The action had been months in the making, orchestrated by an almost endless list of environmental, religious and labor groups. The public protest was expected to be incredibly large, but activists were shocked at such a massive turnout. Hundreds of thousands crafted a party like atmosphere, with tons of energy, in what the Christian Science Monitor describes as a raucous parade. In fact, Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York is quoted as saying:

After over forty years in the trenches of the environmental movement, I’ve never been more inspired and awe-struck… Today proves global support for climate action is undeniable. A swell of humanity has spoken as one: The time to act on climate is now.

This “swell” is particularly speaking to those in attendance at the United Nations Climate Summit. The gathering of roughly 100 heads of state kicked off on September 23. At the summit, officials sought discussion of global carbon emissions and a move towards a consensus for international reduction standards at next years gathering in Paris.

One may argue the environmental movement is stronger now than any other time in human history, with a real chance to force meaningful change. I, with reservation, would agree.

Teacher’s union president Carol Sutton of Connecticut told the New York Times: “I’m here because I really feel that every major social movement in this country has come when people get together. It begins in the streets.” — and I would agree with her. I have attended multiple environmental protests, some as small as 11 people, others as large as 40,000, and they have all been inspirational and exciting. I wish I could have been in the streets of New York, standing shoulder to shoulder, with so many. Social change does begin in the streets, but that is the easy part.

Having such a number of people turn out for the climate march is sure to move the political gathering held at the United Nations. It is good to engage existing institutions and work for change, but this is a short-term solution. The long-term solution will require radicalism. It is here that I have my reservations about the strength of the movement. Engaging institutions will not accomplish what it is we must ultimately seek: Anarchism. Liberty would allow us to explore the idea of mutualism — with each other, and our ecology, by advancing the concept of ecosystem services in the liberated market. It is systems of power and domination, upheld by the state, that have allowed such a divorce of our societies from the natural world.

Most importantly, the burden of proof, the idea that a more sustainable order is worthy of human labor, falls on those of us in the environmental movement — not state institutions. Though engagement of current institutions is needed, we should ultimately seek their destruction and lead by example.

Here in lies the problem with many (certainly not all) movement environmentalists today — we speak in terms of state policy and authoritarian institutions. The same institutions that have failed all species time and time again. The systems of power and domination we so often turn to, from war to development, have long turned their backs on the natural order. They work only to obtain resources, not to preserve. Any state decree exalting the environment should be met with pure skepticism. War alone, the very health of the state, demands enough unsustainable resource extraction and fossil fuel use to propel human civilization into the full effects of anthropogenic climate change. Our plan of action should instead seek to tear down this authority with brute force. Independent scholar Kevin Carson explains:

Our goal is not to assume leadership of existing institutions, but rather to render them irrelevant. We don’t want to take over the state or change its policies. We want to render its laws unenforceable. We don’t want to take over corporations and make them more “socially responsible.” We want to build a counter-economy of open-source information, neighborhood garage manufacturing, Permaculture, encrypted currency and mutual banks, leaving the corporations to die on the vine along with the state.

We do not hope to reform the existing order. We intend to serve as its grave-diggers.

The question then becomes, what will follow? The answer is something both beautiful and complex, while liberating and dynamic. Perhaps it is time to revisit our classical naturalists — of which there are plenty. However, one thing that John Muir (or your favorite historical eco-advocate) and his ilk had was a connection to the natural world and a desire for conservation. They did not much care to talk about what governments ought to do, but rather what they ought not do. Environmental achievement was obtained by pronouncing the splendid beauty of natural ecosystems, the challenges facing nature, and the innate need to protect wild spaces — even for our own well-being. Muir and other environmental advocates also practiced their ideals as they labored for the great outdoors.

In order to meet the demands of a changing Earth we will have to adapt. We will be required to constantly change, just like our mountains and rivers. Anarchist and Deep-Ecologist Gary Snyder, in his essay, The Etiquette of Freedom, describes, in great detail, the need to reclaim the words nature, wilderness and wildness — and it is in wildness that we will discover anarchism.

Nature, of course, is the collective physical world — all landscapes and seascapes, all flora and fauna, free of development. Wilderness is uncultivated land, in a natural state, liberated of human behavior. Wildness, however, is the ultimate practice — a praxis of liberty. Wildness, according to Snyder, is the quality of being wild or untamed. Snyder notes that human beings are indeed wild, but this does not mean disorderly. In fact, he argues that wildness will lead to a highly ordered society where our relationship with nature will be interactive, thus allowing the construction of durable social systems. This is also an idea explored by naturalist anarchist Peter Kropotkin in his book, Mutual Aid – A Factor of Evolution [PDF]:

In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense – not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species[…] in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits[…] and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development[…] are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.

There is indeed mutualism everywhere in nature, just as in human society, but the concept is absent from systems of power and domination. If we are to take the environment, and the consequences of climate change seriously, it is our duty to abandon such systems as they represent the unsociable species — they restrict human innovation, exacerbate environmental change and are composed of a ruling caste who seek first and foremost their own preservation. Simply, they are doomed to decay — and thus our message along with them.

Environmentalism, in its purest form, seeks the elevation of human society along with the natural world. Conservation and sustainable resource use would re-organize our neighborhoods. We would be free to labor in our own communities, craft our own institutions and own the means of our production. We would have a mutual relationship with our surrounding ecology, where we could receive beneficial ecosystem services such as air and water purification, flood control, carbon sequestration, psychological benefits and much more simply by conserving natural areas.

The natural world would benefit from being liberated of sprawl. Complex ecosystems (even in urban areas) would be left intact. In such an order species decline would be mitigated by the protection and restoration of natural habitat. Furthermore, the more decentralized our societies, the more we are liberated from institutions that seek maximum utility of resources. Then, we could naturally reduce our carbon emissions without coercive force. Our communities will flourish when liberated of state.

