Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, Part 2

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Polly Fry. This is the.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Second part of our two parter on Peter Kropotkin, who
was deeply influential in the development of anarchism in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We are picking up
with Krapotkin's return to Russia from the Jura Mountains, which
was in May of eighteen seventy two. But first we
are going to take a quick jump ahead in the

(00:39):
timeline for just a moment. In nineteen eleven, Kropotkin wrote
the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Anarchism, and it seems useful
at this point for context to talk a little bit
about what anarchism is as a political philosophy, since there
are a lot of different types of anarchism today and

(01:01):
they all have their own various goals and nuances. It's
also helpful to spell out what Kropotkin, who is an
anarchist communist, meant by this terminology, and like what he
thought that somebody consulting the Encyclopedia about anarchism would need
to know about it.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
Kropotkin began his entry on anarchism with its etymology from
Greek words meaning contrary to authority. He defined it as
quote the name given to a principle or theory of
life and conduct under which society is conceived without government.
Harmony in such a society being obtained not by submission

(01:38):
to law or by obedience to any authority, but by
free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional,
freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as
also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs
and aspirations of a civilized being. In a societiety developed

(02:00):
on these lines, the voluntary associations, which already now begin
to cover all the fields of human activity, would take
a still greater extension, so as to substitute themselves for
the state in all its functions. He went on to say, quote,
if that is contended, society were organized on these principles,

(02:21):
man would not be limited in the free exercise of
his powers and productive work by a capitalist monopoly maintained
by the state, nor would he be limited in the
exercise of his will by a fear of punishment or
by obedience towards individuals or metaphysical entities, which both lead

(02:43):
to depression of initiative and servility of mind. He would
be guided in his actions by his own understanding, which
necessarily would bear the impression of a free action and
reaction between his own self and the ethical conceptions of
his surroundings. Man would thus be enabled to obtain the

(03:05):
full development of all his faculties intellectual, artistic, and moral,
without being hampered by overwork for the monopolists or by
the servility and inertia of mind of the great number.
He would thus be able to reach full individualization, which
is not possible either under the present system of individualism

(03:29):
or under any system of state socialism and the so
called Volkstak the popular state. Krapotkin went on to describe
private ownership of land and capitalist production for the sake
of profit as quote the main obstacle which prevents the
successes of modern techniques from being brought into the service
of all so as to produce general well being. He

(03:52):
called the state the chief instrument in permitting a few
people to monopolize the land and capitalists to keep a
disparate portionate amount of production for themselves. This five page
Encyclopedia entry also includes a history of anarchist thought going
back more than two thousand years, and a lengthy bibliography.

(04:14):
It is not all that surprising that governments don't really
like it when people start calling for their abolition, and
in Russia, material about anarchism, socialism, and revolutionary ideas were banned.
Kropotkin had collected a library of these kinds of books
and papers during his travels through Western Europe, and he

(04:35):
wanted to smuggle all of that into Russia. He had
heard that there were networks of Jewish smugglers operating along
the Russian frontier in Poland, and he negotiated with a
smuggler who typically worked with cloth, to get his library
across the border. After arriving back in Saint Petersburg, Krapotkin
joined the Tchaikovsky Circle, named for the Russian revolutionary socialist

(04:59):
Nikol Chaikovsky. The circle had started as a student group
for self education and self improvement. It had evolved into
a revolutionary organization that printed and distributed materials on socialism, nihilism,
and political agitation, and which tried to organize workers in
the country. The circle was focused on populism and socialism,

(05:23):
not on anarchism, and in eighteen seventy three Kropotkin wrote
an essay called must we occupy Ourselves with an Examination
of the Ideal of a Future System to advocate for
other members to adopt anarchism. Krapotkin worked with the Tchaikowski
Circle for about two years, and during that time more

(05:44):
and more people who were connected to it or to
other revolutionary movements in Russia were arrested.

Speaker 2 (05:51):
It started to become difficult to have meetings because so
many leaders had been imprisoned. Eventually, Krapotkin got word that
the police were targeting him, and he refused to leave
Russia or go into hiding, in part because he was
scheduled to hold a debate about his work with the
Russian Geographical Society. In eighteen seventy four, Kerpotkin was captured

(06:14):
and imprisoned at the Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg.
His brother Alexander rallied the Russian scientific community to advocate
for him to be allowed to complete his scientific work.
He was working on a book at the time about
the Earth's glacial period that the geographic society wanted him
to be able to finish. Alexander was also motivated by

(06:36):
the understanding that being in prison with nothing to occupy
his time would probably kill his brother. In Peter's words quote,
my brother turned the whole scientific world in Saint Petersburg
upside down to move it to support his application. Eventually,
the Czar gave permission for Kerpotkin to finish his report,

(06:57):
and arrangements were made for him to be allowed to
have a pen, ink and paper from sun up to
sundown every day. Sundown was at three in the afternoon
in the winter, and he was like, well, can't do
anything about that. When it got dark, someone would bring
him a lamp and take away his paper and pen,

(07:18):
and he spent his evenings reading history books. While Peter
was in prison, his brother Alexander was also arrested after
writing a letter in which he described what was happening
to his brother at the prison and expressed his hatred
for the despotic rule of Russia.

