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NOTE Mutual Aid: The Anarchism of Peter Kropotkin

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The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with

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Jeff Rigenbach.

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It was 90 years ago this month, on February 8, 1921, that Peter Kropotkin died in Dimitrov,

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then a small town in Russia about 40 miles north of Moscow.

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He had been born in Moscow itself almost exactly 78 years before, on December 9th, 1842, but

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he had spent at least half of the 78 intervening years living abroad, a few years in Switzerland,

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a few more in France, though most of his time in France was spent behind bars, and for more

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than 30 years, in England.

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Kropotkin was of noble birth, Prince Kropotkin was the title he was born into, and like his

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His father and his father before him, he was expected to become an officer in the Tsar's

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army and pursue a military career.

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The young Peter Kropotkin dutifully went to military school, and on graduation at the

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age of 19, accepted a commission in the Tsar's army.

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But to his father's disgust, he requested an assignment in Siberia, where he knew there

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was little or nothing military for the army to do, so that he stood a pretty fair chance

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of being attached to one of the various geographical expeditions that were busily mapping the region

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and documenting its flora and fauna.

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Geography and zoology, you see, were his true passions.

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Military service was just something he was doing to please his father.

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And Kropotkin succeeded with his underhanded and self-serving plans.

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He became a military attaché on several geographical expeditions over the next few years, working

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Working alongside the geographers and zoologists and winning their respect for his conscientiousness

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and accuracy.

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In 1867, at the age of 24, he resigned his commission in the army, whereupon his father

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disinherited him, leaving him a prince with no visible means of support.

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Nothing daunted, Kropotkin began putting himself through the University of St. Petersburg by

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working as a salaried employee of the Russian Geographical Society.

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In 1871 he led exploratory expeditions for the society in Finland and Sweden.

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But by then his enthusiasm for geography and zoology, though still very strong, had begun

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to play second fiddle to a more recently acquired enthusiasm for radical politics.

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By some time late in 1872, near the time of his 30th birthday it would appear, he decided

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he was an anarchist.

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After the influence of these new ideas he joined an illegal society, the Tchaikovsky Circle,

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which had been named for one of its members, a younger brother of the celebrated composer.

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Though the Circle's principal activity seems to have been the publication of foreign books

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in editions for Russian readers, Marx, Darwin and John Stuart Mill were among the authors

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they made available, the members began gradually to be picked off, arrested by the Tsar's

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In 1874, Kropotkin, now 31, was imprisoned for this crime.

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After two years behind bars, he escaped and fled to Switzerland.

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There he remained for the next five years, until in 1881, after the assassination of

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the Tsar, the Swiss caved into pressure from the Russian government and agreed to expel

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Well, all Russian nationals living on Swiss soil who were known radicals or revolutionaries.

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Again Kropotkin fled, this time to France, but within a couple of years, thanks to the

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continuing machinations of his enemies in St. Petersburg, he was arrested again, this

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time by French authorities, who charged him with sedition and locked him up anew after

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his conviction on these charges.

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By this time, however, he was able to rely on his growing international reputation to

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protect him from the worst of the mistreatment various political authorities had in mind

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for him.

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Since his escape to Switzerland from Russia almost a decade before, in 1876, when he was

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33 years old, he had earned his living as a scientific journalist, contributing articles

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to magazines and newspapers.

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During these same years, the scholarly papers he had published during his time in Russia,

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based on his explorations, had gradually percolated through the scientific community.

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It proved very easy for his friends and supporters on the outside to organize petitions and letter-writing

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campaigns in which some rather eminent persons participated.

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After three years, the French gave in to the pressure and released Kropotkin.

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Having tried Switzerland and France without much success, he decided to try England.

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And England worked out for him just fine.

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He lived there from 1886 to 1917, writing principally for Nature magazine, The Times

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of London and an influential intellectual magazine of the day, The Nineteenth Century.

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Yet when the Tsar's government fell in the February 1917 revolution and the way was cleared

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for him to return home, he seized the opportunity.

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He was 74 years old when he came back to a Russia he hadn't seen since he was in his

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mid-30s.

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Shortly after he arrived, the October Revolution installed the Bolsheviks in power, an event

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Kropotkin publicly deplored.

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Paul Average reports that he told one friend, this buries the revolution, and commented

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further that the Bolsheviks were demonstrating how the revolution was not to be made, that

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is by authoritarian rather than libertarian methods.

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Kropotkin didn't live to see the worst consequences of the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian Revolution,

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however, as we have seen by the time conditions in the larger cities had become as bad as

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Ayn Rand portrays them in her novel We the Living, he was dead, and of course conditions

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became far worse after his death than they had ever been before it.

