Today in Labor History December 9, 1842: The Anarchist formerly known as Prince, Peter Kropotkin, was born on this date in Moscow. Kropotkin was a geographer and anarcho-communist. His most well-known works include “Conquest of Bread,” “Fields, Factories,” and “Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution,” which explores the role of mutually-beneficial cooperation and reciprocity (i.e., mutual aid) in the animal kingdom and human societies both past and present. It was an argument against the theory of social Darwinism, popular at the time, that argued that existing social relations were the natural consequence of rich people’s inherent genetic superiority over the poor. Kropotkin argued that because mutual aid has pragmatic advantages for the survival of human and animal communities, it has proliferated through natural selection. In 1874, Kropotkin was arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress for subversive political activity. In 1876, he escaped and fled to Switzerland. During his younger days, he served as a geographer for the Russian empire. In 1873, he published a scientific paper showing that the existing maps entirely misrepresented the physical features of Asia.
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