“In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense – not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.” - Peter Kropotkin
What exactly is he trying to say? First he talks about Voluntarism, which is based in Capitalism which he hates. He then implies that he thinks unsociable species should be shot.
I love Kropotkin’s evolutionary writings, but I don’t understand him. He is talking VOLUNTARISM, but he is an advocate of economic planning, and marxism.
I’m afraid what he’s saying is that anarchism=atomist and the destruction of human society, while statism is the paragon of society. Hence, anarchism runs counter to the inherent social nature of man. You see, when you’re our for a beer with your buddies you’re setting up a state[;)]
To the origin post: Kropotkin wasn’t a Marxist. Marx did not like anarchism, even anarcho-socialism.
I think Kropotkin is like some of the anarcho-socialists here that claim that their form of anarchism is voluntarism. Since it is more voluntary than wage slavery or whatever. I don’t think he says that they should be shot. Only that they will not survive.
Which I think is true of any ideology. All of them advocate some type of society. But society cannot be a thing unto itself to any ideology, since everyone finds some society or other to be offensive. What he is saying is not to conform to it, but that his own ideas are best fit to a surviving society.
The sociobiologist EO Wilson said something like “Marx was right. He just had the wrong species.” Or something like that. I do not find the “argument from nature” to be convincing. Even though it does contain some truisms… they are not really helpful.
Have we not heard the same fears expressed twice? By the anti-abolitionists in America before Negro emancipation, and by the Russian nobility before the liberation of the serfs? “Without the whip the Negro will not work,” said the anti-abolitionist. “Free from their master’s supervision the serfs will leave the fields uncultivated,” said the Russian serf-owners. It was the refrain of the French noblemen in 1789, the refrain of the Middle Ages, a refrain as old as the world, and we shall hear it every time there is a question of sweeping away an injustice. And each time actual facts give it the lie. The liberated peasant of 1792 ploughed with a wild energy unknown to his ancestors, the emancipated Negro works more than his fathers, and the Russian peasant, after having honoured the honeymoon of his emancipation by celebrating Fridays as well as Sundays, has taken up work with as much eagerness as his liberation was the more complete. There, where the soil is his, he works desperately; that is the exact word for it. The anti-abolitionist refrain can be of value to slave-owners; as to the slaves themselves, they know what it is worth, as they know its motive.- Peter Kropotkin
So what exactly is stopping from people in a planned economy from working?
The fact that the planners are unable to allocate resources effectively. I think it has as less to do with the will to work, rather than the inability to determine what to work on.
Explain what about them? They’re at the bottom of the food chain, except for crocodiles and komodo dragons, both of which socialize and cooperate with their fellows.
Conversely, the chameleon preys on insects. He’s a real winner.
Don’t entrepreneurs try to include as many people as possible in their consumer bases? Don’t they try to find a productive use for everyone, not just the strongest? sigh
Kropotkin wasn’t a Marxist, he was a pioneering left-wing anarchist. IIRC, he believed that society should be organized through various worker and peasant co-ops. I haven’t read any of his writings in a long time though, so I might be confusing his views with the views of other left-wing anarchists.
Kropotkin had an axe to grind against both the state and the capitalist. Essentially, he thought that all attempts at revolution had failed because they had always failed to tackle the root cause of inequity in the first place – private property.
To him, the notion of ‘mine’ necessitates divison of interest, and he felt that no-one had the actual right to claim something as ‘mine’ when everything in human civilization had been shaped and created through the collected efforts of the entire species. Thus, the only proper and lasting revolution would be the Anarchist Communist revolution, which would not only free mankind from the State (the enforcement of exclusive interest) and the notion of capital (the cause of exclusive interest).
Without abolishing the State, we would never be free, and without abolishing private property we would never be altruistic; in Kroptkin’s mind the two requisites for happiness (and thus equality) in society.
Hence, of course, his remarks about the animal kingdom. Only the altruistic will thrive.