Mutual Aid (2022)

by Clifford Harper

From the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time featured a discussion on the Russian anarchist Peter Alekseevich Kropotkin. The focus was not primarily on his political advocacy, rather it was his book Mutual Aid: a factor of evolution that was the object of consideration.

Published a couple of years before the Socialist Party of Great Britain was founded, it is an examination of the role cooperation and mutuality has played in evolution. There was an aggressive strain of Darwinism, personified by Darwin’s bulldog, T.H. Huxley, which emphasised the war of all against all as the motive force behind natural selection.

This view has often been deployed as justification for capitalism being the expression of self-interest as the prime motivation of human economic, political and social relations. It has been a persistent theme, running from Hobbes’s Leviathan, that seemed to draw biological justification from Darwin’s work.

In common parlance, this thinking is often expressed as socialism being a nice idea, but against human nature. If evolution depends on natural selection being driven only by self-regarding motives, then socialists are setting themselves against nature.

Kropotkin however, along with many, many others internationally, insisted that it was this brutalist view that disregarded the actuality of nature. Rather than begin by justifying human potential for cooperation, which might have been regarded as a plea for human exceptionalism, his approach was to examine nature more broadly to see if there was evidence of mutuality being fundamental.

His was no sentimental view of nature, as is demonstrated in the opening lines of the Introduction. ‘Two aspects of animal life impressed me most… One of them was the extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most species of animals have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the enormous destruction of life which periodically results from natural agencies’.

This is the antithesis of unbridled idealism, a realistic view based on his own extensive travels, experience and observation. The second aspect arising from his observations is telling:

‘…even in those spots where animal life teemed in abundance, I failed to find – although I was eagerly looking for it – that bitter struggle for the means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists… as the dominant characteristic of the struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.’

Then, chapter by chapter, he goes on to demonstrate how it is mutuality amongst animals of the same species that is the primary, and crucial, factor in survival and evolution. He begins with invertebrates and progresses through ants, bees, birds to mammals.

On reaching humans he presents what evidence there is that cooperation in the Palaeolithic period was a necessity for survival in a hostile world, continuing to be so in both the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. Primitive communism was not some fancy of Marx and Engels.

He goes on to trace this important feature of human life as it expressed itself, often in adverse political situations, from pre-history into history itself, into the medieval free cities and guilds. He cites examples of insurgent warriors taking land by force who eventually swapped spears for spades and operated cooperative farming communities.

Even in the 19th century he found expressions of mutuality in village communities and the nascent labour movement, although it is through the 19th century and the rise of industrial capitalism that private property became predominant and protected by the state. The mutual gave way to the individual.

While Mutual Aid is an anarchist constructing a scientific basis for communism rather than the historical materialism of Marx, the two approaches are surely not exclusive. Marx gives an understanding of how we arrived at the society we have and identifies the mechanism for change, the conscious action of the working class acting on its own behalf. The object being the establishment of a worldwide socialist system based on meeting need not profit. The question as to its viability will undoubtedly continue to be raised until socialism is actually realised.

Kropotkin indicates that rather than being alien to nature, biology demonstrates the contrary. Modern research and observation has found cooperation to be fundamental in nature. Plants provide each other with nutrients, fish groom each other for parasites, ants work together to build nests, bees sacrifice their lives for the good of the hive and predators hunt in packs.

Evolution requires groups of organisms to act together for mutual benefit. In 2016, research using a new conceptual evolutionary model at Tomsk State University was published. Competition and the struggle for existence were found not to be the main drivers of evolution. Rather, the avoidance of competition is important (bit.ly/3xkTOK9).

So, Kropotkin is vindicated by research in the land of his birth, as well as research more widely throughout the world. His own book refers to many researchers and observers from a plethora of nationalities, just as he draws evidence from every continent. By doing so he not only makes the case for mutuality, but also demonstrates human progress to be a global phenomenon, as socialism, as the practical realisation of mutuality, must be.

This book review might seem to be 120 years late, but not so. There is an abiding interest in the premise of Kropotkin’s argument and it continues to have a resonance for those advocating a radical alternative to capitalism.

Eighty years after Mutual Aid was published Stephen Jay Gould’s essay (1988), Kropotkin Was No Crackpot (marxists.org/subject/science/essays/kropotkin.htm) examines the controversy around the meaning for society of Darwinism at the turn of the Twentieth century.

Gould expresses how seemingly contradictory positions do not have to be polarised: ‘Reproductive success … works in many modes. Victory in battle may be one pathway, but cooperation, symbiosis and mutual aid may also secure success…’

He goes on to outline Kropotkin’s work, setting it in the mainstream of Russian thinking as exemplified by N.I. Danilevsky whose expertise in both population dynamics and fisheries led him to critique Darwinism as ‘…the credo of a distinctly British ‘national type’ as contrasted with old Slavic values of collectivism.’ The ‘national type’ he referred to was the line of thought running from Hobbes through Adam Smith to Thomas Malthus, the developing philosophy of capitalism.

In September 2021, to mark the centenary year of his death, PM Press/Kairos published a new edition of Mutual Aid with a new Forward, Introduction, Afterword and Postscript. Some of the terminology is anachronistic – references to savages and red Indians – but it is of its day. When he uses such nomenclature, it is not to disparage, rather to show mutuality to be universal.

Those who would change society need to counter assertions rendered as indisputable facts, such as competition is fundamental to human nature. What Mutual Aid demonstrates, along with subsequent biological research showing cooperation at the cellular level is vital for organic development, is that advocacy of a system based on people voluntarily contributing their abilities so all can receive according to their needs is not utopianism, but natural. Mutual aid indeed.

Dave Alton

A Co-op in Spain (2014)

Book Review from the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dan Hancox: ‘The Village Against the World’. Verso £9.99.

Marinaleda is a village of 2,700 people in the Andalusia region of southern Spain, about sixty miles east of Seville. Under the Franco dictatorship it was poor and underdeveloped, like most places in the area, where massive landed estates owned by aristocrats prevailed. When Franco died in 1975, Spain began a transition to capitalist democracy. The people of Marinaleda organised in unions and demanded land; eventually, in 1991, the government gave them 1200 hectares of land belonging to a duke.

So began the development of what Hancox terms ‘an anti-capitalist answer … [a] community founded on mutual aid and collectivism, not the profit motive’. The village co-operative owns El Humoso, a farm several miles away. This is planted with labour-intensive crops such as cotton and sugar beet, thus providing more employment than the previous practice of growing crops such as corn that need little labour power. All co-op members earn the same wage, and any surplus is re-invested to create more jobs. There are no local police, the village is run by assemblies on the basis of direct democracy, and many villagers live in self-built homes for which they pay just fifteen euros a month. Each month the villagers work together voluntarily doing improvement work, such as gardening in the park.

Yet all is not quite what it seems. The regional government provides building materials and architectural assistance for the self-built homes, and also some kind of farming subsidy (unfortunately Hancox does not say much about this). The unemployment rate is much lower than the national average, but is still five to six percent. The present economic crisis in Spain has not left the village untouched, with regionally-based funding drying up, and there is insufficient money to pay the workers at El Humoso. The charismatic mayor, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, is taking a back seat and is powerless to solve the current problems.

Further, some rather unpleasant aspects of local life are mentioned. Two of the village’s elected councillors are from the PSOE (roughly the Spanish equivalent of the Labour Party). One of them tells Hancox that those who do not agree with the mayor (those who are not Gordillistas) do not bother to attend the assemblies, and many of those who attend do so as a way of getting work. Some opponents have felt uncomfortable staying in Marinaleda and so have moved to live elsewhere. Hancox comments that in this and other cases it is impossible to distinguish facts and gossip, leaving the reader with no idea of where the truth lies.

Marinaleda carries on some Andalusian traditions of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism, and shows that people can live without large landowners and capitalists. But it is not a socialist village, just one way of organising production to survive under capitalism. 

Paul Bennett

"We have been here before!" (1958)

By Clifford Harper.

From the September 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

   "If I had kept a diary for the last twenty-four years and inscribed in it all the devotion and self-sacrifice which I came across in the Socialist movement, the reader of such a diary would have had the word ‘heroism’ constantly on his lips. But the men 1 would have spoken of were not heroes; they were average men, inspired by a grand idea. Every Socialist newspaper has the same history of years of sacrifice without any hope of reward, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, even without any personal ambition. I have seen families living without knowing what would be their food tomorrow, the husband boycotted all round in his little town for his part in the paper, and the wife supporting the family by sewing, and such a situation lasting for years, until the family would, retire, without a word of reproach, simply saying; ‘Comrades, we can hold on no more!’ 

   I have seen men, dying from consumption, and knowing it, and yet knocking about in snow and fog to prepare meetings, and speaking at meetings within a few weeks from death, and only then retiring to the hospital with the words: ‘Now, friends, I am done; the doctors say I have but a few weeks to live. Tell the comrades that I shall be happy if they come and see me.’ I have seen facts which would be described as ‘idealisation’ if 1 told them in this place; and the names of these very men, hardly known outside a narrow circle of friends, will soon be forgotten when the friends, too, have passed away. In fact, I don’t know myself which most to admire, the unbounded devotion of these few, or the sum total of petty acts of devotion of the great number. Every quire of a penny paper sold, every meeting, every hundred votes which are won at a Socialist election, represent an amount of energy and sacrifice of which no outsider has the faintest idea. And what is now done by Socialists has been done in every popular and advanced party, political and religious, in the past. 

    All past progress has been prompted by like men and by a like devotion.’’
—(From Mutual Aid, by. Prince Peter Kropotkin, Pelican Book A.49.)

Cooking the Books: Marx and corals (2008)

The Cooking the Books column from the March 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his latest book, Coral, A Pessimist in Paradise, the biologist and popular science writer Steve Jones attributes to Marx the statement that “we see mighty coral reefs rising from the depth of the ocean into islands and firm land, yet each individual depositor is puny, weak, and contemptible”. Marx was something of a polymath, but an expert on corals?

These words do appear in Capital – in chapter 13 of Volume I on “Co-operation” – but were not written by Marx. He was quoting a passage from a book by Richard Jones making the point that by working together humans can construct things which they would not otherwise be able to.

The Rev. Richard Jones (1790-1855) was the Rev. Malthus’s successor as Professor of Political Economy at the East India College in Haileybury. Marx held Jones in fairly high esteem – a whole chapter of Theories of Surplus Value is given over to a discussion of his views – because he did not regard capitalism as an ideal system deduced from assumptions about human nature but as just one historically evolved way of organising the production and distribution of wealth.

But to return to Jones the Biologist. After misattributing the quote to Marx, he continues, believing himself to be summarising Marx’s view:

“Every atoll proved that collective action, by polyps or by people, was a natural law. Society had been ruined by an altogether artificial medium called cash, which matured into capital and led to exploitation. In an ideal world all would give what they could and get what they needed. In time the state – and money – would lose its raison d’être and a global system of mutual aid would begin” (chapter III).

Although Marx did want a society without state or money in which people “would give what they could and get what they needed”, he did not base the case for this on what happened in nature. That was the position set out by the anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin in his 1902 book Mutual Aid, A Factor in Evolution.

Kropotkin’s position has an obvious attraction for socialists as it would turn the tables and make socialism natural and capitalism unnatural. His book has always been popular amongst socialists as an answer to the Social Darwinists who argued that Darwin’s “struggle for existence” and “survival of the fittest” applied to human society too and that any attempt to limit it would lead to the degeneration of the human race.

