Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (64 page)

Although he has been associated with the doctrine of ‘propaganda by the deed’, Kropotkin was opposed to indiscriminate violence, and tried to distance himself from the doctrine. Individual acts of violence were only legitimate if part of a revolutionary struggle with anarchist goals directed at a specific form of oppression. He understood the despair which led to acts of terrorism, and refused to condemn anarchist terrorists outright, recognizing that the State itself engaged in terrorism of the people. He put great stress on the context and the motives of terrorists: ‘Individuals are not to blame;’ he wrote to his friend Georg Brandes, ‘they are driven mad by horrible conditions.’
²⁴
He personally found violence abhorrent but recognized that in certain situations it could not be avoided. But it should primarily be directed against economic targets, not against individuals, whatever their social class or position in the State. Economic ‘terrorism’ in the sense of industrial sabotage was therefore all right, but not throwing dynamite and bombs into bourgeois cafés.

Kropotkin saw ‘revolution’ and ‘evolution’ as inevitable processes in social change. He recognized that revolutions, that is ‘periods of accelerated rapid evolution and rapid changes’, are as much in the nature of human society as slow evolution which incessantly goes on in civilized societies. The question was not so much how to avoid revolution, as ‘how to attain the greatest results with the most limited amount of civil war, the smallest number of victims’, and a minimum of mutual embitterment.
²⁵

As he grew older he did not believe less in revolution. In the first edition of
Freedom
in 1886, he wrote that the social revolution was imminent and inevitable and that it would be proletarian and international: ‘we are as unable to prevent the storm as to accelerate its arrival.’
²⁶
Twelve years later, he stated optimistically at the end of
Memoirs of a Revolutionist
(1899) that at the age of fifty-seven he was more deeply convinced than ever that a revolution could occur by chance in Europe ‘in the sense of a profound and rapid social reconstruction’ although it would not assume the Violent character’ which revolutions in the past had assumed.
²⁷
While he quoted Proudhon ‘in demolishing we shall build’ in the first edition of
The Conquest of Bread
, he stressed in a footnote to the last Russian edition how difficult it is to build ‘without extremely careful consideration beforehand’ and preferred the inversion ‘in building we shall demolish’.
²⁸
Nevertheless, he remained convinced that the gains in the past had always been made by ‘the force of the popular revolution’ and not ‘an evolution created by an elite’.
²⁹

It was during the thirty years that Kropotkin lived in England that he elaborated his mature thought. Like Godwin he based his anarchist hopes on a particular view of nature and human nature. Indeed, his view of nature as governed by necessary laws, his stress on man as a social being, and his recognition that change will often be gradual recall Godwin’s teaching. What was new was his confidence in the creativity and virtue of people living in simple societies, his desire to give a scientific grounding to his anarchist conclusions, and his overall evolutionary perspective.

Kropotkin’s approach to nature and man (as he called the human species in the habit of his day) is rigorously scientific. He came to realize soon after settling in England that

In
Modern Science and Anarchism
, first published in Russian in 1901, he recognized that anarchism like socialism in general was born among the people, but he maintains:

He goes on to argue that the movement of both natural and social science was in the direction of the anarchist ideal.

A man of his time, Kropotkin shared Spencer’s and Comte’s positivistic faith in science to bring about progress, but he also wanted to extend scientific methods of thinking into the educational, moral and political spheres. In a letter to a friend in 1899, he wrote:

Kropotkin was referring here to those thinkers who were trying to use Darwin’s theory of evolution to justify existing inequalities. The Social Darwinists, as they came to been known, attempted to give pseudo-scientific support to capitalism, racism and imperialism: as there was struggle for survival in society as well in nature, it was right and inevitable that the fittest should survive and rule, whether it be a group of individuals, a race or a nation. T. H. Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, presented the animal world as a perpetual ‘gladiator’s show’ and the life of primitive man as a ‘continuous free fight’.
³³
Kropotkin threw himself into the controversy and offered an alternative interpretation of the evolutionary process.

