WATCH: Cooperation is more important than competition in human survival, argued Peter Kropotkin. After competition brought two world wars, mutual aid twice sought to rescue humanity. Will there be a third chance? asks Joe Lauria.
The following is the full text upon which CN Editor Joe Lauria delivered condensed remarks (seen in above video) at the Mut Zur Ethik (The Courage to be Ethical) conference in Sarnach, Switzerland on Aug. 29. Time: 24m 26s
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
CN at 30
In our youth there were certain books that stood out and left a lasting impression on us. At the time, these books seemed to change our entire lives, young as our lives were. One would-be genius told me she was 8 years old when she read Montesquieu. I guess I was a late bloomer as I reached about 17 before I started reading serious books.
One of those books came to mind as soon as I read these words in Zeit Fragen (the newspaper of the conference organizers) on what this conference is about:
“The world has changed radically in recent years, and changes radically still. The forces that persist in striving for global supremacy are opposed by others working for peace and a world order based on equality and equal rights. The quest for supremacy comes at a high price: Reason and humanity fall by the wayside, so endangering all of us – those who insist on preserving their power, as well as all others.
This seems to be something those who lead the West, heirs to long traditions of imperial superiority, have not (yet) understood. They have forgotten the treasures of the humanistic tradition, the idea of bonum commune – a good life for all.
We in the West are missing an ethic of common identity, common purpose – an ethic of togetherness. In direct consequence, democracy, the rule of law, and international law are being dismantled. Warmongering supplants the ability to build peace. A cult of irresponsibility prevails.
This makes it all the more important to rethink or return to cultural traditions that have proven their worth in the way people and nations live together.”
The book that immediately came to mind when reading these words was Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by the Russian prince, Peter Kropotkin.
Who Was Peter Kropotkin?
Kropotkin at his desk c. 1890 (Unknown/Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons)
Born into an aristocratic family in 1842 in Moscow, he became a page to Tsar Nicholas I. As a military officer in Siberia, he took part in geological expeditions for which he won a gold medal from the Russian Geographical Society for discovering that the land from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean was a plateau and not a plain. A Siberian mountain range was later named for him.
As Siberia correspondent for a St. Petersburg newspaper, he studied peasant social organization. He continued his geographical studies at St. Petersburg university and took part in a polar expedition in 1870. Kropotkin was just as interested in human society as the natural world and was stirred by the 1871 Paris Commune. In 1872 he traveled here to Switzerland where he became involved with the Jura Federation, led by Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.
Radicalized in Switzerland, Kropotkin returned to Russia with contraband literature and joined an anarchist circle. His first political writings in 1873 argued for a stateless society of workers and peasants owning the factories and the land.
The secret police came after his group for advocating these ideas and Kropotkin was arrested for agitation in 1874 and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, a scandal for a member of the Russian elite. In jail he was allowed to complete a report he was writing on the Ice Age.
Because of ill health he was moved to a lower security prison from which he escaped and arrived back here in Switzerland in 1876, where began the publication Le Révolté.
Five years later, in 1881, he was expelled from Switzerland at Russia’s request after the assassination of Alexander II, though there was no proof he had a direct role in it. Kropotkin exiled in France and then London after he learned that the Holy League, a tsarist group, intended to kill him for his alleged link to the assassination.
Back in France he was imprisoned for four years before returning to London where he began a publication called Freedom. Inspired by reading Mutual Aid in 1983 I went to its offices in Whitechapel and induced its editors to publish an article I’d written. The paper is still published online.
After the Bolshevik Revolution Kropotkin returned to Russia in 1917 where, despite being opposed to Marxism, he was treated as a friend of the revolution. He refused the offer of a cabinet seat from the Petrograd Provisional Government. His application for residency in Moscow was personally approved by Lenin with whom he met and corresponded. Kropotkin argued with him against the centralization of authority to no avail.
After he died of pneumonia in February 1921 aged 79 his family refused a state funeral offered to him. His Moscow funeral was the last public demonstration of the anarchist movement in Russia as it was fully suppressed by the end of 1921. But in 1935 a station in the Moscow metro was named after Kropotkin.
Kropotkin’s coffin is brought to the railway station of Dmitrov to be transferred to Moscow for the funeral. (Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons)
Kropotkin’s Argument
Kropotkin’s political ideas arose largely from his study of animal life and peasant society during his time in Siberia. It was on the basis of his observation of animal and human cooperation that he concluded that mutual aid, and not mutual struggle, is the primary factor in human evolution and survival. This was an argument in direct contradiction to the evolving consensus at the time put forward by Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley of a war for survival of the fittest.
Kropotkin’s argument is essentially this: Human individuals and societies are both competitive and cooperative. The question is which has been more important in the survival of species. Mutual Aid was a response to Huxley’s 1888 book Struggle for Existence and its Bearing upon Man, which promoted the idea of Social Darwinism – that it is, a competitive struggle against others for survival.
This was a misinterpretation of Darwin, Kropotkin argued. In his book’s vast and incisive overview of human history, he shows that it has been predominately the cooperative side of our natures, not the competitive, that has led to our survival until today.
Mutual Aid should be considered, he wrote, “not only as an argument in favor of a pre-human origin of moral instincts, but also as a law of Nature and a factor of evolution.”
It’s Not Love
He rejected the idea that it was love or parental feeling that led to mutual aid.
“It is not love to my neighbour—whom I often do not know at all—which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague, feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me. So it is also with animals. It is not love, and not even sympathy (understood in its proper sense), which induces a herd of ruminants or of horses to form a ring in order to resist an attack of wolves; not love which induces wolves to form a pack for hunting; … and it is neither love nor personal sympathy which induces many thousand of fallow-deer scattered over a territory as large as France to form into a score of separate herds, all marching towards a given spot, in order to cross there a river.
It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy—an instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life.
But it is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience—be it only at the stage of an instinct—of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own.”
Response to Huxley
Mutual Aid published in 1902 is a collection of articles written between 1890 and 1896 for the publication Nineteenth Century as a direct response to Huxley’s 1888 Struggle for Existence and its Bearing upon Man, which Kropotkin writes “to my appreciation was a very incorrect representation of the facts of Nature.”
Social Darwinism emerged during the Gilded Age -– the unrivaled heyday of unregulated capitalism until the resurgent Gilded Age of our own neoliberal era.