Kropotkin sought to counter this argument by bringing forward evidence that the struggle for individual survival was not the only factor in biological evolution but that co-operation and mutual aid both within and between species were too. Kropotkin was a scientist in his own right – he had done some pioneering work on the geography of Siberia – and Jones says his contribution was taken seriously by biologists who called his theory “mutualism” (not to be confused with the market anarchism of that other anarchist Proudhon). It is now called “symbiosis” (literally, living together) and is a recognised fact of nature.

The trouble is that, whereas there is agreement on this fact, there is no agreement on its interpretation. While Kropotkin saw this as an argument for a co-operative, communist society, others have argued that it is not really mutual aid but rather mutual exploitation. As a self-confessed pessimist Jones tends to agree, but he does make the point that the science of biology can’t contribute anything to what he calls “philosophy” beyond supplying facts. He’s basically right, though we would express it differently: that conclusions about how human society should be organised cannot be derived from the behaviour of other organisms. The Social Darwinists (and their latter-day incarnation, the Sociobiologists) are wrong to try to do this but so, even if unfortunately, are Socialist Darwinists like Kropotkin. Marx was right to steer clear of such arguments and base the case for a stateless, moneyless communist society on an analysis of human society not biology.

Letter: What's capitalism, again? (2001)

Letter to the Editor from the September 2001 issue of Socialist Standard

What's capitalism, again?

Dear Editors,

In "What is Capitalism?" (Socialist Standard, December 2000), you claimed it would be impossible to support the world's present population in an economy of self-employed small producers. You warned of the danger that anti-capitalists would be diverted by the "small is beautiful" strand in Green and anarchist thinking.

This is not so obvious as you seem to think. The present degree of concentration of capital is not the result of some inherent dynamic in the development of technology, but of state subsidies to gigantism. There is a whole literature by Walter Adams, Barry Stein, F.M. Scherer, etc on economy of scale, showing that even heavy manufacturing reaches peak efficiency at relatively low levels of production—in the case of autos, 3 percent of the US market. Kirkpatrick Sale argued that most light consumer goods could be produced locally in factories of fewer than fifty workers.

Even such a decentralized condition is not the economy of self-employed artisans you wrote of. But a decentralized, market industrial economy does not automatically imply capitalism. I agree with the mutualist Benjamin Tucker that the extraction of a surplus from labour (i.e., capitalism) is impossible without state intervention to guarantee privilege and subsidize accumulation. Without the legal money monopoly to keep capital scarce and expensive, and thereby maintain labor discipline, wages would rise to value added and bargaining leverage would increase astronomically.

As a Wobbly I firmly support direct action to achieve workers' control of large employers. But in the small business sector, it is better simply to dismantle the state system of privilege and let a real free market lead to de facto worker ownership. And market relations between worker-controlled firms, including large industrial plants, avoids the iron law of oligarchy. The tendency of federated planning bodies to end up rubber-stamping the decisions of a permanent technical staff is illustrated in LeGuin's The Dispossessed.

Small-scale, organic farming may be more labor intensive than mechanised agriculture, but it can be much more efficient in output per acre. Output could be drastically increased by intensively rebuilding the soil with leguminous cover crops, composting all wastes, and using cisterns and rain traps to conserve water for irrigation. The Third World has plenty of labor available. The main reason for hunger is the fact that hundreds of millions of peasants in the past generation have been evicted for cash crop agriculture. The solution is not the "Green Revolution", but getting rid of generals, landlords, and the West's fraternal assistance to death squads.

Finally, keep up the good work. Free market/mutualist types in the libertarian socialist community may disagree with you on many things, but we are also eager to cooperate on the things we have in common: eliminating subsidy and privilege, ending transnational corporate imperialism, and dismantling the jackboot police state.

Kevin A. Carson , Lovell, Arizona, USA.

Reply:

You defend the notion that a market economy need not necessarily be capitalist. The article itself already conceded this point in connection with what Marx called "simple commodity production", but questioned whether such an economy could be established today, indeed whether it had ever existed anywhere, suggesting that "the nearest that may have come to it would have been in some of the early colonial settlements in North America". It is therefore interesting that you should call in to defend such an economy Benjamin Tucker (born in Massachusetts in 1854) whose mentor was Josiah Warren (born in Massachusetts in 1798).

Basically, the individualist anarchist Tucker idealised the economy of the early colonial settlements in North America and advocated a return to this ideal. According to him, if the state were abolished and a complete laissez-faire market economy allowed to operate, competition would ensure that all goods sold at their labour-time cost and that the rate of interest fell to zero, thus eliminating profit and interest. He assumed that the competing units would be self-employed farmers and artisans or co-operatives formed by them. You want to introduce "worker-controlled firms, including large industrial plants", as another competing unit.

We agree that capitalism could not exist without a state but argue that capitalist exploitation occurs as a result of the normal operation of market forces. Profit does not arise from the state intervening to allow capitalist firms to sell their goods above their labour-time value, but from capitalist firms employing wage labour selling goods at this value but only having to pay their employees the value of their labour-power, which is less being determined by its cost of production. So, to eliminate profit, such an economy would not have to involve anyone working for wages. We must also doubt whether in such an economy the rate of interest really would fall to zero as that would assume that lenders could be found prepared to lend their money at zero interest.

It is because capitalism is based on wage-labour that we talked about a theoretical non-capitalist market economy having to be based on self-employed farmers and artisans. It would also have to be an economy based on handicraft rather than industrial production. The reason for this is that where there is industrial production the work involved in turning the raw materials into a finished product is no longer individual, but collective. You yourself recognise this by introducing worker-controlled industrial firms into Tucker's rather smaller-scale economy (so, incidentally, conceding our initial point that an economy of small-scale independent producers could not provide enough to maintain the world's present population). But this would bring some inevitable consequences.

First, since industrial production can produce goods at a lower cost per unit than handicraft production, with complete laissez-faire, competition would eliminate most of the independent, self-employed artisans. In other words, industry would begin to be concentrated into the hands of the firms employing industrial methods of production.

Second, it wouldn't stop here. With complete laissez-faire, competition would result in those firms which employed the most productive machinery winning out against those employing out of date and so less productive machinery. So, there would be a tendency towards a yet greater concentration of industry into the hands of the big firms, which would get bigger even if still at this stage worker-controlled co-operatives.

But what about the displaced independent artisans and the members of bankrupt workers' co-operatives? How would they get a living? Would they not be obliged to sell their skills to the worker-controlled firms that had won out in the battle of competition? But if wage labour appeared then so would profits and exploitation even if these profits would accrue to the members of the worker-controlled firms. Some might be prepared to share these with their new employees, but the continuing competitive pressures would oblige them to give priority to investing them in new, more productive machinery so as to be able to stay in business and not go bankrupt themselves. In fact, this has been the long-run tendency with such firms under capitalism today, as with the kibbutzim in Israel and the various Mennonite enterprises in North and South America. They have begun to employ wage labour and orient their production towards making profits and accumulating these as new capital.

In short, even if it were possible to go back to the sort of economy Benjamin Tucker envisaged, the tendency with laissez-faire would be for capitalism to develop again. This is fact is openly recognised by his political cousins, the so-called "anarcho-capitalists", who see this a good thing rather than a bad one.

Having said this, we can accept that there has been a degree of over-centralisation under capitalism and that a socialist society could sensibly introduce some decentralisation, particularly of food production, but this would have to be on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources and the consequent complete disappearance of the market, money, banks and the rest of the paraphernalia of buying and selling. Only on this basis can people democratically decide the degree of centralisation and decentralisation that corresponds to their preferences freed from the pressures of economic competition and market forces—Editors.