AT WHICH POINT OF TECHNOLOGICAL EVOLUTION DOES THE NEEDS TO HAVE GREATER ORGANISATION OF SOCIETIES BEYOND SIMPLE MUTUAL AID? 

IS THERE A NEED TO MAKE PROFITS IN ORDER TO EVOLVE TO THE NEXT STEP OF WHAT WE WANT, BEYOND WHAT WE NEED? DO WE NEED WARS?

DO WE UNDERSTAND THE IMPLICATION OF DEBT? IS DEBT NECESSARY ON A GREATER SCALE TO SUPPLY PROFITS FOR CORPORATIONS AND WAGES TO THE PEOPLE? IS DEBT A BURDEN ON THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT?

ARE WE ADDICTED TO PROGRESS? ARE WE ADDICTED TO STYLISTIC CONSUMPTION, BEYOND SURVIVAL?

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Mutual Aid, a Factor in Evolution - Peter Kropotkin

Darwinism had emphasized competition as the sole determining factor in evolution. According to Kropotkin, however, Darwin and his successors ignored an equally important, if not more important, factor: mutual aid.

BEFORE CONTINUING WITH KROPOTKIN, LET’S MAKE A DETOUR VIA GERMANY…

Something needs to be done to save Germany. 

€1 trillion of debt is not it

Berlin’s Russia war hysteria is taking it down a clearly signposted path of self-destruction…

BY Tarik Cyril Amar

Germans are famously – infamously, really – fiscally conservative. Believe me, I know: I am German and have witnessed for decades, indeed all my conscious life, how my compatriots have fretted obsessively over public debt.

They often conflate the rules that may work for individual, personal frugality with what is needed by a modern state and its economy. Indeed, they have crystallized their misguided ideal of how to manage public finance with a tight fist and little foresight in the odd avatar of ‘the Swabian Housewife’ (Swabians are stereotypically thrifty and prudent; sort of the Scots of the German sense of self).

And whenever the national adoration of the Swabian Housewife was not enough, plaintive sobs of ‘Weimar, Weimar’ were added. You see, Germany’s first failed experiment at (more or less) democracy, the Weimar Republic of the interwar years, is said to have died, among other things, of inflation.

Hyperinflation, so this shaky but (formerly) extremely powerful tale of a “unique inflation trauma” goes, undermined that state’s legitimacy from the very beginning, so that it could never grow strong enough to later withstand the pressure of the Great Depression and the Nazis.

Curiously enough, in this sorely mistaken version of recent German history, austerity was enshrined as the magic charm that will keep inflation away and therefore also other undesirable things such as Leni Riefenstahl movies, fascism, and starting and losing yet another world war while committing genocide.

In reality, it was, of course, precisely the austerity policy of the last Weimar governments, enacted about as undemocratically as is fashionable again now (see below), that really made the effects of the Great Depression even worse and helped open a path to power for the Nazis.

But this time, everything is different. In a truly unprecedented move – instantly recognized as historic, for better or, much more likely, worse – Germany’s elites, in politics, the media, and academia, have closed ranks Nuremberg-party-rally-style to make Germany splurge again. The upshot is a fundamental policy change, complete with fixing the constitution, another thing Germans usually are obstinately conservative about. And all that to go into massive, quite possibly crippling debt for, in essence, war with Russia.

For, in sum, there are three ways in which Germany wants to go on a big binge: The so-called debt brake – an anachronistic and economically primitive limit on public debt – will be removed for anything having to do with ‘defense’, that is, in reality a massive rearmament program, including civil defense and the intelligence services, as well as for military assistance to Ukraine.

Second, the German government will also incur debt to the tune of another €500 billion to be spent over 12 years. This money is supposed to be invested in climate action (a sob to Germany’s militaristic, far-right Greens) and infrastructure.

