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Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

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Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#81

Post by n8cpdx »

082349872349872 wrote: post #18

Interesting. While reading this, I wondered idly if solidarity might be more acceptable phrasing than mutual aid in the US?

Anarchists seem to think they have a monopoly on mutual aid, but it turns out that police agencies are all about it as well. At least where I’m at, people think that mutual aid is the secret sauce they have to defeat the efforts of the state, not realizing that just in Portland they have the city, multiple counties, Metro, and several neighboring suburbs strategically sharing resources and cooperating, even across state lines.

I observe that mutual aid between well-structured and stable organizations of well-trained people is even more effective than mutual aid between lone actors and temporary self-organizing cliques.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#82

Post by serverholic »

specialist wrote: post #71
acabal wrote: post #19

I produced a free ebook edition of Mutual Aid for Standard Ebooks last year: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/peter-kropotkin/mutual-aid It's very readable and quite interesting. It aimed to have a veneer of science, when the science of animals and nature was still fairly undeveloped; and it succeeded in a sense, because its observations are still held in regard, but I think it succeeded much better as a work of phi…

> men can't really cooperate in any grand sense Dawn of Everything shares the latest anthropology and archeology about prior societies. Spoiler: Science indicates a whole lot more cooperation than was previously assumed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything I'm quite bullish on the future of cooperatives. Perhaps like the worker directed social enterprises advocated by Richard Wolfe. One missing "tech…

Whenever I see someone talk about The Dawn of Everything I like to link this series of video critiques.

https://youtu.be/oJIHWk_M398

The person critiquing generally agrees that humans are cooperative but he takes issue with the author’s general position that people kinda just decide to organize culture in a certain way. Instead the video creator offers a materialist perspective that I find a lot more compelling.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#83

Post by 082349872349872 »

robertlagrant wrote: post #80
082349872349872 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so what model of overall cooperation would avoid Wikipedia drama? (having seen humanity's response to Covid, I'm not willing to admit "the spirit of full cooperation will bloom as defecting behaviour withers away" as axiomatic. But I am curious as to what you have in mind?)

I don't have an alternative for Wikipedia. I'm saying we shouldn't lean into any (always seductive) way of thinking that demonises people who disagrees with our one true way of doing things. People should be herded cats; neither wild cats nor herded sheep.

Agreed. What terms might be better than the game-theoretic Cooperator and Defector, then?

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#84

Post by cuteboy19 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #67
culi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what ways has mankind demonstrated that "tribes of men" can't cooperate? Humans have been able to live in large decentralized polities for millennia and modern archeology strongly backs this up. Göbekli Tepe (~11kya), the still-standing mammoth houses of North Eastern Europe (~15kya), or perhaps best exemplified by "the new archaic" or "monuments without kings"[^0] which is a term used by archeologists to describe…

I think Kropotkin would agree with you rather than GP -- you are making arguments that would in fact be dear to Kropotkin. Check out his books for yourself if interested. His work on this subject was in large part a response to the influence of "darwinism" at the time, where it became commonplace to think that "evolution" meant that we were evolved to compete with each other viciously, that selfish competition was ou…

There would be no point in competing with someone who has the same genes as you since it is the genes that drive evolution. Going further, the more different the genes the more you would want to compete.

So this means that you would cooperate most with your parents then your siblings, then your family, tribe, race and species.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#85

Post by jrochkind1 »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #84
jrochkind1 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Kropotkin would agree with you rather than GP -- you are making arguments that would in fact be dear to Kropotkin. Check out his books for yourself if interested. His work on this subject was in large part a response to the influence of "darwinism" at the time, where it became commonplace to think that "evolution" meant that we were evolved to compete with each other viciously, that selfish competition was ou…

There would be no point in competing with someone who has the same genes as you since it is the genes that drive evolution. Going further, the more different the genes the more you would want to compete. So this means that you would cooperate most with your parents then your siblings, then your family, tribe, race and species.

That is not Kropotkin's analysis; it is a very commonplace current "evolutionary psychology" analysis (as well as probably a common 19th century "social darwinism" analysis!)