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In the introduction to Mutual Aid, Kropotkin quotes Huxley about “gladiator’s show” of prehistoric people: “… the weakest and stupidest went to the wall, while the toughest and shrewdest, those who were best fitted to cope with their circumstances, but not the best in another way, survived. Life was a continuous free fight, and beyond the limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of existence.”
Kropotkin said,
“There are a number of evolutionists who may not refuse to admit the importance of mutual aid among animals, but who, like Herbert Spencer, will refuse to admit it for Man. For primitive Man—they maintain—war of each against all was the law of life.”
Kropotkin went on:
“We have heard so much lately of the ‘harsh, pitiless struggle for life,’ which was said to be carried on by every animal against all other animals, every ‘savage’ against all other ‘savages,’ and every civilized man against all his co-citizens—and these assertions have so much become an article of faith—that it was necessary, first of all, to oppose to them a wide series of facts showing animal and human life under a quite different aspect.
It was necessary to indicate the overwhelming importance which sociable habits play in Nature and in the progressive evolution of both the animal species and human beings: to prove that they secure to animals a better protection from their enemies, very often facilities for getting food (winter provisions, migrations, etc.), longevity, and therefore a greater facility for the development of intellectual faculties; and that they have given to men, in addition to the same advantages, the possibility of working out those institutions which have enabled mankind to survive in its hard struggle against Nature, and to progress, notwithstanding all the vicissitudes of its history.”
Kropotkin gives us a tour of history, beginning with mutual aid among animals; among pre-historic people; among what he calls barbarians; in the medieval city and finally in his own day.
His history describes elite institutional efforts over succeeding generations to repress people’s natural instinct to cooperate, imposing conditions of life to divide them so they pose little threat to ruling interests. Despite increasingly sophisticated efforts over the centuries, both ideologically and through the use of force, the resilient, cooperative instinct continues to emerge, however.
Ultimately, Kropotkin says essentially that humanity has a stark choice: cooperate or die.
Distorting Darwin
Charles Darwin, 1881. (Elliott & Fry, Victorian photography studio, London)
Kropotkin begins his book discussing the distortion of Darwin’s ideas, arguing that Darwin himself acknowledged cooperation in species such as bees and ants and that his followers overemphasized competition in natural selection. He wrote:
“[Darwin] foresaw that the term which he was introducing into science [survival of the fittest] would lose its philosophical and its only true meaning if it were to be used in its narrow sense only—that of a struggle between separate individuals for the sheer means of existence.
He insisted upon the term being taken in its ‘large and metaphorical sense including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny.’
While he himself was chiefly using the term in its narrow sense for his own special purpose, he warned his followers against committing the error (which he seems once to have committed himself) of overrating its narrow meaning.
In The Descent of Man he gave some powerful pages to illustrate its proper, wide sense. He pointed out how, in numberless animal societies, the struggle between separate individuals for the means of existence disappears, how struggle is replaced by co-operation, and how that substitution results in the development of intellectual and moral faculties which secure to the species the best conditions for survival.
He intimated that in such cases the fittest are not the physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but those who learn to combine so as mutually to support each other, strong and weak alike, for the welfare of the community. ‘Those communities,’ he wrote, ‘which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.’”
Animals’ Mutual Aid
English: Ants working together to get food. (Amanda Blom Photography/Wikimedia Commons)
Drawing on his experience studying nature in Siberia, Kropotkin then gives copious evidence to demonstrate mutual aid among animals.
He describes how ants share food and work, including building bridges with their bodies to overcome obstacles. Bees work collectively to create and maintain hives.
Migratory birds, such as cranes and swallows, cooperate in long-distance flights by taking turns to lead the flock to reduce wind resistance. Birds protect each other’s young in the nest from predators.
The same goes for mammals like deer, buffalo, and wild horses grouping together to ward off predators. Wolves hunt in packs, share their food and together care for the sick and injured.
Social bonds take precedence over individual survival. In the sea, even lobsters and crabs will practice collective defense.
Environment
Kropotkin points out that harsh conditions, such as in the Siberian tundra, are more likely to engender mutual aid than in less challenging circumstances where individual survival through competitive behavior may take precedence. But even in such circumstances cooperative behavior is essential for group survival.
When defense isn’t needed at a grassroots level, but is instead provided by the state, individualism can start to supplant mutual aid. Hence Kropotkin’s absolute opposition to the state.
In his discussion of animals, he shows how mutual aid in primates leads to more sophisticated social structures. Monkeys and apes share food, grooming and defense, protecting the weaker members of the group.
Small mammals and rodents build and share a tunnel system and use calls to communicate alarm. Penguins and seagulls share incubation of newborns and gather together for defense.
He also points out mutual aid between species, such as birds removing parasites from large mammals and different species of fish banding together to defend against common predators.
Overall, Kropotkin establishes that mutual aid is a natural instinct, not a device, which boosts adaptability and resilience in order to reproduce the species with traits favoring sociability.
Individualistic competition may benefit certain individuals, but it weakens the survival of the group. Competition is found mostly in one species against another. Within a species it is less common than cooperation. When competition does occur within a species it is mostly the result of human-made scarcity, in other words inequality, he says.
With examples from the animal kingdom Kropotkin laid the groundwork to demonstrate that mutual aid is actually fundamental among humans too.
North central Siberia in this Envisat image from March 5, 2012. In the lower-left corner is the Yenisei river, flowing north into the Kara Sea (not pictured). The Yenisei is considered the boundary between eastern and western Siberia. The majority of pictured area lies above the Arctic Circle, an area of continuous permafrost. (European Space Agency/Wikimedia Commons)
Mutual Aid Among Prehistoric People
Focusing on the San people of Southern Africa and Australian Aborigines, Kropotkin demonstrates that hunter-gatherer societies share tools, food and land. Hunting and gathering is a collective endeavor and the spoils are shared for the benefit of group survival.
Cooperative behavior becomes institutionalized in clans and tribes, held together through ceremony and ritual – without hierarchy or central authority. Disputes are resolved within the tribes through collective mediation promoting social cohesion.
The Great Transition: Mutual Aid Among ‘Barbarians’
Agriculture and the domestication of animals led to a social and political revolution that has challenged mutual aid among humans forever. Sedentary life led to the alliance between chiefs, warriors and shamans, becoming a ruling establishment for centuries – divine kings, priests to legitimize the state and generals to enforce its will.