Infrastructure, here, has much to do with military purposes as well. No secret has been made out of the fact that often decrepit German railways, roads, and bridges, for instance, are to be renovated not merely for civilian and commercial purposes. Instead, as before in German history, trains and autobahn highways, for instance, are being highlighted as key parts of military logistics.

And as before as well, the big propaganda story is that they are needed for sending military forces into a fight against Russia. Only that this time, Germany is presented as a hub for all of NATO. Whatever ‘all of NATO’ may mean in the future.

Third – and usually overlooked – as Germany is a federation, its individual land states are also being empowered to assume additional debt. The way all of this is supposed to work together over the next decade or so, is complex. For instance, there are complicated and probably impractical rules designed to avoid labeling ordinary budget expenses and debt-making as part of this program. Yet the upshot is quite simple: The German government has created a tool to add a total of about a trillion euros or even more of debt.

It is true that to some extent, all of the above is simply a local variant of a general EU-plus-UK frenzy: With Brussels, London, and Paris as agitators-in-chief, the whole shabby, stagnating bloc is dreaming big about going into massive debt, perhaps even, in essence, confiscating private savings, to confront Russia. With or without the US. That is just another application of the key current governing principle of Western elites: Rule by permanent emergency. And if there is no real emergency around, they just make one up.

But there is also something specifically German about Berlin’s ‘Sonderweg’ into deadly debt. For one thing, so much then for that old habit of whining about inflation in ‘Weimar’: It turns out that the one purpose that makes Germans overcome their hitherto allegedly debilitating fear of inflation and debt is – wait for it – launching a re-armament program in the style of 1930s Nazi Germany. Because, we must assume, unlike Weimar, that regime ended really well.

You see the irony, I trust. The Greeks probably spot the tragedy: In 2015, the Germans, most of all, turned their nation into a ritual sacrifice to the EU god of Austerity (the bloodthirsty Kali version of the local Swabian Housewife deity).

Yet if ideological-narrative clumsiness and an astonishing inability to see just how bemusing they sometimes look to others were the only problems here, it would just be Germany as usual. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

Much more is at stake. Because there is a much worse irony: In principle, it is true that Germany urgently needs a big dose of Keynesianism, that is, of using public debt to relaunch its deindustrializing (compliments US and Ukraine) deathbed economy. Yet to tie this fundamentally sane and absolutely necessary policy to a hysterical war scare about Russia will produce great economic waste as well as terrible risks.

These risks include a ruinously costly failure of the policy with horrendously destabilizing domestic effects and an even more ruinous ‘success’, namely a self-fulfilling prophecy effect, in which what is officially presented as preventing war by increased deterrence will help bring that war about.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: The problem is not even that Berlin is admitting, once again, not only how dilapidated the German military is, but that something needs to be done in earnest, that is expensive, about that weakness. A reasonable modernization is urgently needed; and that, in principle, is a fact that serious observers, including in Moscow, are likely to understand (whether they currently find it useful to say so out loud or not).

What makes the stress on rearmament so pernicious in this case are four features that the German elites have deliberately attached to it: Ukraine; exaggeration; a truly deranged, monotonous propaganda drive about an impending war with Russia; and last but not least, a coup-like implementation of the policy by an unusually shameless maneuver.

To deal with the most obvious first: German companies may, of course, find production locations and markets in Ukraine, especially if the moronic Western proxy war finally ends (and they would have to thank both Washington and Moscow for that, definitely not Berlin or Brussels). Such investment and commerce would also benefit Ukrainians.

But simply throwing money at Kiev and its corrupt regimes must end, because in realistic terms, Ukraine is not an asset but a great burden. And for those who wish to talk about what they misunderstand as ‘values’: Ukraine is not a democracy and does not have the rule of law or a halfway free media; its ‘civil society’ – at least what Westerners encounter in chic cafes in Kiev and on promotion tours across academia – is a bloated grant fraud gig; and to top it all off, it is extremely corrupt. For Berlin, it is perverse, self-damaging, and actually immoral to feed Ukrainian elites even more money.

