Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin

Posted 6 October 2025

This book can be read in its entirety on the Anarchist Library.

I went into this book not knowing what it was going to be about. It gripped me from the beginning; the descriptions of animal behavior in the Mutual Aid Among Animals sections made me want to look more into nonfiction biology texts to see if I could possibly learn more. I highly doubt that was Kropotkin's intention.

The mutual aid chapters relating to humans are divided into different types of societies – savages, barbarians, the medieval city, and "ourselves" (then-present-day Europeans). Yes, those are the actual words Kropotkin uses; he was a European writing in the late 19th/early 20th century. Kropotkin doesn't focus entirely on European cultures – there are descriptions of mutual aid and cooperation in cultures from Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Australia. He references plenty of other scientists and their work (the book comes with an appendix). Some of them, I assume, would be familiar to the reader in 1902, but the only one I was able to recognize was Charles Darwin.

Speaking of Darwin, it's obvious through Kropotkin's writing that social "Darwinism" was a problem back then as it is now.

The state's role as an antagonist to mutual aid is discussed in later chapters. What's also discussed is now communities continually turn to mutual aid and cooperation despite that antagonism, as mutual aid, rather than competition, is (what Kropotkin believes to be) the natural state of humanity.

The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin

Posted 19 September 2025

I would like to point out that there is a book called Anarchist Communism that is actually just the first 5 chapters of The Conquest of Bread. If you can only buy one book, get The Conquest of Bread. Or just read it here for free on the Anarchist Library.

As I read through this book, I was struck by how optimistic Kropotkin was. It was written in 1892 – when most European countries were monarchies, before the Soviet Union, before WW1 and WW2. There's so much he thought would happen that just…didn't.

There's definitely some dated language and ideas in here – draining swamps and marshes to use as farmland, for example – and especially dated numbers, with regards to the amount of people required to do a certain amount of work for a certain amount of hours. I'd definitely like to find a modern equivalent to it.

How Nonviolence Protects the State by Peter Gelderloos

Posted 10 September 2025

This is definitely required reading for everyone, not just leftists or anarchists. The main takeaway is that advocating nonviolence exclusively, rather than a variety of tactics, is used by people of privilege (especially white people, and that includes white anarchists) because they don't want to feel uncomfortable or actually challenge any of their privilege. Also that nonviolence is largely ineffective at convincing the state to do anything, meanwhile violence tends to actually produce results.

I bought a print version through my local bookstore, but this book can be found in its entirety on The Anarchist Library.

The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays

Posted 30 March 2025

This is a collection of essays by Nestor Makhno, translated by Alexandre Skirda. I thought it might be good for me to read something written by an actual revolutionary. I'm not sure I got much out of it; I've been looking into libertarian communism since I was 12 so a lot of the theory was already familiar to me. What wasn't familiar to me was the actual practice – the Makhnovshchina and how it functioned – and Ukrainian history. It's definitely a topic I'll have to look into more.

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Posted 26 May 2025

When I saw that Facebook/Meta was trying to suppress this book, I knew I had to read it. After all, that wouldn't be happening if this book didn't have some good, juicy stuff in it, right?

Some personal background: I "deleted" my own Facebook account in 2015, as I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with allowing corporations to have my data. Every couple of years, I get an email from Facebook saying that someone tried to log into my account, which clearly wouldn't be happening if they'd actually deleted my account, rather than made it inactive.

It's pretty obvious why Meta didn't want the author to be able to promote this book. It makes the entire leadership look awful, and it's entirely because of their own behavior. Meta harbors sexual predators, does nothing to discourage predatory behavior from their own leadership, encourages calls to violence and genocide (most obvious in Myanmar) – and it's all for engagement. It's to keep people coming back to Facebook so they can be served advertisements and Meta makes more money.

Over the past few years, I've increasingly thought that it would be a net benefit to the world if tech bros were rounded up and shot. This book has done nothing to change that opinion – if anything, it's strengthened it. I don't believe there's a way for these people to redeem themselves.