Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid
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Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid
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Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid
#2Sidenote: That's a really weird way of writing his first name. While the Russian does have a letter that visually resembles ë (unicode: ё), it is not a variation of the letter e as this transcription suggests, but invariably pronounced something like 'yo'. The name is pronounced "Pyotr", and of course corresponds to Peter, by which name Kropotkin was also known. I've no idea where this spelling comes from, but it's like writing Bladimir or Cergei instead Vladimir Sergey. Weird.
PS: Read Kropotkin, he's good.
Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid
#3"Conquest of Bread" had a huge impact on my politics. It cut through the capitalist realist narrative that we're all in economic competition and that capitalism is the only sane solution. It made me feel like another world is possible. I changed my life to pursue these other possibilities ever since.
Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid
#4"Conquest of Bread" had a huge impact on my politics. It cut through the capitalist realist narrative that we're all in economic competition and that capitalism is the only sane solution. It made me feel like another world is possible. I changed my life to pursue these other possibilities ever since.
Yes and we've been taught from a young age that capitalism and democracy are joined at the hip. But when we look back we can see how capitalism accommodated itself quite nicely to domination starting from the early modern period.
Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid
#5"Conquest of Bread" had a huge impact on my politics. It cut through the capitalist realist narrative that we're all in economic competition and that capitalism is the only sane solution. It made me feel like another world is possible. I changed my life to pursue these other possibilities ever since.
Same here.
Growing up fully immersed in the capitalist world it’s easy to think that this is the natural state of things.
This book, among others, helped me change perspective and challenge my assumptions about the world.
Totally recommended.
Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid
#6Seems Kropotkin was always doomed to be dubbed a "revolutionary" (in
the negative sense) purely by dint of his observations. Humans don't
live "in nature". We live within systems we build. The cooperative
struggle against a hostile environment naturally becomes one against
the incumbent system [1]. The system therefore naturally mobilises to
disrupt cooperation, to divide and disorient. And therein lies the
paradox of digital communication, that the more we are connected - via
the system - the more we are divided.
[1] worth comparing to William James' "Moral equivalent of war"
Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid
#7Sidenote: That's a really weird way of writing his first name. While the Russian does have a letter that visually resembles ë (unicode: ё), it is not a variation of the letter e as this transcription suggests, but invariably pronounced something like 'yo'. The name is pronounced "Pyotr", and of course corresponds to Peter, by which name Kropotkin was also known. I've no idea where this spelling comes from, but it's l…
I find that even "Peter" sounds a bit strange... I've always read him as "Pierre", which is the name under which he signed a great deal of his works.
Of course, "Pёtr" is a monstrosity.
Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid
#8"Conquest of Bread" had a huge impact on my politics. It cut through the capitalist realist narrative that we're all in economic competition and that capitalism is the only sane solution. It made me feel like another world is possible. I changed my life to pursue these other possibilities ever since.
I heard (of course) of anarchism a long time ago, but I always wrote it off as impractical: since without government, there's nobody to stop somebody from starting one. However, this may be incorrect, but it does require a population that is always willing to fight against the formation of a government. I think now that anarchism is practical, at least for a population of committed anarchists, and in the absence of hostile external forces. There's no way that anarchism could be imposed on people who don't want it (a contradiction), and it's going to be a stretch to expect people who grew up with capitalism or authoritarianism (or both) to accept it.
It was in Le Guin's novel "The Dispossessed" that I first read a convincing account of such a society, and I only later read some of Kropotkin and Bakunin's work.
Edit: Other forms of society are based on a carrot and stick system; people believe that without threats or rewards, people won't bother to work; they don't believe in mutual aid as sufficient in itself.
Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid
#9Sidenote: That's a really weird way of writing his first name. While the Russian does have a letter that visually resembles ë (unicode: ё), it is not a variation of the letter e as this transcription suggests, but invariably pronounced something like 'yo'. The name is pronounced "Pyotr", and of course corresponds to Peter, by which name Kropotkin was also known. I've no idea where this spelling comes from, but it's l…
I actually like this spelling. The sounds that have exact equivalents use the Latin alphabet and those that do not are replaced by the character's native system. Cause his name is not Pyotr or Peter or Pierre or whatever else. It is Pëtr indeed.
Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid
#10"Conquest of Bread" had a huge impact on my politics. It cut through the capitalist realist narrative that we're all in economic competition and that capitalism is the only sane solution. It made me feel like another world is possible. I changed my life to pursue these other possibilities ever since.
Yes and we've been taught from a young age that capitalism and democracy are joined at the hip. But when we look back we can see how capitalism accommodated itself quite nicely to domination starting from the early modern period.
It depends on what you mean by democracy. For people who mean a government by a parliament of elected representatives making laws and a centralized state government running the state by those laws - then that tends to go with capitalist relations of production; and it is an accessible and useful structure for commercial corporations, which will have their property ownership enforced by the state, and will not have to have continuing agreement of local populations to their activities.
The dictionary says Democracy means: "Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives." - so there's already the question of decision by representative yes-or-no. Plus, there's the question of what the 'government' part means. Some Anarchists would say they oppose democracy because of it. Does it mean that decisions get enforced by a special social structure? Are decisions majoritarian? etc.