Secondly, it is not possible to pin down the precise mix between military and civilian deficit spending that would be the optimal Keynesian mix to jolt Germany out its economic coma. But there can be no doubt that the current plans have erred on the military side, probably massively. For one thing, it is a simple economic fact that weapons and other military expenditures are not productive in the usual sense. They are at best third-best to prime the pump of a national economy. Those fantasizing about enormous knock-on effects to compensate for that fact are either ignorant or dishonest.

Unsurprisingly, even the German government’s own chief auditing body – the Bundesrechnungshof – has criticized the debt plans: For the federal auditors, they are excessive as a whole. And, regarding their preponderant military side, they find that these expenses should not have been freed from the debt brake, making them, in effect, unlimited. As a result, “long-term, high interest expenditures” will threaten damage to state finances as well as corporations, leading to “economic and social risks.”

Time will tell, but much of the currently fashionable boosterism and boasting is likely to be remembered with embarrassment. Joe Kaeser, the head of the Siemens conglomerate, for instance, may – like Chancellor-elect Friedrich Merz – exult now about Germany being back. He has clearly overlooked that, with Germany especially, the question should always be ‘back to what?’ Yet even he notices that ‘we don’t know exactly how’.

Really? What intriguing nonchalance when you are about to pick up a trillion euros of additional national debt. No wonder that even Switzerland’s arch-capitalist and very Russophobic Neue Zuercher Zeitung has met the new German enthusiasm for debt with pronounced skepticism.

Thirdly, there is the war scare. For those who do not know German, it may be hard to imagine just how pervasively unhinged Germany’s public sphere has become. Traditional as well as social media are feeding the population a constant, ceaseless torrent of Russophobic war-in-sight propaganda. The very few and thoroughly marginalized German critics of this manufactured mass psychosis speak of war hysteria, and they are right.

Tellingly, a small but ubiquitous platoon of experts-from-hell such as Carlo Masala, Soenke Neitzel, Gustav Gressel, and Claudia Major have gone into overdrive: After years of getting everything – yes, really, everything – wrong about the Ukraine conflict, they are now confidently predicting a war with Russia and telling Germans what to think and do about it.

Their fascinatingly diverse (not) and always fresh and surprising (also not, really not) discussions, pounding Germans on a nearly daily basis from one studio or another, usually now turn on when exactly ‘the Russian’ (Der Russe!) is going to strike. Opinions vary between essentially tomorrow morning and in a few years.

And that insanity is, unfortunately, now representative in Germany, at least among its so-called elites. One problem with this propaganda is old and obvious: Those spreading it start believing in it themselves. Indeed, in Germany, they have long reached that stage: Like the doomsday cult, which they really are, they are self-hystericizing and self-escalating.

Which means that while a rational German leadership would seek to balance due diligence in matters of security with national-interest-based diplomacy and, yes, cooperation with Russia, this type of approach is now impossible. Instead, those Germans who love to talk in the name of the nation are busy talking it into yet another very stupid, very unnecessary, and, in the end, very lost war.

Finally, there is the way in which this policy turn was executed. It may have been (barely, formally) legal, but if so, then only by the letter of the law. Its spirit and democracy as such have been violated vigorously and in public. For Merz, who is not even chancellor yet, has used the old, pre-election parliament to ram these changes through. The new parliament, already elected, would not have allowed him to find a majority for this operation.

This means Germany’s next chancellor deliberately went against the already clearly declared will of the voters, and he did so by using a transparent dirty trick. All the parties helping him do so, including the Greens and his likely future coalition partners from the Social Democrats, have sullied themselves.

And all that while Merz has shown his contempt for law and decency by inviting the internationally wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu to Germany, and Sarah Wagenknecht’s BSW has been kept out of parliament by obvious election manipulation and extremely likely falsification. No wonder many Germans have lost belief in the traditional parties. If there is one force standing to profit from all of the above it is, of course, the AfD, Germany’s strongest opposition party now. German Centrists: Don’t cry on our shoulders and don’t whine about ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ when your silly firewall against the AfD crumbles. You only have yourselves to blame.