This order is possible, it is up to us to obtain it. May our inclined labor craft a beautiful, sustainable existence? If we achieve such a feat, anarchism will be our method and we will know wildness, as it is the process of simply living free – the grandeur of such freedom is only attainable in liberty.

In late 1909, two great men corresponded across oceans, religions, generations, and races. Leo Tolstoy, sage of Christian nonviolence in his later years, wrote to the young Mohandas Gandhi, struggling for the rights of Indian settlers in South Africa:

God helps our dear brothers and co-workers in the Transvaal. The same struggle of the tender against the harsh, of meekness and love against pride and violence, is every year making itself more and more felt here among us also.

A year later, wearied by domestic strife, and unable to endure the contradiction of life in Christian poverty on a prosperous estate run with unwelcome income from his great novels (written before his religious conversion and published by his wife), Tolstoy fled by train for parts unknown and a simpler end to his waning days. He wrote to his wife:

My departure will distress you. I’m sorry about this, but do understand and believe that I couldn’t do otherwise. My position in the house is becoming, or has become, unbearable. Apart from anything else, I can’t live any longer in these conditions of luxury in which I have been living, and I’m doing what old men of my age commonly do: leaving this worldly life in order to live the last days of my life in peace and solitude.

But Tolstoy’s final journey was both brief and unhappy. Less than a month later, cold and weary from numerous long rides on Russian trains in approaching winter, he contracted pneumonia and died at age eighty-two in the stationmaster’s home at the railroad stop of Astapovo. Too weak to write, he dictated his last letter on November 1, 1910. Addressed to a son and daughter who did not share his views on Christian nonviolence, Tolstoy offered a last word of advice:

The views you have acquired about Darwinism, evolution, and the struggle for existence won’t explain to you the meaning of your life and won’t give you guidance in your actions, and a life without an explanation of its meaning and importance, and without the unfailing guidance that stems from it is a pitiful existence. Think about it. I say it, probably on the eve of my death, because I love you.

Tolstoy’s complaint has been the most common of all indictments against Darwin, from the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 to now. Darwinism, the charge contends, undermines morality by claiming that success in nature can only be measured by victory in bloody battle – the “struggle for existence” or “survival of the fittest” to cite Darwin’s own choice of mottoes. If we wish “meekness and love” to triumph over “pride and violence” (as Tolstoy wrote to Gandhi), then we must repudiate Darwin’s vision of nature’s way – as Tolstoy stated in a final plea to his errant children.

This charge against Darwin is unfair for two reasons. First, nature (no matter how cruel in human terms) provides no basis for our moral values. (Evolution might, at most, help to explain why we have moral feelings, but nature can never decide for us whether any particular action is right or wrong.) Second, Darwin’s “struggle for existence” is an abstract metaphor, not an explicit statement about bloody battle. Reproductive success, the criterion of natural selection, works in many modes: Victory in battle may be one pathway, but cooperation, symbiosis, and mutual aid may also secure success in other times and contexts. In a famous passage, Darwin explained his concept of evolutionary struggle (Origin of Species, 1859, pp. 62-63):

I use this term in a large and metaphorical sense including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny. Two canine animals, in a time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with each other which shall get food and live. But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought…. As the mistletoe is disseminated by birds, its existence depends on birds; and it may metaphorically be said to struggle with other fruit-bearing plants, in order to tempt birds to devour and thus disseminate its seeds rather than those of other plants. In these several senses, which pass into each other, I use for convenience sake the general term of struggle for existence.

Yet, in another sense, Tolstoy’s complaint is not entirely unfounded. Darwin did present an encompassing, metaphorical definition of struggle, but his actual examples certainly favored bloody battle – “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” in a line from Tennyson so overquoted that it soon became a knee-jerk cliche for this view of life. Darwin based his theory of natural selection on the dismal view of Malthus that growth in population must outstrip food supply and lead to overt battle for dwindling resources. Moreover, Darwin maintained a limited but controlling view of ecology as a world stuffed full of competing species – so balanced and so crowded that a new form could only gain entry by literally pushing a former inhabitant out. Darwin expressed this view in a metaphor even more central to his general vision than the concept of struggle – the metaphor of the wedge. Nature, Darwin writes, is like a surface with 10,000 wedges hammered tightly in and filling all available space. A new species (represented as a wedge) can only gain entry into a community by driving itself into a tiny chink and forcing another wedge out. Success, in this vision, can only be achieved by direct takeover in overt competition.

Furthermore, Darwin’s own chief disciple, Thomas Henry Huxley, advanced this “gladiatorial” view of natural selection (his word) in a series of famous essays about ethics. Huxley maintained that the predominance of bloody battle defined nature’s way as nonmoral (not explicitly immoral, but surely unsuited as offering any guide to moral behavior).

From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is about on a level of a gladiator’s show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to fight – whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given.

But Huxley then goes further. Any human society set up along these lines of nature will devolve into anarchy and misery – Hobbes’s brutal world of bellum omnium contra omnes (where bellum means “war,” not beauty): the war of all against all. Therefore, the chief purpose of society must lie in mitigation of the struggle that defines nature’s pathway. Study natural selection and do the opposite in human society:

But, in civilized society, the inevitable result of such obedience [to the law of bloody battle] is the re-establishment, in all its intensity, of that struggle for existence – the war of each against all – the mitigation or abolition of which was the chief end of social organization.

This apparent discordance between nature’s way and any hope for human social decency has defined the major subject for debate about ethics and evolution ever since Darwin. Huxley’s solution has won many supporters – nature is nasty and no guide to morality except, perhaps, as an indicator of what to avoid in human society. My own preference lies with a different solution based on taking Darwin’s metaphorical view of struggle seriously (admittedly in the face of Darwin’s own preference for gladiatorial examples) – nature is sometimes nasty, sometimes nice (really neither, since the human terms are so inappropriate). By presenting examples of all behaviors (under the metaphorical rubric of struggle), nature favors none and offers no guidelines. The facts of nature cannot provide moral guidance in any case.

