Catherine Malabou / Rethinking Mutual Aid: Kropotkin and Singer in debate

/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Catherine Malabou

Peter Kropotkin / Photo: PD-US - Peter Singer / Photo: John Donegan/1826

Since the beginning of the current sanitary crisis, many reflections on the necessity of mutual aid, solidarity, and cooperation have emerged here and there. It is important to notice from the outset that mutual aid, understood as a genuine concept, is not a temporarily limited set of actions determined by the emergency of a crisis. Mutual aid, in the eyes of its most influent thinkers, is an actual revolutionary dynamism, the motor of a totally renewed vision of the  social. As we know, mutual aid has been one of the most important theoretical and practical tenet of XIXth century anarchism. His prominent representant is of course Piotr Kropotkin, author of the famous 1902 Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.[1]

I got deeply involved in the exploration of this concept when I started to write my new book on the philosophical dimension of anarchy and anarchism.  What gave me the incentive to begin writing this book was the revelation, so to speak, that anarchism was the most plastic of all political theories to the extent that it does not refer to any fixed political doctrine, does not dogmatically set up a well constituted body of doctrines, and is made of a myriad of theories and concrete practices all over the world. The plasticity of anarchism, and consequently the anarchism of plasticity itself, appear in the making, they invent their own forms while asserting the necessity of such an invention. The absence of principles (an-archy) implies the production of prefigurative formal creations and actions.

Mutual aid is one of these forms. 

It has become necessary to go back to its anarchist birth place, in order to situate its political value. Once again, mutual aid is not just care, or solidarity. It relies on a biological theory, pertaining to evolutionism. It is defined by Kropotkin as an evolutionary trend, that he contrasts with Darwin’s notion of natural selection. Living beings do not only compete Kropotkin does not negate the existence of natural selection), they also help each other in order to survive.

Before I develop this point, I have to remark that because of its biological roots, mutual aid has been ridiculed and rejected. First, it was judged too naïve, too confident in a kind of natural benevolence. Second and more seriously, it was judged dangerous because of its anticipatory flirting in with socio-biologism (Edward Wilson, Sociobiology, the New Synthesis, 1975), and its vision of a naturalistic and essentialist basis for politics. Third, it was proven (supposedly) untrue by a great number of biologists and ethologists who, in a great many diversity of ways, have undertook to demonstrate, from the end of the XIXth century on, that all forms of altruistic behaviors in animals as well as in humans were just forms of veiled selfishness. We would only help others when this can benefit us (or our genes, cf Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene) in a way or another.

Altruism. Such is the key concept associated with that of mutual aid. Kropotkin does not make an extended use of it, but we understand, when we read Mutual Aid, that it constantly sustains his analysis. I have also to remark that the term “altruism”, coined by Auguste Comte, has not become a canonical philosophical concept, outside some anglo-saxon moral theories. An altruistic behavior may be defined as « a behavior that benefits others at some cost to oneself ». It is clear that mutual aid may be regarded the highest form of altruistic behaviors. Once again, altruism, and consequently also mutual aid, have not received the philosophical attention they deserved. Not a word about them in Levinas’ ethics for example. 

Too naïve once again, too morally simplistic, and essentialist.

Biologists on their end agree that some animal behaviors are altruistic: food sharing, groom exchanges in monkeys for example. In their views though, altruistic behaviors are forms are always reciprocal. Helping the others would only possible if sustained by the expectation that others will help us in return. Kin altruism (the sacrifice of the individual to preserve its kinship, behaviors meant to improve the genetic prospects of my children surviving and reproducing), group selection (preservation of the group at the cost of destruction of other groups), are be the most well-known forms of altruistic behaviors. Later on, economists like Robert Axelrod have established that the formal pattern of altruism was just “tit for tat”.

Time has come to reexamine the link that exists between mutual aid and altruism. If I chose here to confront Piotr Kropotkin and Peter Singer, two very different thinkers to say the least, both claim the existence of non-reciprocal altruism. Mutual aid as conceived by Kropotkin implies the suspension of reciprocity. Non-reciprocal altruism is the basis of Singer’s effective altruism.

