mutual aid

[disclaimer: to me.. ‘mutual aid’ is a form of people telling other people what to do.. which is huge to why we have not yet gotten to legit freedom]

adding page while reading after post anarchism.. since ie: pp 55-60 capture a bit of the unsettling ness of the rallying around mutual aid (kropotkin) ness.. much like the unsettling ness of the rallying around any form of democratic admin et al

from after post anarchism:

55

If it can be demonstrated that Kropotkin’s system of ‘mutual aid’ also called for the restriction of the free movement of the individual then it can also be argued that his work, like much of traditional anarchist philosophy, was always at war with itself.

mutual aid (kropotkin)

59

*It is worth highlighting the authoritarian dimension of Kropotkin’s manifest ethics, because Kropotkin has asked the unique individual to sacrifice herself, her very being, to the binding rules of conduct in the principle of ‘mutual aid.’..t Meta-ethical critiques of his work, stemming as early as 1925, have focused on Kropotkin’s essentialism and his **disregard for the freedom of the individual. .. Boas and others have produced inadequate accounts of Kropotkin’s work. What follows is the revealing of this problematic reading as an account of the manifest text. We shall see that Kropotkin’s ethical notion of sacrifice is quite different from the meta-ethical notion of sacrifice found in the writings of Georges Bataille.

*yeah that.. why ‘mutual aid.. while seemingly better/kinder.. still isn’t deep enough.. need a means sans any form of m\a\p

**won’t get legit attachment if no legit authenticity – maté basic needs law et al

Kropotkin argued, in “Anarchist Morality” (1897), that what “mankind admires in a truly moral man is his energy, the exuberance of life which urges him to give his intelligence, his feeling, his action, asking nothing in return” (Kropotkin, 1897). This is certainly an ethical response (to give ‘without return’ from the pit of one’s being) and yet the authoritarian dimension of Kropotkin’s imperative—epitomized, in some ways, in the Levinasian *“ethics of responsibility” (cf., Zizek, 2005)—is revealed in the notion of self-sacrifice. How else to instigate anarchist morality if not by force and coercion, if not by self-repression and self-sacrifice? For, on the one hand, the Stirnerian egoist sacrifices things which she owns, but she does not thereby sacrifice her ‘ownness’: as Stirner put it:

*responsibility ness as cancerous distraction

The Kropotkinian mutualist sacrifices her ‘ownness’ in exchange for her freedom just as the academic sacrifices her being in exchange for her knowledge, and if she does not do this she is thought to be a “monster” (cf., Kropotkin, 1922), to be the ‘un-man.’

60

Kropotkin’s manifest anarchist ethics can therefore only be implemented by way of the ethical imperative; to be sure, an ethical imperative that is sustained by the explosive selfishness of unique individuals. But one does not freely sacrifice, according to Kropotkin: *one must freely sacrifice. .t In Morris’s article on Kropotkin’s ethics, he writes: “He [Kropotkin] was not therefore concerned with semantics, with the meaning of moral concepts, issues which fascinate contemporary philosophers leading them to emphasize what is clearly self-evident, **namely that moral judgements are prescriptive, giving rise to ethical theory or prescriptivism”..t (italics in original; 2002: 425). The point to be taken here is that Morris, in his endorsement of Kropotkin, and critique of semantic meta-ethical philosophers, confesses a fundamental truth of naturalism: the descriptive inevitably collapses into the prescriptive. Phillips has likewise argued that “Kropotkin transfers his naturalistic observations into a prescription for human society”..t (2003: 143), and so my thesis here is not unfounded. What is more, Phillips suggests that “Kropotkin’s naturalism, like that of the social Darwinists, lies not in describing nature, but in creating a metaphor for guiding human behaviour” (ibid.). This is the problem with the prescriptive extrapolation.