But a third solution has been advocated by some thinkers who do wish to find a basis for morality in nature and evolution. Since few can detect much moral comfort in the gladiatorial interpretation, this third position must reformulate the way of nature. Darwin’s words about the metaphorical character of struggle offer a promising starting point. One might argue that the gladiatorial examples have been over-sold and misrepresented as predominant. Perhaps cooperation and mutual aid are the more common results of struggle for existence. Perhaps communion rather than combat leads to greater reproductive success in most circumstances.

The most famous expression of this third solution may be found in Mutual Aid, published in 1902 by the Russian revolutionary anarchist Petr Kropotkin. (We must shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers furtively stalking about city streets at night. Kropotkin was a genial man, almost saintly according to some, who promoted a vision of small communities setting their own standards by consensus for the benefit of all, thereby eliminating the need for most functions of a central government.) Kropotkin, a Russian nobleman, lived in English exile for political reasons. He wrote Mutual Aid (in English) as a direct response to the essay of Huxley quoted above, “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society,” published in The Nineteenth Century, in February 1888. Kropotkin responded to Huxley with a series of articles, also printed in The Nineteenth Century and eventually collected together as the book Mutual Aid.

As the title suggests, Kropotkin argues, in his cardinal premise, that the struggle for existence usually leads to mutual aid rather than combat as the chief criterion of evolutionary success. Human society must therefore build upon our natural inclinations (not reverse them, as Huxley held) in formulating a moral order that will bring both peace and prosperity to our species. in a series of chapters, Kropotkin tries to illustrate continuity between natural selection for mutual aid among animals and the basis for success in increasingly progressive human social organization. His five sequential chapters address mutual aid among animals, among savages, among barbarians, in the medieval city, and amongst ourselves.

I confess that I have always viewed Kropotkin as daftly idiosyncratic, if undeniably well meaning. He is always so presented in standard courses on evolutionary biology – as one of those soft and woolly thinkers who let hope and sentimentality get in the way of analytic toughness and a willingness to accept nature as she is, warts and all. After all, he was a man of strange politics and unworkable ideals, wrenched from the context of his youth, a stranger in a strange land. Moreover, his portrayal of Darwin so matched his social ideals (mutual aid naturally given as a product of evolution without need for central authority) that one could only see personal hope rather than scientific accuracy in his accounts. Kropotkin has long been on my list of potential topics for an essay (if only because I wanted to read his book, and not merely mouth the textbook interpretation), but I never proceeded because I could find no larger context than the man himself. Kooky intellects are interesting as gossip, perhaps as psychology, but true idiosyncrasy provides the worst possible basis for generality.

But this situation changed for me in a flash when I read a very fine article in the latest issue of Isis (our leading professional journal in the history of science) by Daniel P. Todes: “Darwin’s Malthusian Metaphor and Russian Evolutionary Thought, 1859-1917.” I learned that the parochiality had been mine in my ignorance of Russian evolutionary thought, not Kropotkin’s in his isolation in England. (I can read Russian, but only painfully, and with a dictionary – which means, for all practical purposes, that I can’t read the language.) I knew that Darwin had become a hero of the Russian intelligentsia and had influenced academic life in Russia perhaps more than in any other country. But virtually none of this Russian work has ever been translated or even discussed in English literature. The ideas of this school are unknown to us; we do not even recognize the names of the major protagonists. I knew Kropotkin because he had published in English and lived in England, but I never understood that he represented a standard, well-developed Russian critique of Darwin, based on interesting reasons and coherent national traditions. Todes’s article does not make Kropotkin more correct, but it does place his writing into a general context that demands our respect and produces substantial enlightenment. Kropotkin was part of a mainstream flowing in an unfamiliar direction, not an isolated little arroyo.

This Russian school of Darwinian critics, Todes argues, based its major premise upon a firm rejection of Malthus’s claim that competition, in the gladiatorial mode, must dominate in an ever more crowded world, where population, growing geometrically, inevitably outstrips a food supply that can only increase arithmetically. Tolstoy, speaking for a consensus of his compatriots, branded Malthus as a “malicious mediocrity.”

Todes finds a diverse set of reasons behind Russian hostility to Malthus. Political objections to the dog-eat-dog character of Western industrial competition arose from both ends of the Russian spectrum. Todes writes:

Radicals, who hoped to build a socialist society, saw Malthusianism as a reactionary current in bourgeois political economy. Conservatives, who hoped to preserve the communal virtues of tsarist Russia, saw it as an expression of the “British national type.”

But Todes identifies a far more interesting reason in the immediate experience of Russia’s land and natural history. We all have a tendency to spin universal theories from a limited domain of surrounding circumstance. Many geneticists read the entire world of evolution in the confines of a laboratory bottle filled with fruit flies. My own increasing dubiousness about universal adaptation arises in large part, no doubt, because I study a peculiar snail that varies so widely and capriciously across an apparently unvarying environment, rather than a bird in flight or some other marvel of natural design.

Russia is an immense country, under-populated by any nineteenth-century measure of its agricultural potential. Russia is also, over most of its area, a harsh land, where competition is more likely to pit organism against environment (as in Darwin’s metaphorical struggle of a plant at the desert’s edge) than organism against organism in direct and bloody battle. How could any Russian, with a strong feel for his own countryside, see Malthus’s principle of overpopulation as a foundation for evolutionary theory? Todes writes:

It was foreign to their experience because, quite simply, Russia’s huge land mass dwarfed its sparse population. For a Russian to see an inexorably increasing population inevitably straining potential supplies of food and space required quite a leap of imagination.