Speaker 1 (07:36):
Krapotkin was held at the fortress for about two years,
during which he became increasingly ill. He was moved to
the house of detention next to the court once a
trial date was set. By that point, he was really sick,
and while people were allowed to bring him food, he
had become too sick to eat most of it.

Speaker 2 (07:56):
Eventually, in eighteen seventy six, he was sent to Saint
Peter's Military Hospital, which wasn't as secure as the fortress
or the house of detention. He and his friend started
making a plan to break him out. There was a
gate at the hospital that was left open for carts
to get in and out for deliveries and things, but
there were also guards watching. Kerpotkin and his friends communicated

(08:20):
using enciphered letters and they worked out pre arranged signals.
He was supposed to watch for somebody walking by with
a red balloon singing a particular song, but then on
the day, Kerpotkin never saw a balloon. It turned out
that his friends outside the prison had not been able
to find one that day, But that worked out because

(08:42):
the carriage that he was supposed to get into to
escape wound up getting stuck in traffic. They tried again
with a new plan, involving a violin player that he
would need to listen for to give the signal, and
Kerpotkin successfully made his escape.

Speaker 1 (08:58):
Kropotkin's plan was to go back to Russia after the
hubbub of his escape had died down, but instead, in
his words quote, I was soon taken up by the
wave of the anarchist movement which was just then rising
in Western Europe, and I felt that I should be
more useful in helping that movement to find its proper
expression that I could possibly be in Russia.

Speaker 2 (09:20):
Krapotkins meant the next stretch of time traveling around parts
of Western Europe, working and making contacts. He went to Finland,
then to England, where he started writing science articles for
the journal Nature. From there he went to Switzerland, where
he joined the Jura Federation and the International Workingmen's Association
also called First International. We talked about those organizations last time.

(09:45):
He established an anarchist newspaper called Le Revolte in eighteen
seventy nine. Some of the funding for that came from
another anarchist geographer, that was Alysee Recluse, who was from
France and had become Krapotkin's friend and collaborator. Krapotkin and
Recluse had very similar ideas on interpreting anarchism through science.

(10:08):
I just I kind of love that there were these
two specifically anarchist geographers.

Speaker 1 (10:14):
Yes, a lot of.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
The places that Krapotkin lived and visited during these years
were home to international groups of anarchists, including people who
had been expelled or had fled from other countries, including Russia,
for their revolutionary activism. This included people who had been
part of the insurrection known as the Paris Commune in
eighteen seventy one. Krapotkin had a lot of friends and collaborators,

(10:42):
and they held meetings and workshops, and they exchanged letters
and papers as they, in his words, worked out the
quote practical and theoretical aspects of anarchist socialism. During this time,
Krapotkin quote gradually came to realize that anarchists represents more
than a mere mode of action and a mere conception

(11:03):
of a free society. That it is part of a philosophy,
natural and social, which must be developed in a quite
different way from the metaphysical or dialectic methods which have
been employed in sciences. Dealing with man I saw that
it must be treated by the same methods as natural sciences, not, however,

(11:24):
on the slippery ground of mere analogies such as Herbert
Spencer accepts, but on the solid basis of induction applied
to human institutions, and I did my best to accomplish
what I could in that direction. We'll talk more about
this after a sponsor break. Because Peter Kropotkin had escaped

(11:52):
from prison in Russia, and because his revolutionary and anarchist
writings were somewhere between suspicious and illegal in a lot
of places, he had been traveling under the name Loveshof.
In eighteen seventy seven, he went to Belgium for the
International Workingmen's Association's International Congress and then the International Socialist Congress.

(12:16):
While he was in Ghent for the second of these,
police discovered his alias. Friends, spotted police officers waiting for
him outside of his hotel, and then got him out
of the country and back to England. He stayed there
briefly before going to Paris. After one of his friends
was arrested in a sting that was also apparently meant

(12:38):
to include Kerpatkin, he left again and went to Switzerland.

