When my attention was drawn, later on, to the relations between Darwinism and Sociology, I could agree with none of the works and pamphlets that had been written upon this important subject. They all endeavoured to prove that Man, owing to his higher intelligence and knowledge, may mitigate the harshness of the struggle for life between men; but they all recognized at the same time that the struggle for the means of existence, of every animal against all its congeners, and of every man against all other men, was "a law of Nature." This view, however, I could not accept, because I was persuaded that to admit a pitiless inner war for life within each species, and to see in that war a condition of progress, was to admit something which not only had not yet been proved, but also lacked confirmation from direct observation.

The Importance of Mutual Aid

Bei diesem Text handelt es sich um die Überarbeitung eines Vortrags, den Kropotkin 1896 in Paris halten wollte. Dazu kam es jedoch nicht, da er aus Frankreich ausgewiesen wurde. Kropotkin umreißt in der Rede seine Grundideen des Anarchismus, also eines Staatssystems, das ohne hierarchische Strukturen auskommt, und das stattdessen auf Freiheit, Selbstbestimmung, Gleichberechtigung und kollektive Selbstverwaltung setzt.

Diese Ausgabe von Kropotkins "Anarchismus"-Rede wurde neu übersetzt, folgt also, wie alle Ausgaben der ofd edition, den aktuellen Rechtschreibregeln. Dadurch verbessert sich nicht nur die Lesbarkeit, es werden auch Missverständnisse vermieden und der Komfort bei der Lektüre steigt erheblich.

Anarchismus - Neu übersetzte Ausgabe (Klassiker der ofd edition)

Sociability and need of mutual aid and support are such inherent parts of human nature that at no time of history can we discover men living in small isolated families, fighting each other for the means of subsistence. On the contrary, modern research, as we saw it in the two preceding chapters, proves that since the very beginning of their prehistoric life men used to agglomerate into gentes, clans, or tribes, maintained by an idea of common descent and by worship of common ancestors. For thousands and thousands of years this organization has kept men together, even though there was no authority whatever to impose it. It has deeply impressed all subsequent development of mankind; and when the bonds of common descent had been loosened by migrations on a grand scale, while the development of the separated family within the clan itself had destroyed the old unity of the clan, a new form of union, territorial in its principle-the village community-was called into existence by the social genius of man. This institution, again, kept men together for a number of centuries, permitting them to further develop their social institutions and to pass through some of the darkest periods of history, without being dissolved into loose aggregations of families and individuals, to make a further step in their evolution, and to work out a number of secondary social institutions, several of which have survived down to the present time.

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

Communism is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society. Communist society also involves the absence of private property, social classes, money, and the state. Communists often seek a voluntary state of self-governance but disagree on the means to this end. This reflects a distinction between a more libertarian approach of communization, revolutionary spontaneity, and workers' self-management, and a more vanguardist or Communist party-driven approach through the development of a constitutional socialist state followed by the withering away of the state. As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum, communism is placed on the left-wing alongside socialism, and communist parties and movements have been described as radical left or far left.

Contents:

Karl Marx

Manifesto of the Communist Party

The Class Struggles in France

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Friedrich Engels

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Peter Kropotkin

The Conquest of Bread

Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution

Vladimir Lenin

State and Revolution

What Is to Be Done?

Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism

Joseph Stalin

The Foundations of Leninism

Anarchism or Socialism?

Marxism and the National Question

Organization of a Russian Federal Republic

The October Revolution and the National Question

Dialectical and Historical Materialism

Marxism and Problems of Linguistics

Leon Trotsky

History of the Russian Revolution

My Life

The Revolution Betrayed

Our Revolution Essays on Working-Class and International Revolution, 1904-1917

Dictatorship vs. Democracy

From October to Brest-Litovsk

Lenin

Results and Prospects

The Permanent Revolution

Literature and Revolution

The Bolsheviki and World Peace

Communism. Selections from Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky - Manifesto of the Communist Party, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, The Conquest of Bread, State and Revolution, Anarchism or Socialism? History of the Russian Revolution

One of the current objections to Communism, and Socialism altogether, is that the idea is so old, and yet it has never been realized. Schemes of ideal States haunted the thinkers of Ancient Greece; later on, the early Christians joined in communist groups; centuries later, large communist brotherhoods came into existence during the Reform movement. Then, the same ideals were revived during the great English and French Revolutions; and finally, quite lately, in 1848, a revolution, inspired to a great extent with Socialist ideals, took place in France. "And yet, you see, " we are told, "how far away is still the realization of your schemes. Don't you think that there is some fundamental error in your understanding of human nature and its needs?"

At first sight this objection seems very serious. However, the moment we consider human history more attentively, it loses its strength. We see, first, that hundreds of millions of men have succeeded in maintaining amongst themselves, in their village communities, for many hundreds of years, one of the main elements of Socialism-the common ownership of the chief instrument of production, the land, and the apportionment of the same according to the labour capacities of the different families; and we learn that if the communal possession of the land has been destroyed in Western Europe, it was not from within, but from without, by the governments which created a land monopoly in favour of the nobility and the middle classes.

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