If these Russian critics could honestly tie their personal skepticism to the view from their own backyard, they could also recognize that Darwin’s contrary enthusiasms might record the parochiality of his different surroundings, rather than a set of necessarily universal truths. Malthus makes a far better prophet in a crowded, industrial country professing an ideal of open competition in free markets. Moreover, the point has often been made that both Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently developed the theory of natural selection after primary experience with natural history in the tropics. Both claimed inspiration from Malthus, again independently; but if fortune favors the prepared mind, then their tropical experience probably predisposed both men to read Malthus with resonance and approval. No other area on earth is so packed with species, and therefore so replete with competition of body against body. An Englishman who had learned the ways of nature in the tropics was almost bound to view evolution differently from a Russian nurtured on tales of the Siberian wasteland.

For example, N. I. Danilevsky, an expert on fisheries and population dynamics, published a large, two-volume critique of Darwinism in 1885. He identified struggle for personal gain as the credo of a distinctly British “national type,” as contrasted with old Slavic values of collectivism. An English child, he writes, “boxes one on one, not in a group as we Russians like to spar.” Danilevsky viewed Darwinian competition as “a purely English doctrine” founded upon a line of British thought stretching from Hobbes through Adam Smith to Malthus. Natural selection, he wrote, is rooted in “the war of all against all, now termed the struggle for existence – Hobbes’ theory of politics; on competition – the economic theory of Adam Smith. … Malthus applied the very same principle to the problem of population. … Darwin extended both Malthus’ partial theory and the general theory of the political economists to the organic world.” (Quotes are from Todes’s article.)

When we turn to Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid in the light of Todes’s discoveries about Russian evolutionary thought, we must reverse the traditional view and interpret this work as mainstream Russian criticism, not personal crankiness. The central logic of Kropotkin’s argument is simple, straightforward, and largely cogent.

Kropotkin begins by acknowledging that struggle plays a central role in the lives of organisms and also provides the chief impetus for their evolution. But Kropotkin holds that struggle must not be viewed as a unitary phenomenon. It must be divided into two fundamentally different forms with contrary evolutionary meanings. We must recognize, first of all, the struggle of organism against organism for limited resources – the theme that Malthus imparted to Darwin and that Huxley described as gladiatorial. This form of direct struggle does lead to competition for personal benefit.

But a second form of struggle – the style that Darwin called metaphorical – pits organism against the harshness of surrounding physical environments, not against other members of the same species. Organisms must struggle to keep warm, to survive the sudden and unpredictable dangers of fire and storm, to persevere through harsh periods of drought, snow, or pestilence. These forms of struggle between organism and environment are best waged by cooperation among members of the same species-by mutual aid. If the struggle for existence pits two lions against one zebra, then we shall witness a feline battle and an equine carnage. But if lions are struggling jointly against the harshness of an inanimate environment, then lighting will not remove the common enemy – while cooperation may overcome a peril beyond the power of any single individual to surmount.

Kropotkin therefore created a dichotomy within the general notion of struggle – two forms with opposite import: (1) organism against organism of the same species for limited resources, leading to competition; and (2) organism against environment, leading to cooperation.

No naturalist will doubt that the idea of a struggle for life carried on through organic nature is the greatest generalization of our century. Life is struggle; and in that struggle the fittest survive. But the answers to the questions “by which arms is the struggle chiefly carried on!” and “who are the fittest in the struggle!” will widely differ according to the importance given to the two different aspects of the struggle: the direct one, for food and safety among separate individuals, and the struggle which Darwin described as “metaphorical” – the struggle, very often collective, against adverse circumstances.

Darwin acknowledged that both forms existed, but his loyalty to Malthus and his vision of nature chock-full of species led him to emphasize the competitive aspect. Darwin’s less sophisticated votaries then exalted the competitive view to near exclusivity, and heaped a social and moral meaning upon it as well.

They came to conceive of the animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among half-starved individuals, thirsting for one another’s blood. They made modern literature resound with the war-cry of woe to the vanquished, as if it were the last word of modern biology. They raised the “pitiless” struggle for personal advantages to the height of a biological principle which man must submit to as well, under the menace of otherwise succumbing in a world based upon mutual extermination.

Kropotkin did not deny the competitive form of struggle, but he argued that the cooperative style had been underemphasized and must balance or even predominate over competition in considering nature as a whole.

There is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species; there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defense…. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.

As Kropotkin cranked through his selected examples, and built up steam for his own preferences, he became more and more convinced that the cooperative style, leading to mutual aid, not only predominated in general but also characterized the most advanced creatures in any group-ants among insects, mammals among vertebrates. Mutual aid therefore becomes a more important principle than competition and slaughter:

If we … ask Nature: “who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?” we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization.

If we ask why Kropotkin favored cooperation while most nineteenth-century Darwinians advocated competition as the predominant result of struggle in nature, two major reasons stand out. The first seems less interesting, as obvious under the slightly cynical but utterly realistic principle that true believers tend to read their social preferences into nature. Kropotkin, the anarchist who yearned to replace laws of central government with consensus of local communities, certainly hoped to locate a deep preference for mutual aid in the innermost evolutionary marrow of our being. Let mutual aid pervade nature and human cooperation becomes a simple instance of the law of life.

Neither the crushing powers of the centralized State nor the teachings of mutual hatred and pitiless struggle which came, adorned with the attributes of science, from obliging philosophers and sociologists, could weed out the feeling of human solidarity, deeply lodged in men’s understanding and heart, because it has been nurtured by all our preceding evolution.

