Humanity + Society

Mutual Aid for a More Just World

Meeting human needs through solidarity and reciprocity.

JM Heatherly
Cultured
Published in
10 min readSep 23, 2021

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Neighborhood Mutal Aid Illustration | Photo Courtesy of Storyline Community

How are needs met in a fair and just society? We recognize today that many needs go unmet, resulting from a system designed to extract wealth from the many to benefit the few rather than meet human needs. A belief persists today that we exist in silos and only the strongest survive.

The idea of “Survival of the Fittest”, a popular, early interpretation of Charles Darwin’s work, proclaimed that. While Darwin spent years studying the natural world and sailing the world on the HMS Beagle, he wasn’t the only one to expound on the theory.

Pëtr Kropotkin, the father of Russian anarchism, later noticed something else during his time in Siberia. Today we discuss his observations of mutual aid in the natural world. Next, we distinguish mutual aid from charity, and then we top it all off with several examples like the Black Panthers, the Amish, and Little Free Libraries.

Kropotkin Observes Mutual Aid

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(he/they) Edit, Garden, Hospitality, Music, Organize, Socialist. Finding gems to polish for you. https://www.jmheatherly.com/