Kropotkin & Mutual Aid – Lesson 2: Mutual Aid vs Social Darwinism, nature is not a war of all against all
The idea that humans are naturally selfish and competitive is not science. It is ideology. Kropotkin knew how to prove it.
Kia ora,
Last lesson we met Kropotkin and the basic idea of mutual aid: that cooperation, not competition, is the fundamental driver of survival and progress. This lesson we go deeper into the scientific and political argument that underpins it.
To understand why mutual aid was so important as a theory in Kropotkin’s time — and still is today — we need to understand what he was arguing against: Social Darwinism.
What is Social Darwinism?
Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. His theory of natural selection was a genuine scientific revolution. But the version of Darwin that captured the popular imagination was not Darwin’s own. It was a distortion created by thinkers who wanted to use evolutionary science to justify the social order of industrial capitalism.
Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer — who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”, not Darwin — argued that competition was the fundamental law of nature, and therefore of society. The rich were rich because they were fitter. The poor were poor because they were weaker. Inequality was natural, even beneficial. Helping the poor would only interfere with the healthy operation of competition and slow human progress.
This was enormously convenient for the ruling class of Victorian Britain and Gilded Age America. It dressed exploitation and inequality in the language of science. It made the suffering of workers and the colonised not a political problem to be solved but a natural process to be accepted.
Social Darwinism today
Social Darwinism never went away. It just changed clothes. Neoliberal economics is Social Darwinism in a suit: the idea that markets are natural, competition is inevitable, the strong survive, and the rest adapt or perish. You hear it every time someone says:
“If they can’t afford rent, they should have made better choices.” “Businesses that fail deserve to fail.” “You can’t fight human nature — people are just selfish.” “Welfare creates dependency.” “The market knows best.”
In Aotearoa, this logic has been deployed relentlessly since the 1984 economic reforms. The Rogernomics revolution was not just a set of economic policies. It was an attempt to permanently install a Social Darwinist common sense: that competition is nature, cooperation is weakness, and anyone who can’t survive the market has only themselves to blame.
Kropotkin’s counter-argument
Kropotkin took the Social Darwinists on directly, on their own scientific terrain. He was not arguing from sentiment or morality alone. He was arguing from evidence.
His years in Siberia had given him an extraordinary natural laboratory. The conditions were so harsh that if competition were truly the dominant force in evolution, nothing should have survived. What he found instead was cooperation at every level: animals warning each other of predators, sharing food stores, huddling for warmth, caring for injured members of their groups.
He then traced mutual aid through human history: in indigenous and peasant communities, in medieval guilds, in the solidarity networks of the early labour movement. In every case, the communities that survived and flourished were not those where the strongest individuals dominated. They were those where cooperation was most developed.
His argument was straightforward: mutual aid is a factor of evolution. Not the only factor, but a decisive one. Species and communities that cooperate outcompete those that don’t, over the long run. Cooperation is not against nature. It is one of nature’s most powerful strategies.
The political stakes
Why does this matter so much? Because if human beings are naturally competitive and selfish, then capitalism is simply the political expression of human nature, and any alternative to it is utopian or authoritarian. But if cooperation is equally or more fundamental to human nature, then capitalism is not the natural order. It is a particular historical arrangement that has to be actively imposed and maintained — exactly what Gramsci’s concept of hegemony describes.
Kropotkin and Gramsci, read together, make a powerful argument: the ruling class maintains its power by making competition and selfishness feel natural, while actively suppressing and delegitimising the cooperative practices that have always been the real basis of working-class survival.
Every time a community organises a food bank, every time workers cover each other’s shifts, every time neighbours form a collective to resist eviction — they are not doing something sentimental. They are doing something scientifically sound, historically grounded, and politically subversive.
Questions for you
Where do you encounter Social Darwinist thinking in everyday life — in news coverage, political speech, workplace culture, or social media? What language does it use?
Can you think of examples from nature or from your own community that contradict the idea that competition is the dominant force in survival?
Reply or comment below. These questions connect the theory to your daily reality — that connection is exactly what we are building.
Next up: Lesson 3 – Mutual aid in working-class history: strikes, friendly societies, and solidarity networks.
In solidarity,
The Kiwi Dialect