What Kropotkin called barbarians were tribes transitioning from hunter-gathering to agricultural or pastoral economies. Germanic, Mongols, Slavs, etc. were outside of Greek, Roman and ancient hierarchical and centralized authority. These ancient and classical states dominated through military conquests and the imposition of social stratification, including slavery, enforced through ideology and state violence to repress the natural instinct of mutual aid still dominant in barbarian tribes.
Mutual aid inside barbarian tribes was challenged by emerging hierarchies in the transition to sedentary life. Nevertheless Kropotkin shows how mutual aid still persisted.
Even though the means of production had changed from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture, in the villages of this era, land, tools and harvests were still shared communally.
Defense also remained a largely a shared obligation in tribal society outside the dominance of standing armies. Social bonds were reinforced in assemblies like the Germanic volkmoot or thing.
Laws were developed to enforce mutual obligations such as communal support during famine, and laws were enforced through communal consensus, not centralized authority.
Kropotkin quotes the Roman historian Tacitus’s description of barbarian societies to show that even as societies and economies became more complex the lack of repressive central authority among barbarian tribes allowed mutual aid to flourish through cooperative institutions.
Dutch illustrator Charles Rochussen’s portayal of a Germanic thing, or assembly. 18878-1881. Rijksmuseum. (Wikimedia Commons)
Battle Lines Are Drawn
The battle lines were drawn in this era within barbarian tribes between the emerging alliance of chiefs, warriors and priests defending private land ownership on the one hand versus the vast population still operating under tribal mutual aid.
This competition within the group’ that created the division between ruled and ruler eventually led to Social Darwinism, a distortion of nature pitting everyone against each other. It is still very much with us today.
Battle lines between the tribes and central authorities such as in Rome had already been drawn and were in time breeched, as barbarians overtook the empire. Their control in the West eventually developed into feudalism.
Throughout all of these momentous changes, Kropotkin argues that the natural instinct of cooperation remained resilient despite increasing assaults against it.
Mutual Aid in the Medieval City
Despite social stratification, especially in the countryside, mutual aid survived in medieval cities in the form of guilds (financial aid, training, and protection for members), communes (free cities as semi-autonomous republics governed by assemblies, like Florence and Ghent) charitable institutions (hospitals, almshouses, community granaries), and in defense and infrastructure such as building canals, cathedrals and city walls.
These cities resisted monarchs and feudal lords to preserve mutual aid even when overseas colonies with the rise of mercantilism and the emergence of the capitalist class undermined the autonomy of the free city states.
Mutual Aid vs Capitalism Until Kropotkin’s Time
Capitalism creates artificial competition and fosters individualism, undermining the natural instincts of cooperation, Kropotkin argued. Resistance to capitalism has come in the form of trade unions, cooperatives, fights against enclosure, strikes and the development of socialist, communist and anarchist organizations and parties as well as charities. Peasant rebellions and utopian movements were efforts to maintain social bonds in the face of the ravages of capitalism and centralized authority.
Kropotkin concludes his book by arguing that humans have a natural propensity to cooperate, which has preserved the species and though suppressed by central authorities, continues to survive despite all efforts to destroy it.
As an anarchist, Kropotkin believed that only decentralized communities could practice mutual aid and not the state.
Mutual Aid & World War
Battle lines between elites and the public – and between elites themselves – twice in the 20th Century led to supreme conflict. The First World War was a war within capitalism itself, each against the other, for dominance of the system, a senseless battle of survival of the fittest in the capitalist bloc and their overseas colonies. The remnants of the feudal system that tried to suppress the mutual aid of the medieval cities collapsed with the fall of the Hohenzollern (Germany), Habsburg (Austria-Hungary), and Romanov (Russia) eagles.
After the war Germany and Turkey were severely weakened, Britain maintained its empire for the time being and a new player made its entrance into the entanglements of Europe, the United States, which had just 20 years earlier emerged as an empire beyond its shores by finishing off the decrepit empire of Spain.
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The accumulated greed for wealth and power that culminated in the Gilded Age of capitalism led to the war that was supposed to end all wars. It was the most destructive conflict to that point in history. Competition had not proven to be the engine of progress the Social Darwinists professed it to be but an engine of utter destruction.
Kropotkin surprised and disappointed many of his followers by supporting the Allied side rather than opposing the war altogether, arguing that German aggression needed to be defeated.
The unbelievable carnage in the fields of Europe led to a collective reassessment. The Social Darwinist ethic, which attempted to use science to legitimize socially predatory behavior, had clearly contributed to the unimaginable horrors.
First Post-War Resurgence of Mutual Aid
‘Haïlé Sélassié of Ethiopia addresses League of Nations in Geneva June 30, 1936 after Italy’s invasion of his country. (Frank-Henri Jullien/Wikimedia Commons)
There was a widespread implicit acknowledgment post war that a return to mutual aid was needed to put humanity back on a course to survival.
Out of this came a series of developments. The League of Nations was established, ill-fated as it turned out to be. In Italy in 1920, in perhaps the most striking example of mutual aid in defiance of capitalist rule, 600,000 Italian workers took part in factory takeovers. These weren’t sit down strikes.
The workers ran the factories as well as freight trains that moved raw material and finished goods in a demonstration of anarcho-syndicalism which showed the bosses weren’t needed to run an industry. The people, through mutual aid, alone could do it by themselves.
Italian capitalist leaders freaked out. They reacted by supporting a movement to repress this massively successful display of mutual aid which threatened capitalism itself. It was called fascism.
Then in 1928, in another display of institutional mutual aid in direct reaction to the breakdown of World War I, 62 nations signed onto the Kellogg-Briand Pact, named after the U.S. and French foreign ministers who negotiated it. The pact sought to outlaw war as an instrument of foreign policy and to promote peaceful resolution of conflicts.
In the U.S. a best-selling 1934 book, Merchants of Death, claimed U.S. banks and corporations plotted to draw the U.S. into WWI. A Senate subcommittee chaired by Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota investigated the book’s charges and found U.S. companies had made massive profits from the war.
Nye’s hearings led to Congress passing laws in 1935, 1936 and 1937 known as the Neutrality Acts making it illegal to lend money or sell arms and ammunition to any country involved in war.
