It's very readable and quite interesting. It aimed to have a veneer of science, when the science of animals and nature was still fairly undeveloped; and it succeeded in a sense, because its observations are still held in regard, but I think it succeeded much better as a work of philosophy.
In any case, it suffers a little for what I think is the naive thesis of "if only mankind could cooperate like the animals do, we would live in a utopia." Of course, mankind has demonstrated through thousands of years of history that tribes of men can't really cooperate in any grand sense, so the point seems rather moot.
Wherever you look we see constant evidence of humanity's ability to cooperate to achieve grand accomplishments. I mean we're on the internet ffs. Ever heard of Wikipedia? Or how most modern tech companies are only possible because of the massive efforts of the open source communities? These aren't really new behaviors for humanity. In fact, I'd argue that if you take a look at the way language evolved you'd find a lot of support for the idea that it's actually a defining characteristic of humanity
[^0]: https://documents.saa.org/container/docs/default-source/doc-...
The best laid plans of mice and men, therefore, would seem to be those that (a) allow Cooperators to combine with at least linear effect, and (b) are resistant to sizeable Defecting populations.
His work on this subject was in large part a response to the influence of "darwinism" at the time, where it became commonplace to think that "evolution" meant that we were evolved to compete with each other viciously, that selfish competition was our evolutionary inheritance, that this was somehow proven by darwin that we were "naturally" inclined to brutal competition between individuals. (I think a lot of this thought is still commonplace, including in "evolutionary psychology.")
Kropotkin argued that this is a misreading of natural history and the effects of evolution, that in fact cooperation is just as much/more a factor in natural selection, in survivability, that all creatures were in fact "evolved" to cooperate -- including humans, and for sure there are many many places where intensive cooperation is visible in human history.
(He specifically wrote about "indigenous" societies being based on cooperation -- which I think is an over-simplification, "indigenous" societies historical and present are very diverse rather than uniform on this axis -- see _Dawn of Everything_ for a contemporary anarchist scholarly take on this diversity -- but that was Kropotkin's scholarly anarchist take at the time). (If humans have in modern times often chosen on a mass scale to mistreat and kill each other even though they are "naturally" cooperative, it is not because of some evolutionary predestination).
Is what I get as a summary of one of Kropotkin's theses. I think he would fully agree that cooperation is one of the defining characteristics of humanity, would fully agree that humans are "built for cooperation". Cooperation as fundamental and foundational to evolution, and to animal as well as human life (humans understood as animals in the post-darwin world) was, like, his whole thing.
Check out the wikipedia section in his entry, for confirmation that my interpretation is common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kropotkin#Cooperation_an...
I think GP's comment here is a mischaracterization. I am worried that y'all are going to get the wrong idea about Kropotkin here!
[He was thinking and writing in the Victorian era, and his approach to "science" is characteristic, it wouldn't be accepted as a proper "scientific" approach today. It is still, though, I agree with OP article, interesting and useful philosophy, which provides a challenge to what we can realize are some assumptions not scientifically validated of even contemporary "evolutionary psychological" thinking].
Dawn of Everything shares the latest anthropology and archeology about prior societies. Spoiler: Science indicates a whole lot more cooperation than was previously assumed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything
I'm quite bullish on the future of cooperatives. Perhaps like the worker directed social enterprises advocated by Richard Wolfe.
One missing "technology" is better, more durable governance. Cooperatives have been vulnerable to corporate capture (or transmutation). Like the farmer's cooperatives of yore. And they need better protection against coups, usurpers.
But surely that's solvable. We have 1,000s of successful examples to learn from.
Imagine a world where participating in a home owner association, local government council, or a volunteer org's executive board wasn't considered cruel and unusual punishment.
The person critiquing generally agrees that humans are cooperative but he takes issue with the author’s general position that people kinda just decide to organize culture in a certain way. Instead the video creator offers a materialist perspective that I find a lot more compelling.
I'd argue the fact that humans can live in reasonably stable polities of more than a billion people proves, and in an economic space of practically the entire planet (globalisation!) proves we absolutely can cooperate at grand, epic scales.Whether or not that means Kropotkin is right is another thing, but we're built for cooperation.
I suspect humans, over tens of thousands of years, have successfully domesticated not only b taurus and c familiaris, but also h sapiens.
I'm assuming this is satire, but it's hard to tell via text.
In one paragraph you say that his biological observations are still held in high regard. (Nothwithstanding that the science of such things was farily “underdeveloped”, he protested… you know, like how people massively protest against Darwin’s theories, from about the same era?) Then you take a dump on those same observations in the next paragraph because people who have lived in class societies, under strict hierachies (that’s all of recorded history, yes) weren’t nice to each other? Well… why do you think anarchists proposed an alternative to that?
You know what is utopian? To build a society on such a flawed human nature as what we have, centred around our selfish shortcomings—basing socity on on subjugation, oppression, and exploitation, so that (predictably) the ones who are vile and strong will take as much for themselves as they can and exploit the rest—see history—and for us collectively to doom ourselves by ruining the planet by pillaging it of its resources and all kinds of ecological balance. That’s utopian!
But congrats on your ebook project. Your pathetic little gloss demonstrates how classic literature is often wasted like pearls before swine.