Is there any hope left? Yes, maybe. Because although this is a terrible beginning, the policy just started is also meant to be carried out over a decade and more. Much may happen in that time. For instance, German corporations might finally – if quietly – rebel against being crippled by a self-defeating sanctions war against Russia, especially when their US competitors will be back in the Russia business, as they are clearly itching to. The Ukraine conflict may end in such a manner that Germany’s Zelensky stans simply won’t have anyone left to send the money to. Last but not least, even currently hyperventilating Germans may perhaps notice when Russia does not, actually, attack.

Yet for now, Germany is continuing on its path of severe and self-evident national self-harm. And unfortunately, history teaches that Germans can stay such a course through to a very bitter end. There are no guarantees that things will be better this time.

https://www.rt.com/news/614669-save-germany-trillion-debt/

BACK TO KOPOTKIN…

Kropotkin believed that a communist society could be established only by a social revolution, which he described as, "... the taking possession by the people of all social wealth. It is the abolition of all the forces which have so long hampered the development of Humanity".[57] However, he criticized forms of revolutionary methods (like those proposed by Marxism and Blanquism) that retained the use of state power, arguing that any central authority was incompatible with the dramatic changes needed by a social revolution. Kropotkin believed that the mechanisms of the state were deeply rooted in maintaining the power of one class over another, and thus could not be used to emancipate the working class.[58] Instead, Kropotkin insisted that both private property and the state needed to be abolished together.

(GUSNOTE: THE WEF… WHERE WE’RE AT:

ABOLISH PRIVATE PROPERTY, THE STATE IS CONTROLLED  BY CORPORATION IN WHICH YOU CAN PARTICIPATE…)

The economic change which will result from the Social Revolution will be so immense and so profound, it must so change all the relations based today on property and exchange, that it is impossible for one or any individual to elaborate the different social forms, which must spring up in the society of the future. [...] Any authority external to it will only be an obstacle, only a trammel on the organic labor which must be accomplished, and beside that a source of discord and hatred.[57]

Kropotkin believed that any post-revolutionary government would lack the local knowledge to organize a diverse population. Their vision of society would be limited by their own vindictive, self-serving, or narrow ideals.[59] To ensure order, preserve authority, and organize production the state would need to use violence and coercion to suppress further revolution, and control workers. The workers would be reliant on the state bureaucracy to organize them, so they would never develop the initiative to self-organize as they needed.[57] This would lead to the re-creation of classes, an oppressed workforce, and eventually another revolution.[60] Thus, Kropotkin wrote that maintaining the state would paralyze any true social revolution, making the idea of a "revolutionary government" a contradiction in terms:

We know that Revolution and Government are incompatible; one must destroy the other, no matter what name is given to government, whether dictator, royalty, or parliament. We know that what makes the strength and the truth of our party is contained in this fundamental formula — "Nothing good or durable can be done except by the free initiative of the people, and every government tends to destroy it;" and so the very best among us, if their ideas had not to pass through the crucible of the popular mind, before being put into execution, and if they should become masters of that formidable machine — the government — and could thus act as they chose, would become in a week fit only for the gallows. We know whither every dictator leads, even the best intentioned, — namely to the death of all revolutionary movement.[57]

Rather than a centralized approach, Kropotkin stressed the need for decentralized organization. He believed that dissolving the state would cripple counter-revolution without reverting to authoritarian methods of control, writing, "In order to conquer, something more than guillotines are required. It is the revolutionary idea, the truly wide revolutionary conception, which reduces its enemies to impotence by paralyzing all the instruments by which they have governed hitherto."[59] He believed this was possible only through a widespread "Boldness of thought, a distinct and wide conception of all that is desired, constructive force arising from the people in proportion as the negation of authority dawns; and finally—the initiative of all in the work of reconstruction—this will give to the revolution the Power required to conquer."[59]