Speaker 1 (12:42):
Kripatkin was wanted not just because of his anarchist communist ideas.
There were also anarchists who were using violence in pursuit
of their social and political goals. In eighteen seventy eight,
there were four different assassination attempts against European heads of state,
so the twelfth of Spain, amberto the first of Italy,

(13:03):
and two different attempts on the life of Kaiser Wilhelm,
the First of Germany. The assailants were anarchists, and anarchist
organizations and publications expressed their sympathy or support for them.
Rumors started to spread that these attacks were an international conspiracy,
possibly coordinated by the Jura Federation. There were other violent

(13:27):
incidents as well, including bombings. Nerdania Voglia or the People's Will,
was formed in eighteen seventy nine. Some of this organization's
leaders were anarchist revolutionaries, and its tactics included terrorism and
a series of assassination attempts, eventually the successful assassination of

(13:48):
Zar Alexander the Second in eighteen eighty one. In Part one,
we read from Kerpotkin's writings about the goal of attaining
quote the greatest results with the most limited amount of
civil war, the least number of victims, and a minimum
of mutual embitterment. But he never disavowed this kind of
political violence there were other incidents that were more like

(14:10):
massacres that he did criticize, but like, this was not
the kind of thing that he really saw a need
to try to disavow or disclaim. And after Alexander the
Second's assassination, Krapotkin and his wife Sophie considered working with
Narada Ya Volya. Sophie or Sophia Grigoryevna was a Jewish
woman from Ukraine, and she married Peter Kropotkin in October

(14:34):
of eighteen seventy eight. Krapotkin doesn't actually mention their meeting
or their marriage in his memoir, sort of like his
offhand mention of being hospitalized for half of his first
winter at the core of pages that we talked about
in part one. He just casually mentions his wife later
on in the narrative, like everybody knows about her, Like.

Speaker 2 (14:56):
When did he get a wife?

Speaker 1 (14:57):
Yeah, she just kind of pops in the number of
sources described Kerpotkin as almost twice her age, but she
was born in eighteen fifty six, so when they got
married she would have been twenty two and he was
thirty six. Sophie was a teacher and a writer and
a collaborator in her husband's work. They seemed to have
had a happy marriage, but they were separated at various

(15:20):
points when Peter was traveling, or had to flee, or
was imprisoned. After the assassination of Alexander the Second, Kerpotkin
was expelled from Switzerland, something he believed had been done
at Russia's request. He and his wife went to London,
where they stayed for about a year. There wasn't much
of an anarchist or revolutionary movement happening in London at

(15:42):
that point, and they found that really isolating, so they
went to France and they reconnected with the movement there.
In eighteen eighty two, Sophie's brother died and that night
Gendarmes came to arrest Peter. Was not related to his
brother's death, that was just when they showed up tried
to take him into custody. He asked if he could

(16:03):
stay with his wife until after his brother in law's funeral,
and that was refused. Elisee Reclue and his friends from
Geneva came to stay with her. Krapotkin's arrest was part
of a wave of arrests of suspected anarchists and members
of the International Workingmen's Association, which was banned in France.

(16:23):
He was tried and imprisoned in Lyons, and then he
was moved to a prison in Clairvaux, along with twenty
two others who had all been sentenced to more than
a year in prison. In Claervaux, Krapotkin got sick again.
The prison was in a swampy area and he got malaria,
and he also developed scurvy. Sophie and their friends and

(16:44):
allies continually petitioned for his release. In eighteen eighty six,
Peter's brother Alexander took his own life. The brothers had
stopped corresponding after Peter had first left Russia because of
the risks that would have posed to Alexander to be
writing to this brother who was basically a political exile

(17:05):
at that point, but that did not really protect Alexander.
He was exiled to Siberia under suspicion that he had
helped with Peter's eighteen seventy six prison escape. After reconnecting,
a lot of their writing was about science, and Peter
described his brother as despairing because he knew that once
he was released from exile, he would never be allowed

(17:27):
to live in any of the university towns in Russia
or Western Europe. He was survived by a wife and
three children. Kropotkin was released from prison in eighteen eighty six,
and a year later he and his wife welcomed a daughter, Alexandra,
named for Kropotkin's late brother. Kropotkin's experiences up to this

(17:49):
point led him to condemn all prisons, and in eighteen
eighty seven he published a book titled In Russian and
French Prisons. While Kerpatkin had been in prison, an anarchist
movement had gotten under way in England, and he went
there to join it. He had become one of Europe's
foremost writers and thinkers on the subject of anarchism, and

(18:11):
he also started to become connected to anarchists in North America.
In the wake of the Haymarket affair, in which four
men were executed after someone threw a bomb during a
labor demonstration at Haymarket Square in Chicago, Kropotkin wrote letters
condemning their death sentences, and then stayed abreast of what

(18:32):
was happening in the anarchist movement in the United States afterward.
In eighteen ninety Kropotkin wrote his first article on the
subject of mutual aid, titled Mutual Aid among Animals, which
was the start of a whole series of articles published
in the journal The Nineteenth Century. In eighteen ninety two,
he published a book titled The Conquest of Bread, which

(18:55):
was originally a series of articles that appeared in Le Revolte.
This book laid out Krapotkin's anarchist communist ideas and also
countered common objections to those ideas. At various points in
the text, Krapotkin rhetorically asks a question and then answers it.
The first chapters are more focused on political philosophy, and

(19:17):
the later chapters are more practical, detailing how to power
a revolution and what would happen afterward, with sections on food, dwellings, clothing,
and ways and means. He almost plays Devil's advocate against
his own arguments so that then he can address those
devil's advocate questions.

