Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

A pioneering treatise on cooperation and reciprocity, from the great anarchist thinker’Don’t compete! – competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!’In his pioneering 1902 treatise on human cooperation, the anarchist thinker and natural scientist Peter Kropotkin argued that it is our innate instinct for mutual aid – rather than mutual struggle – which enables societies to survive and flourish. From the earliest days of evolution through to medieval guilds, indigenous nomads and modern voluntary organisations, Kropotkin’s vision of small-scale, ecologically sustainable, collective communities challenged the orthodoxies of his age, whether individualism or Marxism. Mutual Aid offers instead a radical, and prescient, rewriting of the whole of human history.With an introduction by David Priestland