In this SEDI session, anarchist writer and editor Iain McKay delivers a brisk, idea-dense tour of Peter Kropotkin’s science, ethics, and revolutionary politics—showing how the famed geographer’s fieldwork and evolutionary arguments undergird a living anarchist program.
McKay (lead author of An Anarchist FAQ and editor/translator of major Kropotkin editions) threads together mutual aid, syndicalism, and council organization with Kropotkin’s critiques of state socialism and “red-in-tooth-and-claw” misreadings of Darwin.
He contrasts T. H. Huxley’s dour view of nature with Kropotkin’s empirical case that cooperation is a force in evolution, then links that insight to the ethics and strategy of class struggle. Along the way he situates key works—Modern Science and Anarchy, Mutual Aid, Fields, Factories and Workshops, The State: Its Historic Role, and The Great French Revolution—as a coherent toolbox for building working-class power outside parliament and against bureaucratic socialism.
McKay also speaks from the editor’s desk: he assembled the comprehensive Direct Struggle Against Capital and produced new English editions of Modern Science and Anarchy and Words of a Rebel, restoring Kropotkin’s revolutionary edge against later hagiography.
This event is part of the Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute (SEDI)’s ongoing series, bringing radical thinkers, organizers, and historians to deepen our understanding of the past and sharpen our interventions in the present.
The Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute (SEDI):
https://www.dolgoffinstitute.com/
Explore Iain McKay’s work:
An Anarchist FAQ – https://www.anarchistfaq.org/
Author page – https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/iain-mckay
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