Speaker 2 (19:38):
Uh. Krapotkin was aware of various utopian social experiments that
were underpinned with communist ideals but were ultimately unsuccessful. We've
talked about various of them on the show before, and
he thought that one reason for some of these failures
was that a lot of these experiments were very austere,
and a lot of them had a very focus on

(20:01):
rules or religious or moral standards. Their leaders could be
very controlling. An answer to this, The Conquest of Bread
also has chapters on the need for luxury and agreeable work,
and the need for people to be able to make
free agreements with one another.

Speaker 1 (20:19):
This all rested on the core idea of everyone having value. Quote.
We must recognize and loudly proclaim that everyone, whatever his
grade in the old society, whether strong or weak, capable
or incapable, has before everything the right to live, and
that society is bound to share amongst all, without exception,

(20:43):
the means of existence at its disposal. We must acknowledge
this and proclaim it allowed, and act up to it.

Speaker 2 (20:51):
He went on to say, quote this cannot be brought
about by acts of Parliament, but only by taking immediate
and effective possession of all that is necessary to ensure
the well being of all. This is the only really
scientific way of going to work, the only way which
can be understood and desired by the mass of the people.

(21:13):
We must take possession in the name of the people
of the granaries of the shops full of clothing. In
the dwelling houses, nothing must be wasted. We must organize
without delay, a way to feed the hungry, to satisfy
all wants, to meet all needs, to produce, not for
the special benefit of this one or that one, but

(21:35):
so as to ensure to society as a whole its
life and further development. Enough of ambiguous words like the
right to work, with which the people were misled in
eighteen forty eight, and which are still resorted to with
the hope of misleading them, Let us have the courage
to recognize that well being for all, henceforward possible must

(21:59):
be realized.

Speaker 1 (22:01):
Okay, if you're wondering at this point, what does this
have to do with bread specifically, here's more quote. If
we wish for a social revolution, it is no doubt
first of all, to give bread to everyone, to transform
this execrable society in which we can every day see
capable workmen dangling their arms for want of an employer

(22:22):
who will exploit them, women and children wandering shelterless at night,
whole families reduced to dry bread men, women and children
dying for want of care, and even for want of food.
It is to put an end to these inequities that
we rebel, but we expect more from the revolution. We

(22:43):
see that the worker compelled to struggle painfully for bare existence,
is reduced to ignore the higher delights, the highest within
man's reach, of science, and especially of scientific discovery, of art,
and especially of artistic creation. It is, in order to
obtain for all of us joys that are now reserved

(23:04):
to a few, in order to give leisure and the
possibility of developing everyone's intellectual capacities, that the social Revolution
must guarantee daily bread to all. After bread has been secured,
leisure is the supreme aim. To move on from this book,
in eighteen ninety seven, Kripotkin made his first of two

(23:26):
visits to North America. He was invited for the Association
for the Advancement of Science meeting in Toronto, and then
spent ten weeks in Canada. From there, he went to
Detroit for the meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, and then to the conference of the
National Geographic Society in Washington, d C. He also gave

(23:47):
various lectures and speeches, many of which were republished and
distributed by anarchist organizations in North America. On this trip,
he also went to Massachusetts, where he admired a communal
diet dining room that was organized by less affluent students
at Harvard, and to New York where he made arrangements
to start publishing an autobiography in installments in the Atlantic.

(24:11):
That autobiography was Memoirs of a Revolutionist which we have
been reading from over these two episodes, that was published
as a book in eighteen ninety nine. That same year
that that book came out, Kirpotkin also published Fields, Factories
and Workshops, which applied the anarchist idea of decentralization to industry.

(24:33):
He also examined how this would work through a scientific lens,
and he discussed work as a form of art with
practical learning and important part of a person's education. In
eighteen ninety nine, another thing that happened was the Socialist International,
also called the Second International, was founded. It was one

(24:53):
of the successors to the International Workingmen's Association or First International.
Kin part of debates within the Federation about the use
of political action, meaning participation and advocacy through existing political systems.
Kropotkin thought that political action could lead to very minor changes.

(25:15):
At most.

