Mutual aid is a voluntary system of cooperation, exchange, and collaboration for the common benefit. The phrase has been heard more and more this century as states reveal themselves to be less than resilient in the face of natural and unnatural disasters. This directory of mutual aid groups in New York City, for instance, shows the range of resource/skill sharing going on.

The idea of mutual aid is much older than its present resurgence. Cooperation, after all, has been fundamental to human history. And mutualism, as symbiotic cooperation is called in biology, is vital to life itself. As the Russian prince turned anarchist Peter Kropotkin argued more than a century ago with the subtitle of his Mutual Aid (1902), it is “a key factor of evolution.”

Yet mutual aid/mutualism never seems to get as much attention as conflict/competition does. Ever since Darwin, elites have pushed the self-justifying notion of evolution as a matter of winners and losers, merging biology with market economics and touting what Herbert Spencer termed the “survival of the fittest.” Spencer aligned his reading of Darwin with his own economic theories: the resulting “Social Darwinism” should really be called “Spencerism.” Spencerism’s descent into eugenics underlay elite self-conceptions—as well as murderous reigns of racism and nationalism—for decades. Its reappearance on the American scene in the twenty-first century should be taken as a foreboding.

Mutual aid still gets short shrift. It’s just not as sexy or box office as the idea of “nature, red in tooth and claw”—a line gifted to the world by the poet Alfred Tennyson. Consider nature documentary entertainments: there will be more supposedly exciting scenes of antelopes being hunted by predators than there will be of insects pollinating plants.

Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, usually called Peter Kropotkin in English-language works, was born a prince in 1842. He grew up to renounce his title. Before that, he was chosen at the age of eight by the tsar himself to attend the elite military Corps of Pages school in St. Petersburg. In 1861, he became Page de Chamber to the tsar. That was the year of the emancipation of Russia’s serfs; Kropotkin’s father had owned serfs in three provinces. By then Peter was already in the process of radicalization. He would eventually be imprisoned in Russia and France for his politics. He spent four decades of his life in exile in Switzerland, France, and England.

Inspired by the plight of the serfs and his experience among Siberian nomads and the watchmakers of Jura, Switzerland, among other influences, Kropotkin became a luminary of anarchist communism. This left-wing version of anarchism postulated the end of private property and the social ownership and distribution of resources.

Political theorist Ruth Kinna puts Kropotkin in specific historical context, explaining that

Kropotkin’s theory of mutual aid can be seen as an attempt to motivate action in the face of the decline of revolutionary anarchism.[…] Kropotkin’s particular understanding of science and of Darwinian theory led him to believe that science could be used as a political instrument to halt this decline.

As an anarchist, Kropotkin opposed both social democracy/Marxism, which he saw as inevitably authoritarian, and laissez-faire liberalism/individualism/libertarianism, which of course negated mutual aid. In his arguments for the importance of co-operation in the evolutionary process, he suggested there were two senses of mutual aid, biological and ethical. As Kinna paraphrases, “Biologically, mutual aid was an instinctual sense of co-operation. Ethical mutual aid, on the other hand, was created by the habits which result from biological practice. By co-operating, species formulate codes of behavior, languages and sense of common interest.”

Kropotkin returned to Russia following the October 1917 Revolution, but the resulting Bolshevik state turned out to be exactly what he’d always argued against. His funeral in 1921 would be the last permitted anarchist gathering in the Soviet Union—afterwards, Russian anarchism would be ruthlessly suppressed.

Mutual aid, however, lives on—precisely because it is a part of life.

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