But the second reason is more enlightening, as a welcome empirical input from Kropotkin’s own experience as a naturalist and an affirmation of Todes’s intriguing thesis that the usual flow from ideology to interpretation of nature may sometimes be reversed, and that landscape can color social preference. As a young man, long before his conversion to political radicalism, Kropotkin spent five years in Siberia (1862-1866) just after Darwin published the Origin of Species. He went as a military officer, but his commission served as a convenient cover for his yearning to study the geology, geography, and zoology of Russia’s vast interior. There, in the polar opposite to Darwin’s tropical experiences, he dwelled in the environment least conducive to Malthus’s vision. He observed a sparsely populated world, swept with frequent catastrophes that threatened the few species able to find a place in such bleakness. As a potential disciple of Darwin, he looked for competition, but rarely found any. Instead, he continually observed the benefits of mutual aid in coping with an exterior harshness that threatened all alike and could not be overcome by the analogues of warfare and boxing.

Kropotkin, in short, had a personal and empirical reason to look with favor upon cooperation as a natural force. He chose this theme as the opening paragraph for Mutual Aid:

Two aspects of animal life impressed me most during the journeys which I made in my youth in Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria. One of them was the extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most species of animals have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the enormous destruction of life which periodically results from natural agencies; and the consequent paucity of life over the vast territory which fell under my observation. And the other was, that even in those few spots where animal life teemed in abundance, I failed to find – although I was eagerly looking for it – that bitter struggle for the means of existence among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.

What can we make of Kropotkin’s argument today, and that of the entire Russian school represented by him? Were they just victims of cultural hope and intellectual conservatism? I don’t think so. In fact, I would hold that Kropotkin’s basic argument is correct. Struggle does occur in many modes, and some lead to cooperation among members of a species as the best pathway to advantage for individuals. If Kropotkin overemphasized mutual aid, most Darwinians in Western Europe had exaggerated competition just as strongly. If Kropotkin drew inappropriate hope for social reform from his concept of nature, other Darwinians had erred just as firmly (and for motives that most of us would now decry) in justifying imperial conquest, racism, and oppression of industrial workers as the harsh outcome of natural selection in the competitive mode.

I would fault Kropotkin only in two ways – one technical, the other general. He did commit a common conceptual error in failing to recognize that natural selection is an argument about advantages to individual organisms, however they may struggle. The result of struggle for existence may be cooperation rather than competition, but mutual aid must benefit individual organisms in Darwin’s world of explanation. Kropotkin sometimes speaks of mutual aid as selected for the benefit of entire populations or species – a concept foreign to classic Darwinian logic (where organisms work, albeit unconsciously, for their own benefit in terms of genes passed to future generations). But Kropotkin also (and often) recognized that selection for mutual aid directly benefits each individual in its own struggle for personal success. Thus, if Kropotkin did not grasp the full implication of Darwin’s basic argument, he did include the orthodox solution as his primary justification for mutual aid.

More generally, I like to apply a somewhat cynical rule of thumb in judging arguments about nature that also have overt social implications: When such claims imbue nature with just those properties that make us feel good or fuel our prejudices, be doubly suspicious. I am especially wary of arguments that find kindness, mutuality, synergism, harmony – the very elements that we strive mightily, and so often unsuccessfully, to put into our own lives – intrinsically in nature. I see no evidence for Teilhard’s noosphere, for Capra’s California style of holism, for Sheldrake’s morphic resonance. Gaia strikes me as a metaphor, not a mechanism. (Metaphors can be liberating and enlightening, but new scientific theories must supply new statements about causality. Gaia, to me, only seems to reformulate, in different terms, the basic conclusions long achieved by classically reductionist arguments of biogeochemical cycling theory.)

There are no shortcuts to moral insight. Nature is not intrinsically anything that can offer comfort or solace in human terms – if only because our species is such an insignificant latecomer in a world not constructed for us. So much the better. The answers to moral dilemmas are not lying out there, waiting to be discovered. They reside, like the kingdom of God, within us – the most difficult and inaccessible spot for any discovery or consensus.

According to the most recent findings, on a given night in January 2013, 610,042 Americans were homeless. From 2012 to 2013, homelessness did decline 3.7 percent and 31 states saw a fall in homelessness. However, 20 states saw an increase. And more people are on the verge of homelessness since poverty increased by 0.6 percent and households experiencing severe housing cost burdens increased by 0.7 percent.

Government anti-poverty efforts already crowd out private giving because of how those policies pervert incentives. Now local governments are taking it one step further by explicitly outlawing giving to the homeless, despite homelessness being a significant lingering problem for the US economy. 33 U.S. cities now ban or are considering banning the practice of sharing food with homeless people.

Some cities have reportedly started to fine, remove or threaten to throw in jail private groups that work to serve food to the needy instead of letting government-run services do the job. The justification for these bans is to prevent government-run anti-homelessness programs from being diluted.

The policy is not only completely backwards, it is simply cruel. It’s difficult to imagine the mindset of someone so obsessed with making government programs responsible for helping people that they propose using force to prevent anyone else from doing so. People often accuse anti-poverty programs of creating a culture where poor people are dependent on the government (which they do), but now we are starting to see policies that institutionalize that culture by force.

This new method of making criminals out of peaceful and charitable citizens is merely the latest in the long line of attacks in the war on the homeless.

Governments create poverty as we know it. They ratchet up costs of living and make it difficult to climb the economic ladder. They do this through arbitrary regulation, licensure requirements, protectionist trade policy, barriers to employment, inflation driven bubbles, urban renewal projects and more.

Author and activist, Charles Johnson, writes, “Government regimentation of land, housing, and labor creates and sustains the very structure of urban poverty … Government regulations create homelessness and artificially make it worse for the homeless by driving up housing costs and by obstructing or destroying any intermediate informal living solutions between renting an apartment and living on the street.”