But none of these measures to restore mutual aid would last.
It took only 22 years for Europe to again be plunged into world war.
The Second Post-War Resurgence of Mutual Aid
Eleanor Roosevelt holding poster of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (in English), Lake Success, New York. November 1949. (FDR Presidential Library & Museum/Wikimedia Commons)
Once again Big Power competition squashed cooperation among and within nations leading to a second round of worldwide destruction.
When the worst war in human history was over, once again attempts at cooperation emerged. The world sought to take stock of itself, considering it had threatened its own survival through the disruption of mutual aid.
The United Nations was formed to “end the scourge of war,” U.N. agencies were to foster health, development and worldwide cooperation. The U.N. was institutionalized Mutual Aid so to speak.
Adding to the 1945 U.N. Charter’s attempted blueprint to end war, the U.N. enshrined the principles of mutual aid in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948. These sought to ensure basic rights that preserve mutual aid among peoples. Its preamble reads:
“Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law…”
There were other examples of peoples and nations coming to together in cooperation and in opposition to the predatory and individualistic behavior that led to global devastation. The post-war, non-aligned movement, the precursor of today’s BRICS, saw newly decolonized developing countries practice a kind of mutual aid against the dominance of the U.S.-led West.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was an attempt to create a mechanism to defuse Cold War tensions and foster detente and cooperation on key international issues such as disarmament and the uses of outer space.
State-Run Mutual Aid
Aneurin Bevan, British health minister, on the first day of the National Health Service, July 5, 1948 at Park Hospital, Davyhulme, near Manchester. (University of Liverpool Faculty of Health & Life Sciences)
Workers in Britain threw out wartime leader Winston Churchill and the first government-run health service since Bismarck, the NHS, was established the same year, 1948. Across Western Europe government was put into the service of the public as never before.
Kropotkin of course would not have agreed with government-directed mutual aid in the form of social democracy. Here is where I differ a little with the great Russian anarchist. He saw no positive role for government. Mutual aid had to be practiced locally, from the ground up, without the involvement of the state, he held.
Ideally, this is what the world should strive for. But the world is much more complex than in Kropotkin’s time, and social democracy, as practiced in Western Europe after the war, with a mixed economy and a strong social safety net, may be the best system human beings will ever be capable of.
The US: The Greatest Threat to Mutual Aid
In opposition to these moves to revive mutual aid, the forces of individualism and greed fought back to maintain control. The beginning of the Cold War by the Truman administration, and the subsequent nuclear arms race, was in direct contradiction to efforts to preserve the species through the revival of mutual aid.
The Cold War was driven by the U.S. emerging from WWII with troops and intelligence scattered around the world ready to enforce U.S. access to new markets and resources through invasions and coups installing foreign governments subservient to U.S. interests.
To support this global empire, the U.S. developed a permanent military state that still dominates at home and with declining authority abroad. This militarized economy takes away from the administration of mutual aid among the people and glorifies a single leader and the interests of an elite class over the population.
This came about despite three U.S. presidents who at least tried to warn about the consequences to society of U.S. power.
James Madison warned in 1795:
“Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other … In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture of heterogeneous powers: the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man … War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.”
After every previous war U.S. soldiers returned to the fields and factories and the economy returned to civilian pursuits. But after the Second World War fear of a return to the Depression led to the permanent military economy. Eisenhower’s 1961 warning that this would threaten American democracy – and world peace – has come true.
After Cold War competition nearly led to nuclear annihilation in the Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy’s warned in his famed June 1963 American University speech not to humiliate a nuclear weapons state – the Soviet Union. The warning. as seen in today’s Ukraine crisis, has been ignored.
[See: A History of Humiliation]
Kennedy sought to humanize the Soviet people for an American audience in an effort to restore global cooperation and the survival of the species. Some analysts think it led to his own death five months later as clashed directly with the interests of American militarism. JFK favored mutual aid over Big Power competition and potential mutual destruction.
Throughout the Cold War 1950s and into the 1960s, dissent was crushed. If one sought detente, as Kennedy did in his speech, one was usually denounced as a traitor.
Then Henry Kissinger achieved detente in the 1970s. Today one is back to being a traitor if one seeks cooperation rather than confrontation with Russia.
After McCarthy’s 1950s witch hunt was disgraced, sociability led to mass protests against the U.S. war in Vietnam that were not easily crushed. The 1960s anti-consumerist counterculture, and the spread of social revolution in the developing world, posed a threat to the Social Darwinists.
The Attack of the NeoLiberals
Ronald Reagan and Prime Margaret Thatcher in the Oval Office, 1988. (White House, Wikimedia Commons)
The Chicago School of neoliberal economics, in which the state plays almost no role min the economy, leaving individual greed to dominate, facilitated fascistic, U.S.-led dictatorships in Latin America and brought two supreme Social Darwinists to power in the West.
The regimes of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the U.S. began working diligently from 1980 to dismantle whatever government-run mutual aid exists. It was nearly 50 years ago that the neoliberal movement was begun in earnest and we are still living with.
Thatcher and Reagan set out a worldwide agenda of privatization, free trade, deregulation, and destruction of trade unions and the social safety net. This meant selling off state-owned heavy industries, railways and the gradual privatization of government-run health services. It seems all that will remain of commonly-held property will be parks and public libraries.
Thatcher went much further than saying mutual aid doesn’t exist or shouldn’t exist. She said society itself does not exist. Only the individual does.
There was no clearer declaration that Social Darwinism was alive and well in the late 20th century.
Global Competition vs Global Cooperation
Multilateral institutions such as the U.N., created after the war to foster mutual aid and cooperation between nations, became paralyzed at the Security Council by the Cold War rivalry. (The non-binding General Assembly became the focus of international solidarity during the decolonization period.)
In the fourth decade of the Cold War, Reagan and Thatcher drummed up Big Power competition, heightening tensions, leading to a second near nuclear war in Project Able Archer in 1983.
But in the midst of the Thatcher-Reagan social repression came one of the great outpourings of mutual action geared towards survival of the species. It was a prime example of the resilience of mutual aid that Kropotkin wrote about.
