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Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

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Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#111

Post by annadiru »

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.

Nature ecologies are so full of examples of mutual aid across all types of life that we are still discovering new relationships everyday. I'd like to see an updated collation of all these findings since kropotkin's writigs. Any suggestions?

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#112

Post by SyzygistSix »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #88
SyzygistSix wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

No, I'm not. Some of that wealth was created by externalizing costs in the form of pollution. Because that is how our society was designed and we did not have good alternatives until around the turn of the century. But most of it was not. Most was genuine wealth that improved many people's lives.

The point of lifting people out of poverty - which doesn't mean they have now have money; it more means they have more access to education, healthcare, and capital - is that those people are now in a better position to help us deal with the future challenges, climate change being one of them. In addition to their quality of life being much better. There is a significant bootstrapping effect.

>How many more billions of people could we have brought out of poverty if the goal wasn't to improve bottom lines?

We don't know. It is difficult to say what would happen in a different timeline. But if Mao-era China and the Soviet Union are any indication, what we decided upon was a much better outcome than that. If you can design a system where wealth is allocated in a way that creates more wealth than it does currently, plenty of folks are all ears. Lots of people in positions of influence like creating more wealth.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#113

Post by serverholic »

schizo89 wrote: post #108
ausbah wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that anarcho-capitalism, and to a lesser degree even libertarianism, is a fundamentally flawed philosophy because of it being against hierarchies that "suppress" their followers and in support of hierarchies that bolster them. In other words capital owners down playing the state and propping up "free market economics".

There's much changed since the inception but the core idea of anarchism is abolishing central powers (and single truth) in favor of their own homemade belief system where government has no power over them and can't enforce their laws, because, hey, they're (anarchists) moved away from main stream.

Communities with rules are not necessarily against the ideas of anarchism as long as participation in that community is voluntary.

Anarchism != chaos

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#114

Post by PartiallyTyped »

SyzygistSix wrote: post #112
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

No, I'm not. Some of that wealth was created by externalizing costs in the form of pollution. Because that is how our society was designed and we did not have good alternatives until around the turn of the century. But most of it was not. Most was genuine wealth that improved many people's lives. The point of lifting people out of poverty - which doesn't mean they have now have money; it more means they have more acc…

There is a mountain of difference between:

We did not have good alternatives, until we did; and

We suppressed progress, had people killed, and squashed all attempts at public ownership of the goods, launched defamation campaigns, buried people in lawsuits, had them locked in their homes or jail for no reason other than being a block at corporate earnings.

If you have to slave away your life to pay for access to education, you clearly don’t have access to it, you are paying with your life for it.

What wall street and the rich are asking for is absurd. Gains on top of gains, chasing growth on rate of growth.

People in places of influence care about creating more wealth for themselves. They clearly don’t care about the average person because they are not the average person.

lets assume for a moment that we don’t have access to space, we are confined on earth, and have finite resources to work with. Certain people by virtue of chance end up consuming orders of magnitude more resources by virtue of their lineage and the place they were born it.

By said virtue, they impose onto the rest of us their will, and make it so they don’t face any repercussions for their wastefulness.

Can you argue, in good conscience, that all the resources spent on and by somebody like Musk, are better spent on Musk than feeding families in Africa, building infrastructure and providing top notch education to have more doctors and researchers do stuff like, idk find cures to all the different forms of cancer that we have?

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#115

Post by romwell »

SyzygistSix wrote: post #76
romwell wrote: post #5

Incidentally, I've just been unpacking moving boxes, and put the beautifully illuminated [1] print of Mutual Aid on my "to-read" bookshelf. I wonder how often this particular instance of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon happens on HN, i.e. what's the intersection of regulars here and people familiar with names like Kropotkin, Makhno, etc. [1] PM press edition: https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1272

It's not difficult to find Kropotkin's name popping up in many places online.

Of course it's not. I just wonder how common it is with people who frequent HN, which is a very unrepresentative sample of the population.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#116

Post by [deleted] »

serverholic wrote: post #113
schizo89 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's much changed since the inception but the core idea of anarchism is abolishing central powers (and single truth) in favor of their own homemade belief system where government has no power over them and can't enforce their laws, because, hey, they're (anarchists) moved away from main stream.

Communities with rules are not necessarily against the ideas of anarchism as long as participation in that community is voluntary. Anarchism != chaos

[deleted]

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#117

Post by shmerl »

082349872349872 wrote: post #42
culi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anyone's unaware: famous Ukrainian anti-anti-semitist/anarchist revolutionary who lead a peasant revolt that supported farmer communes in much of Ukraine before getting crushed by both the White and Red Army pro-russian tankies hate him

fwiw, even Lyube has a song memorialising Makhno, Батька Махно, and I don't know if they're considered tankies, but they're definitely tankie-adjacent (they sang at the pro-"Z" concert at the start of the invasion, ffs). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRMfa6MSAaY

I suppose they aren't too bright then.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#118

Post by aebtebeten »

culi wrote: post #99
pessimizer wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro-Soviet, not "pro-Russian."

I was specifically referring to the vein of tankies that are pro-Russia in the ongoing invasion of Ukraine (yes they exist)

There may be less distance than we think.

I'm not sure what's going on in https://youtu.be/LffLqUwlY2Y?t=200 , but would not be surprised if it's something to do with rehabilitating Stalin (of the eponymous tanks)?

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#119

Post by teachrdan »

ausbah wrote: post #96
greenie_beans wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

where does the ability to mold humans to fit a certain set of standards end? incentives, culture, norms, etc. I think can shape someone's default mode of thinking and actions on the margin, but eventually you reach some point like the "New Soviet Man" where you're asking someone not to be human?

> like the "New Soviet Man" where you're asking someone not to be human?

I wonder if late American capitalism is doing the same with entrepreneur worship. Mainstream culture celebrates people who are self starters, constantly grinding, always on the lookout for unfulfilled human desires and new markets, sensitive to customers' feelings and individuality while somehow also completely indifferent to urgent systemic catastrophes like environmental destruction or the end of democracy (which require collective effort)...

This is not an ideology like Soviet dogma. But in capitalism's funny way, it's an omnipresent and coherent archetype nevertheless.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#120

Post by civopsec »

FireInsight wrote: post #37
082349872349872 wrote: post #18

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

I'd say that it could be confusing, since people often "Stand in solidarity" without any actions, but "Giving mutual aid" is something active, like protesting, monetary aid, a large scope if things.

Solidarity is all about mutuality… doesn’t matter what pretenders and virtue signallers in the digital age try to lead you to believe.
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