The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

‘Don’t compete! – competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!’ Welcome to the anarchist history of the world. In this lively, provocative work, Peter Kropotkin argues that ‘mutual aid’ is a natural instinct in all of us, animal and human. Cooperation, reciprocity, support: these, for Kropotkin, are the overlooked foundations of our history. In this, Kropotkin challenges all the major orthodoxies of his age, from individualism and social Darwinism to Marxist theories of the saviour state. Instead, these essays insist that a better life for all of us – and our planet – begins when we reject competition, and embrace the local, the mutual and the collective.