Mass demonstrations against nuclear weapons, especially one million protestors in New York’s Central Park in June 1982, and millions across Western Europe in October 1983, including one million in The Hague and 400,000 in London’s Hyde Park, eventually led Reagan and Soviet leader Mihail Gorbachev to agree at the 1986 Reykjavik Summit to what became the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
The demonstrations had been particularly against the deployment of intermediate-range U.S. cruise missiles in Europe. These were removed along with Soviet SS-20s in the agreement.
Will We Survive This Time?
The RT-2PM2 Topol-M space intercontinental ballistic missiles, cold-launched, three-stage, solid-propellant, road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles with thermonuclear warheads. Rehearsal for Victory Day Military Parade, Moscow, April 2012. (Vyacheslav Argenberg/Wikimedia Commons)
After both world wars the world remembered what had allowed the human race to survive: cooperation and mutual aid. Post-war attempts were made to minimize competition between nations and peoples and to increase mutual aid. The first attempt failed when world war came for a second time. After the Second World War multilateral institutions were put in place in the hope that this time international cooperation could stave off the descent of man to utter destruction.
The end of the Cold War in 1991 brought a brief hope of international cooperation. In the United States there was talk of a “peace dividend,” meaning spending on weapons would now be spent on society. There would be no triumphalism over the defeated Soviet Union, then President George H.W. Bush said. There was talk of a united Europe at peace from Lisbon to Vladivostok.
Instead, Wall Street and U.S. corporate carpetbaggers swept into the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, eyed its enormous natural resources, asset-stripped the formerly state-owned industries, enriched themselves, gave rise to oligarchs and impoverished the Russian, Ukrainian and other former Soviet peoples.
The humiliation intensified with the decision in the nineties to expand NATO eastward despite a promise made to last Soviet premier Gorbachev in exchange for reunifying Germany. Even Washington’s man in the Kremlin, Boris Yeltsin, at first objected to NATO expansion, while then Sen. Joe Biden supported it though he knew it would provoke Russian hostility.
Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin then closed the door on Western interlopers in order to restore Russian sovereignty and dignity, ultimately angering Washington and Wall Street. Russia sought in treaty proposals with the U.S. and NATO in 2009 and again in 2021 to create a new security architecture in Europe.
Instead Russia’s enormous natural resources and its obstacle to U.S. global dominance has led the West to provoke Russia in Ukraine with the overthrow of the democratically-elected government in 2014. The U.S.-installed government attacked ethnic Russians in the breakaway Donbass region, which defended its democratic rights against the coup.
After failing at repeated attempts of diplomacy, Russia intervened in the civil war in 2022. Fighting continues against NATO-trained and equipped Ukraine amid realistic fears of a nuclear confrontation between NATO and Russia. Despite clear warnings from Moscow of a potential nuclear retaliation, American and German soldiers have attacked Russia by firing U.S. and German missiles into Russia from Ukraine territory risking the ultimate disaster.
Nearly 50 years of neoliberalism and a new Cold War have weakened the institutions of mutual aid. The U.S. seeks to replace international law and the principles of mutual aid in the U.N. Charter with a so-called rules-based order, in which the U.S. alone makes the rules and sets the order.
After two world wars humanity nobly tried to return to mutual aid to save the species. Both times it failed to preserve the peace.
While the old bonds that knit clans and tribes together may have been broken by the individualism of capitalism, Kropotkin saw that it is impossible to completely crush the natural instinct of people to aid one another.
But the tragedy is that this time with nuclear weapons aimed at one another, there may not be another post-war period to try to return to the sanity of aiding one another to survive.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.
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(i) the New Deal, which supposedly arose from the worst depression in the history of modern capitalism, was in fact the outcome of key class battles of the 1930s that the workers actually won, due to being led by militants and Reds. These victories panicked sections of the US ruling class into tolerating some safety-net measures and workers rights to organise, lest revolution broke out. In a letter to a friend, FDR wrote: “…no question in my mind that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation. History shows that where this occurs occasionally, nations are saved from revolution.” That’s what the New Deal really was all about. Numerous elements of the New Deal persisted after WWII, not least that returning servicemen trained in the art of war might use it on their rulers if they weren’t granted some respite from US Hobbesian capitalism in return for their war sacrifices.
(ii) the welfare state in many western countries following WWII (or as is proffered here, “…social democracy, as practiced in Western Europe after the war, with a mixed economy and a strong social safety net, may be the best system human beings will ever be capable of.”). In part, the rise of the post-WWII welfare state was driven by similar motivations to prevent potentially revolutionary outbreaks, but also because the Soviet Union stood as an example of providing social services unmatched anywhere in the capitalist world (despite the heavy Stalinist suppression of all political opposition and dissent). Aneurin Bevan, et al. were well aware of this.
(iii) the ’80s privatisations unleashed by Thatcher and Reagan were the opening shots of winding back as many post-WWII welfare state measures as they could get away with, which crucially needed also the breaking of potential organised working class resistance. This was achieved by the bellweather events of the smashing of the PATCO strike in the US and the Coal Strike in the UK. But it was the restoration of capitalism in the USSR in 1991-92 which enabled the full-throated neoliberal re-imposition of capitalism’s natural tendency to atomise the working class and impose without restriction the ‘delights’ of the free market on it. ‘The end of history’ was really the ideological cover for the fictional end of class antagonisms and struggles and, of course. Effective organised working class resistance was stymied by completely compromised misleaders along with the complete prostration of the left over the past 30-35 years.
No anarchist revolution has ever been made, and where anarchists have come close to holding power, they’ve willingly participated in coalitions with bourgeois parties running a bourgeois state machine to prop up capitalism in deep crisis, best exemplified in the Spanish Civil War. Anarchists refuse to understand that if the working class were to overthrow the capitalist class, they’ll necessarily not only have to smash the rulers’ state machine, but by necessity replace it with their own state machine to expropriate the capitalists, repress their counterrevolutionary efforts, and plan rationally how to socialise and use the expropriated resources (factories, mills, mines, banks, etc) to the benefit of all. Individual anarchist collectives can never do this, and will end up competing, not co-operating, with one another for resources and raw materials, as also happened in Spain.
Ideally, co-operation is all very desirable, but in practice it thus must be imposed, legislated and enforced. Democratic mechanisms, which typically arise during the pre-revolutionary and insurrectionary phases of revolutions (as workers councils, communes, soviets, etc), will be needed to resolve competing interests and priorities, and of course must be institutionalised and enforced by the revolutionary class, arms in hand.
