Mutual Aid
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Mutual Aid
An Illuminated Factor
of Evolution
Peter Kropotkin
Illustrated by N.O. Bonzo
Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution
Peter Kropotkin
Illustrated by N.O. Bonzo
This edition 2021 PM Press
ISBN: 9781629638744 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781629638751 (hardcover)
ISBN: 9781629638966 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020947278
Cover and interior design by N.O. Bonzo
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
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First published in Canada in 2021 by Between the Lines
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ISBN: 9781771135801
Printed in the USA.
Contents
by Ruth Kinna
by David Graeber and Andrej Grubai
by GATS
Foreword
by Ruth Kinna
In March 1889 Peter Kropotkin agreed to give six lectures to William
Morriss Socialist Society in Hammersmith, London. Labelling the series
Social Evolution, he planned to explore the grounds of socialism. As
it turned out, he never delivered the talks, but the title and timing, just a
year before he published his first essay on mutual aid, hint at the content.
He left a bigger clue when he told Morriss daughter May that he had been
working on the series during his recent tour of Scotland. According to local
press reports, one of the issues on Kropotkins mind was the feasibility of
socialism. Perhaps rashly, given that one critic had dismissed his social-
ism as a futile, dangerous scheme to reach Arcady through anarchy, he
told an Aberdeen meeting that too many workers attracted to socialism
still believed it impractical. The account of social evolution he outlined in
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution was a response to this scepticism and it
has since become his most celebrated refutation.
The concept of mutual aid is outlined in eight essays. The first,
Mutual Aid among Animals, was published in 1890 in the journal The
Nineteenth Century. By 1896, Kropotkin had completed the others. The
resulting book was published in 1902, but Kropotkin continued to develop
the concept, notably in Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal (1897); The State:
Its Historic Role (1898); and Modern Science and Anarchism (1912). Some
thirty years after starting his investigations, he issued his final, incomplete
statement, posthumously published as Ethics, Origin and Development
(1924). Each new iteration brought out a different facet of the concept: the
repressive character of the modern European state, the impulses driving
exemplary behaviours, the basis of moral action, the principle of justice
that morality described, and the structural mechanisms for its accultura-
tion. The common thread tying these strands together was Kropotkins
view that socialism tapped an innate tendency to cooperate common to all
living things. Socialism was neither the utopists candy mountain nor the
salvationists pie in the sky. It was a potential alternative. The thrust of
Kropotkins argument was that existing disciplinary, exploitative orders
had institutionalized competition and individual struggle, wrongly pre-
senting this behaviour as natural. Against this, the theory of mutual aid
demonstrated that there was nothing inevitable, preordained, much less
moral or good about these arrangements. Nature was plastic and there-
fore malleable to forces capable of building convivial, libertarian social
systems.
Mutual Aid lends itself to multiple interpretations. This is partly
because Kropotkin theorised it by intervening in a longstanding debate
about the social and ethical implications of Charles Darwins Origin of
Species . In doing so, he enthusiastically adopted Victorian interdisciplinary