Speaker 2 (25:16):
Anarchists were banned from the Federation in eighteen ninety six.
In nineteen oh one, Krapotkin made his second visit to
North America, this time at the invitation of the Lowell Institute,
which had been founded in Boston to provide educational opportunities
to the public regardless of race, education, or economic status.

(25:37):
Krapakin gave lectures on both Russian literature and anarchism in
and around Boston, and then went to New York, where
Emma Goldman arranged many of his appearances. Krapakin got the
flu during this tour and he had to take some
time off before going on to Pittsburgh and then to Chicago,
where he stayed with Jane Adams and spent a week

(25:58):
living at Hull House. We have talked about Jane Adams
and Hull House on the podcast before, and another previous subject,
doctor Alice Hamilton, was living there at the time. She
said that everyone there came to love him. While in Chicago,
Kropotkin also visited the tomb of the Haymarket murders. Yeah,

(26:20):
we haven't really mentioned it, but like a lot of
people described Krapotkin as like really friendly and happy and personable.
People seemed to just like him wherever he went. Four
months after Krapotkin left the United States, President William McKinley
was assassinated by anarchist Lean Zolgitz. Rumors spread that this

(26:41):
assassination was a plot that had been orchestrated by Krapotkin
and Goldman. Krapotkin was deeply upset by this, especially when
people that he had worked with while in the United
States were jailed in the wake of these allegations.

Speaker 1 (26:55):
That November, he had a heart attack. Anarchists had carried
out multiple other assassinations between those of Alexander the Second
and William McKinley. Those included President Sadi Carnot of France
in eighteen eighty four, Premier Antonio Canovas del Castillo of
Spain in eighteen ninety seven, Empress Elizabeth of Austria in

(27:17):
eighteen ninety eight, and King Umberto of Italy in nineteen hundred.
Kropotkins's visit to the US in nineteen oh one was
his last since in nineteen oh three, Congress passed a
law banning anarchists from entering the country.

Speaker 2 (27:34):
Kropotkin's book Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution was published
in nineteen oh two and is often described as this masterpiece,
and we will get to that after a sponsor break.
Peter Kropotkin's nineteen oh two book Mutual Aid A Factor

(27:57):
of Evolution grew out of the work and experience chances
that we talked about in part one of this episode.
In a lot of ways, it feels like the whole
episode has been working up to this book. There was
also a response to some of the scientific and social
writing of the time. Charles Darwin had published on the
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in eighteen

(28:20):
fifty nine. Other scientists had interpreted Darwin's work primarily in
terms of survival of the fittest, meaning that life on
Earth was rooted in continual struggle, with only the strongest surviving.
There's some of that in Darwin's work, but like people,
kind of took it.

Speaker 1 (28:38):
To an extreme.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
Social Darwinists had also applied the idea to humans, framing
human groups and human races in a hierarchy, with the
strongest and best being the white men. Social Darwinism was
explicitly racist and ablest, and was used to justify eugenics
and laissez fair capitalism. It basically framed the poor as

(29:02):
less fit. In eighteen eighty eight, Thomas Henry Huxley published
The Struggle for Existence in Human Society, which also incorporated
Thomas Malthus's theory that population growth will always outpace the
amount of food available. This essay framed human existence as

(29:23):
one of inevitable, relentless struggle, and Kerpatkin's Mutual Aid was
a response to it. Mutual Aid was also inspired in
part by a lecture given by Russian zoology professor Karl
Kessler at the Russian Congress of Naturalists in January eighteen
eighty Kessler argued that there was a law of struggle

(29:44):
in the animal world, but also a law of mutual aid,
and that cooperation was more important to survival than competition.
This was a short introductory address, so it didn't include
a lot of detail, and it had only been printed
in Russian, so the idea he is in it had
not really spread beyond the Russian scientific community. The first

(30:05):
chapters of Mutual Aid discuss mutual aid among non human animals.
For Potkin notes that there is violence and conflict in
the animal world, but he argues that there is as
much or even more mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defense,
and then he gives numerous examples. We are not saying

(30:28):
them all by any stretch, but they are things like
ants working collectively to build nests and rear young and
forage for food and raise aphids. He notes that ants
maintain this social structure by punishing ones who violate it,
like ants will kill an ant that has food and
refuses to share it with other ants that are hungry,

(30:50):
where they will drive that ant out of the nest.
He writes, quote, if we knew no other facts from
animal life than what we know about the ants and
the termites, we already might safely conclude that mutual aid,
which leads to mutual confidence, the first condition for courage
an individual initiative, the first condition for intellectual progress, are

(31:15):
two factors infinitely more important than mutual struggle and the
evolution of the animal kingdom.

Speaker 1 (31:22):
Kripacin describes cooperation among the lower animals like the social insects,
as driven by instinct, but in higher animals like mammals
and other vertebrates, he attributes it at least partly to reason,
His examples include pelicans fishing together by paddling together in
a half circle, driving the fish ahead of them toward

(31:44):
the shore, birds migrating together and singing in concert, social
mammals playing together for pleasure, including animals of different species
and in numerous species, all across the animal kingdom, sentries
keeping watch to warn others of threats. He wrote that
even rats, which fight each other in People's sellers, quote,

(32:06):
are sufficiently intelligent not to quarrel when they plunder our larders,
but to aid one another in their plundering expeditions and migrations,
and even to feed their invalids. He writes, quote, All
these mammals live in societies and nations, sometimes numbering hundreds
of thousands of individuals. Although now, after three centuries of

(32:29):
gunpowder civilization, we find but the debris of the immense
aggregations of old, how trifling in comparison with them are
the numbers of the carnivores. And how false therefore is
the view of those who speak of the animal world,
as if nothing were to be seen in it but
lions and hyenas plunging their bleeding teeth into the flesh

(32:52):
of their victims. One might as well imagine that the
whole of human life is nothing but a succession of
war mass. But then after that, he notes that even
the carnivores cooperate, starting with wolves, jackals, and hyaenas hunting
together in packs, and in the non human animals most

(33:13):
like us being the monkeys and apes. Quote, it is
hardly needful to say that those mammals, which stand at
the very top of the animal world and most approach
man by their structure and intelligence, are eminently sociable. All
things considered, it must be said that sociability, action in common,
mutual protection, and a high development of those feelings which

(33:35):
are the necessary outcome of social life are characteristic of
most monkeys and apes, from the smallest species to the
biggest ones. Sociability is a rule to which we know
but a few exceptions.

Speaker 2 (33:50):
He goes on to say, quote life in societies enables
the feeblest insects, the feeblest birds, and the feeblest mammals
to resist or protect them from the most terrible birds
and beasts of prey. It permits longevity. It enables the
species to rear its progeny with the least waste of

(34:10):
energy and to maintain its numbers, albeit a very slow
birth rate. It enables the gregarious animals to migrate in
search of new abodes. Therefore, while fully admitting that force, swiftness,
protective colors, cuttingness, and endurance to hunger and cold, which
are mentioned by Darwin and Wallace, are so many qualities

(34:31):
making the individual or the species the fittest under certain circumstances,
we maintain that under any circumstances, sociability is the greatest
advantage in the struggle for life. Kropotkin eventually moves from
cooperation among non human animals to cooperation in human societies,

(34:53):
and just to be clear here he uses some very.

Speaker 1 (34:56):
Outdated language describing mutual aid among savages and then barbarians,
and then medieval cities, and then among ourselves, kind of
walking through what he perceives as the timeline of development.
The point that he was making was that humans have
worked together and helped each other as human social structures
have evolved from societies that were organized around a whole

(35:19):
tribe or clan. Those are the ones he called the savages,
to societies in which smaller villages became the core unit.
Those were, by his definition, the barbarians, to the development
of medieval cities with governments, to the creation of whole
nations the way we live today. Yeah, he apparently criticized
this language later on, but he continued to use it

(35:42):
because it was still like the language that was in
use at the time. He continues to give lots of
examples through these chapters. He acknowledges that there are limits
to what we know about a lot of indigenous communities
of the past, who faced warfare and genocide and were
sometimes written about primarily by the people who had tried

(36:03):
to exterminate them. But he also includes examples from indigenous
hunting and gathering peoples that still exist today, like the
San peoples of southern Africa, who were also known as
the Bushmen. He writes that before many of them were
forced to abandon their way of life, they quote lived
in small tribes or clans, sometimes federated together, that they

(36:26):
used to hunt in common and divided the spoil without quarreling,
That they never abandoned their wounded and displayed strong affection
to their comrades. Kripatken writes of the quote barbarian village
communities that they were quote not only a union for
guaranteeing to each one his fair share in the common land,
but also a union for common culture, for mutual support

(36:50):
in all possible forms, for protection from violence, and for
a further development of knowledge, national bonds and moral conceptions.
And every charge and the judicial, military, educational, or economical
manners had to be decided at the folkmoots of the village,
the tribe, or the confederation.

Speaker 2 (37:10):
When it comes to the medieval city, he writes about
the common people trying to free themselves from feudal lords, saying, quote,
no period of history could better illustrate the constructive powers
of the popular masses than the tenth and eleventh centuries,
when the fortified villages and marketplaces, representing so many oases

(37:31):
among the feudal forest, began to free themselves from their
lord's yoke and slowly elaborated the future city organization. But unhappily,
this is a period about which historical information is especially scarce.
We know the results, but little has reached us about
the means by which they were achieved. The whole process

(37:52):
of liberation progressed by a series of imperceptible acts of
devotion to the common cause, accomplished by many men who
came out of the masses by unknown heroes whose very
names have not been preserved by history.

