Here are some quotes from the back cover of Freedom Press's 1998 reprint of Peter Kropotkin's 1902 work, MUTUAL AID: A Factor of Evolution.

"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 path to advantage for individuals.  If Kropotkin overemphasized mutual aid, most Darwinians in Western Europe exaggerated competition just as strongly.  If Kropotkin drew . . . 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."
                                                                         

 STEPHEN JAY GOULD

"In light of scientific investigation in the many fields upon which Mutual Aid draws since its  publication, Kropotkin's data and the discussion he based them on stand up reasonable well . . . .Mutual Aid will never be any more out of date than the Declaration of Independence.  New facts may increasingly become available, but we can already see that they will serve largely to support Kropotkin's conclusion that 'in the ethical progress of man, mutual support--not mutual struggle--has had the leading part'."

ASHLEY MONTAGU

"The earliest theorists of anarchism, such as William Godwin and Kropotkin, strikingly anticipate the findings of sociology in their estimate of human behaviour and the means of modifying conduct. . . . Kropotkin profoundly influenced biology by his theory of Mutual Aid, propounded as a counterblast to the social conclusions drawn from the Darwinian 'struggle for existence'.  He was one the first systematic students of animal communities, and may be regarded as the founder of modern social ecology."

ALEX COMFORT

 

Another anarchist I like is Jean Grave (1854-1930).  Here is a paragraph from Louis Patsouras's book, The Anarchism of Jean Grave:

For Grave, anarchism embodied free and co-operative individuals in an egalitarian environment  free of any authority associated with hierarchy in such institutions as government, private capital and religion, the antithesis of the Liberal view of legally free but economically and socially stratified individuals locked in competition.  There was a social contract, so to speak, that united the individual to the general community, the universality of mutual aid,  which anarchists would defend by arms if necessary.  In the event of civil war, would not anarchism, however, not need organisation and hierarchy in order to defend itself?  Perhaps, but one must not discount the various anarchist safeguards that would make hierarchy difficult in the long run, like absence of wage labour, general equality and participatory democracy.

Here is something from Martin Buber's Paths in Utopia on the ideas of the German anarchist and martyr, Gustav Landauer.

"It would be madness,"  Landauer writes in a letter to a woman who wanted to abolish marriage, "to dream of abolishing the few forms of union that remain to us!  We need form, not formlessness.  We need tradition."  He who builds, not arbitrarily and fruitlessly, but  legitimately and for the future, acts with inner kinship with age-old tradition, and this entrusts itself to him and gives him strength.  It will now be clear why Landauer calls the "other" relationship which man can enter into instead the ordinary State-relationship, not by nay new name but simply "People".  Such a "People" comprehend comprehend the innermost reality of "Nationhood" - what remains over after when "Statehood" and politicization have been superseded:  a community of being and  a being in manifold community.

As promised, here is a little more from Colin Ward.  It is from his essay Harmony in Complexity appearing in Anarchy in Action.  I'll just quote a few sentences to give the gist and recommend you read the balance for yourself, which is my strategy for all the posts in this series.


One of the most frequently met reasons for dismissing anarchism as a social theory is the argument that while one can imagine it existing in a small, isolated, primitive community, it can not possibly be conceived in the context of large, complex, industrial societies.  This view misunderstands both the nature of anarchism and the nature of tribal societies. . . .


Anarchy is a function, not of society's simplicity and lack of organisation, but of its complexity and multiplicity of social organisations. . . . 

The anarchist alternative is that of fragmentation, fission rather than fusion, diversity rather than unity,  a mass of societies rather than  a mass society. 

One of my favorite anarchists died recently.  That would be Colin Ward (1924-2010).  The journal, Anarchist Studies, is dedicating  a special issue in Autumn 2011 to his work and legacy.  The volume 18, number 10 issue of that same journal has a tribute to him written by David Goodway.  I want to quote from it here and then in a later post I'll give a Ward quote from his essay Harmony Through Complexity.

" . . . His  third book, Anarchy in Action (1973), was his only work on the theory of anarchism, and indeed the only one 'directly and specifically about anarchism' until his final publication, Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction (2004).  In Anarchy in Action he makes entirely explicit his highly original anarchism ( even if, as he always acknowledged, much indebted to Kropotkin and Landauer).  The opening words have been much quoted: 'Th argument of this book is that an anarchist society,  a society that organizes itself without authority, is always in existence, like  a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism'.  His kind of anarchism, 'far from being a speculative vision of a future society . . . is a description of a mode of human organization, rooted in the experience of everyday life, which operates side by side with, and in spite of, the dominant authoritarian trend of our society'."