Prince Peter Kropotkin: Philosophy
Kropotkin can be considered one of the last great anarchist thinkers. Truly a revolutionary and completely dedicated to his cause, one of his compatriots remarked that he had truly not seen a man as happy with what he was doing than Kropotkin. Rediscovered in the late '60s with the creation of the counterculture and the New Left, Kropotkin greatly affected European liberalism in the twentieth century, and was the creator of the American and British anarchist movements of today. Kropotkin was a truly unique man in the sense that he was willing to give up everything for what he believed in, and that is what he did until the very end of his life.
The anarchist theory Kropotkin advocated was a very libertarian anarchism much in the same pattern of French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's work. It's aim was to "put anarchism on a scientific basis," rationally planning the ideology and future history of the radical ideology, where people lived in harmony with the existence of an attitude he dubbed mutual aid (altruistic cooperation). Much of his philosophical thought is contained in the famous Mutual Aid (1902), which explains the way his theories work. In being in opposition to Darwinism, which stressed competition and conflict for survival and regeneration, Kropotkin proposed the idea that cooperation was the chief factor in the evolution and success of the species. This idea was based on his scientific studies of Siberia conducted in the 1860's, where he observed that sociability was dominant feature at every level of the animal world. Especially among humans, cooperation was the rule rather than the exception. In human societies, the way cooperation was undertaken among humans had evolved, generally organized into five stages: primitive tribe, peasant village, medieval commune, and finally, modern social/trade association (Red Cross, trade unions, etc.). Even after the rise of bureaucratic government, people still maintained some sort of localized cooperation among themselves. The trend of modern history, therefore, was going back towards decentralized, nonpolitical, and cooperative society. In such an environment, men could develop their "creative faculties" without inteference from rulers, religious leaders, or soldiers.
The ultimate goal of Kropotkin's theories was the creation of anarchist communism, a state in which society functioned on adherence to a principle of mutual aid. The ills of private property and economic inequality would be ridden through the free distribution of goods and services. The principle of wages, in which what was lopsidedly awarded was the basis of what was owned, would be replaced by the principle of need, an economic system in which what was needed was the basis for what was owned. Kropotkin envisioned a utopian society where men could "do both industrual and agricultural work." Society would be organized into communes, or cooperative communities, in which men would lead a comfortable life, working until forty or fifty years of age and integrated into an organic and pleasant existence for all due to a fair division of labor. However, the prince stressed the need for an "integral education," one in which both mental and manual skills would be cultivated, to produce an integrated society. All children would be taught science and mathematics as would be normal, but would also be taught in the outdoors by doing and observing first hand. Kropotkin also called for the modification of the penal system under this philosophy. Opposing the prison system in Russia that he had stayed in as "schools of crime" due to their harsh and psychologically trying environments, he called for a greater "human understanding" and moral pressure to be placed on prisoners for their own wellness. Such ideas were very utopian and idyllic, but were revolutionary ideas for Kropotkin's time which are being successfully tried all over the world today.