As I  just mentioned, the two thinkers have little in common. Kropotkin inscribes his theory of mutual aid within an anarchist critique of capitalism. Singer does not attack capitalism, on the contrary. Effective altruism is a way to modestly and tentatively repair the inefficacy of governments regarding extreme poverty and precarity. It is not a challenge of the concept of government per se. Besides, capitalism is not antagonistic with mutual aid and altruism. Singer affirms that hyper rich people like Bill Gates or George Soros actually help by giving huge amount of money to charities or environmental organizations. He writes : « (…) Effective altruism typically value equality not for its own sake but for its consequences. It isn’t clear that making the rich richer without making the poor poorer has bad consequences, overall. It increases the ability of the rich to help the poor, and some of the world’s richest people, including Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, have done precisely that, becoming, in terms of the amount of money given, the greatest effective altruists in human history. (…) It would not be easy to demonstrate that capitalism has driven more people into extreme poverty than it has lifted out of it ; indeed there are good grounds for thinking that the opposite is the case. »[2] Singer mentions Kropotkin in several of his books, but only rapidly and in passing. It is clear that Singer would never present himself as an anarchist — even if this point could and should be discussed.

Yet, I do think that Kropotkin and Singer share much more common traits than it seems. They are, as far as I can judge, the only two thinkers who propose a vision of the link between biology, ethics and politics without elaborating a biologism. This link is precisely mutual aid for the former, effective altruism  for the latter. For Kropotkin, mutual aid is an evolutionary trend for the former, for Singer, it a rational calculation that follows from biological evolution.

If I am touching on this topic now, it is because I think that a reevaluation of the political potential of the biological — that, once again, has nothing to do with the effort to assign a biological basis to politics — has become urgent. The systematic critique of biopolitics, as I tried to demonstrate elsewhere, has become insufficient to conceptualize the point of encounter of the evolutionary and the historical that structures, in different ways and degrees, all living beings.

Inverting the order of exposition, I will start with Singer’s vision of this point of encounter, then will turn to Kropotkin.

For Singer, effective altruism is not a matter of generosity, but of calculation. « Effective altruism » is  a specific branch of utilitarianism. It is about “maximizing happiness” on the basis of equal consideration of interests. “We should give similar importance to similar interests.”  

So what does maximizing happiness mean? « Effective altruism », Singer writes, « is based on a very simple idea : we should do the most good we can. »[3] Effective altruism is « the project of using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis. »[4] What is “good”? “Good” is everything that prevents suffering and death from precarious conditions of life. And preventing, here, implies giving. Or more exactly, earning to give. « Earning to give is a distinctive way of doing good. »[5]  The principle is apparently simple : people from affluent countries should give money to people from poor countries. This without any central control. 

Effective altruists only gives to strangers, to people they do not personally know, so that the giver should not expect anything in exchange. « Genuine, non-reciprocal altruism toward strangers does occur »[6] . It is also clear that effective altruism is a way to struggle against self-interest: « [effective altruists] are able to detach themselves from personal considerations that otherwise dominate the way in which we live. »[7]  

Before going more into details about the process of giving, let’s explore its relationship to the biological. Kinship or group altruism form a “circle”, Singer explains, the biological circle of reciprocity (or “nearness”). Reciprocal altruism is inscribed biologically in the species. Non-reciprocal altruism then implies an enlargement of the circle. To what extent is it also based on biological grounds? Such are the fascinating questions that Singer raises in his book  The Expanding Circle, Ethics, Evolution and Moral Progress, first published in 1981 and constantly revised and republished ever since.

Photo: Handshake / PD-US

Is effective altruism the continuation of reciprocal altruism understood as a biological trend? Yes and no. The expansion of the circle is accomplished by reason. It is true that reason is initially a biological phenomenon, a result of evolution. At the same time, the emergence of reason marks an interruption of continuity within the continuity of evolution. This interruption is not a clean cut, but, once again, an expansion, an opening. « Altruistic impulses once limited to one’s kin and one’s own group might be extended to a wider circle by reasoning creatures who can see that they and their kin are one group among others, and from an impartial point of view no more important than others. Biological theories of the evolution of altruism through kin selection, reciprocity and group selection can be made compatible with the existence of non-reciprocal altruism toward strangers if they can accept this kind of expansion of the circle of altruism. »[8]  The emergence of reason appears to be a discontinuous continuity. We see how the idea of « expansion » implies both a rupture from- and a preservation of- the biological. In Hegelian terms, we might characterize the expansion of the circle as an Aufhebung.

Rational calculation is both the continuation and the metamorphosis of the initial mutualistic biological trend. Expanding the circle implies that the gift should benefit  not only rational beings but also animals,  plants, [or perhaps] [and] even mountains, rocks and streams […] »[9]

What is the altruistic calculation about?