Kropotkin applied this criticism to the Bolsheviks' rule following the October Revolution. Kropotkin summarized his thoughts in a 1919 letter to the workers of Western Europe, promoting the possibility of revolution, but also warning against the centralized control in Russia, which he believed had condemned them to failure.[61] Kropotkin wrote to Lenin in 1920, describing the desperate conditions that he believed to be the result of bureaucratic organization, and urging Lenin to allow for local and decentralized institutions.[62] Following an announcement of executions later that year, Kropotkin sent Lenin another furious letter, admonishing the terror which Kropotkin saw as needlessly destructive.[63]

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MUTUAL AID

A FACTOR OF EVOLUTION

BY P. KROPOTKIN

1902

INTRODUCTION

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.

The terrible snow-storms which sweep over the northern portion of Eurasia in the later part of the winter, and the glazed frost that often follows them; the frosts and the snow-storms which return every year in the second half of May, when the trees are already in full blossom and insect life swarms everywhere; the early frosts and, occasionally, the heavy snowfalls in July and August, which suddenly destroy myriads of insects, as well as the second broods of the birds in the prairies; the torrential rains, due to the monsoons, which fall in more temperate regions in August and September—resulting in inundations on a scale which is only known in America and in Eastern Asia, and swamping, on the plateaus, areas as wide as European States; and finally, the heavy snowfalls, early in October, which eventually render a territory as large as France and Germany, absolutely impracticable for ruminants, and destroy them by the thousand—these were the conditions under which I saw animal life struggling in Northern Asia. They made me realize at an early date the overwhelming importance in Nature of what Darwin described as "the natural checks to over-multiplication," in comparison to the struggle between individuals of the same species for the means of subsistence, which may go on here and there, to some limited extent, but never attains the importance of the former. Paucity of life, under-population—not over-population—being the distinctive feature of that immense part of the globe which we name Northern Asia, I conceived since then serious doubts—which subsequent study has only confirmed—as to the reality of that fearful competition for food and life within each species, which was an article of faith with most Darwinists, and, consequently, as to the dominant part which this sort of competition was supposed to play in the evolution of new species.

On the other hand, wherever I saw animal life in abundance, as, for instance, on the lakes where scores of species and millions of individuals came together to rear their progeny; in the colonies of rodents; in the migrations of birds which took place at that time on a truly American scale along the Usuri; and especially in a migration of fallow-deer which I witnessed on the Amur, and during which scores of thousands of these intelligent animals came together from an immense territory, flying before the coming deep snow, in order to cross the Amur where it is narrowest—in all these scenes of animal life which passed before my eyes, I saw Mutual Aid and Mutual Support carried on to an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species, and its further evolution.

And finally, I saw among the semi-wild cattle and horses in Transbaikalia, among the wild ruminants everywhere, the squirrels, and so on, that when animals have to struggle against scarcity of food, in consequence of one of the above-mentioned causes, the whole of that portion of the species which is affected by the calamity, comes out of the ordeal so much impoverished in vigour and health, that no progressive evolution of the species can be based upon such periods of keen competition.

Consequently, when my attention was drawn, later on, to the relations between Darwinism and Sociology, I could agree with none of the works and pamphlets that had been written upon this important subject. They all endeavoured to prove that Man, owing to his higher intelligence and knowledge, may mitigate the harshness of the struggle for life between men; but they all recognized at the same time that the struggle for the means of existence, of every animal against all its congeners, and of every man against all other men, was "a law of Nature." This view, however, I could not accept, because I was persuaded that to admit a pitiless inner war for life within each species, and to see in that war a condition of progress, was to admit something which not only had not yet been proved, but also lacked confirmation from direct observation.

