Ok. How should I start this? Well, Kropotkin is my favorite social anarchist writer. By far! From the four main ones, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Malatesta, he is the one I like the most. His first book I've read was a few years ago (maybe 4 years) and it was called The conquest of bread. About this subject, this was so far the book I tough it was the most honest and precise about all the aspects of the anarchist ideology, its necessity and its possibles developments, in a very simple, down to earth and human way. He doesn't have for example the frenetic fire Bakunin has, he is much more serene, which is quite hard to find in anarchists sometimes, and that amazes me about him. Well, I do like Bakunin also. Very much indeed. However I think Bakunin is more the kind of guy that would give the fuel to a machine, but wouldn't himself project and built the machine itself. For me this is more kind of a Kropotkin style. Well, anyway it doesn't matter. About anarchy Proudhon is a good guy also, however he gets to much into economics to me. I don't follow it to much so sometimes I get a bit lost into Proudhon's books. Well, Malatesta seems to be more of a Kropotkin also, however I confess I only read a few essays he wrote so I don't really have enough knowledge to conceive a very good opinion about him. Although I did like his essays I read. He has a nice touch of his Italianess on his philosophy I would say. He puts a bit of love into his writings for example. I find this amazing. This is something that to be fair you sometimes feel when reading about anarchy. That there is some ocean moving deep down that makes some people desire freedom for everybody. Call it love or whatever, although this is something I sometimes get from some anarchists essays, in Malatesta this seems to me to be more clear and open than in the Russians for example (Bakunin and Kropotkin). Although I confess this is more of a feeling I have than of an analytic analysis of theirs writings. But anyway, this was supposed to be about Kropotkin's book and not a review on anarchist writers. So let it be it. I might come back to the others latter on.
After falling in love with The conquest of bread, I decided to give a go at his other famous book called Mutual aid: A factor of evolution. I liked very much the title already. One of the things I most dislike about some capitalist preachers is when they come and say, but such are human beings, they like to compete, to be better than others, is the struggle to survive, the survival of the fittest, or whatever. Kind of trying to say that capitalism is almost nature's choice. Ok, as Kropotkin also says in his book, it is absolutely true that these kind of things are indeed present in human beings, and did exist over human evolution. But what is not true is that this is the only thing that exists in us. We are a bit more than only struggle and fight. This is what Kropotkin shows in this book. He starts showing mutual aid in nature, in animals. He does a very long analysis of Darwin's works but also does himself a lot of empirical research with many kind of animal species from Siberia and from other parts of Russian and the world. The first chapter is all dedicated to this study. I confess this kind of analysis is a bit new to me because I've never read Darwin's or any other biologist, or evolutionist, about those things. So Kropotkin was kind of the open door for me to it. I got a few other books about evolution and development of species to read latter, but that will still take some time. Ok, but the book is not only that. In the second chapter he starts to describe a lot of the development of the firsts human tribes and how mutual aid is present constantly over its evolution. He does a very anthropological study about human development from tribes, clans, small villages, cities and so on, and shows how even in the cruelest tribes there were always in some degree towards some aspects of its existence mutual aid. But more than this, he shows how mutual aid was indeed very important in the survival of animal species and of human societies all over history. In the latter chapters he goes on in history telling this kind of things until we get to our days. The book follows kind of the line: animals, savages, barbarians, medieval cities, and ourselves. It is a very good book about anthropology. But what impressed me the most is the amount of knowledge and detailed information he gives about such a variety of subjects. Specially biology and history. I don't know exactly how many years took him to write the whole book but I guess it couldn't have been less than ten years. The guy really studied and did a lot of research to write about it. To be fair, although I wasn't very familiarized with at least the biological part, I thinks this is by far one of the most rich books I've ever read in terms of content. The guy was amazing. Really, he was not only a social scientist but also a traditional scientist and knew history and anthropology very deeply. I am very amazed by him. And all for a noble cause. What a guy this Kropotkin was. Unbelievable!
By the way, this is a link for the .pdf if you are interested: http://www.complementarycurrency.org/ccLibrary/Mutual_Aid-A_Factor_of_Evolution-Peter_Kropotkin.pdf
