Peter Kropotkin
Thinker · 1842-1921 · Politics, stage 3: Meet the thinkers
Argued that cooperation is as basic to nature and society as competition, and that a stateless society could be built on it.
Overview
Kropotkin was born into the Russian nobility, trained as a geographer, and did fieldwork in Siberia that shaped his later argument. He became an anarchist communist, was imprisoned in France and in Russia, spent decades in exile in England, and returned after 1917 to criticise the Bolshevik state before his death. Mutual Aid, written against the popular reading of Darwin that made competition the whole story, gathers evidence that cooperation within species is widespread and that human societies have long organised themselves through guilds, communes and voluntary associations rather than by command. The Conquest of Bread sketches how production and distribution might work without either state or wage, on the principle that the accumulated inheritance of past labour belongs to everyone. Critics argue that his account depends on small-scale conditions that do not scale, and that he underestimates how large economies solve coordination problems.
Where to start reading
The Conquest of Bread 1892
A practical sketch of an anarchist communist society: how food, housing, clothing and work might be organised without state or wage.
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution 1902
A survey of cooperation among animals and in human history, arguing that mutual aid is as much a factor in survival as competition.
Part of
Sources
- Peter Kropotkin Wikipedia
- Anarchism Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyPlaces his communist anarchism against the individualist and market strands.