On the contrary, a lecture "On the Law of Mutual Aid," which was delivered at a Russian Congress of Naturalists, in January 1880, by the well-known zoologist, Professor Kessler, the then Dean of the St. Petersburg University, struck me as throwing a new light on the whole subject. Kessler's idea was, that besides the law of Mutual Struggle there is in Nature the law of Mutual Aid, which, for the success of the struggle for life, and especially for the progressive evolution of the species, is far more important than the law of mutual contest. This suggestion—which was, in reality, nothing but a further development of the ideas expressed by Darwin himself in The Descent of Man—seemed to me so correct and of so great an importance, that since I became acquainted with it (in 1883) I began to collect materials for further developing the idea, which Kessler had only cursorily sketched in his lecture, but had not lived to develop. He died in 1881.

In one point only I could not entirely endorse Kessler's views. Kessler alluded to "parental feeling" and care for progeny (see below, Chapter I) as to the source of mutual inclinations in animals. However, to determine how far these two feelings have really been at work in the evolution of sociable instincts, and how far other instincts have been at work in the same direction, seems to me a quite distinct and a very wide question, which we hardly can discuss yet. It will be only after we have well established the facts of mutual aid in different classes of animals, and their importance for evolution, that we shall be able to study what belongs in the evolution of sociable feelings, to parental feelings, and what to sociability proper—the latter having evidently its origin at the earliest stages of the evolution of the animal world, perhaps even at the "colony-stages." I consequently directed my chief attention to establishing first of all, the importance of the Mutual Aid factor of evolution, leaving to ulterior research the task of discovering the origin of the Mutual Aid instinct in Nature.

The importance of the Mutual Aid factor—"if its generality could only be demonstrated"—did not escape the naturalist's genius so manifest in Goethe. When Eckermann told once to Goethe—it was in 1827—that two little wren-fledglings, which had run away from him, were found by him next day in the nest of robin redbreasts (Rothkehlchen), which fed the little ones, together with their own youngsters, Goethe grew quite excited about this fact. He saw in it a confirmation of his pantheistic views, and said:—"If it be true that this feeding of a stranger goes through all Nature as something having the character of a general law—then many an enigma would be solved." He returned to this matter on the next day, and most earnestly entreated Eckermann (who was, as is known, a zoologist) to make a special study of the subject, adding that he would surely come "to quite invaluable treasuries of results" (Gespräche, edition of 1848, vol. iii. pp. 219, 221). Unfortunately, this study was never made, although it is very possible that Brehm, who has accumulated in his works such rich materials relative to mutual aid among animals, might have been inspired by Goethe's remark.

Several works of importance were published in the years 1872-1886, dealing with the intelligence and the mental life of animals (they are mentioned in a footnote in Chapter I of this book), and three of them dealt more especially with the subject under consideration; namely, Les Societes animales, by Espinas (Paris, 1877); La Lutte pour l'existence et l'association pout la lutte, a lecture by J.L. Lanessan (April 1881); and Louis Buchner's book, Liebe und Liebes-Leben in der Thierwelt, of which the first edition appeared in 1882 or 1883, and a second, much enlarged, in 1885. But excellent though each of these works is, they leave ample room for a work in which Mutual Aid would be considered, not only as an argument in favour of a pre-human origin of moral instincts, but also as a law of Nature and a factor of evolution. Espinas devoted his main attention to such animal societies (ants, bees) as are established upon a physiological division of labour, and though his work is full of admirable hints in all possible directions, it was written at a time when the evolution of human societies could not yet be treated with the knowledge we now possess. Lanessan's lecture has more the character of a brilliantly laid-out general plan of a work, in which mutual support would be dealt with, beginning with rocks in the sea, and then passing in review the world of plants, of animals and men. As to Buchner's work, suggestive though it is and rich in facts, I could not agree with its leading idea. The book begins with a hymn to Love, and nearly all its illustrations are intended to prove the existence of love and sympathy among animals. However, to reduce animal sociability to love and sympathy means to reduce its generality and its importance, just as human ethics based upon love and personal sympathy only have contributed to narrow the comprehension of the moral feeling as a whole. It is not love to my neighbour—whom I often do not know at all—which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me. So it is also with animals. It is not love, and not even sympathy (understood in its proper sense) which induces a herd of ruminants or of horses to form a ring in order to resist an attack of wolves; not love which induces wolves to form a pack for hunting; not love which induces kittens or lambs to play, or a dozen of species of young birds to spend their days together in the autumn; and it is neither love nor personal sympathy which induces many thousand fallow-deer scattered over a territory as large as France to form into a score of separate herds, all marching towards a given spot, in order to cross there a river. It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy—an instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life.