I don't really want to get into the whole argument here -- it's one of those that we will go on forever with.

But the Kropotkin point of view would probably point out that humans as a species (and any species, in fact) have improved survivability and natural selection when we cooperate with those in our communities/populations without regard for family relations.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#86

Post by greenie_beans »

serverholic wrote: post #79

Anarchism is an interesting topic, and learning about it has lead me down some interesting paths of learning and thought. At its core, it’s the position of being against hierarchies of power where humans dominate those with less power. In simple terms, it’s being against humans dominating each other. The big question is can we have a functioning society with less human domination and how far can we reduce it? That’s…

agreed. the human nature argument is a lazy one against something like anarchism or any other alternative system. if we can be socialized to seek money (it starts with the piggy bank when we're like 4 years old), we can be socialized to not seek those things and instead seek something else. replace "money" or "greed" with any negative way that humans behave, like power or domination.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#87

Post by serverholic »

greenie_beans wrote: post #86
serverholic wrote: post #79

Anarchism is an interesting topic, and learning about it has lead me down some interesting paths of learning and thought. At its core, it’s the position of being against hierarchies of power where humans dominate those with less power. In simple terms, it’s being against humans dominating each other. The big question is can we have a functioning society with less human domination and how far can we reduce it? That’s…

agreed. the human nature argument is a lazy one against something like anarchism or any other alternative system. if we can be socialized to seek money (it starts with the piggy bank when we're like 4 years old), we can be socialized to not seek those things and instead seek something else. replace "money" or "greed" with any negative way that humans behave, like power or domination.

Yes, the environment we grow up in plays a huge part in our development. Everything from nutrition during development to culture, values, etc. All shape how we think.

I was learning recently about Christopher Columbus and his encounters with native peoples and it’s fascinating how differently these people thought. The natives had a hard time understanding the colonizers and their endless need for gold and things.

Eventually some of them theorized that the European’s god is actually gold lol.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#88

Post by PartiallyTyped »

SyzygistSix wrote: post #75
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are not cooperating at grand scales, not in what matters to the average person, but we certainly cooperate on helping the rich get richer.

Are you ignoring the billion and a half people that have been lifted out of poverty since the 50s or 60s? We can definitely cooperate to benefit the masses of humankind and we do.

Are you ignoring that despite knowing the consequences of climate change for a hundred or so years, "we" chose to ignore them for corporate profits?

What's the point of lifting anyone out of poverty if we are actively ruining our environment through obviously unsustainable behaviour?

How many more billions of people could we have brought out of poverty if the goal wasn't to improve bottom lines? What about all the displaced people due to wars for oil?

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#89

Post by throwayyy479087 »

serverholic wrote: post #79

Anarchism is an interesting topic, and learning about it has lead me down some interesting paths of learning and thought. At its core, it’s the position of being against hierarchies of power where humans dominate those with less power. In simple terms, it’s being against humans dominating each other. The big question is can we have a functioning society with less human domination and how far can we reduce it? That’s…

>The big question is can we have a functioning society with less human domination and how far can we reduce it?

No, not with any scale. This has been tried and tried and tried. It's a nice idea, but like most of leftism, only works on paper.

I wish the people that argue for things like the destruction of the family would instead push for universal healthcare. That's at least doable.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#90

Post by 082349872349872 »

n8cpdx wrote: post #81
082349872349872 wrote: post #18

Interesting. While reading this, I wondered idly if solidarity might be more acceptable phrasing than mutual aid in the US?

Anarchists seem to think they have a monopoly on mutual aid, but it turns out that police agencies are all about it as well. At least where I’m at, people think that mutual aid is the secret sauce they have to defeat the efforts of the state, not realizing that just in Portland they have the city, multiple counties, Metro, and several neighboring suburbs strategically sharing resources and cooperating, even across st…

that seems to be a crux: how to get (and utilise) well-trained people while avoiding long-lived organisations.

(to some degree, one might argue that back in the day, Silicon Valley was an example of successfully recombining groups of well-trained people, each of whose career-length might involve participation in over a dozen different hierarchal entities; in the 1970s this promiscuity was considered radical.)

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