This essay appeared in Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth (Vol. IX, No. 4) in June 1914. It summarises Kropotkin’s arguments on mutual aid and how they fit in with his other, explicitly revolutionary, works and ideas.
At first received with distrust, the idea that mutual aid and mutual support represent an important factor in the progressive evolution of animal species seems to be accepted now by many biologists. In most of the chief works of Evolution, which have appeared lately in Germany, it is already recognised that two different aspects of the struggle for life must be distinguished: the struggle of the whole, of large divisions, of a species against adverse natural conditions and rival species, and the struggle between individuals within the species; in other words: exterior warfare and inner war. At the same time it begins also to be recognised that the struggle for life within the species has been exaggerated and that mutual aid is, to say the least, as much a fundamental principle in Nature as mutual struggle; while for progressive evolution it is without doubt the most important of the two.
The value of this recognition cannot be overlooked. Darwin already foresaw it. Once it is recognised that the social instinct is a permanent and powerful instinct in every animal species, and still more so in man, we are enabled to establish the foundations of Ethics (the Morality of Society) upon the sound basis of the observation of Nature and need not look for it in supernatural revelation. The idea which Bacon, Grotius, Goethe, and Darwin himself (in his second work, The Descent of Man) were advocating is thus finding a full confirmation, once we direct our attention to the extent to which mutual aid is carried on in Nature. We see at once what a powerful weapon it represents even for the feeblest species in their struggle against adverse natural conditions, the longevity it secures to the individuals, the accumulation of experience, and the development of higher instincts and intelligence that it renders possible within the species.
To show this importance of the social instinct as a basis of Ethics is the work which I am now engaged in.
Another important consideration to which the study of mutual aid in Nature brings us is that it enables us better to realise how much the evolution of every animal species, and still more so of human societies and separate individuals, depends upon the conditions of life under which they are developing. This idea, so energetically advocated by the French Encyclopaedists at the end of the eighteenth century, and by their Socialist and Anarchist followers in the succeeding century, beginning with Godwin, Fourier, and Robert Owen, is bitterly combated by the defenders of Capitalism and the State, as well as by the religious preachers, and we all know what advantage they took of the struggle-for-life idea for the defence of their position—much to the despair of Darwin himself. Now that we see that the idea of an inner struggle within the species had been grossly exaggerated by Darwin’s followers, we understand that if in his works, subsequent to his Origin of Species (The Descent of Man and especially Variation in Animals and Plants), he gave more and more importance to the action of exterior conditions in determining the lines of evolution of all living beings—he did not make “a concession” to his opponents, as we are told by some of his English followers. He merely summed up the result of the immense researches he had made into the causes of variation after he had published in 1859 his first epoch-making work, The Origin of Species.
A careful, dispassionate study of the effects of environment upon the development of both societies and individuals can thus be made now, and it is sure to open new, important vistas upon Evolution as a whole, while at the same time it frees the social reformer from the doubts he might have had concerning his efforts of changing first the present conditions of life of mankind and saying that better conditions of social life, based on mutual support and equality, would already raise man’s moral conceptions to a level they never could attain under the present system of slavery and exploitation of man by man.
A third point upon which the researches made can throw a new light is the origin of the State. Some ideas upon this subject, derived from the studies of the development of Society, and contained in Mutual Aid, I have embodied in a pamphlet, “The State and Its Historical Role.” But much more could be said upon this important subject, and, as every careful reader will see himself, the chapters I give in the book to “Mutual Aid in the Medieval City” and, the preceding chapter, to the Village Community, open new lines of research which would be rich in important practical results. Unfortunately, the worship of the centralised Roman State and Roman Law, which reigns supreme in our universities, stands in the way of such researches. The more so, as such studies, if they were made, would give support to the ideas growing now in the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon communities as regards the necessity of independence, or “home rule,” not only for separate nationalities but also for every geographically separate territory, every commune and parish. Such an independence—it begins now to be understood—would be the only proper way for establishing a real union between the different parts of a territory, in lieu of the artificial cohesion enforced now by a common submission to some outside authority. It has been said in some reviews of this book that I have to some extent exaggerated the good features of the medieval free republics. But if this book were not written for the general reader, and if I had incorporated into it the immense mass of material I have collected in the reliable contemporary sources, and serious modern works on the subject, one would have seen that, far from having exaggerated, I was compelled to limit my illustrations to quite a small number of those I might have given. Those illustrations which I have in my manuscript notes alone would do to make a second volume.
Now that we see such a great movement among the workingmen of Europe and America towards themselves working out the forms which production and exchange ought to take in a society freed from the yoke of Capital and State, I earnestly advise those workers who are already thinking in that direction to meditate about what we know of the first two centuries of independent life in the medieval cities, after they had thrown off the yoke of feudal barons, bishops, and kings, and started a new development on the lines of freedom and federation. Of course, we must not try to imitate the past—history does not repeat itself, and I have indicated in Mutual Aid the mistakes the medieval cities committed when they worked out their freedom charts. What we have to do is to see whether the principles of independence and free federation were not infinitely better, leading to prosperity and a higher intellectual development, than the submission to outside authorities and the enslavement to Church and State, which characterised the epoch that followed the fall of the free cities and inaugurated the growth of military States.
At the present time the idea of centralisation and centralised States is so much in vogue, even among Socialists, that we often hear people saying that the smaller nationalities have no reason to exist; the sooner they will be swallowed by the more numerous ones, the sooner they forget their mother tongue, the better.
All my life, experience has taught me quite the reverse. All that I have learned in my life has persuaded me, on the contrary, that the surest way to bring about a harmony of aspirations among the different nations is for every fraction of mankind to further develop and to enrich the language that is spoken by the masses of that fraction of humanity. This will also be the surest way for all those fractions to agree among themselves as to the one or two languages that will be accepted later on as the chief means of international intercourse. The more so as learning a language would be a knowledge quite easy to acquire under the perfected methods of teaching languages which are already worked out now.
Besides, this is also the surest way to stimulate every nationality to develop the best that it has worked out in the course of centuries in its own surroundings: the surest way to enrich our common inheritance with those national features which give a special value to philosophical conceptions, to poetry, and to art.