The importance of this distinction will be easily appreciated by the student of animal psychology, and the more so by the student of human ethics. Love, sympathy and self-sacrifice certainly play an immense part in the progressive development of our moral feelings. But it is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience—be it only at the stage of an instinct—of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one's happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad and necessary foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed. But this subject lies outside the scope of the present work, and I shall only indicate here a lecture, "Justice and Morality" which I delivered in reply to Huxley's Ethics, and in which the subject has been treated at some length.

Consequently I thought that a book, written on Mutual Aid as a Law of Nature and a factor of evolution, might fill an important gap. When Huxley issued, in 1888, his "Struggle-for-life" manifesto (Struggle for Existence and its Bearing upon Man), which to my appreciation was a very incorrect representation of the facts of Nature, as one sees them in the bush and in the forest, I communicated with the editor of the Nineteenth Century, asking him whether he would give the hospitality of his review to an elaborate reply to the views of one of the most prominent Darwinists; and Mr. James Knowles received the proposal with fullest sympathy. I also spoke of it to W. Bates. "Yes, certainly; that is true Darwinism," was his reply. "It is horrible what 'they' have made of Darwin. Write these articles, and when they are printed, I will write to you a letter which you may publish." Unfortunately, it took me nearly seven years to write these articles, and when the last was published, Bates was no longer living.

After having discussed the importance of mutual aid in various classes of animals, I was evidently bound to discuss the importance of the same factor in the evolution of Man. This was the more necessary as there are a number of evolutionists who may not refuse to admit the importance of mutual aid among animals, but who, like Herbert Spencer, will refuse to admit it for Man. For primitive Man—they maintain—war of each against all was the law of life. In how far this assertion, which has been too willingly repeated, without sufficient criticism, since the times of Hobbes, is supported by what we know about the early phases of human development, is discussed in the chapters given to the Savages and the Barbarians.

The number and importance of mutual-aid institutions which were developed by the creative genius of the savage and half-savage masses, during the earliest clan-period of mankind and still more during the next village-community period, and the immense influence which these early institutions have exercised upon the subsequent development of mankind, down to the present times, induced me to extend my researches to the later, historical periods as well; especially, to study that most interesting period—the free medieval city republics, of which the universality and influence upon our modern civilization have not yet been duly appreciated. And finally, I have tried to indicate in brief the immense importance which the mutual-support instincts, inherited by mankind from its extremely long evolution, play even now in our modern society, which is supposed to rest upon the principle: "every one for himself, and the State for all," but which it never has succeeded, nor will succeed in realizing.

It may be objected to this book that both animals and men are represented in it under too favourable an aspect; that their sociable qualities are insisted upon, while their anti-social and self-asserting instincts are hardly touched upon. This was, however, unavoidable. We have heard so much lately of the "harsh, pitiless struggle for life," which was said to be carried on by every animal against all other animals, every "savage" against all other "savages," and every civilized man against all his co-citizens—and these assertions have so much become an article of faith—that it was necessary, first of all, to oppose to them a wide series of facts showing animal and human life under a quite different aspect. It was necessary to indicate the overwhelming importance which sociable habits play in Nature and in the progressive evolution of both the animal species and human beings: to prove that they secure to animals a better protection from their enemies, very often facilities for getting food and (winter provisions, migrations, etc.), longevity, therefore a greater facility for the development of intellectual faculties; and that they have given to men, in addition to the same advantages, the possibility of working out those institutions which have enabled mankind to survive in its hard struggle against Nature, and to progress, notwithstanding all the vicissitudes of its history. It is a book on the law of Mutual Aid, viewed at as one of the chief factors of evolution—not on all factors of evolution and their respective values; and this first book had to be written, before the latter could become possible.

