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Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

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Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#61
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's different because in English, a diacritic of two dots (diaeresis) is used to show that a vowel is pronounced separately from the vowel that came before it, not as a mix. Naïve is one example, where it is pronounced na-ive, not nive. That said, I also like it, but it means something different here.

> in English, a diacritic of two dots (diaeresis) is used to show that a vowel is pronounced separately from the vowel that came before it, not as a mix. You've correctly defined diaeresis, but it's not actually used in English except in articles that get published in The New Yorker . There is a reason the common English name for the diacritic is "umlaut". The normal use in English is to show that a word comes from G…

It absolutely is used in English, although not commonly, and it was more common in older texts. Nowadays it’s mostly used in proper nouns like Zoë, Chloë, and in some spellings of my own name, Coën.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#62
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…

> mankind has demonstrated through thousands of years of history that tribes of men can't really cooperate in any grand sense I'd argue the fact that humans can live in reasonably stable polities of more than a billion people proves, and in an economic space of practically the entire planet (globalisation!) proves we absolutely can cooperate at grand, epic scales.Whether or not that means Kropotkin is right is anothe…

Domesticated animals are often more cooperative than their wildtype kin.

I suspect humans, over tens of thousands of years, have successfully domesticated not only b taurus and c familiaris, but also h sapiens.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#63
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll hardly achieve anything by it, besides really breaking spellchecking software.

And annoying the language speakers. Pёtr is painful to read. Peter, Pyotr, Peter, Пётр, pick any, but don't mix and match please!

What about the other way? Would it be legit to transliterate the english nickname Pete as Пить?

Много городов у вас в России))

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#64

Kropotkin would weep to what has become Jura's anarchist dream. We may have reached independance from Bern but at the cost of a parlement filled with liberals and conservatives.

any good reading for Jura's anarchist dream? (le français, ça joue)

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defectors implies authoritarianism, and my way or the highway thinking. which have generally been the enemy of overall cooperation. Wikipedia and the internet work because they mostly aren't like that, and are at their worst when they are.

Hmm, if someone "defects" wikipedia and doesn't edit it, no big deal. But there absolutely are edit wars and battles of authority and admin bans etc.

Indeed. Hence my final phrase :)

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#66

Kropotkin would weep to what has become Jura's anarchist dream. We may have reached independance from Bern but at the cost of a parlement filled with liberals and conservatives.

any good reading for Jura's anarchist dream? (le français, ça joue)

A movie "Unrueh" (Unrest) has just been released in the theaters about Kropotkin's Swiss period. Haven't seen it yet but it is on my list

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#67
post #25
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…

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 our evolutionary inheritance, that this was somehow proven by darwin that we were "naturally" inclined to brutal competition between individuals. (I think a lot of this thought is still commonplace, including in "evolutionary psychology.")

Kropotkin argued that this is a misreading of natural history and the effects of evolution, that in fact cooperation is just as much/more a factor in natural selection, in survivability, that all creatures were in fact "evolved" to cooperate -- including humans, and for sure there are many many places where intensive cooperation is visible in human history.

(He specifically wrote about "indigenous" societies being based on cooperation -- which I think is an over-simplification, "indigenous" societies historical and present are very diverse rather than uniform on this axis -- see _Dawn of Everything_ for a contemporary anarchist scholarly take on this diversity -- but that was Kropotkin's scholarly anarchist take at the time). (If humans have in modern times often chosen on a mass scale to mistreat and kill each other even though they are "naturally" cooperative, it is not because of some evolutionary predestination).

Is what I get as a summary of one of Kropotkin's theses. I think he would fully agree that cooperation is one of the defining characteristics of humanity, would fully agree that humans are "built for cooperation". Cooperation as fundamental and foundational to evolution, and to animal as well as human life (humans understood as animals in the post-darwin world) was, like, his whole thing.

Check out the wikipedia section in his entry, for confirmation that my interpretation is common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kropotkin#Cooperation_an...

I think GP's comment here is a mischaracterization. I am worried that y'all are going to get the wrong idea about Kropotkin here!

[He was thinking and writing in the Victorian era, and his approach to "science" is characteristic, it wouldn't be accepted as a proper "scientific" approach today. It is still, though, I agree with OP article, interesting and useful philosophy, which provides a challenge to what we can realize are some assumptions not scientifically validated of even contemporary "evolutionary psychological" thinking].

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#68
post #28
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nestor Makhno considered himself a student of Kropotkin.

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

Pro-Soviet, not "pro-Russian."

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Russian ë is a completely separate letter pronounced "yo". This is non-intuitive to English speakers, which is why the name in question is almost always anglicized as Pyotr, not "Pëtr".

> It's really weird seeing letter ё in English language title. It’s not, for the varied reasons I gave. I know that this is yet another variant. I agree there is a problem with it in that its meaning is not well-known (so you may want to use more well-known alternatives), but not that the diacritic itself is “weird” or foreign to English language users.

It's weird because it doesn't make sense, not because it's a diacritic.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, if someone "defects" wikipedia and doesn't edit it, no big deal. But there absolutely are edit wars and battles of authority and admin bans etc.

Indeed. Hence my final phrase :)

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?)

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