That dude needs to read Kropotkin. His book on mutual aid is all about how cooperation is a natural law as well.
I don’t like the word civilization, although I have a hard time expressing exactly why I feel so. I associate the word with superiority over those who are uncivilized. I feel like the word is forwarding the word [barbarian], and thus creates xenophobia towards tribal societies. It makes us channel our force into the machine rather than into our communities.
I’ll have to read more about this to fern my impression.
Despite the quote, Kropotkin actually criticizes “civilized” peoples in Mutual Aid compared to “uncivilized” peoples, often in tribal forms of society. He doesn’t feitishize tribal societies either though, he tends to lean much more towards the village structure of society, which I agree on. I think an ideal anarchist society would function as a confederation of “villages” (note, I use that term loosely, I am not an anprim). There are PLENTY of historical examples of confederations across the world which have worked, long before the rise of the nation-state in the 1500s, which so “coincidently” forming alongside the advent of capitalism, individualism, and the beginning of European colonialism.
Anyways, I agree. I would describe myself as post-civ, as I think since the rise of the agricultural revolution, the socieities we look back on as entire civilizaitons have been controlled by a powerful, wealthy few, who use their monopoly on violence to enact their will. If that’s what civilization is, then I’m not really here for it.
Oh boy do I have a video for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0_w87J9Dj0
Civilization is the current state of affairs, a class-based society that must be abolished for it is antithetical to human life, especially nowadays with capital and it’s natural tendencies (war, crises, etc).
With this in mind, the quote implies that a future non-class based society would abolish cooperation which is funny
There are people out there that would say the opposite, atleast for humans. People like Bookchin and Öcalan.
That doesnt mean that they dont want technology to stop existing or that they explicity want to go back to a world where everyone lives in small groups of hunters & gatherers. They just connect the invention of the state with what many would say was the dawn/emergence of civilization.
Besides that, the phrasing has a really colonial undertone, using contrasting jungle & civilization and kind of assigning them positive and negative values. Wouldnt suprise me, because anarchist were really not that aware when it comes to colonialism around that time…
I think Kropotkin also said more or less the opposite himself in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.
He initially set out to prove Charles Darwin’s assertion that competition is the law of the Jungle and ended up discovering the opposite, and that’s why he wrote Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. It was intended to be a refutation of Charles Darwin’s work.
I was about to mention that too. The first part of mutual aid is talking through all the ways that animals work together and support each other.