I should certainly be the last to underrate the part which the self-assertion of the individual has played in the evolution of mankind. However, this subject requires, I believe, a much deeper treatment than the one it has hitherto received. In the history of mankind, individual self-assertion has often been, and continually is, something quite different from, and far larger and deeper than, the petty, unintelligent narrow-mindedness, which, with a large class of writers, goes for "individualism" and "self-assertion." Nor have history-making individuals been limited to those whom historians have represented as heroes. My intention, consequently, is, if circumstances permit it, to discuss separately the part taken by the self-assertion of the individual in the progressive evolution of mankind. I can only make in this place the following general remark:—When the Mutual Aid institutions—the tribe, the village community, the guilds, the medieval city—began, in the course of history, to lose their primitive character, to be invaded by parasitic growths, and thus to become hindrances to progress, the revolt of individuals against these institutions took always two different aspects. Part of those who rose up strove to purify the old institutions, or to work out a higher form of commonwealth, based upon the same Mutual Aid principles; they tried, for instance, to introduce the principle of "compensation," instead of the lex talionis, and later on, the pardon of offences, or a still higher ideal of equality before the human conscience, in lieu of "compensation," according to class-value. But at the very same time, another portion of the same individual rebels endeavoured to break down the protective institutions of mutual support, with no other intention but to increase their own wealth and their own powers. In this three-cornered contest, between the two classes of revolted individuals and the supporters of what existed, lies the real tragedy of history. But to delineate that contest, and honestly to study the part played in the evolution of mankind by each one of these three forces, would require at least as many years as it took me to write this book.

Of works dealing with nearly the same subject, which have been published since the publication of my articles on Mutual Aid among Animals, I must mention The Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man, by Henry Drummond (London, 1894), and The Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct, by A. Sutherland (London, 1898). Both are constructed chiefly on the lines taken in Buchner's Love, and in the second work the parental and familial feeling as the sole influence at work in the development of the moral feelings has been dealt with at some length. A third work dealing with man and written on similar lines is The Principles of Sociology, by Prof. F.A. Giddings, the first edition of which was published in 1896 at New York and London, and the leading ideas of which were sketched by the author in a pamphlet in 1894. I must leave, however, to literary critics the task of discussing the points of contact, resemblance, or divergence between these works and mine.

The different chapters of this book were published first in the Nineteenth Century ("Mutual Aid among Animals," in September and November 1890; "Mutual Aid among Savages," in April 1891; "Mutual Aid among the Barbarians," in January 1892; "Mutual Aid in the Medieval City," in August and September 1894; and "Mutual Aid amongst Modern Men," in January and June 1896). In bringing them out in a book form my first intention was to embody in an Appendix the mass of materials, as well as the discussion of several secondary points, which had to be omitted in the review articles. It appeared, however, that the Appendix would double the size of the book, and I was compelled to abandon, or, at least, to postpone its publication. The present Appendix includes the discussion of only a few points which have been the matter of scientific controversy during the last few years; and into the text I have introduced only such matter as could be introduced without altering the structure of the work.

I am glad of this opportunity for expressing to the editor of the Nineteenth Century, Mr. James Knowles, my very best thanks, both for the kind hospitality which he offered to these papers in his review, as soon as he knew their general idea, and the permission he kindly gave me to reprint them.

Bromley, Kent, 1902.

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