One of the most successful propaganda projects of the last 150 years has been the political hijacking of evolution. Darwin’s work was about adaptation, interdependence and the complex relationships between living systems. It described nature, it did not prescribe how human society should be organised. Yet the emerging capitalist class needed a story that made hierarchy appear natural. The answer was what later became known as Social Darwinism. The slogan “survival of the fittest” – coined by Herbert Spencer, not Darwin – was transformed from a biological observation into a political ideology. Suddenly poverty was “natural”, wealth proved virtue, colonialism became civilisation and exploitation became progress. It wasn’t science, it was propaganda.
Mutual aid is part of evolution, as Peter Kropotkin argued in Mutual Aid, cooperation is one of evolution’s greatest survival strategies. Humans survive because we share knowledge and build communities. We care for children and older people, we communicate, create culture, language itself is cooperative technology. The most successful species are rarely those engaged in endless internal competition, they are the ones capable of collaboration and adaptation. Modern biology has repeatedly confirmed that cooperation, symbiosis and mutual dependence are fundamental evolutionary forces.
But power has rewrites knowledge, leading to the lesson that isn’t simply that the right misunderstood Darwin, it’s that dominant systems continually rewrite ideas to justify themselves. When empire ruled, science was used to justify empire, when colonialism dominated, science justified colonialism. When #neoliberal capitalism became common sense, economics was rewritten to make markets appear inevitable. Today #AI is sold as inevitable, yesterday it was cryptocurrency, tomorrow it will be something else, the pattern remains the same, power captures useful ideas and reframes them as justification for existing power.
The #geekproblem is a story about how sadly this process doesn’t only happen in politics, it happens constantly in technology as well The #geekproblem is technical communities believe technology is neutral while ignoring the social systems around it. Open source without open governance becomes dominated by maintainers, open protocols without open communities become captured by corporations. Open projects without #4opens drift toward hidden hierarchies and private control. The technology remains “open” while the culture closes.
The function of the #4opens is that openness makes ideological capture harder – Open Data lets people verify claims – Open Source lets people inspect the tools – Open Standards prevent enclosure – Open Process prevents hidden power from quietly taking control. This fourth open is the crucial one, without open process, technical openness eventually becomes another hierarchy wearing a friendly face. The left needs to learn this, to focus more on building instead of arguing, because evolution never rewarded the loudest ideology, it rewarded the communities that learned to adapt together.
The idea of Mutual Aid builds on the work of Peter Kropotkin he was a Russian geographer, biologist, and anarchist who published Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution in 1902. In this book, Kropotkin challenged the social Darwinist path, that human progress was pushed by competition and “survival of the fittest.” Instead, he argued that cooperation and mutual aid were fundamental to both humane societies and the natural world. This idea was radical at the time, as it went against capitalist and nationalist ideologies that were, as now, deeply ingrained in the scientific and social thought.
As then, as now, little changes, ‘s ideas were dismissed by contemporaries, who pushed #capitalism, nationalism, and state authority as the “natural” path of human society. #Kropotkin, however, saw these as they are, artificial and contrary, to the cooperative tendencies that are easy to see in both human and animal behaviour. By advocating for “stateless socialism” rooted in mutual aid, Kropotkin proposed an alternative social path based on voluntary cooperation rather than coercion and competition.
But we still find today that this path is still a hard one to take, as public authorities continue to demonize #anarchists as radicals, as they have throughout the 20th century. But this is a native path that is relevant in the context of global movements against racism, state violence, and other right-wing paths. Now more than ever, mutual aid and cooperative social structures offer a vision of a world beyond capitalist exploitation and state control. There are meany seeds already present in the existing society, not just historical curiosities but relevant to today’s social movements. By “rediscovering what is and has always been right before our eyes,” we can encourage people and communities to look beyond the surface of the current mess and glimpse the possibilities for radical change that we need.
A #KISS call to action, is that radical ideas, science, politics and social organization are paths to challenging the status quo and take a more just and equitable path. A powerful reminder of the transformative potential of mutual aid and cooperative action, especially in times of social mess. It challenges us to think beyond the limits of capitalist “common sense” and only building from the state. To imagine new paths of organizing society that are balanced by solidarity and mutual support.