duckduckgo Pyotr Kropotkin

December 21, 2018 8:58 PM

Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was born December 9, 1842 (OS)¹. A member of the nobility by birth, and a scientist, philosopher, revolutionary and anarchist, he developed his understanding of Mutual Aid while on military assignment in Siberia.The Prince of Evolution. Where Is Kropotkin When We Really Need Him?

Kropotkin Was No Crackpot, Stephen Jay Gould

Kropotkin also had a kickass beard

What Do We Mean By Mutual Aid?, Big Door Society
How Anarchists Helped Californian Fire Refugees in a Walmart Parking Lot - "They say "mutual aid" is a better model for providing aid than traditional top-down charity work."
Beyond Relief - "After Hurricane Maria, a mutual aid movement grows"
The Uses Of Disaster

Michael Hudson: “Moral Hazard” vs Mutual Aid – How the Bronze Age Saved Itself from Debt Serfdom
A History Of True Civilisation Is Not One Of Monuments

Collected works at: Anarchy Archives, The Anarchist Library, Marxists.org and Kropoktin's entry Anarchism from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.

Pyotr Kropotkin died 8 February 1921, in Moscow. Emma Goldman was there

1: Russia wouldn't use the Gregorian calendar until 1918, making this date 21 December 1842 in modern counting.

posted by the man of twists and turns (17 comments total)

You rang?
posted by battleshipkropotkin at 9:23 PM on December 21, 2018 [24 favorites]

Great stuff!
posted by The Toad at 9:25 PM on December 21, 2018

🍞🍞🍞
posted by The Whelk at 9:34 PM on December 21, 2018 [5 favorites]

Kropotkin didn't die, he just went to the North Pole and started redistributing stolen goods from stores to children.
posted by anotherpanacea at 12:51 AM on December 22, 2018 [14 favorites]

🥀🥀🥀
posted by eustatic at 3:54 AM on December 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

Dude got around. He showed up in Richmond, Virginia, not that long ago, for instance. (Spoiler-ful Kirkus review.)
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:02 AM on December 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

He features fairly largely in the anarchist section of The Proud Tower (B. Tuchman), a book about the run up to WWI that I'm currently reading on my phone. (I can have whole entire books delivered wirelessly to my pocket-sized computer in mere seconds, how amazing is that? << - I have the olds today.)
posted by which_chick at 4:06 AM on December 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

Where Is Kropotkin When We Really Need Him?

[begins working on The Conquest of Bread and Zombies]

But seriously - happy belated 176th, comrade!
posted by ryanshepard at 6:06 AM on December 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

It is a travesty that Mutual Aid isn't a cornerstone of Political Science / International Relations.
posted by aspersioncast at 6:24 AM on December 22, 2018 [5 favorites]

Well to be fair we’re now trying to make it the cornerstone of ....society.

(The anarchists keep us honest, there’s a lot of value in having a political tendency in your movement that’s all about political freedom and individual autonomy )
posted by The Whelk at 6:28 AM on December 22, 2018 [6 favorites]

the absolute legend
posted by thsmchnekllsfascists at 8:41 PM on December 22, 2018

What's so depressing to me is that the old-school anarchists were trying to figure out how to build societies where we cooperated for the mutual good, but without coercion--and the modern anarchists are too dim to see that there's a point to society after all.
posted by praemunire at 9:56 PM on December 22, 2018

What's so depressing to me is that the old-school anarchists were trying to figure out how to build societies where we cooperated for the mutual good, but without coercion--and the modern anarchists are too dim to see that there's a point to society after all.

you don't know many anarchists, i guess?
posted by thsmchnekllsfascists at 10:18 PM on December 22, 2018 [6 favorites]

Remember Kronstadt.

So often, mutual aid arises on the islands in the bay, the refuges in the fens of England, maroonage in the dismal swamps and islands of America.

Love to all, to all of the coming migrants. We can't afford to wait for the displacement this time.
posted by eustatic at 9:31 AM on December 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

For chewy entertainment, try also the SF novel The Watch, in which Kropotkin is mysteriously healed on his deathbed and dropped into the US in 1999.
posted by clew at 11:45 AM on December 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

Ah, Kropotkin's long been one of my heroes, starting back as an undergrad when I wrote a thesis on his historiography of the French revolution. Such an amazing life. What a range of thought and practice.

(I still can't forgive him for supporting WWI, though)
posted by doctornemo at 3:52 PM on December 23, 2018

Also interesting on how a lot of his "fuzzy: theories about natural selection and cooperation vs. competition have been borne out with stuff like Kin Selection.
posted by The Whelk at 7:33 PM on December 23, 2018 [3 favorites]