Speaker 1 (38:07):
Kropotkin also describes medieval cities as having overlapping systems of
support and mutual aid. Quote. The medieval city thus appears
as a double federation of all households united into small
territorial unions the street, the parish, the section, and of
individuals united by oath into guilds according to their professions,

(38:29):
the former being a produce of the village community origin
of the city, while the second is a subsequent growth
called to life by new conditions. From there, kripat Can
moves into the present and the growth of military states,
which most of us are living in today. Even if
it doesn't have a standing military, there's probably other military

(38:51):
presence there. He believed that as states became more powerful,
developed these militaries and social structures, communities found new ways
to collectively help one another. This included the rise of
labor unions and their mutual aid during strikes, and mutual
aid organizations among people living in slums. In Krapotkin's point

(39:13):
of view, this need to help is an innate part
of us quote. The sophisms of the brain cannot resist
the mutual aid feeling because this feeling has been nurtured
by thousands of years of human social life and hundreds
of thousands of years of pre human life in societies,
and it extends to clubs and organizations that are all

(39:34):
about enjoying things in life or study, research, education, or art,
not just helping people with basics of survival. The book
Mutual Aid became a foundational text of anarchist communism, even
though it doesn't include the terms anarchism or anarchy anywhere
in its three hundred and seventy five pages, and the

(39:57):
word communism is only in their seven times. Four of
those times are in descriptions of indigenous social structures as
quote primitive communism, and two of them are a book
title and that book's entry and the index whi jeeves
one use of the word communism, which was again to

(40:17):
describe an existing social structure. This is really a work
of zoology and anthropology, but the examples throughout the book
and the perspective on them are examples of the ideas
of anarchist communism in action. There are also passages like
this quote in short, neither the crushing powers of the

(40:37):
centralized state, nor the teachings of mutual hatred and pitiless struggle,
which came adorned with the attributes of science from obliging
philosophers and sociologists, could weed out the feeling of human
solidarity deeply lodged in men's understanding and heart, because it
has been nurtured by all our preceding evolution. The outcome

(41:00):
of evolution since its earliest stages cannot be overpowered by
one of the aspects of that same evolution. And the
need of mutual aid and support, which had lately taken
refuge in the narrow circle of the family, or the
slum neighbors in the village, or the secret union of workers,
reasserts itself again even in our modern society, and claims

(41:23):
its rights to be as it has always been, the
chief leader towards further progress. Such are the conclusions which
we are necessarily brought to when we carefully ponder over
each of the groups of facts briefly enumerated in the
last two chapters.

Speaker 2 (41:40):
To move on from this book, a revolution swept through
Russia in nineteen oh five as people demanded political reforms,
including the creation of a Russian parliament, Nicholas the Second
eventually issued the October Manifesto, which promised the creation of
a popularly elected life legislative body, the Duma, as well

(42:02):
as other reforms. Some people, including Krapotkin, thought this Manifesto
did not go nearly far enough. This inspired him to
look for lessons from the French Revolution, and he published
a book on that in nineteen oh nine. When World
War One began in the nineteen teens, Krapotkin took the
stance of supporting the Allied Powers, which many anarchists saw

(42:25):
as a betrayal. Militarized states were antithetical to the core
ideas of anarchism, but Kropotkin thought that the authoritarianism of
Germany and the Central Powers was the much bigger threat.
He also thought that if the Allies won the war,
France might act as an inspiration for social equality and
liberty around the world. This led to divisions within the

(42:49):
anarchist movement. Then, in March of nineteen seventeen, after years
of wartime deprivation and military defeats, Zar Nicholas the Second
abdicated the throne, which marked the end of Tsarist rule
in Russia. Peter Kropotkin, he was now seventy four, went
back to Russia with his family. They arrived there that May.

(43:13):
He was so eager to get there that he left
while the war was still ongoing, like they were traveling
through hostile waters to get there. He had been meeting
and corresponding with Russian anarchists and other revolutionaries for years,
especially after that nineteen oh five revolution. He had been

(43:34):
nicknamed the grandfather of the Russian Revolution. After he arrived
back in Russia, he played a role in setting the
direction of the provisional government, although he turned down a
cabinet level position of Minister of Education.