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Ropotkin himself played no small part in bringing this catastrophe about.

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In the later years of the 19th century, his was one of the most influential of the voices

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raised in support of the economic absurdity of abolition of private property, and the

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rule of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

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Early in his career, he had lent his support to what was often called back then propaganda

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of the Deed, terrorist violence we would call it today, intended to arouse the sleeping

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masses to political awareness and political action.

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He abandoned these positions early on, but not before he had committed his early ideas

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to paper and thereby made certain of their influence over at least two generations of

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young European anarchists and communists.

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Nonetheless, Peter Kropotkin is one of the half-dozen cases of famous anarcho-communists

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that I would say is worth a second look if you're seeking candidates for places in the

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libertarian tradition.

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In previous episodes of this podcast, I've said as much about Rudolf Rocker and Emma

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Goldman.

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I say it now about Peter Kropotkin.

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Not only did Kropotkin awaken pretty quickly to the folly of his early admiration for violence

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In order to understand this, it is necessary to understand first the intellectual world in which Peter Kropotkin came of age in the early 1860s.

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Like all good students of that era and later eras as well, Kropotkin knew his Thomas Hobbes.

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Hobbes had written, 200 years before, in the middle of the 17th century, about the conditions

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that had existed when human beings lived in what he called the state of nature, before

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coercive governments were established.

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Hobbes described the principal feature of this period as a war of all against all, and

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the life of the average human during this time as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and

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short.

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Its conception of things seemed to be echoed in the language of Charles Darwin's On the

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Origin of Species, published in 1859 when Kropotkin was 16 years old, with its talk

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of how, as George Woodcock summarizes it,

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In nature there is never enough for all, and that it is not desirable that it should be,

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since the most potent force in the evolution of the animal world and of human societies

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is the struggle for existence within the species, which procures the survival of the fittest

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and thus ensures the progress of the race.

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The problem Kropotkin confronted with respect to all this not long after his appointment

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to a post in Siberia is described simply and succinctly in the opening pages of his most

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famous work, Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution, first published in 1902 when he was nearly

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of Money.

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I failed to find, he wrote, although I was eagerly looking for it, that bitter struggle

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for the means of existence among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered

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by most Darwinists, though not always by Darwin himself, as the dominant characteristic of

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struggle for life and the main factor of evolution.

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What he saw instead was mutual aid and mutual support carried on to an extent which made

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me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the

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preservation of each species, and its further evolution.

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He concluded that life in societies enables the feeblest animals, the feeblest birds,

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and the feeblest mammals to resist, or to protect themselves from, the most terrible

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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Are so many qualities making the individual or the species the fittest under certain circumstances?

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We maintain that under any circumstances sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle

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for life.

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Those species which willingly abandon it are doomed to decay, while those animals which

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know best how to combine have the greatest chance of survival and of further evolution,

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Although they may be inferior to others in each of the faculties enumerated by Darwin

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and Wallace, except the intellectual faculty.

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As George Woodcock notes, this argument is potentially important to anyone who wants

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to allege that human society, with all its manifest advantages, can be carried on without

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the protection offered by the state.

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The argument was designed, Woodcock writes, to show that anarchist proposals could work,

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because they were based on the constants of social relations among beings of all kinds,

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human and animal.

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It was also designed, of course, to put the quits to Thomas Hobbes' assertion that life

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in the state of nature was a war of all against all.

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Perhaps if life in the state of nature included mutual aid, then there could indeed be a free

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Society, one in which force and the threat of force played no part.

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In the 1960s, Barbara Brandon famously responded when asked what would happen to the poor and

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disabled in a libertarian society that, if you want to help those people, no one will

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stop you.

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Kropotkin envisioned a human society in which more than a few would want to help those who

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were poor and disabled.

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When Peter Kropotkin died in February of 1921, these ideas did not die with him.

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About three weeks before his death in Brooklyn, New York, a Russian immigrant couple gave

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birth to an infant they named Murray, Murray Bookchin, who would do a good deal to advance

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Kropotkin's main idea about human society.

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Bookchin was what used to be known as a red diaper baby.

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He grew up a Marxist.

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He joined the Young Pioneers, the communist youth organization, at the age of nine.

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But he devoted as much of his time as he could to reading and studying.

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And it wasn't long before he began to discern problems in the faith he had been fed with

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his mother's milk.

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By the end of the 1930s, while still a teenager, he announced that he could no longer support

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Stalin.