In other words, government causes homelessness, then pretends to fix it with anti-poverty programs. Now it is making the plight of the homeless even more difficult by restricting their options and forcing them to rely on the government, rather than their family, friends, and communities. It seems that the government is no longer pretending to help the poor. They are explicitly coming out as against helping homeless people.

The war on homelessness is clearly escalating. Governments are ramping up their methods of creating homelessness and making the experience as miserable and tragic as possible. The only way to end homelessness is to get the government out of the picture. Remove the giant roadblock created by government intervention and allow free people to provide for themselves and others.

Instead of preventing families, friends, and communities from helping the homeless, they need to be encouraged to do so. Mutual aid networks, horizontal community efforts, and plain old charities would be a true war on poverty. Social cooperation and voluntary giving is the only cure. Not top-down, cruel laws like these.

Upon arriving at the food bank, I did not know what to expect since I had never volunteered in this manner before. There are two large garage doors on the front of the building; I entered through a side door that led to the office. There I shook hands with Wes, who runs the warehouse. He led me to the warehouse which has an upper-deck where customers look at assorted items and choose what they want – there are no limits. The lower-deck consisted of many large shelves full of food items. The first thing Wes had me do was put packages of cans in a pile below shelves of other food. The work I performed was mainly heavy-lifting, including moving boxes of food around the facility and helping customers load their vehicles. I would also help sort items and put them in their proper places. The operation of the food bank runs very smoothly. Customers would come in and pick out which items they need, running at nineteen cents per pound, and place them on a skid. After they were finished, the skid was transported to a ledge and taken off of the skid. The customers would back in through one of the garage doors and pull up to the ledge. From the ledge, other volunteers and I would help load these items into the backs of their vehicles.

After helping a few customers, Wes came up to me and explained exactly what the food bank does; it sells food items to organizations and charities, such as food pantries (including church-based), the Women’s shelter, Teen Challenge and even day care centers. The food bank takes in food donated by food-drives and the general good will of people. While volunteering I noticed that a few times the staff was preparing to have a food-drive at certain places. They also take in items from grocery and convenience stores that are some-what damaged (such as a few cracked eggs) or close to expiring. Their official mission statement reads,

The Western Maryland Food Bank, Inc. is committed to reducing hunger by acquiring and distributing food and non-food items to local and regional organizations assisting those in need.

Now that I have described the operations of a food bank, let us see some statistics on worldwide hunger and poverty. In the world today, a recorded 842 million people do not have enough food to eat. About 827 million of those people live in developing countries and poor nutrition causes about forty-five percent of deaths in children under age five. In 2012, about 46.5 million U.S. citizens lived in poverty; 49 million lived in food insecure households, 15.9 million of them children. With a world population of about seven billion, 842 million people may not seem like a lot. But roughly imagine the combined populations of the United States, Indonesia, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and Sweden without enough food to eat, while the rest of the world is living the good life. It always sounds much more shocking when describing statistics according to entire populations because, although more prevalent in developing countries, hunger occurs all over the world. It is much more camouflaged by the well-off when in developed countries because, if that is not the reality of the majority, then why show what only a minority go through?

I chose to volunteer at a food bank because I wanted to work within a place that deals with the issue of hunger, one of the most common and profound forms of violence. Hunger is an issue that is largely neglected by those in charge because they feel as though they have far more important priorities than making sure people, especially children, are not going hungry. Although most food banks receive government funding, they provide a good model of voluntary cooperation in order to help the needy. We cannot and must not wait for the state to “help” us. We must take care of ourselves and each other. Mutual aid is a simple way to help people overcome poverty in a peaceful manner. We must build our own facilities, such as food banks, and resources so that this may be possible and not let anyone tell us that it cannot be done.

Many conformists may see this as idealistic, and me an ideologue, but I see it as absolutely natural and desirable. Hunger is something that can lead people to commit acts of criminality out of desperation, such as theft or physical violence. A lot of people damn those who commit these acts, but many of them are put into a situation, such as poverty, where they are out of options. Poverty is, without a doubt, a cause of crime. Some may see certain people as inherently ugly, while I see them as beautiful individuals who are begging to be set free from whatever coercive powers are keeping them bound. I sincerely believe that peace is an absolute kept from truly coming into existence. No matter who I am speaking to, a brother, sister, friend, comrade, it is intrinsic that we knock down those barriers that keep peace from emerging and a free society from flourishing.

Noi siamo stati portati a pensare che “attivismo” consista nel volere che qualcun altro faccia qualcosa. Imploriamo i politici eletti, i burocrati, spronandoli all’azione. Ma l’attivismo migliore, il più efficace, è quando prendiamo in mano la situazione e risolviamo i nostri problemi – o colpiamo i nostri nemici – da soli. Nello stato messicano di Michoacán, la popolazione si è ribellata contro il cartello del narcotraffico dei Cavalieri Templari, cacciandoli via con una forza tale che il governo messicano dispera di sopprimere i vigilantes e ora spera di corromperli, trasformandoli da una manifestazione spontanea della rabbia popolare in un altro braccio armato dello stato criminale. Speriamo che resistano.

E ora la popolazione si sta sollevando in Nigeria. Mentre il resto del mondo ha risposto ai crimini odiosi di Boko Haram con hashtag e selfie, la popolazione di Kala/Balge ha risposto con proiettili e machete, prendendo in mano la propria vita e le proprie famiglie. Difendere se stessi significa imparare a confidare in se stessi; i corsi di autodifesa, oltre alle tecniche per sconfiggere l’assalitore, insegnano anche ad avere fiducia nella propria forza e nel proprio potere. Boko Haram ha reagito come da sempre reagiscono i bulli davanti ad una vittima che improvvisamente prende coraggio: hanno fatto dietrofront e sono scappati, lasciandosi alle spalle morti e feriti da quei codardi che sono sempre stati.