Friedrich Engels’ On Authority [1872] said it all:
“But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists.”
In short, anarchism poses no danger to the capitalist ruling class, but is dangerous to the working class and all the oppressed.
I asked an AI a question. “how many wars and armed conflicts have their been in the world since the founding of the United Nations?”
a: “Since the founding of the in 1945, over 478 wars have occurred globally up to May 2021, with a new war starting on average every two months during that period. More recent data indicates that at least 150 ongoing armed conflicts have been recorded each year in recent times, a number that has increased from previous decades but has rarely fallen below 100 in any year for centuries.”
q: “what was the primary purpose of the united nations?”
a: “The primary purpose of the United Nations is to maintain international peace and security, prevent conflicts, and promote peaceful resolution of disputes among nations.”
That is from Brave.com
Of course, if you ask if the United Nations has been a failure, you don’t get the same answer. The AI is of course trained, by what it was fed to read and analyze during its “training”, to give an answer that first gives the successes of the UN (it actually lists El Salvador, now home to CECOT concentration camp, as one of those), before discussing that some sources might call the UN to be a failure. The AI finds well funded right-wing sources on the internet for this part of its answer. One is led to the Heritage Foundation via a link.
Thus we learn that modern AI’s do not use logic to answer more complicated questions. Logic simply asks whether the organization has fulfilled its primary purpose.
As always, keep your head on a swivel and protect yourself at all times. Don’t follow leaders, and beware of parking meters. Those fines have gone way up ’cause Mayors don’t like to tax the rich but still always need more money than they’ve got.
Thank you Joe for this in depth analysis of Kropotkin and Mutual Aid. We witness the emergence of the human instinct for mutual aid whenever there is a natural disaster. Class divisions evaporate and people lend a hand to preserve the survival of the whole, thus demonstrating the artificial nature of the corporate state being imposed as a method of social control.
The destiny for humanity so far seems to be that the diabolical patently going pro-active and the angelic patiently mired in the meditative. Humanity’s legacy, one fears, may remain so unless reversed and Divinely fated otherwise !
I think the student led movement for solidarity with the Palestinians is indicative of what they demand the future will be for them. They are the only reason I still hold out hope that humanity is still capable of turning things around.
The fact that they were completely ineffective does not bother you? They used stupid tactics, that seemed designed to fail. They deliberately sat in tents and waited for the Big Bad Wolf to come blow them all down. Then they went home and felt good about themselves about how virtuous they were in their token opposition. Meanwhile, tens of thousands died in Gaza, and millions lived in a life of misery, starvation and lack of medical care that is orchestrated by the very system in which they live and contribute.
Nothing about that movement looked like a real struggle for real change. Compare it to Sproul Hall or other actions of real opposition to segregation and war. Silvio’s speech a Sproul Hall is lightyears away from these anti-genocide tents. The really funny part is that those students kept on paying massive fees to the same universities that they said they were opposing. The idea of boycotting the institution that was involved in genocide never seems to have occurred to them, and they get really mad if they are told that the corporate institution might not give them their corporate degree so that they can proceed out into the corporate world as a loyal corporate worker who of course is not even allowed the symbolic act of protest of buying a tent on mommy and daddy’s credit card and offering up as a sacrifice.
One of the huge problems of “the left” these days is that they strongly believe that ineffectual, symbolic acts will somehow change the world. When in fact the only thing that has changed the world is large masses of people all getting really mad. If the French had relied on the symbolism of setting up a few tents on the lawn of Versailles Palace to create change, then they’d have been stuck with the suggestion that of course everyone can eat cake because everyone always has cake.
Hm!
Pro-active and meditative “aren’t (necessarily) opposites but complementary: mindfulness from meditation helps you be mindfully present while planning, allowing for skillful, proactive choices rather than impulsive reactions, creating a foundation for growth by understanding your inner state before taking action” according to Google’s simplistically detailed AI Overview, that is, without having to rely on divine intervention in order to change from the diabolical into the angelic.
On the other hand, perhaps nuclear annihilation is “divinely fated”!
Apologies for the apparently not directly solicited reply.
I cannot understand. Under US law and International law is genocide legal? Is forced starvation legal? Are wars of aggression legal? Is bombing countries without declaring war legal? Is random mass murder of people around the world with or without proof of criminality legal? Is piracy legal? Is the stealing of ships not theft? Is the entire US system run by cowards, idiots, criminals and parasites? Is there a functioning judicial system? If the government of the country of “law and order” has become above its own law, it is a rogue, criminal state violating its own most serious crimes, then it has to fall on the shoulders of the American people. Find and gather legal advice to charge living presidents with the crimes against its own laws. It is not a partisan issue. It is the entire corrupt system. It is not an opinionated grasping of straws. It is survival of this country.
Yet again humanity has found itself poised at the cusp of either seizing it’s destiny or evaporating under its fate. If humanity can identify and emplace bodies of pro-active deliverers under responsibly rational minds then and only then has it any hope. At present times, this seems a tall order indeed, sadly !
If ‘humanity’ hasn’t learned by now…. what’s next, destiny or fate?
And here, this lay commenter is thinking, fate and destiny for all of humanity are inseparable dimensions on a continuity (the uninterruptedness, constancy, or steadiness of a process, development, or connection) of being, and becoming more humane in our so-called civilizations.
We are all embodied creations/products (select your preferred adjective) of nature’s biology, who are born into, and eventually leave this bodily ‘encasement’ through physiological death or extinction (again, select at will), but please, not ‘evaporation’, whichever be the preferred word.
As far as is known empirically, through the constructs of mind, ‘humanity’ is NOT a monolithic entity; without the possibility for a more beneficial development, universally, of the potentialities in ‘the self’ for all of humanity, on a level playing field.
Ergo “Yet again humanity has found itself poised at the cusp of either seizing its destiny or evaporating under its fate” seems to this commenter to be an illogical statement.
‘Destiny’ and ‘fate’ are definitely NOT mutual exclusives.
Rather they are inseparable parts and parcel of the holistic whole.
And we thought hitler was mad.
We were “told” that Hitler was mad. What Hitler really was was that Hitler was an effective tool of the “industrialists” of Germany, who were frightened to death by workers demanding decent pay for safe work and access to health care and education. Towards the very end, at the end of a 20 year career of serving the oligarchs, it does appear that his large, oligarch-inflated ego did go over into insanity of megalomania and a denial of the reality of the world. But, that was only in the last couple of years of his 20 years of serving the oligarchs.
