Social Kropotkinism: The Best ‘New Normal’ for Survival in the Post COVID-19, Climate Emergency World?

Jennifer  Cole; Adam  Badger; Phil  Brown; Oli  Mould

doi:10.36941/ajis-2022-0143

Authors

Jennifer Cole Lecturer, Global and Planetary Health, Department of Health Studies, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham TW20 0EX, United Kingdom
Adam Badger Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University, United Kingdom
Phil Brown Department of Behavioural and Social Sciences, University of Huddersfield, Queensgate, Huddersfield HD1 3DH, United Kingdom
Oli Mould Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, TW20 0EX, United Kingdom

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.36941/ajis-2022-0143

Keywords:

Anarchism, Kropotkin, evolution, mutual aid, community resilience, COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was originally an evolutionary biologist, writing shortly after Charles Darwin, who pointed to collaboration rather than competition as the underlying driver of (human) evolution, development and survival. This paper questions why ‘Social Darwinism’ has entered the language when ‘Social Kropotkinism’ has not. We position Social Kropotkinism – based on mutual support and community cooperation as opposed to Darwinian survival of the fittest – as having value as a new societal organising principle that can help to ensure social justice and equitable distribution of increasingly scarce resources in the post-pandemic, climate emergency world. We chart the re-emergence of Kropotkin’s ideas of mutualism against the current literature on the evolution of human cooperation, showing how the blossoming of community-level mutual aid during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has exposed and filled many cracks in UK Government provision of welfare and social care, is the inevitable end-result of the empathy and predisposition for cooperation that has underpinned the development of complex societies and civilisation.

Received: 5 August 2022 / Accepted: 13 October 2022 / Published: 5 November 2022