Anche in America, il centro dell’impero, dobbiamo imparare ad agire direttamente contro i bulli tra noi, contro le forze dell’impero. Non occorre che l’azione sia frontale e violenta, anche se chi decide di affrontare direttamente gli oppressori merita il nostro rispetto. All’interno del movimento contro la guerra di questi ultimi quattordici anni ci sono stati molti eventi buonisti diretti a risvegliare le coscienze e raccogliere fondi. Ma l’attivismo più efficace ha preso due forme: scoraggiare l’arruolamento nelle forze armate, e incoraggiare chi è arruolato ad uscirne. Entrambe rappresentano una sfida più efficace degli striscioni, allungano una mano verso i soldati ed offrono loro una buona alternativa alla vita militare, uno degli ultimi luoghi della nostra società in cui giovani capaci possono ottenere un lavoro sicuro con una buona paga e benefici. È importante il risultato ottenuto: togliere acqua dal mulino imperialista, obbligando i suoi padroni a impiegare più denaro e tempo a cercare di trattenere i soldati e meno ad uccidere e menomare.

Parlare di alternative all’arruolamento in un istituto superiore di borgata non ha la stessa drammaticità di un’imboscata ad un convoglio di Boko Haram nella giungla nigeriana nel cuore della notte, ma le due cose condividono un aspetto chiave: non devi implorare per ottenere pietà e pace. In entrambi i casi, prendi il nemico frontalmente, e affronti personalmente il meccanismo che causa oppressione e dolore. Se vogliamo salvarci, dobbiamo seguire l’esempio coraggioso della popolazione di Kala/Balge, e salvarci da soli.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

We are conditioned to think of “activism” as getting someone else to do something. We plead with elected officials and bureaucrats, prodding them to take action. But the best and most effective activism is when we take matters into our own hands and solve our problems — or strike at our enemies — ourselves. In Mexico’s Michoacan province, the people rose against the Knights Templar cartel, driving them off with such alacrity that the Mexican government has given up attempts to suppress the vigilantes and now hopes to suborn them, turning them from a natural manifestation of the people’s wrath into another arm of the criminal state. We pray they resist the attempt.

And now in Nigeria, the people are rising. While the rest of the world responded to Boko Haram’s vicious crimes with hashtags and selfies, the people of Kalabalge responded with bullets and machetes, taking their lives and their families into their own hands. To defend oneself is to learn to rely on oneself; in self-defense courses, we learn confidence in our own strength and power as much as we learn specific techniques for defeating assailants. Boko Haram reacted the way bullies have reacted from time immemorial to suddenly emboldened victims — they turned tail and ran, leaving their dead and wounded behind like the cowards they always were.

In America, the imperial center, we too must learn to act directly against the bullies in our midst, against the forces of the empire. These actions need not be direct, violent confrontation — although those who do choose to engage their oppressors directly deserve our respect. In the anti-war movement over the last fourteen years, many consciousness-raising, fund-raising and feel-good events have been held, but the most effective activism I’ve seen has taken two forms — discouraging enlistment, known as “counter-recruiting,” and encouraging soldiers currently in the military to get out. Both are much more challenging than holding a sign at a rally, requiring us to get to know the people we are trying to reach and to offer them a good alternative to the military, which is one of the last places left in our society where any able-bodied young person can get a secure job with good pay and benefits. But both get results that matter, denying grist to the imperial mill, forcing the managers of the imperial state to spend more time and money on finding and retaining soldiers and less on killing and maiming others.

Talking to a classroom in an inner city high school about alternatives to the military is not as dramatic as ambushing a Boko Haram convoy in Nigerian jungle in the middle of the night, but both actions share one key aspect — neither involves begging power for mercy and comfort. Rather, both take on the enemy directly, confronting personally the mechanisms of oppression and violence. If we are going to be saved, we must follow the bold example of the people of Kalabalge, and save ourselves.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, I Frutti dell’Azione Diretta.

L’offerta di sicurezza è una delle giustificazioni più basilari dell’esistenza dello stato. Si immagina che lo stato protegga la popolazione dai predatori, sia interni che esterni. Ma in Nigeria lo stato non ha la capacità di adempiere questa funzione. E forti dubbi esistono anche riguardo la volontà: secondo notizie poi confermate da Amnesty International l’esercito nigeriano era venuto a conoscenza con quattro ore di anticipo del fatto che una colonna armata di militanti di Boko Haram si stava dirigendo verso Chibok: quattro ore durante le quali l’esercito non ha fatto assolutamente nulla.

Ora, visto che il governo nigeriano non può o non vuole proteggere i nigeriani, forse questi potrebbero prendere esempio dai messicani, che si sono armati per difendere se stessi dall’aggressività sia dei cartelli della droga che dello stato. Ovviamente il governo nigeriano cerca di favorire la dipendenza della popolazione dallo stato vietando il possesso di armi semiautomatiche e fucili di qualunque genere; divieto che, pateticamente, non riesce ad applicare ai gruppi di Boko Haram ma che i custodi del collegio di Chibok disgraziatamente rispettano fin troppo.

L’autodifesa armata contro il terrorismo è uno di quei territori che nel corso del secolo appena iniziato sono stati esplorati ampiamente. Il punto di svolta dell’occupazione americana in Iraq non è stato, come si crede comunemente, un prodotto delle tattiche americane, ma piuttosto il risultato degli sforzi di gruppi armati di autodifesa, organizzati dagli stessi iracheni in barba al loro governo fantoccio. Anche se questi gruppi venivano finanziati dai militari americani, la decisione di agire è nata all’interno delle comunità tribali irachene. L’esempio iracheno, così come quello fornito dalla popolazione dello stato messicano di Michoacán, può costituire un modello efficace di difesa da Boko Haram per il popolo nigeriano.

