Peter Kropotkin, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
I do not deny the struggle for existence; Darwin was right that it is real and that it selects.12 What I deny is the narrow reading his English followers made of it — that nature is a gladiators' show, a war of each against all, and that whatever cooperation we practice is a late rebellion of morality against our animal inheritance. I went to the field, to Siberia and Manchuria, to see for myself, and I saw the opposite.
The animals that endure the great cold, the drought, the migration, are not the fiercest individual competitors but the ones that band together — the herds, the flocks, the colonies, the packs. Sociability is itself a weapon in the struggle for existence, the most powerful there is, and the species that practice mutual aid are precisely the ones that flourish and advance, while the unsociable dwindle.34
Darwin himself saw this in The Descent of Man, where the social instincts are the origin of the moral sense; it was his popularizers, Huxley above all, who turned selection into a sermon for competition. Mutual aid is not a pretty exception to the law of nature; it is a factor of evolution, and among the higher animals and in humankind the decisive one.5
Our ethics, our cities, our very capacity for progress grow from it. This is not sentiment. It is what the evidence shows.
Besides, Darwin never attempted to submit to a closer investigation the relative importance of the two aspects under which the struggle for existence appears in the animal world, and he never wrote the work he proposed to write upon the natural checks to over-multiplication, although that work would have been the crucial test for appreciating the real purport of individual struggle.Mutual Aid, pp. 3–4
How far Darwin himself was to blame for this misunderstanding of the real meaning of the 42 struggle for existence, we cannot discuss here. But certain it is that when, twelve years after ** The Origin of Species/' Darwin published his " Descent of Man " he already understood strug- gle for life in a different sense.Modern Science and Anarchism
Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Of course it would be extremely difficult to estimate, however roughly, the relative numerical importance of both these series of facts. But if we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: " Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war " with each other, or those who support one another?Mutual Aid, p. 6
It represents the best weapon in the great struggle for life which continually has to be carried on in Nature against climate, inundations, storms, frost, and the like, and con- tinually requires new adaptations to the ever-changing conditions of existence.Ethics, Origin and Development
As I have already pointed out elsewhere," the difference between these two interpretations is enor- iitSee Mutual Aid among aidmeds and men, as a factor of Evolution. 320 MORAL TEACHINGS— XIX CENTURY mous. In one case the observer sees the struggle between the indi- viduals of the same group — or, more accurately, — he does not see, but mentally pictures to himself such a struggle.Ethics, Origin and Development
Long dismissed as ideologically motivated natural history, Mutual Aid has undergone a substantial scientific rehabilitation. Stephen Jay Gould's "Kropotkin Was No Crackpot" (1997) argued that Kropotkin's position was serious science, shaped by the harsh Russian environment that made cooperation visibly adaptive, and overstated only in its enthusiasm. Modern evolutionary biology — the theory of reciprocal altruism (Trivers), kin selection (Hamilton), the revival of multilevel/group selection (D.S. Wilson, E.O. Wilson's later work), Frans de Waal's primatology, Lynn Margulis on symbiogenesis, and Martin Nowak's work on cooperation as a "third pillar" of evolution — has confirmed that cooperation is a genuine and central evolutionary factor, though explained by mechanisms Kropotkin did not have. The popular "nature is competition" framing (and the rhetoric around the "selfish gene") remains the counter-current his argument was written against.