If you already have a blog post or something I'd love to read it :)
Anyway, it is very common to transliterate Пётр as Peter, though Pyotr seems even more common.
In your other examples, all the sounds would be considered "o-like" (rather than "e-like") in most languages with a 5-vowel phonology or similar. A reader might not be able to parse the diaresis, but if they say it with a plain "o", it's a reasonable approximation.
But then "ё" in "Пётр" is really just [ʲo] phonetically, so it should, ideally, be reflected by "o" or some derivative glyph in transliteration for readers to be able to understand and pronounce it with any semblance of accuracy. Something like "Pötr" would probably be best, actually, since in most alphabets that have "ö", it's used for [ø] or similar, which would give a more accurate approximation of [ʲo] than just [o].
OTOH the Latin "ë" (when present in the alphabet, which is much rarer to begin with) tends to stand for [ə], so it would be most logical to use it to distinguish "э" from "е". Note that this can be treated as a consistent pattern: a diaresis over the vowel inverts its "default" frontness (front vowels become back, back vowels become front) to simulate the corresponding presence or absence of [ʲ]. Thus we can then also write "ä" for "я", "ü" for "ю", and "ï" for "ы".
For cyrillic a fixed transliteration is both more needed. "o" and "ö" sound different, but even if you pronounced any "ö" as "o" everybody would understand what you meant. This is different for cyrillic where there are many letters where typical western readers wouldn't even know how to pronounce them. A "Щ" would look like a weird "W", but is romanized as "shch" or "sch".
Even more extreme examples would be the romanization of japanese.
If you’re going to use Ë just because it looks the same as the original Cyrillic, then logically you’d also use P instead of R, X instead of Kh, etc.
It’s also common to see it in loan words and proper names, even with a different meaning.
At its core, it’s the position of being against hierarchies of power where humans dominate those with less power. In simple terms, it’s being against humans dominating each other.
The big question is can we have a functioning society with less human domination and how far can we reduce it? That’s a deep question that involves everything from economics to the study of human nature.
In terms of human nature, I think people are far too quick to ascribe certain behaviors to human nature.
I was learning recently about Christopher Columbus and his encounters with native peoples and it’s fascinating how differently these people thought. The natives had a hard time understanding the colonizers and their endless need for gold and things.
Eventually some of them theorized that the European’s god is actually gold lol.
There's been number of historic personalities, such a Napoleon Bonapart that gave rise to a though that maybe individual have no power over historic process and history is pre-determined.
Anarchism is about denying that fatalism and branching your own fork in history where no historic processes have any power over you.
That's a leftist idea, that gave birth to anarcho-capitalism which in turn is fundamental idea in crypto-anarcho-capitalism (hello libertarians).
Really those schism and isms gone a long mile with original idea, I'd recommend reading classical thinkers and figuring out if their ideas are still relevant today.
Just a right wing group co-opting left wing terminology to try and give their abhorrent beliefs credence.
And anarcho-capitalism has nothing to do with anarchism since capitalism is a system of domination. It’s just rebranded laissez-faire capitalism.
No, not with any scale. This has been tried and tried and tried. It's a nice idea, but like most of leftism, only works on paper.
I wish the people that argue for things like the destruction of the family would instead push for universal healthcare. That's at least doable.
I observe that mutual aid between well-structured and stable organizations of well-trained people is even more effective than mutual aid between lone actors and temporary self-organizing cliques.
(to some degree, one might argue that back in the day, Silicon Valley was an example of successfully recombining groups of well-trained people, each of whose career-length might involve participation in over a dozen different hierarchal entities; in the 1970s this promiscuity was considered radical.)
Actually I was surprised when I wanted to find a straight forward equivalent to "entre aide". It seems that "interhelp" is sufficiently obvious for having an organization taking this name, but this apparently not an idiomatic word per se.
https://www.lpm.org/news/2022-11-27/eastern-ky-mutual-aid-gr...
Kropotkin is a major figure of anarchism that you’ll found revered even in some Russel's books. Surely hackernews readership red all Russel works — both color, didn’t it?
Don’t you search for a Wikipedia biography each time you cross an antonomastic street, creating it if needed?
We have a square named after indian city of Bangalore - the Bangalore square. I was sure for a long time that's just another (jewish?) surname. Even though I knew that city, in context of street names I simply assume surnames, it didn't occur to me to think anything else.
pro-russian tankies hate him
I wonder how often this particular instance of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon happens on HN, i.e. what's the intersection of regulars here and people familiar with names like Kropotkin, Makhno, etc.
[1] PM press edition: https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1272
[1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/petr-kropotk...
[2] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutua...
[3] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-memoi...
https://librivox.org/conquest-bread-2-by-peter-kropotkin/
https://librivox.org/anarchy-by-errico-malatesta/
https://librivox.org/god-and-the-state-by-mikhail-bakunin/
https://librivox.org/mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution-by-pet...
A friend of mine described this as "essentially the same as every conversation between anarchists and communists today", which seems largely accurate. In particular, I enjoyed one comment:
> “No, no,” Kropotkin replied, “if you and your comrades think in this way, if the power is not going to their heads, and if they feel that they will not be going in the direction of oppression by the state, then they will achieve a lot. Then the revolution is truly in good hands.”
Draw your own conclusions.