1) Maximizing happiness, Singer says, means maximizing the effects of the gift by calculating how many people it will be beneficial to, and choosing each time the larger quantity. « Toby Ord has given another example of the cost differences between helping people in affluent countries and helping people elsewhere. You may have received appeals for donations from charities in affluent countries providing blind people with guide-dogs. That sounds like a case worthy of support — until you consider the costs and the alternative to which you could donate. It costs about $40 000 to supply one person in the United States with a guide dog ; most of the expense is incurred in training the dog and the recipient. But the cost of preventing someone from going blind because of trachoma, the most common and preventable blindness, is in the range of $20-$100. If you do the math, you will see the choice is to provide one person with a guide dog or revent anywhere between four hundred and two thousand cases of blindness in developing countries. » 

2) determining and calculating how much you can give.

3) calculating what the most urgent issue is, and determining what the most reliable charity, or NGO is.

4) setting limits: « We ought to give until we reach the level of marginal utility, that is the level at which, by giving more, I would cause as much suffering to myself or my dependents as I would relieve by my gift » the limits beyond which giving would become counterproductive. [10]

Singer adds: “It is true that effective altruists talk more about the number of people they are able to help than about helping particular individuals”.[11] “Consistent with the points just made, many of the most prominent effective altruists have backgrounds in or are particularly strong in areas that require abstract reasoning, like mathematics or computing.”[12] “My favorite example of the combination of effective altruism and numeracy is the website Counting Animals, which has the subtitle ‘A place for people who love animals and numbers’.”[13]

Singer defines such a mathematical morals so to speak as grounded in the equal considerations of interests and oriented toward consequences only.[14] It is in that sense that it is said to be “effective“.

Effective altruists should “living modestly and donating a large part of their income — often much more than the traditional tenth, or tithe— to the most effective charities ; Researching and discussing with others which charities are the most effective or drawing on research done by other independent evaluators ; Choosing the career in which they can earn most, not in order to be able to live affluently but so they can do more good ; Talking  to others, in person or on line, about giving, so that the idea of effective altruism will spread ; Giving part of their body — blood, bone marrow, or even a kidney, to a stranger.“[15]  The effective altruist must ask:  “how they can make the biggest possible reduction in the suffering in that larger universe of suffering.”[16] 

*

Selection and competition between living beings and species are not the only evolutionary laws: such is Kropotkin’s fundamental affirmation. There exists a natural trend toward solidarity and cooperation among living beings.

Such a view  does not contradict Darwin proper. Darwin himself, in The Descent of Man, acknowledged this trend to solidarity. It rather contradicts social Darwinism, founded, according to Kropotkin, on a Hobbesian vision of society, a state of permanent war and competition. Protection against enemies, the necessity of survival, unity and mutual support for the sake of the community, are the reasons for mutual aid. In the first part of his book, Kropotkin analyzes the behavior of ants and bees, the mutual protection systems among birds, cranes, parrots. He mentions the unity of birds during migrations, the way in which wolves associate in hunting, and a lot of other examples.

Kropotkin operates a radical transformation of the philosophical core of anarchism. He does so by promoting “life” as what Yusuke Katakura calls “ a principle of becoming always already existing in and as multiplicities, not only in Europe, but in all regions of the world”.[17]  

As a geographer, Kropotkin elaborated his theory on the basis of his observations made during field trips in Siberia and Manchuria where he discovered that many animals were able to survive extremely severe conditions of life, wandering through immense territories devoid of artificial borders. What he specifically calls “mutual aid” is not only cooperation but more fundamentally a type of relation that allows for the maintenance of small variations in individuals (whereas Darwin argues that variations are sorted out by a selection that leads to the elimination of the weakest). Katakura very rightly declares: “contrarily to the widely shared opinion that anarchism relies on a belief in the fundamental character of the Good, Being or the Individual, mutual aid does not constitute the substance of life, but only a contingent dynamic relation between living beings, always anterior to individuals, that forms the individual and preserve its variation (…). In short, preservation of anteriority leads to the creation of a set of new states and of an increased diversity. In Kropotkin’s theory, multiplicity is always made possible by the return of the ancient.”[18]  

In the second half of his book, Kropotkin analyzes the social destiny of mutual aid, living animals behind in order to examine human behaviors. He describes the multiplicity of the social egalitarian forms in contemporary world: clans, guilds, village communities, agricultural cooperation, unionism, etc as social forms of mutual aid. These forms, he shows, resist and recreate themselves each time they are attacked, as it is the case with the development of capitalism and its link to State hegemonies, in Europe and elsewhere. 