Now of course, we are told that he was mad. And we are told that there is no problem with Germany and Japan rearming and threatening their neighbors again. Just like we are told that there is no problem that oligarchs are on a drive again for world domination and view force as the way to achieve this. We are told once again that the ends justify the means. We are told not to worry, because the real story of World War II and its 60,000,000 corpses is that “Hitler was mad.” Goebbels was always adamant in his time against revealing his methods, and the fact that this era is now remembered as “Hitler was Mad” and Goebbels methods still remain opaque speaks volumes about this world.
This is propaganda psychology. It gets its effect by reducing big problems down to simple notions like “Vote for a Woman” or “Make America Great” or “Hitler Was Mad” among many others. These days personalized and targeted by Big Data. This of course began with Herr Goebbels in Germany and the power of mass media radio and films. Now of course the same forces use all aspects of broadcast and social media towards these same ends.
In this era of mind control, rational minds are few and far between. Most of the minds around me just echo what they are told through their screens. In this way, they are controlled by their screens. And what the oligarchs put onto those screens via algorithms and filters and personal monitoring of what everyone says and does to make sure that the best personal illusions are presented to all minds to keep them as far as possible from independent, logical rational thought.
After all, nobody rational would be buying a bit of any of this. And in capitalism, that would be a disaster if people stopped buying what they are told to buy, and trained to buy, and influenced to buy, and otherwise manipulated into buying. We live in a world on Mind Control, and a well-respected book of the time titled “The Selling of The President” (McGinnis, 1969) is nearing its 60th birthday. Presidents are sold just like soap, and these days that includes all the modern, deceptive efforts of social media along with a broadcast media that does many things that were illegal at the time of that book.
We humans, if we are to survive the upcoming tests of eliminating all nuclear AND hypersonic missiles and successfully adapt to climate change on an over populated planet mutual aid will have to be a world society adaptation. There are already issues and this will continue. I don’t envision these tests not creating all sorts of aggressive behavior, it will not be pretty.
There exists a very good reason the Office of Homeland Security, empowered by the so called Patriot Act adopted both the incident command system and heavily supported Mutual Aid Laws.
What so many Americans fail to realize is these mandates came with strings attached. I know worked in a related field during the post 911 era and know the story very well. These policies changes who calls the shots in National Emergencies. How ever at this point with Mr. Orange presiding as King of the Clown Assed MAGA Cult self professing by their own actions and words their Fascist Zionist beliefs proudly to the MSM.
So just before the first of the new year I Officially call, “BULL SHIT!”
Just a bit of perspective here. Humor me.
The madness which currently has a death grip on our nation must be resolved posthaste! The good news is, “We do have options!”, the bad news is, “Everyone is talking but nothing is being done!” Jeff Beck 1968 CD Guitar Shop, song A Day In the House!
I am not one bit surprised by where the U.S. finds itself these days. After the military I knew one thing never take you eyes off the government. We have a catastrophe currently underway in this country and Captain Bligh at the helm of the ship of state.
Orde of the Day is wake up and understand this must happen very quickly.
***. Under the topic of HARD FACTS: If the wrong things were to happen right now we all might be over with . Nukes it will be quick, a total collapse of the economy would very likely create civil unrest the likes of never been seen before.
Currently we are experiencing the result of far too many Americans who do not understand what happens when you let your politicians run wild with corporate America and foreign lobbyist representing the Super Wealthy Elitists (SWETS), Financiers – One World Order types of Extremists who very openly show inconsiderate overt arrogance and joy and pleasure while kicking down at others.
These people are currently letting their “Guy” make them richer and in even more control. Time for ICE to round up republicans seems to me.
Y’all have a Happy New Year!
Since war is the most environmentally and climate destructive activity of them all, and since we should have begun our adaption to “climate change” decades ago, any real chance of humanity successfully surviving the existential challenge of clearing both hurdles seems to be remote. Humanity appears to be face-planting on the first hurdle, and is moving rapidly away from dealing with climate change. Nothing spews greenhouse gasses like F-35 fighter jet, or an Abrams tank, or some missile destroyer with its high-powered gas turbines driving it through the waves at 35 knots.
So far we haven’t seen burning oil wells yet in the recent conflicts, but with Don Trump wanting wars in both Iran and Venezuela, that doesn’t seem to be too far into the distant future. Both wars might be only weeks away, unless Netanyahu gets a hold signal from the Don in his meeting to ask permission to attack Iran And of course Don Trump and his fellow oligarch travelers don’t want to control that oil to keep it from being spewed into the atmosphere. They instead see that oil as a valuable source of profit for their bank accounts and will try to pump it and burn it for profit as fast as they can.
Meanwhile the oligarchs engage in the magical thinking that says they can invent some future tech that will reverse the physics of global warming, or that they can just fly off to Mars someday. Just as long as their bank accounts stay big enough and the people remain divided enough until there aren’t enough left to do anything about it.
Or, people could watch an old movie about corporate control called “Network”, and start yelling “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” Hollywood don’t make movies like that no more, no matter how many Academy Awards it won at the time.
Keine Bange, zuerst stürzt die deutsche Wirtschaft ins Bodenlose. Wer hat die Gaspipeline zerstört, die unser Rückgrat der Wirtschaft war? Wer bot Deutschland das teure Frackinggas als Ersatz an? Trump hilft den großen Unternehmen aus Deutschland, sich in den USA anzusiedeln. Wer hat den Krieg in der Ukraine initiiert? Es war nicht Trump. Wie man verhindert, dass das Finanzsystem kollabiert, hatte Lyndon LaRouche schon vor Jahrzehnten beschrieben. Machen Sie sich an die Arbeit, ehe es zu spät ist.
Great article; I completely agree with everything in it. Many Americans are too self-centered, egocentric, and group-narcissistic, with little social consciousness. A core belief of any true leftist revolutionary should be that if others or society as a whole are suffering, the revolutionary should feel that pain too. Some people in America believe they can achieve self-realization even as the country is being torn apart by the ruling class and Trump, but that’s not only inhumane, it’s also unscientific. For the U.S. to truly progress toward becoming a better country, all 350 million people must feel self-realized with their basic needs met.