Cosa possiamo fare noi occidentali per aiutare il popolo nigeriano? La cosa più ovvia è ovviamente illegale: se un americano dona armi ai nigeriani o va a combattere contro Boko Haram finisce in galera per molti anni. Un caso che illustra l’assurdità di queste leggi è quello di Eric Harroun, un veterano americano che è andato in Siria a combattere il governo di Assad. Harroun rischia il carcere per aver aiutato gli stessi ribelli siriani che l’amministrazione Obama sta cercando di aiutare. Date queste leggi, c’è poco che l’occidente possa fare legalmente, se non fare donazioni alle istituzioni di carità nigeriane e fare pressione sul governo nigeriano.

Un consiglio al popolo della Nigeria: Il vostro governo non ha né il potere né la volontà di proteggervi. Gli aiuti da parte dei governi occidentali potrebbero risolvere questa dolorosa crisi nel breve, ma non sono una soluzione di lungo termine. Invece di aspettare che i burocrati di Abuja vengano a salvarvi, prendete misure adesso per proteggere voi stessi e i vostri figli. Armatevi, se potete. Organizzate servizi di vigilanza. E se il vostro governo vi chiede di fermarvi, chiedetegli dove era il quattordici aprile, quando le vostre figlie sono state rapite.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Provision of security is the most basic justification given for the existence of the state. The state is supposed to protect the population from predators, both foreign and domestic. However, in Nigeria, the state is clearly incapable of fulfilling this function. Indeed, serious questions exist as to whether or not it even wants to; reports confirmed by Amnesty International indicate that the Nigerian army had four hours’ notice that an armed column of Boko Haram militants was en route to Chibok — four hours during which the army did absolutely nothing.

Since the Nigerian government is either unwilling or unable to protect the Nigerian people, perhaps Nigerians should look to the example of the Mexican people, who have armed themselves in self-defense against both predatory cartels and predatory government forces. Of course, the Nigerian government strives to foster dependence on itself among the people, forbidding them to own semi-automatic rifles or handguns of any type — a prohibition it is pathetically unable to enforce on Boko Haram, but one which the guardians of the schoolgirls of Chibok sadly obeyed all too well.

Armed self-defense against terrorism is well-trodden territory this century. The turning point of the American occupation of Iraq was not, as is commonly believed, a product of American tactics, but rather the result of the efforts of armed self-defense groups established by the Iraqis themselves, outside the American-backed government. While these groups were funded by the American military, the initiative to act arose within the traditional tribal groups of the Iraqi people. This model, as well as the example of the people of Mexico’s Michoacan province, can serve as a template for successful self-defense against Boko Haram by the Nigerian people.

What can we do in the West to aid the Nigerian people? The most obvious way to help is of course completely illegal — any Americans who donate weapons to the Nigerians or who go to fight Boko Haram themselves face stiff prison sentences. The recent case of Eric Harroun, a U.S. Army veteran who traveled to Syria to fight against the Assad government, illustrates the absurdity of these laws. Mr. Harroun may go to prison for aiding the same Syrian rebels the Obama administration is trying to aid. Given the laws as they are, there is little within those laws we can do in the West, aside from donating to Nigerian charities and helping bring more pressure on the Nigerian government.

To the people of Nigeria: Your government cannot and will not protect you. Aid from Western governments might address this immediate and painful crisis, but will not be a long-term solution. Rather than waiting for the bureaucrats in Abuja to save you, take steps now to protect yourselves and your children.  Arm yourselves, if you can. Organize watches. And when your government asks you to stop, ask them where they were on 14 April, when your daughters were stolen.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Boko Haram e l’Imperativo dell’Autodifesa.
• Spanish, Boko Haram y el imperativo de la autodefensa

I think, for a long time, we’ve been trying to look for new ways to talk about concepts like mutual aid and solidarity; horizontal loyalty, at least as Krulwich describes it (and as Friedman uses it), serves exactly this kind of function. Instead of waiting for power to grant us seats at the table, we create our own tables and work to help each other out. Insofar as journalism is concerned, this is especially crucial – as my latest op-ed shows, the journalism cartel has no intention or desire to embrace independent media. They are offering us no quarter, so we should take the point and set up lodgings elsewhere. Or better, build those lodgings ourselves.

Think of your network as a community—a group of professional collaborators with whom you share skills and ideas, contacts and advice—that you invest in whether or not you’re looking for a new job.

I mentioned that I thought this concept seemed almost stigmergic in nature, and it turned out that I wasn’t too far off.

From Krulwich’s speech:

So for this age, for your time, I want you to just think about this: Think about NOT waiting your turn.

Instead, think about getting together with friends that you admire, or envy.  Think about entrepeneuring. Think about NOT waiting for a company to call you up. Think about not giving your heart to a bunch of adults you don’t know. Think about horizontal loyalty. Think about turning to people you already know, who are your friends, or friends of their friends and making something that makes sense to you together, that is as beautiful or as true as you can make it.

And when it comes to security, to protection, your friends may take better care of you than CBS took care of Charles Kuralt in the end. In every career, your job is to make and tell stories, of course. You will build a body of work, but you will also build a body of affection, with the people you’ve helped who’ve helped you back.

And maybe that’s your way into Troy.

I think, for a long time, we’ve been trying to look for new ways to talk about concepts like mutual aid and solidarity; horizontal loyalty, at least as Krulwich describes it (and as Friedman uses it), serves exactly this kind of function. Instead of waiting for power to grant us seats at the table, we create our own tables and work to help each other out. Insofar as journalism is concerned, this is especially crucial – as my latest op-ed shows, the journalism cartel has no intention or desire to embrace independent media. They are offering us no quarter, so we should take the point and set up lodgings elsewhere. Or better, build those lodgings ourselves.