Kropotkin’s views were first inspired by a lecture delivered in 1880 ‘On the Law of Mutual Aid’ by the Russian zoologist and Dean of St Petersburg University Karl Kessler, who argued that mutual aid is as much a law of
nature as mutual struggle, but the former was far more important in the progressive evolution of the species. Kropotkin went on to argue that there is far more evidence in nature of co-operation within a species than of competition. In his most famous work
Mutual Aid
(1902), he suggests with a rich array of data that in the struggle for life mutual aid appears to be a rule among the most successful species and argues that it is the most important factor in evolution:

Kropotkin makes clear that the struggle of existence which takes place is a struggle against adverse circumstances rather than between individuals of the same species. Where the other Social Darwinists argued that the struggle between individuals leads to the survival of the fittest, Kropotkin asserted that the unit of competition is the species as a whole and that the species which has the greatest degree of co-operation and support between its members is most likely to flourish. He concludes:

Mutual aid within the species thus represents the principal factor, the principal active agency in evolution. Progress, biological and social, is best fostered not by force or cunning, but by the practice of mutual support and co-operation.

Kropotkin did not hesitate to apply these observations of the animal world to the human species. He maintains that society is a natural phenomenon existing anterior to the appearance of man, and man is naturally adapted to live in society without artificial regulations. Man is and always has been a social species. Kropotkin draws on the findings of anthropology to argue that in traditional societies human beings have always lived in clans and tribes in which customs and taboos ensure co-operation and mutual aid. Unbridled individualism is therefore a modern growth. He maintains from his historical studies that mutual aid reached its apogee in the communal
life of the medieval cities. Even the appearance of coercive institutions and the modern State from the sixteenth century has not eradicated voluntary co-operation:

Evolutionary theory, if properly understood, will not justify the inevitability of capitalist competition or the need for a strong State but rather point to the possibility of anarchy. Indeed, it forms the cornerstone of Kropotkin’s philosophy.
³⁷

It follows that anarchism is not against but in keeping with evolving human nature. Indeed, Kropotkin insisted that the anarchist thinker studies society and tries to discover its tendencies and in his ideal merely points out the direction of evolution: ‘The ideal of the Anarchist is thus a mere summing-up of what he considers to be the next phase of evolution. It is no longer a matter of faith; it is a matter of scientific discussion.’
³⁸

Kropotkin not only argues that this is an accurate and true description of nature and the human species, but sees it as providing the ground for morality. By studying human society from the biological point of view, he believes that it is possible and desirable ‘to deduce the laws of moral science from the social needs and habits of mankind’.
³⁹
‘Nature’, he writes in his incomplete
Ethics
,

Human beings are therefore by nature moral. Moreover, by living in society they develop their natural collective sense of justice which grows to become a habit. They are therefore morally progressive and their primitive instinct of solidarity will became more refined and comprehensive as civilization develops. Indeed, Kropotkin inferred from his study of nature and human history ‘the permanent presence of a
double tendency
– towards a greater development on the one side, of
sociality
, and, on the other side, of a consequent increase of the intensity of life, which results in an increase of
happiness for the
individuals
, and in progress — physical, intellectual, and moral.’
⁴¹

Kropotkin never completed his work on ethics, and what exists is principally an account of the evolutionary origins of the moral sense and a history of ethics from the Greeks to the end of the nineteenth century. In an earlier work on
Anarchist Morality
(1890) he sketched the outline of a system of ethics devoid of the metaphysical and the supernatural. He distinguishes between our innate moral sense and the rigid moral codes imposed by authority. Where the former gives rise to sympathy and solidarity, the latter find their origin in primitive superstitions taken over by priests and conquerors to support their rule.

The moral sense is expressed in mutual aid, without which society cannot exist. Kropotkin attempts to derive an objective system of ethics from observations of nature. He defines good as what is useful to the preservation of the species and evil as what is harmful to it. Morality is therefore a ‘natural’ need of animal species. And the morality which emerges from observations of the whole of the animal world may be summed up as:
‘Do
to others what you would have them do to you in the same circumstances.’
⁴²

But this definition of justice as equal treatment to be discovered in nature is not enough to hold society together. Altruism must also exist, a readiness to give more than is asked or required, and it is this moral quality which has inspired those who have most contributed to human progress. Like J. M. Guyau who sketched a scheme of morality independent of obligation or sanction, Kropotkin argues that this altruism comes from a feeling of the superabundance of life. It leads the individual to overflow with emotional and intellectual energy. Kropotkin therefore suggests as the summary of moral teaching: ‘spread your intelligence, your love, your energy of actions broadcast among others!’
⁴³
The goal to be aimed for is the plenitude of existence and the free development of every individual’s faculties.