Who knows, maybe after the combination of the U.S.A. and Israel and others of their ilk destroy most of civilization”, the remaining humans not destroyed will follow the path suggested by Kropotkin and finally bring true prosperity to the world..
The First World War always seemed to me Europeans didn’t know what else to do so might as well fight a war. No particular reason other than ennui. Competition let loose, that is, see if we can beat them. In the proper sense, competition is sport and cooperation is life. Individualism and individuation are very different according to psychologist Carl Jung.
Individualism is all ego ; we have a representative of this in the White House. But individuation takes the collective being into account in order to create a more complete individual. Literature, art, language, culture, traditions are fused in an individual to raise he or she up to another level of consciousness.
No body should deny the power of “sport” when we see 30 K fans rise up to cheers their team, however. It’s a part of us that needs recognition and control…seen as entertainment and play, but not life.
Do we, the masses of us, in fact make our own bed?
What is humanity’s excuse, this time, in this era of a purportedly more evolved global animal species, for letting the pariah nation state of Israel get away with brazenly committing genocide?
Persons simply changing the word for what war is, and what it is not; what it entails in “sordid deeds” and how this cripples, and destroys the character and options for how human beings might otherwise react in bettering their lot on the planet, mutually, is the criminality of war! It is the diametrical antithesis of humanitarian evolution.
War is back-to-front; raw evolution of more simple organisms than minds cognitively conscious of a self, capable of thinking critically, reasoning logically and cooperating positively, or so we are taught to believe, for the common betterment of a species calling itself civilized; where the proof is saying the exact opposite.
What does it say about the nature of “human doings” that they reelect as their President, a man who is an extreme narcissist sociopath, whose only objective is to enrich himself, his heirs, and his cohort of sycophantic followers, at the expense of everyone else; no matter the cost to humanity and our survival overall?
This is how “human doings” as opposed to “being human” conduct themselves, even accepting being fed, and gluttonously eating a staler, more rotted version of the same pudding they’ve already tasted; for a second time???
Will we ever learn, as someone once said!
Thank you, Joe Lauria, for this exposition on Kropotkin’s counter to the misuse of Darwin’s theory of evolution known as “Social Darwinism”.
You added relevance by comparing that Gilded Age with ours, and the threats of war which link the eras.
Masterfully constructed.
Thankyou. I always learn something from Mr. Lauria and the CN team. I am sceptical that we can pull back from the “mutual destruction” scenario. And climate chaos is baked into that pie too.
I’m 77 and have never read Kropotkin, even back in the 60s. I started reading Marx when I was 17, but this is new to me. Thanks for the introduction to an author I have missed.
Excellent. To perhaps oversimplify, it might also be seen as the competition between the ideologies of zero/sum and win/win with neocons/neoliberals, fascists and Zionists on one side and the rest of humanity on the other. Both ideologies exist across the globe but zero/sum is evidently in control in the West while win/win is the ideology of the rising East. Perhaps this why the East is rising and the West is falling? You think? In general, the Western reaction to these changing circumstances seems plain enough, “If I cannot have it all, no one else will.” The brilliant ideology of pampered 12 year olds who sadly fill the ranks of Western political and oligarchic elites. Of course, this will not end well. In philosophical terms we find this summarized in the stark warning to never attempt to build your happiness on the suffering of others. Well, duh.
It’s good to see the works of Peter Kropotkin receive attention… and in this context, I’d recommend Jack London’s classic story:
The Strength of the Strong
hxxps://www.online-literature.com/london/strength-of-the-strong/1/
I would not consider international organizations such as the UN as promoters of ‘mutual aid’ – but rather as sinister, undemocratic entities that impose the will of a minority on the rest of us – such as the sanctions on Iraq that killed countless people. What little good they may do is merely a smokescreen for their true purpose – namely, giving a globalist overclass power without responsibility. Therefore, a world without the UN, IMF, World Bank, NATO, BIS, etc… would be a much better place.
The best contemporary example of mutual aid is the co-operative movement, of which further details may be found here:
hxxps://ica.coop/en/cooperatives/facts-and-figures
The United Nations was an attempt at international mutual aid. As the piece says, “The U.S. seeks to replace international law and the principles of mutual aid in the U.N. Charter with a so-called rules-based order, in which the U.S. alone makes the rules and sets the order. After two world wars humanity nobly tried to return to mutual aid to save the species. Both times it failed to preserve the peace.”
The United Nations itself is not the problem, but the way the major powers, especially the United States, manipulates it to purse its narrow interests and crush mutual aid among nations. Even then, the U.N. emergency relief services, for instance, continue to express the instinct of helping one another in times of crisis.
I think it wrong to argue in favor of the UN Charter when quoting the work of Kropotkin. Kropotkin was an anarchist who rejected state government. I find it hard to believe he would have supported the UN, a world wide effort at governmental control.
I agree the UN charter has been hijacked by the Euro-American block (who stated the UN). But in the spirit of this article Kropotkin’s anarchism is the key factor. He was a philosopher who argued for humanism above social structures which inevitably create division between leader and proletariat.
It is not just quoting the work of Kropotkin. The article gives a divergent view from Kropotkin. The article says, “Here is where I differ a little with the great Russian anarchist. He saw no positive role for government. Mutual aid had to be practiced locally, from the ground up, without the involvement of the state, he held.” So the author is well aware that Kropotkin would not have supported the United Nations.
Turn out then that Kropotkin was correct then. As we can all see that the United Nations has been a giant failure. It created a big bureaucracy, that has done some good in some places. But, as an overall force for Peace in the World, trying to make sure that the horrors of World War II and its 60,000,000 corpses never happens again, well, the UN has been a complete failure. It has been captured by the powerful right-wing capitalist powers, which now act just like the right-wing capitalist powers of the 1930’s, and now the UN serves no real purpose in the world and is completely bleeping useless at trying to keep the peace.
A vision that relies on power in some hands which is supposed to protect the rest of us was always a fraud. If we don’t all die riding a bomb down like Slim Whitman, then please learn that the future must be built from the bottom from a strong foundation of equality and mutual aid. The competition of capitalism can never possibly lead to peace. A society built on struggles for power and markets can never find peace. Its very intention is the opposite of peace.
Thank you. I think you’re right.