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And after another few years, as a progressively more disillusioned and skeptical Trotskyite,

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Years in which Bookchin, now in his twenties, did factory work and organizing for the CIO,

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he began to feel that he had to reject categorically the coercion he had come to see as inherent

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in conventional Marxism-Leninism.

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By the time of his 29th birthday at the beginning of 1950, he had decided he was an anarchist.

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And what earlier anarchist had impressed him and influenced him the most?

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Why Peter Kropotkin, of course.

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As William O. Reichert put it in his 1976 book, Partisans of Freedom, a Study in American

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Anarchism, Bookchin shared Kropotkin's view that the evolutionary process we find in physical

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nature has its counterpart in social development, and that we ignore this truth at our own peril.

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To Bookchin it had begun to seem obvious that if Kropotkin had been right that mutual aid

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was a principal factor of the evolutionary process for humans and other animals, then

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it would be wise to treat mutual aid as the spontaneous natural process it is.

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Reichard notes that for both the ecologist and the anarchist, the most striking characteristic

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of nature is the spontaneity that lies at the bottom of every natural growth pattern.

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Mutual aid as a natural growth pattern for our species is also, in a sense, what Friedrich

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Hayek famously spoke of as a spontaneous order.

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And when we see this, we see also that mutual aid needs our protection.

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This is how Reichert summarizes Bookchin's argument.

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Natural living processes atrophy and die to the extent that they are artificially restricted

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and caged within imposed regimens of force and restraint, whereas they flourish and progress

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whenever left to their own internal resources.

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Here's how Bookchin himself puts it in his 1971 book Post-Scarcity Anarchism.

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The ecologist, insofar as he is more than a technician, tends to reject the notion of

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power over nature.

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He speaks instead of steering his way through an ecological situation, of managing rather

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than recreating an ecosystem.

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The anarchist in turn speaks in terms of social spontaneity, of releasing the potentialities

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of people.

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Both in their own way regard authority as inhibitory, as a weight limiting the creative

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potential of a natural and social situation.

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Their object is not to rule a domain, but to release it.

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Reichert comments on this quotation from Bookchin in a way that would probably be surprising

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to the man behind this idea, Peter Kropotkin.

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As the above makes clear, Reichert writes, anarchism draws its inspiration not from the

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modern world of science, but from the idea of nature as it has always been interpreted

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during the previous periods of enlightened thought.

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Nature on this view is not a defective system that needs to be discarded, but a highly ordered

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living process that merely needs to be relieved of its artificial restraints to become the

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magnificent thing it is.

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Just as ecology seeks to right the balance of physical nature by allowing it to revert

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back to its natural patterns of growth, so anarchism seeks to right the balance of human

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society by allowing people to express their inner social inclinations.

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There is a vital truth contained in ecology according to Bookchin, and this is that if

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we wish to advance the unity and stability of the natural world, if we wish to harmonize

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it, we must conserve and promote variety.

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If Bookchin's theory appears strikingly similar to the theory of laissez-faire formulated

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by the enlightened thinkers of the eighteenth century, we should not be surprised, for the

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philosophical foundations of all anarchists stem from the same source.

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Perhaps it was this common debt to the enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

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that led Bookchin to seek grounds for friendly relations with libertarians of our sort during

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in the 1960s and 70s.

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In the 60s, apparently in response to Murray Rothbard's friendly overtures to the new left,

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Bookchin arranged to meet Rothbard, and for a brief time became an occasional visitor

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in Rothbard's famous living room at 215 West 88th Street in Manhattan.

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But the two men did not get along, and the time came soon enough when Rothbard threw

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Bookchin out of his apartment, though the nature of the enormity committed by Bookchin

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to make him deserving of such an eviction seems never to have been recorded.

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In any case, Bookchin continued his friendly overtures to libertarians of our sort into

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the late 1970s, when he spoke at at least one national libertarian gathering, the National

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Convention of the Libertarian Party, held in Boston over Labor Day weekend of 1978.

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In later years, Bookchin changed his mind about libertarians of our sort and about various

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and its other things as well.

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He even stopped calling himself an anarchist.

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But however he characterized his political views at the time of his death nearly five

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years ago in late July of 2006, his work in the middle years of the 20th century stands

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on its own.

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And the essence of that work was the updating and further popularization of an idea traceable

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to Peter Kropotkin.

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The idea that if human beings are freed from the burden of the state, they will naturally

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find a way to live peaceably together.

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They will create a spontaneous order and live in it harmoniously.

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The idea remains an enticing one.

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This is Jeff Rigenbach.

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The Theory of Money and Credit