Mutual Aid: From Kropotkin to Graeber

An Important Pillar of Anarchist Thought

We think of anarchists as basically opposed to any government. And if that means they chafe at all forms of coercion by the state, and the lack of freedom implicit in that coercive model, it does accurately describe the glue that holds all anarchist thought together.  Of course, the obvious corollary to such beliefs is that those noxious behaviors of governments should not persist. There must be a better way!

Peter Kropotkin, an aristocratic Russian from the 19^th century, first popularized the idea of “mutual aid” as that better way. Kropotkin was a naturalist and geographer by training – he had spent years studying various animal populations and primitive tribes in eastern Siberia. His collection of essays published in London, in 1902, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, summarized those studies. He was living in exile due to spurious claims of his connection to plotters against the life of Tsar Alexander II. His goal was to explain how Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection was being misinterpreted by nefarious (capitalist) interests in Europe. “Social Darwinism,” the idea that competition for survival amidst scarcity was the main factor in evolution of human societies, Kropotkin claimed, ignored an equal or greater factor: the cooperative, social nature of all species – what he called the principle of mutual aid. He believed that all living things lived and flourished only through such socialized structures.

While the established anarchist schools of thought, which Kropotkin clearly associated himself with, emphasized social revolution and forcible seizure of the means of production, even the state itself, mutual aid was a fundamental force of nature – to him. He believed that those coercive implements of the state were, by definition, unnatural. The way forward, toward a more socially supportive system, was best visualized as voluntary associations among workers, farmers, all classes in society. Kropotkin had no explanation for the concept of the “will to power,” that seemingly natural desire to control one’s environment – including the people in it! And Nietzsche was a contemporary of Kropotkin, too.

Kropotkin’s sunny outlook on nature did not prevent those malevolent forces of the state from pursuing him into exile, first Switzerland, then France (imprisoned there for his activism), then England. He finally returned to his native Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, now an old man, where he did receive an audience from Lenin – and became a pensioner of the new Bolshevik state! Lenin approved (publicly at least) of the idea of mutual aid, but shortly after Kropotkin’s death in 1921, the Soviet state banned his books and teachings! There is still a Moscow neighborhood bearing his name – which includes a Metro station — and Kropotkin is today classified as an “anarcho-communist” thinker.

The trials and tribulations of anarchism and its inexorable conflicts with the state did not spare Kropotkin or his theory of mutual aid. It was a disruptive philosophy. The state, and authority of all kinds (including religious), were still the enemy. Kropotkin may not have considered violent overthrow of those instruments of coercion as the only answer, though. Instead, he saw small, simple, village-based cooperative arrangements as the future organizational model for humanity – call it anarcho-primitivism if you will. But his influence on 20^th century anarchist thinking would not die. Anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism both built on his mutual aid principles with localized direct action and labor union-based solutions, respectively. And further explorations into history and anthropology would add much more weight to the discussion on mutual aid. Enter David Graeber.

Graeber, in my opinion at least, is the leading anarchist thinker and writer of our time. His untimely death in 2020 at age 59 (from pancreatitis, perhaps aggravated by Covid) and publication of his last work, The Dawn of Everything, co-authored with David Wengrow, in 2021, focused many of us would-be leftist political philosophers on a truly magisterial survey of the entirety of human history. This was the capstone of anthropologist Graeber’s life work, and it borrowed substantially from that original Kropotkin concept of mutual aid. Like his forbear, Graeber was oppressed by the institutional authorities of society – if not the state itself, at least academia (he was denied tenure at Yale in 2005 after several distinguished years of teaching and publishing). Like Kropotkin, Graeber dedicated himself to causes championed by contemporary anarchist communities — like WTO protests in Seattle (1999) and Occupy Wall Street (2011, he is credited with the invention of the slogan, “We are the 99%”). Many consider his penchant for activism as the source of Yale’s decision to deny him tenure.

Two of Graeber’s most important works, The Dawn of Everything and Debt: The First 5000 Years, explore continuity throughout history of certain principles – variations on the concept of mutual aid. In Debt: The First 5000 Years, Graeber explains how the creditor/debtor relationship has dominated the social cohesion of all human endeavors from neolithic times to the present. Money, itself, is nothing more than an acknowledgement of debt – used to extract obedience by creditors (“gifts”) and necessary for debtors to survive (“exchange,” or currency). Mutual aid is the model for Graeber’s thesis, wages are a primary implement of that debtor/creditor relationship. They are not charity! It’s noteworthy that Marx’s view of the Labor Theory of Value (LTV) does not figure into this model. In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber reveals his counter-narrative of history: human development is NOT linear! Nor is there a clear trend toward entropy – where primitive societies are more “humane” than advanced industrial societies (the anarcho-primitivist view). Instead, human societies have been characterized by CHOICE – their members have chosen the organizational forms they wanted, whether authoritarian, imperial, republican, or pastoral.  There is no visible direction to civilization. There is no right answer! A fitting capstone to his career as an anthropologist, indeed. (Although Wengrow indicated that he and his celebrated co-author were planning three sequels.)

There are uncanny similarities in the biographies of these two anarchist thinkers. Both were steeped in anarchist tradition – Kropotkin influenced by both Proudhon and Bakunin, but diverging in important ways, and Graeber claiming that he was converted to anarchism at age 16, heavily influenced by his father whose own youth saw him volunteer in an anarcho-syndicalist Republican militia during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Kropotkin spent years in naturalistic expeditions in Siberia, recording his observations and discoveries. Graeber did his dissertation research in Madagascar, exploring the ethnography of Malagasy groups who traced their origins to the pirate colonies established on the island in the 17^th century. Those were iconic mutual aid colonies — communal property, cooperative governance and all — as Graeber elaborates in his posthumously published Pirate Enlightenment: The Real Libertalia. Kropotkin drew on Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Graeber on a massive body of archaeological and ethnographic evidence accumulated throughout the 20^th century. Both developed an alternative explanation to orthodox academic interpretations of history and human development. Both suffered for their unorthodox views. Neither can be considered “mainstream” even today – they both remain fringe figures. But … Why?

— William Sundwick