pëtr kropotkin
adding page this day (while reading humankind) via kevin fb share (article on rutger – Is It in Us to Build a Post-Pandemic Utopia?):
Kropotkin would be a lot better than Rousseau as a foil for Hobbes.
Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (/kroʊˈpɒtkɪn/; Russian: Пётр Алексе́евич Кропо́ткин; 9 December 1842 – 8 February 1921) was a Russian activist, writer, revolutionary, scientist, economist, sociologist, historian, essayist, researcher, political scientist, biologist, geographer and philosopher who advocated anarcho-communism.
Born into an aristocratic land-owning family, he attended a military school and later served as an officer in Siberia, where he participated in several geological expeditions. He was imprisoned for his activism in 1874 and managed to escape two years later. He spent the next 41 years in exile in Switzerland, France (where he was imprisoned for almost four years) and in England. While in exile, Kropotkin gave lectures and published widely on anarchism and geography. He returned to Russia after the Russian Revolution in 1917 but was disappointed by the Bolshevik state.
Kropotkin was a proponent of a decentralised communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations of self-governing communities and worker-run enterprises. He wrote many books, pamphlets, and articles, the most prominent being The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops; and his principal scientific offering, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. He also contributed the article on anarchism to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition and left unfinished a work on anarchist ethical philosophy
david on mutual aid – has intro by him and andrej on new release of book
In his 1892 book The Conquest of Bread, Kropotkin proposed a system of economics based on mutual exchanges made in a system of voluntary cooperation. He believed that in a society that is socially, culturally, and industrially developed enough to produce all the goods and services it needs, there would be no obstacle, such as preferential distribution, pricing or monetary exchange, to prevent everyone to take what they need from the social product. He supported the eventual abolition of money or tokens of exchange for goods and services.
Kropotkin believed that Bakunin’s collectivist economic model was just a wage system by a different name and that such a system would breed the same type of centralization and inequality as a capitalist wage system. He stated that it is impossible to determine the value of an individual’s contributions to the products of social labour, and thought that anyone who was placed in a position of trying to make such determinations would wield authority over those whose wages they determined.
According to Kirkpatrick Sale:
With Mutual Aid especially, and later with Fields, Factories, and Workshops, Kropotkin was able to move away from the absurdist limitations of individual anarchism and no-laws anarchism that had flourished during this period and provide instead a vision of communal anarchism, following the models of independent cooperative communities he discovered while developing his theory of mutual aid. It was an anarchism that opposed centralized government and state-level laws as traditional anarchism did, but understood that at a certain small scale, communities and communes and co-ops could flourish and provide humans with a rich material life and wide areas of liberty without centralized control.
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from david’s fragments of an anarchist anthropology:
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peter kropotkin, arctic explorer and naturalist, who had thrown social darwinism into a tumult from which it still has never quite recovered by documenting how the most successful species tend to be those which cooperate the most effectively.. (sociobiology for instance was basically an attempt to come up w an answer to kropotkin)
et al
from david is funny:
2:06 – kropotkin: only reason don’t have techs (to do dirty jobs) is that rich people don’t really need them
on just needing to add to first amendment.. because we don’t have freedom of speech.. freedom to gather.. if we have to ask permission first.. once we do that.. rest will take care of self
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fields factories and workshops
toward more complete kropotkin biblio
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be you. 