Lesson 1: Who was Kropotkin, and what is mutual aid?

A Russian prince who became an anarchist, a scientist who watched animals survive by cooperating, and a theory that changes how you see the world.

Kia ora,

Welcome to the second course from The Kiwi Dialect. If you did the Gramsci course, you already have a framework for understanding how power maintains itself through culture and common sense. This course is about the other side of that story: how ordinary people resist, survive, and build power through cooperation.

The thinker we are working with is Pyotr Kropotkin. His big idea is mutual aid: the practice of people helping each other as a fundamental strategy for survival and flourishing.

Who was Kropotkin?

Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was born in Moscow in 1842, into one of Russia’s oldest noble families. He had every material advantage the Russian ruling class could offer. He chose not to use them.

As a young man Kropotkin became a geographer and scientist, spending years in Siberia and Manchuria on geological expeditions. What he saw there began to change him. The land was extraordinarily harsh. Animals and people faced brutal conditions. But what struck him was not the competition for survival. What struck him was the cooperation.

He watched animals help each other through hard winters. He watched peasant communities organise collectively to survive conditions that would have destroyed any individual or family acting alone. He read Darwin, but he came to a different conclusion than the Social Darwinists who were then dominating European thought.

Kropotkin became an anarchist, was imprisoned in Russia, escaped, and spent decades in Western Europe writing and organising. His masterwork, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, was published in 1902. He died in 1921, refusing honours from the new Bolshevik government and warning that centralised state socialism would become a new form of tyranny.

What is mutual aid?

Mutual aid is the practice of people voluntarily cooperating to meet each other’s needs, without the mediation of the state or the market. It is not charity. Charity flows from those who have to those who do not. Mutual aid flows between equals who recognise that they all need each other.

The distinction matters enormously. Charity maintains hierarchy. It positions the giver as superior and the receiver as grateful. Mutual aid refuses that hierarchy. It says: we are all vulnerable, we all have something to contribute, and we are stronger together than apart.

Kropotkin’s argument was that mutual aid is not idealistic or utopian. It is a hard biological and historical fact. Cooperation is how species survive. It is how human communities have always organised in conditions of scarcity and threat. The idea that human nature is fundamentally competitive and selfish is not a scientific observation. It is a ruling-class ideology.

Kropotkin and anarchism

Kropotkin was an anarchist, which in his tradition did not mean chaos or disorder. It meant the abolition of coercive hierarchy — particularly the state and capital — and the organisation of society through voluntary association, federation, and mutual aid.

This course does not require you to be an anarchist. Marxists, democratic socialists, and many others have drawn deeply on Kropotkin’s work on mutual aid without adopting his full political programme. What he offers is not a blueprint for the future state but a lens for understanding existing cooperative practices and their potential.

Where Gramsci asked how we build counter-hegemony through institutions and culture, Kropotkin asks how we build cooperative power through direct relationships and practice. The two traditions are complementary, not competing.

Why read Kropotkin now?

The COVID-19 pandemic produced an explosion of mutual aid networks around the world. In Aotearoa, in the UK, in the US, in India, in South Africa — ordinary people organised food, medicine, childcare, and support for their neighbours without waiting for the state. Many of these networks outlasted the pandemic. Many people who participated in them were radicalised by the experience.

At the same time, decades of welfare state erosion have left working-class communities more dependent on self-organised support than at any point since the mid-twentieth century. Food banks, community pantries, neighbour networks, and informal support systems are filling gaps that the state has deliberately vacated.

Kropotkin helps us understand both the depth of this tradition and its political stakes. Mutual aid is not a stopgap while we wait for better politics. It is a form of politics in itself — a practical demonstration that a different kind of world is already being built in the cracks of the existing one.

Questions for you

Think of a time when you or your community survived something difficult through cooperation rather than individual effort. What made that possible? What did it feel like?

What is the difference, in your experience, between receiving charity and being part of a mutual aid network? Have you experienced both?

Reply to this email or leave a comment. Every response is part of the course.

Next up: Lesson 2 – Mutual aid vs Social Darwinism: why survival of the fittest is a ruling-class myth.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect