"L’Entraide" (Mutual Aid) according to Peter Kropotkin
Ecology - Society - History
To offer to whoever you want, or to yourself !... Urgently ! Mutual Aid: A factor of Evolution by Peter Kropotkin (Пётр Алексеевич Кропоткин).
If you had to read (or offer) only one book, it would be this one!... Published in London, where Kropotkin was in exile, in 1902 (and in French four years later, under the title "L'entraide, un facteur d'évolution" suggested by Élisée Reclus, who spelled it "Entr'aide", a word which will enter the dictionary one year after the book's publication)... This is certainly the most positive work that I have ever read, and of which the perfect topicality is well underlined by the quote from the same Élisée Reclus in the introduction of the French edition :
"Definitively aware of our united humanity, becoming one with the planet itself, embrassing in a single view our origins, our present, our near goal, our distant ideal, this is what constitutes progress."
And that's what it's all about.
Equipped with solid scientific training acquired at the school of the page corps of Tsar Alexander II, and even though a brilliant career in Moscow naturally opened up to him, Kropotkin asked to be assigned to the Cossacks of the Amur River as as an officer. In Siberia, he became an anthropologist, observing the social organization of small communities isolated from everything, a geographer, and a naturalist, searching in Siberian nature for traces and confirmations of Darwin's theories that he admired... He himself sealed his destiny, when following the Polish insurrection of 1863, he resigned from the army to devote himself to his research, scientific, geographical and anthropological activities... In Switzerland, he met Bakunin, and joined the Jura Federation of the First International.
"The theoretical presentation of anarchy as it was then presented by the Jura Federation [...] the criticism of state socialism [...] and the revolutionary character of the agitation, strongly demanded my attention But the egalitarian principles that I encountered in the Jura mountains, the independence of thought and language that I saw developing among the workers [...] all this exerted an increasingly strong influence on my feelings; and when I left these mountains, after a stay of a few days among the watchmakers, my opinions on socialism were made up: I was an anarchist!"
This is how this Russian prince became an activist, and the main theoretician of libertarian communism/Anarcho-communism.
Among the (many) virtues of this work, let us cite, among others;
- The reminder that contrary to the ideas distilled by the newspeak which is rampant today, individualism is not the foundation of anarchism, but of (neo)liberalism, Kropotkin's anarchism being founded on solidarity and the natural order;
- The fact of restoring Darwin's letters of nobility, far from the caricature of the "law of the jungle" and the real betrayal that is "Social Darwinism" (which has nothing to do with social nor with Darwin...);
- Highlighting the importance of the historical and cultural "narrative" which conditions our perception of the world, and therefore what it will be! If your History is that of a succession of wars and power struggles, then truly, humanity seems hopeless... If your History is that of Mutual Aid, then... Anything is possible!
As far as possible DO NOT buy on Amazon!!! There are (still) booksellers in this country. THANKS
Other Intercultural Notes...
"Si vis pacem..." the article, some kind of manifesto of our association.
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