place (e.g. dandelions decompacting soil), and your dog would very likely kill another dog (extremely genetically similar as they are) in order to save your life.
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
Dawn of Everything shares the latest anthropology and archeology about prior societies. Spoiler: Science indicates a whole lot more cooperation than was previously assumed.
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.
> mankind has demonstrated through thousands of years of history that tribes of men can't really cooperate in any grand sense
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.
I'd argue that the fact that humans can live in reasonably stable polities of more than a billion people only proves that there exist social systems and structures which can achieve reasonable outcomes even without cooperation by incentives which ensure that agents who do not intend to cooperate but act competitively and even maliciously still act reasonably out of pure self-interest and fear of retaliation for defecting.
Are you ignoring the billion and a half people that have been lifted out of poverty since the 50s or 60s? We can definitely cooperate to benefit the masses of humankind and we do.
Are you ignoring that despite knowing the consequences of climate change for a hundred or so years, "we" chose to ignore them for corporate profits?
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?
No, I'm not. Some of that wealth was created by externalizing costs in the form of pollution. Because that is how our society was designed and we did not have good alternatives until around the turn of the century. But most of it was not. Most was genuine wealth that improved many people's lives.
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?
> 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.
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.
[1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/petr-kropotk...
[2] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutua...
[3] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-memoi...