Speaker 1 (43:50):
Kropotkin had immense hopes for what this revolution could mean
for Russia. The provisional government established basic civil rights, including
free speech rights and the rights to form unions, bargained collectively,
and to strike. There was a flourishing of communal efforts,
mutual aid organizations and unions, which Kripopkin hoped would lead

(44:11):
to a decentralized, stateless society. But there was also ongoing
unrest and food shortages, and some of that led to
food riots. Then in November of nineteen seventeen or late October,
in the old style calendar. The Bolshevik Party, led by
Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the provisional government. Tensions rose between the

(44:35):
Bolsheviks and the anti Bolsheviks, which led to the Russian
Civil War between the Bolshevik Red Army and the opposing
White Army. In March of nineteen eighteen, Russia signed the
Treaty of Brest Litvosk with the Central Powers and withdrew
from World War One. That July, the Bolsheviks murdered Nicholas
the second and his family. The Russian Civil War and

(45:00):
with a Bolshevik victory in nineteen twenty and Russia and
three other socialist republics formed the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics In nineteen twenty two. Krapotkins said of the Bolshevik takeover, quote,
this buries the revolution. A lot of Lenin's rhetoric paralleled
Kropotkin's own writing, with a vision of decentralized Soviets led

(45:23):
by workers and peasants. There was so much overlap that
outside of Russia there were people who thought the Bolsheviks
were anarchists, but Krapotkin saw Lenin as a dictator, and
the Bolsheviks reminded him of the Committee of Public Safety
in the French Revolution. They had suppressed the democratically elected
Constituent Assembly and had carried out a violent campaign of repression,

(45:47):
hostage taking, and executions known as the Red Terror. Kropotkin
corresponded with Lenin and tried to discourage all of this,
but to no avail. He described Russia as a Soviet
republic in name only, not ruled by worker led Soviets,
but by party committees. Lenin called Kropotkin's advice stupid.

Speaker 2 (46:09):
Kropotkins spent the last years of his life in Dimitrov,
north of Moscow, where an anarchist cooperative had formed, and
there he worked on a history of ethics and some
of his other unfinished writing. Accounts of his last years
describe him as devastated by the rise of the Bolsheviks
in the Civil War. He died on February eighth, nineteen

(46:32):
twenty one, at the age of seventy eight. His funeral
was massive, with Emma Goldman delivering a eulogy. It was
the last anarchist gathering in Russia until after the dissolution
of the Soviet Union. His work continues to be very
influential today people still cite that nineteen eleven Britannica article

(46:53):
and the conquest of Bread was a big influence on
the occupy movement, for example. So that's Peter Potkin. I'm
sure we'll have things to discuss on Friday. Yup, do
we have listener mail? I do have listener mail, Katie
wrote to say, Hello, history pals. I've mentally composed so
many emails to you over the years that don't make

(47:15):
it to the digital page, but after listening to your
recent episode on Hercules Posey, I had to stop and
finally write to you. There is a restaurant in Washington,
d C. Called Founding Farmers and Distillers, and they commissioned
portraits of Hercules and old doll that are on display
at their Massachusetts Avenue restaurant. And then there is a

(47:37):
link to the Founding Farmers and Distillers web page attached
your photos of the portrait and the plaque about the
artist and the intent behind the paintings. These paintings are massive,
easily five feet tall, as my memory serves, so it's
hard to get a photo, a good photo all in
one frame, but they're stunning and full of detail. Aside
from the beautiful art. I remember the food and cocktails

(47:57):
there to be excellent. It would definitely be worth going
if you're in the area I am in. I imagine
Holly is already perusing the menus for pet tax I'm
including pictures of one of our cats, Draper, who was
hiding so well in plain sight that we looked for
him for fifteen minutes before laughing at our oversight. The
joys of having black cats. He's a sweet boy with

(48:19):
a big personality, powered by canned food and fuzzy blankets.
He was a ball of nerves when we adopted him
from the rescue, but he is relaxed into a sweet
and curious guy, but is still prone to hide under
the bed sometimes when life is a bit too much
relatable to be honest. I hope you are each finding
moments of joy in these difficult times. The work you
do on this podcast each week is deeply appreciated, not

(48:40):
only for its content, but for the humanity you bring
to your subjects. Wishing you all the best, Katie, so yes,
we have pictures this portrait of Hercules. I am very
curious about this restaurant. The next time in Washington, d C.
Maybe I'll manage to make it over there. But we
have a picture of a cat tree which looks it's
like it's empty.

Speaker 1 (49:02):
It is not.

Speaker 2 (49:03):
There's a black cat in the shadows there.

Speaker 1 (49:06):
I am incidentally looking at the cocktail menu right now
and going, oh, if we ever head there for work
for some reason, maybe we can go together. Yeah, if
you would like to send us a dough we're a
history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find our
show notes, including the names of all these books by
Peter Kropotkin that we have referenced and read from over

(49:29):
these two episodes. That's at mystonhistory dot com. And you
can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app and
anywhere else you like to get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 (49:43):
Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, Part 2