Kropotkin does not say that these resisting egalitarian forms are “biologically determined”, that they just are remnants of an animal past. They bear witness to a historization of the biological, as they render manifest the point of contact between nature and the social, which partly erases the frontiers between evolution and history. “The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.” Such a statement has very often be misunderstood. It does not say that social forms of cooperation and mutualism are based on a biological trend, that they are evolved expressions of animal behaviors. Here also we find both a continuity and a break with the biological. What Kropotkin argues is that there can be no history without the awareness of the return of  anteriority. Primitive forms of mutual aid are not instinctual, they act as memories of a certain kind, without which history would not be possible. There are of course ruptures with this past, as proven with the emregence of capitalism, or the dissolution of small communities in current gigantic impersonal industrial cities . But the memories of a state of thing anterior to capitalism is never lost. The actors of mutual aid in contemporary societies are the “anonymous masses”. In Modern Science and Anarchism, Kroptkin writes :  “Every social safeguard, all forms of social life in the tribe, the commune, and the early medieval town-republics; all forms of inter-tribal, and later on inter-provincial, relations, out of which international law was subsequently evolved; all forms of mutual support and all institutions for the preservation of peace — including the jury, — were developed by the creative genius of the anonymous masses. While all the laws of every age, down to our own, always consisted of the same two elements: one which fixed and crystallized certain forms of life that were universally recognized as useful; the other which was a superstructure — sometimes even nothing but a cunning clause adroitly smuggled in in order to establish and strengthen the growing power of the nobles, the king, and the priest — to give it sanction.”[19]  

“Anonymous masses” organize resistance to political hegemonies not because they are driven by a stubborn, unconscious natural trend, but because they remember the past without having necessarily memorized it. Biological life is a specific form of remembrance of things past, that is why biological life is always already historical. 

*

For both Singer and Kropotkin, mutual aid and effective altruism do not have anything to do with love, guilt, empathy or charity, but with the logic of life.

I cannot analyze here the numerous differences and incompatibilities even that exist between Singer and Kropotkin. By reading them, my goal is in the end to affirm that it is impossible to evacuate the biological dimension of solidarity.

The current pandemic is the object of many philosophical analyses that heavily rely on Foucault’s concept of biopolitics. Many thinkers argue that the crisis management — terms of confinement, selection of patients, lack of material, cynicism of global leaders — is the result of a biopolitical techniques of governmentality through which the lives of individuals are globally controlled, exploited, normalized and captured. It would of course be difficult to say the contrary. What I wish to argue is that these analyses only understand “life” as something passive and purely exposed to control and “states of exception”. The resisting potential of life to such captures is never envisaged. The diverse manifestations of mutual aid that we see currently emerging are precisely the expressions of such a potential. There exists a biological resistance to biopolitics, a resistance which is all at once empirical and political. Mutual aid is the biological monument secretely erected in our lives in memory of ancestral forms of equality. Life is not the passive, blind, obscure dimension of being, that would only be enlightened by culture, language and the cut from organic determinism. What my work on the brain has taught me is that the biological and the symbolic, the historical and the epigenetic, were inseparable. Therefore, we need a new reformulation of human rights, where the remembrance of the ancestral biological past should find its expression and formulation. Tentatively: “All human beings are epigenetically born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason, conscience and memory, and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

Catherine Malabou

1. Kropotkin, P., Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, 1902, PDF Anarchist Library.

2.  Singer, P, The Most Good You Can Do, How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically, Yale Library, 2015, 50.

3.  Peter Singer,  The Most Good You Can Do. How Effective Altruism is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically, New Haven and London : Yale University Press, 2015, vii.

4.  “Effective Altruism An Introduction », (Essays in Philosophy: Vol. 18: Iss. 1, Article 1). 

5.  The Most Good You Can Do, op. cit., 55.

6.  Singer, P., The Expanding Circle, Ethics, Evolution and Moral Progress, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981, 134.

7.  The Most Good You Can Do, op. cit. 85.

8.  Ibid., 135.

9.  Ibid., 120.

10.  The Most Good You Can Do,  op. cit., 241.

11.  Ibid., 89.

12.  Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14.  The Most Good You Can Do, 79

15. Ibid.

16.  Ibid., 94.

17. Yusuke Katakura, « Actualité de l’évolutionnisme anarchiste de Kropotkin », online publishing, my translation.

18.  Ibid, 5.

19.  Modern Science and Anarchism, PDF, Anarchist Library.

Catherine Malabou is a philosopher. She is a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS and professor of modern European philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, London. She is known for her work on plasticity, a concept she culled from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which has proved fertile within contemporary economic, political, and social discourses. Widely regarded as one of the most exciting figures in what has been called “The New French Philosophy,” Malabou’s research and writing covers a range of figures and issues, including the work of Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, and Derrida; the relationship between philosophy, neuroscience, and psychoanalysis; and concepts of essence and difference within feminism.